In a research article published in NASA's website it seems that similar events have happened in the past too.

Oct. 24, 2002: It was just after lunch on Sept. 25th when I stepped out onto the rear deck of my home in Ohio. What a gorgeous autumn afternoon. The pale blue sky was streaked with wispy white cirrus clouds. The Sun was high and bright.

I glanced up....

The sun was surrounded by an extraordinarily bright, rainbow-colored halo. Flanking it both left and right were two brilliant, comet-shaped rainbow-colored sun dogs or mock suns (technically known as parhelia from Greek words meaning "beside the sun"). Wow!

Above: This scene, recorded in Finland by Pekka Parviainen using a wide-angle lens, is similar to the one author Trudy E. Bell saw in Ohio last month. A football-shaped "circumscribed halo" surrounds the Sun. A fainter "parhelic circle" rings the horizon. "I had never seen anything so huge and so perfectly circular," says Bell.

I dashed to the front yard, which has a better view of the sky, and began turning to see how far the "comet tails" of the sun dogs reached. I turned 360o, accidentally unbalancing myself and falling onto the grass.

Not only was there a halo around the Sun--the so-called "22o halo," which sky watchers often see--but also there was an enormous ring of light running parallel to the horizon at the same altitude as the sun. It was like a giant angel's halo suspended above my town, interrupted every 120o by a brighter splash of light (more "mock suns").

"That's the complete parhelic circle!" I exclaimed aloud to the empty street.

All that morning I had been stepping outside hourly to look up, because I knew that thin cirrus clouds plus bright sunlight almost guaranteed seeing something wonderful. Cirrus clouds are made of millions of hexagonal ice crystals 3 to 6 miles up in the troposphere where jet airplanes fly--each crystal acting as a tiny prism refracting (bending) the sun's light and throwing it elsewhere into the sky.

Because the upper troposphere is almost always below freezing, ice-crystal displays can be seen year-round (I've seen weak sundogs even in July). But truly good displays in the United States are most common in the fall, winter, and spring when the northern jet stream descends southward, drawing down Arctic air masses with their treasure-trove of jewel-like ice prisms.

Source: By Rings Around The Sun Story from NASA Science