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The Mysterious Ball Of Light

M

Mik Bulk

Fresh Blood
Joined
Feb 21, 2022
Messages
13
Hello everybody. I’ve enjoyed these IHTM tales over the last year or so, since discovering the official FT books and subsequently this forum. I’ve joined to share an experience of my own, to find out if anybody has any thoughts on it or has had a similar experience, and for the pleasure of sharing it.

The year is hazy but a reasonable guess would be 2005. It was between Christmas and New Year, so the 28th feels about right. Finally, it was around 1:30am-ish.

Me and my then girlfriend were lying in bed - a futon - under a couple of duvets. It was extremely cold, around -7. We were living in a room above a wooden garage, separated from the main property, and were using two halogen bulb heaters to keep warm; the room was lit by their orange glow.

We were vaguely watching an Italian war film on a large and quite old CRT Sony Triniton TV which was about six feet away from the end of the futon. Suddenly, in my peripheral vision to the right, about five feet in the air, a sort of plasma-ish patch opened up. In the time it took for me to register this activity and turn my head to face it it had begun to shrink back to nothing before disappearing completely. The event lasted 1-2 seconds tops.

For a moment I lay there utterly thunderstruck. Scared certainly, but mainly stunned. We quickly established that we’d both witnessed it. I can’t remember my girlfriend’s exact position but we were lying very close together - but whereas I was lying flat, she was turned at an angle, possibly with her head on my shoulder. Either way, she was facing the event more directly so got a better view of it than me.

After a few minutes of genuine fear we started to discuss it excitedly. So this is our joint description, from memory. It was a vaguely spherical, greenish, whiteish plasma-ish something. It appeared suddenly as something around the size of a snooker ball and rapidly expanded to about the size of a…not quite a football…a netball perhaps? It then equally quickly shrank and kind of fizzled out. It was accompanied by a very quiet by distinguishable fizzing sound. It’s actually quite hard to describe the noise but it wasn’t remarkably jarring.

And that’s it! It had an electrical feel to it, though obviously I haven’t seen, or heard off, electricity manifesting like that before or since. And by ‘electrical’ I mean it’s the closest phenomenon I can attach it to. The weather was clear and freezing. Certainly there was no sign of any thunderstorms.

Something else unusual happened in that room, though I can’t remember if it happened before or after and it was nothing like this incident. Oh, and this happened in Herefordshire for those who, like me, love to get the geography in their head!

Cheers.
 
Endlessly Amazed said:
Welcome to the forum - and what a wonderful first post! Detailed, and with a second person as a witness. What was the other unusual event? Did anyone else in the house ever witness a ball of light or any other weirdness?
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Thank you!

Second witness essential. I may have discounted the event over the years if it wasn’t for my ex’s input.

No one else in the household has ever reported anything similar. I should mention that my dad’s an electrician and I spoke to him about it the next day. He was interested but had no idea what it might have been and had never witnessed anything similar. Furthermore, I worked at an electrical wholesalers at the time so ran it past a few of the electricians who shopped there when I returned in the New Year. They were barely interested and had no theories.

I’ll relate the other experience in another reply, if that’s ok.
 
Endlessly Amazed said:
Welcome to the forum - and what a wonderful first post! Detailed, and with a second person as a witness. What was the other unusual event? Did anyone else in the house ever witness a ball of light or any other weirdness?
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So, the other oddity. Me and my aforementioned then girlfriend were squabbling one night. She was sat on the futon and I was sat on a swivel chair. I think we’d been arguing for about ten minutes and it was becoming more heated. We weren’t quite shouting at one another but our voices were raised.

The room above the garage we were living in was accessed by an outside wooden staircase attached to the building, leading to a door with six glass panes in its top half. I’d put up a ‘curtain’ over the glass for privacy at night - a piece of cloth I’d found attached with drawing pins.

In the midst of our squabble we became aware of heavy and brisk footsteps coming up the stairs. Mostly focused on our argument we both registered the footsteps but didn’t acknowledge them. When they reached the top, and the person was right outside the door, we automatically stopped out of politeness/embarrassment and waited for whoever it was to enter or at least knock.

My parents and sister lived in the house next to the garage and would fairly frequently come over, for all sorts of reasons. Certainly, you could always tell if someone was walking up the staircase.

And then nothing happened. We sat there in silence waiting to greet whichever member of the family it was and then whoever it was suddenly ran heavily back down the steps.

We’d gone from being deep in our argument to polite silence to puzzlement in about six seconds.

Then it hit me that it was past midnight. My parents and sister have always been early to bed people. Visiting after 10pm would be an unusual event - visiting after midnight almost unthinkable.

So we sat there and once again we both felt suddenly very afraid. After perhaps a minute I tentatively approached the door and pulled back the ‘curtain’. Pitch blackness. Now, there was a security light attached to the main house which it was incredibly hard not to set off when you reached the bottom of the stairs - very handily because we used the toilet in the house and the light was useful. On this occasion whoever had very recently belted down the stairs hadn’t set it off.

