To me, with the circumstantial evidence of a power outage, it looked like an electrical arc.
An electric arc can be seen for many miles. An arc is also very hot. I’ve seen evidence of an arc setting green grass ablaze at a distance of at lease 100 feet.
It can also cause a sunburn like effect on unprotected skin. However, most of the guys I worked with in the electrical industry, ran like hell, so that effect was not a problem.
So that would explain the power going out for only two minutes?
Reclosers are programmed to automate the reset process and allow a more granular approach to service restoration. The result is increased availability of supply.
Reclosers address this problem by further dividing up the network into smaller sections. For instance, the city grid example above might be equipped with reclosers at every branch point on the network. Reclosers, because of their upstream position in the network, handle much less power than the breakers at the feeder stations, and therefore can be set to trip at much lower power levels. This means that a single event on the grid will cut off only the section handled by a single recloser, long before the feeder station would notice a problem.
from wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recloser