Two holes in the high mass of cloud cover, known as fallstreak holes or hole punch clouds, were seen across a wide span of Mid-Missouri on Thursday morning.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) website, the phenomenon occurs when super-cooled water droplets are suspended high in the atmosphere and span a large area of the sky.
When some type of disturbance causes the droplets to instantly freeze, creating snowflakes, they fall from the sky. Because the air at that altitude is dry, the moisture is not replenished when the moisture/snowflakes fall out of the cloud, leaving the giant hole.
If the lower altitudes are also dry, the snowflakes do not make it all the way to the surface and instead evaporate, sublimate or stay suspended slightly lower than the rest of the droplets, leaving a tail of frozen ice particles in the sky. The disturbance in this case was more than likely caused by an aircraft passing through the area.