Environment
What Caused This Huge, Glowing Doughnut Over Colorado?
It lasted only a millisecond but was as wide as 26 San Franciscos.
The thing that appeared over La Junta, Colorado, lasted only a millisecond but is clear on slowed video: a glowing sky-discus so massive it could’ve satiated all the doughnut lust of Homer Simpson.
Is this the universe’s way of telling us we all deserve a coffee break? The answer is less spooky, but still weird. The flickering ring recorded by Thomas Ashcraft on June 8 was an ELVE, the necessarily shortened name for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources. ELVEs are the ghostly, ephemeral byproducts of thunderstorms, and the average person can generally go through life without seeing a single one.