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Ball Lightning

rynner2 said:
At the rate we're going, all the Strange Phenomena will soon be explained!

(And then what will we do? :( )
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Make some up. Slenderman is an excellent example.
 
I have seen what I assume is ball lightning, last week in the aftermath of one of the big storms.

I was sitting reading when I noticed my cat watching something intently in the top corner of the room, I assumed it was a bug of some kind and carried on, then when I next glanced up she was still staring intently but moving her head up and down as if she was tracking something that was flying, so I finally looked up and there was a sphere of intense glowing white about the size of plum dancing slowly up and down and moving along the top of the wall where it joins the ceiling. It seemed to be trailing white arcs like a plasma ball, but it was against a very pale almost white background so it was hard to make out. Sort of like glimmers that gave the impression of tendrils of white light. I watched it for about 10-15 seconds then it just stopped, just disappeared. There was no sound or smell.

I have to say it was very pretty and the way it was moving reminded me of how dancing fairies are often portrayed.

Unless anyone thinks a fairy sheltering from the storm is more likely? ;)
 
This newly-published research offers a possible explanation for ball lightning's coherent shape and persistence ...

The 'Skyrmion' May Have Solved the Mystery of Ball Lightning
Scientists bound the magnetic fields of a supercooled quantum object into a complex knot. And what they found may have finally solved the centuries-old riddle of ball lightning, luminous orbs that sometimes linger in the atmosphere during thunderstorms.

That bizarre knot was a quantum object called a "Shankar skyrmion" that was first theorized in 1977, but that no one had ever managed to generate in a lab. A skyrmion is a tightly clustered group of circular magnetic fields, with each circle crossing each other circle exactly once, the researchers expained in a paper published March 2 in Science Advances . ...

Ball lightning, as Live Science previously reported, is a rare and poorly understood weather phenomenon where a colorful glowing orb appears — usually during a thunderstorm — and appears to skitter through the air, far outliving the jagged bolt of lightning people are used to.

Back in 1996, a paper published in Nature proposed that ball lightning might be the result of the magnetic fields around the plasma of a lightning bolt curling into a knot and trapping it within, and proposed a model for what those knotted fields might look like.

The researchers reported that the fields they observed around their cold little skyrmion matched the model proposed in that paper, suggesting that hot ball lightning may, in fact, be a giant, naturally occurring skyrmion.
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SOURCE: https://www.livescience.com/61946-ball-lightning-quantum-particle.html
 
Apologies if there is a thread already covering this topic but I am quite new to this forum and couldn't find any direct reference.

My late mother told me about a very frightening episode of ball lightning that she witnessed when a young girl of about 10 or 11.

She was standing with her back to the open fire in the cottage she lived in with her family , it was early evening in late autumn and there were no signs of a storm or inclement weather. She was dressed in a long nightdress as she was about to go to bed and in the days before central heating she was warming herself before going to the cold bedroom when a ball of flame came down the chimney with such force that it blew the embers out of the fireplace catching her nightdress alight. Luckily her two older brothers were in the room also and quickly rolled her in the rug by the fire to douse the flames and she was only slightly burned but they all said that the ball circled the room quickly as if trying to find an opening or outlet before vanishing again up the chimney which was presumably the only opening to the outside.

When she told me this quite some years ago now she said that the whole event took only a few seconds and they were all baffled and obviously shaken by it - she said that the ball was a little bigger than a tennis ball and made no sound that she could recall other than the whoosh as it came down the chimney.
 
Sounds very similar to the thing my sister saw in her lounge during a thunderstorm.
 
Interesting how those close encounters all refer to a ball of football size or less, the median seemingly apple-sized. Few if any accounts of anything bigger. I think I read an older article about a "bus sized" object, but not sure of it.

If the tendency is for scientific observers to ascribe ufo sightings to these bols, I'm curious as to why they don't seem to break the average size in the cases reported on the ground. If there is a particular physical limit on their sustenance, it me be measurable.

I've seen these on videos associated with crop circles and they are legitimate (the bols, that is). I also recall in my youngness I used to see photos in my 'Tales of the Weird' type books of the scenes of SHC attributed to the phenomenon of ball lightning. For those who wish to have such an encounter, it might provide some pause.
eg - the strange case of Mary Reeser
SHC.jpg

These cases of SHC are all the more intriguing in that the victims and their immediate vicinity inside the room seem to be the only places affected by the fire - which would be required to be of several thousands of degrees in temperature to totally obliterate a human body leaving only a pile of ash and one one uncooked leg. As all trained fire wardens would be aware, it doesn't take much of a pilot flame, even in a relatively cool state, to ignite an entire room and thence a building in pretty quick time.

If you watched a bol drift within a few feet of your eyes, as is claimed in this thread, you'd probably count yourself very lucky to have survived - that is assuming bols are the cause of SHC, which they might not be.
 
I managed to snag a digital copy of Stenhoff's ridiculously expensive Ball Lightning: An Unsolved Problem in Atmospheric Physics. He has synthesized all the evidence for ball lightning and potential theories for it - it's balanced and highly readable. If you can find it at an academic library, check it out.
 
I wouldn't be standing there calmly filming. I'd be backing away.
 
It does look like ball lightning that is following some cabling buried in the ground (I'm just guessing here).
 
All of the sudden it stops casting light on the ground when it reaches the grass and fails to cast any light on the trees....
 
Mythopoeika said:
It does look like ball lightning that is following some cabling buried in the ground (I'm just guessing here).
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Something along that line isn't a bad guess at all. The bright light doesn't waver, stays close to the (wet) ground, and seems to slowly follow a pretty linear path across the tracks (rather than zigzagging around sporadically as many ball lightning reports describe).

