Freaky effect!

Last night I looked out the back window and for just a moment I thought the corn field was on fire!  It looked like a blazing inferno. The effect was much more pronounced when I first saw it, but in the 60 seconds it took to get the camera the fast moving clouds had closed off the view of the sunset significantly.

 The first shot the flash went off, so it's darker since the flash can't go several miles :-)

I turned off the flash and tried again, but didn't hold the camera still enough, so this is just a little blurry.

When I first saw this, there was at least twice as much "fire" and the clouds looked just like smoke coming off the flames.  I've never seen anything like it before.  It's been so dry here that there have been reports of crop fires on the news and that was my first thought.