Then today, Peter e-mailed the following letter with three photographs he took at Stonehenge of an unusual oval object. The wide shot shows the cloud in context when I first saw it. Apparently it was the result of an explosion, with a subsequent fire that caused the plume of black smoke at left. It had faint streamers below, so it was actually a kind of mushroom cloud. The other shots show it at intervals of about a minute apart.
Subsequent shots show it transforming gradually into a smoke ring, seen nearly edge-on.
My favorite frame is the halfway stage, where the ring has a transparent dome. The event occurred to the southwest of Stonehenge - definitely not on the Salisbury plain military area. A local said there was a fireworks factory in that general vicinity. Copyright 1999 by Peter Sorensen Copyright 1999 by Peter Sorensen And finally, back in mid-July, Peter Sorensen first photographed the extraordinarily beautiful formation below when it was fresh in wheat at Cherhill Down a few miles west of the ancient sacred stone circles of Avebury. A mid-July crop formation in wheat at Cherhill Down west of Avebury, Wiltshire, England.