The constant blue-white light is consistent with an electrical arc / flare, and there are what appear to be power lines in the scene.
 
Bad Bungle said:
If genuine footage (I'm a stranger to Photoshop) then that has to be one of the most incredible things I've seen. ...
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kamalktk said:
All of the sudden it stops casting light on the ground when it reaches the grass and fails to cast any light on the trees....
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There are a few things about the footage that don't quite seem "real" to me.

As kamalktk mentions, its illumination effects on the surroundings changes when it moves onto the grass to the right of the tracks, and one would expect to see more reflected light in / on the wet foliage it approaches at the end.

As the light moves off the tracks onto the grass to the right:

- The flat patch of flared illumination appears and remains steadily horizontal rather than dipping and rising to match the apparent contours of the ground beneath. This is the most artificial-looking bit I see in the whole video. Furthermore ...

- The much smaller outboard / secondary bright thingies look like lens flares rather than objects in the scene to me. This could be written off as a camera effect, but these secondary flares don't seem to waver as one would expect them to do in correlation with the continuously flaring "ball."

Additionally ...

- There's something about the absolutely unchanging color and lack of wavering in the solid blue "aura" or "halo" around the "ball" that simply doesn't look natural at all. The blue "halo" is remarkably static compared to the variably flaring "ball", unlike what one would expect if the halo were a side-effect of the flaring.

- The "ball" doesn't seem to pass directly across the tracks as its horizontal in-frame level would insinuate. It seems to recede into the distance on the left side of the tracks, move pretty directly horizontally, and somehow end up on the right side of the tracks at roughly the same distance (from the camera) as the point from which it receded farther into the background on the left side. (The two overhead lamps seem to be roughly the same distance away from the observer down each side of the tracks.)

- The "ball" passes around / through the base of the overhead lamppost on the left just as it does with the post on the right, but it doesn't blow out the lamp on the left-hand one. It zaps the right-hand lamp with a 'mini-bolt' / arc before passing by / through its post, but somehow this still seems inconsistent to me.

I can't shake the cynical thought that the "ball" is an ordinary bright lamp shone directly at a camera in total darkness, and the resultant footage has been overlaid onto a daylight illuminated scene that happened to catch a lamp exploding.
 
Annoying! Too many fakes online.
 
Has ball lightning ever been filmed?There seems to be a lot of controversy over whether it actually exists or there used to be. Is it actually connected to traditional lightening? What is it?
I did a post on here a few years ago about my parents experiences with balls of light on the golf course. They sounded a lot like ball lightening to me but with no thunderstorm. I’m surprised science hasn’t got a good explanation yet for it.
 
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Stillill said:
Has ball lightning ever been filmed?There seems to be a lot of controversy over whether it actually exists or there used to be. Is it actually connected to traditional lightening? What is it?
I did a post on here a few years ago about my parents experiences with balls of light on the golf course. They sounded a lot like ball lightening to me but with no thunderstorm. I’m surprised science hasn’t got a good explanation yet for it.
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I think it's a phenomenon that happens so briefly, nobody has yet managed to get a camera onto it.
It just happens suddenly and unexpectedly.
 
Might mess up the electronics if you did try to take a pic.
 
Stillill said:
Has ball lightning ever been filmed?There seems to be a lot of controversy over whether it actually exists or there used to be. Is it actually connected to traditional lightening? What is it?
I did a post on here a few years ago about my parents experiences with balls of light on the golf course. They sounded a lot like ball lightening to me but with no thunderstorm. I’m surprised science hasn’t got a good explanation yet for it.
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There are a few clips that say they are ball lightning but they not inconclusive. They are too far away or are very brief which means they could be pieces that caught fire when the bolt struck. One popular youtube video said to be BL looks like wires down touching each other in the distance.

As Mythopoeika said, it's just too quick and rare to be captured. It has been generated in a lab, though, that is, something that appears to be like ball lightning. But it just doesn't match the historical descriptions.

I got excited when I first saw this video too but it came with the CGI explanation. Bummer.

I am fascinated at how BL crosses over with reports of spook lights (often along railroad tracks which is possibly why this video looks as it does), UFOs, earth lights and earthquake lights.
 
Sharon Hill said:
There are a few clips that say they are ball lightning but they not inconclusive. They are too far away or are very brief which means they could be pieces that caught fire when the bolt struck. One popular youtube video said to be BL looks like wires down touching each other in the distance.

As Mythopoeika said, it's just too quick and rare to be captured. It has been generated in a lab, though, that is, something that appears to be like ball lightning. But it just doesn't match the historical descriptions.

I got excited when I first saw this video too but it came with the CGI explanation. Bummer.

I am fascinated at how BL crosses over with reports of spook lights (often along railroad tracks which is possibly why this video looks as it does), UFOs, earth lights and earthquake lights.
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Experienced this phenomenon only once during my lifetime - in Perthshire (no longer live there) a short time after a really active thunderstorm had passed over our house - lighting a-plenty. After a brief interval, the initial thunderstorm eventually moved away, this quite large ball of bright light appeared from nowhere and roared across the sky above us, eventually finishing up booming away in the distance, somewhere close near the visible horizon. Crossed North-East to South-West, the final "bang" was very sudden and very loud.
 
I ran into a lot of atmospheric and electrical phenomena when I was going through the old articles; in one case a ball of blue electrical fire came down and sheared the mast off of a ship --there was also Saint Elmo's Fire, and even a large ball of red plasma or something else that was flying around Australia and seen during a period. I tossed all of those out as natural phenomena, but they were very interesting.
 
EnolaGaia said:
It doesn't match the usual / canonical description of St. Elmo's Fire.
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I've always understood that 'St Elmo's Fire' was an effect noticed mainly in ship's rigging in a charged atmosphere at sea?
 
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