The residents of a Brazilian city were puzzled by the appearance of strange and rather menacing-looking yet eerily beautifully dust cloud hanging over their homes.
At first look the obscure cloud resembles a meteorite trail or a tornado, frozen in time, seconds before the impending doom. At second glance, it looks more like a freaky cloud formation.
As the sunset cast dazzling colours across the spectacle, many others took to social media to document the phenomenon, which looked like a meteorite that had stopped in its tracks.
A resident named Joao Paulo Magalhaes shared a video of the sight from a petrol station in Teixeira de Freitas, in the south east of the country, on Thursday evening.
However, Magalhaes said that the residents were relieved and their fears were soon assuaged when the cloud broke apart within five minutes.
‘It really looked like the entrance to a meteorite or something. I was scared too, we thought it would form a tornado,’ he said.
‘The work of God is perfect,’ said an Instagram user. Another user who also shared a photo of the befuddling sight wrote a long caption about the religious significance of the cloud column.
Local meteorologists were reported as saying the oddity was a dust cloud.
Earlier this month, residents of a town in northern China panicked as an enormous sandstorm engulfed their homes.
The footage taken in Ejina, Inner Mongolia, on August 2 showed the terrifying moment the small town was swallowed by the storm.