The house is in a fairly remote place. Around six houses nearby. Whoever took it upon themselves to wander up the pretty long driveway that night, trudge heavily and confidently up the stairs, after seeing the lights in the room were obviously on through the thin cloth ‘curtain’, and then decided to run away, somehow managed to avoid setting the security light off during their approach and their exit.

Naturally, checked with my family members the next day. All denied being awake let alone outside after midnight and were baffled. I would love to know who it was - and if I hadn’t been routed to the chair in fear I could’ve dashed to the ‘curtain’ to find out.

This occurred in spring or summer but could have been any year 2004-07.

I have lived in and used that room as a studio on and off for years, and have never experienced anything similar.

If it was an intruder/thief, they were a crap one. And the strange pause at the door while we sat in silence. I can make no sense of it.

Typing it out like this, I realise it doesn’t sound overly inexplicable but the particular conditions made it feel extremely unusual and frightening.
 
Welcome to the bored, Mik.

Seems to have impacted you pretty deeply, this event. Orbs are a real Fortean phenomenon that science is still baffled by. I first encountered them associated with English crop circles and it blew a bit of a hole in my hardwired skepticism.

I sell heat lamps as part of my daily job in hardware and use them at home. Had you ever considered the effect of a bright light 'shadowing' the eye's retina? You know how when looking at a sunset you close your eyes and can 'see' orbs projected on your inner eyelids, even though not having looked directly at the object? Is it possible that an imprint of your heat lamp could have penetrated your peripheral field of vision, producing the effect of a a brief glowing from the retina?
 
skinny said:
Welcome to the bored, Mik.

Seems to have impacted you pretty deeply, this event. Orbs are a real Fortean phenomenon that science is still baffled by. I first encountered them associated with English crop circles and it blew a bit of a hole in my hardwired skepticism.

I sell heat lamps as part of my daily job in hardware and use them at home. Had you ever considered the effect of a bright light 'shadowing' the eye's retina? You know how when looking at a sunset you close your eyes and can 'see' orbs projected on your inner eyelids, even though not having looked directly at the object? Is it possible that an imprint of your heat lamp could have penetrated your peripheral field of vision, producing the effect of a a brief glowing from the retina?
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Thank you!

Though I can’t deny that the event had qualities similar to an after-image, it was extremely distinctive as something else. Obviously, two of us experiencing the same after-image simultaneously (in terms of length, dimensions etc) would be unusual in itself but it was the, and I didn’t elaborate on this in the first post, the real feeling that ‘something’ had happened - something very singular. We lay completely still and silent for about twenty seconds before either of us spoke. Fear and amazement. Plus there was the faint sound. I fairly frequently experience after-images and I can identify them as such. This event shared qualities but was distinctively something unique in my experience.
 
Will o the wisps are probably part of that county’s lore. Anybody else know of orby events from that neck of your woods?
 
skinny said:
Will o the wisps are probably part of that county’s lore. Anybody else know of orby events from that neck of your woods?
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No doubt but I don’t remember hearing any tales about that phenomenon in these parts.
 
Mik Bulk said:
Thank you!

Though I can’t deny that the event had qualities similar to an after-image, it was extremely distinctive as something else. Obviously, two of us experiencing the same after-image simultaneously (in terms of length, dimensions etc) would be unusual in itself but it was the, and I didn’t elaborate on this in the first post, the real feeling that ‘something’ had happened - something very singular. We lay completely still and silent for about twenty seconds before either of us spoke. Fear and amazement. Plus there was the faint sound. I fairly frequently experience after-images and I can identify them as such. This event shared qualities but was distinctively something unique in my experience.
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At this time in your life, were there other odd occurrences, perhaps what a poltergeist would do? Several members here have written about their poltergeist-like experiences, so this is about as supportive and nonjudgmental a forum as one could hope to find.
 
Endlessly Amazed said:
At this time in your life, were there other odd occurrences, perhaps what a poltergeist would do? Several members here have written about their poltergeist-like experiences, so this is about as supportive and nonjudgmental a forum as one could hope to find.
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Hi. No, absolutely nothing else unusual occurred during this time, apart from the story above about the mysterious footsteps.

Me and my aforementioned then girlfriend did have another truly stunning experience around that time, but it was explicable.

We were walking through some fields on a hot Sunday afternoon when a gigantic tornado-like swirl of hay was pulled up into the sky. It must have reached well over 100 feet up, possibly a lot higher. There was an incredible amount of it. The ridiculous, terrible, hideous thing is that I had a fully-charged Sony camcorder actually in my hands that I was taking to lend to someone - with no tape in it! Outrageous.
 
Mythopoeika said:
The ball of light that disappeared with a crackle... sounds very much like ball lightning.
My sister had a similar experience.
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I’ve considered that, whatever ball lightning might be. I understand that it’s been reported as sometimes lasting very briefly. This may or may not be of importance: running above the garage are a set of three-phase power cables, prob about 25 feet up. Obviously, there’s a roof (of a material made from recycled tyres) between where the thing appeared and the cables but I have wondered if there was some kind of connection.
 
Mik Bulk said:
And I meant to ask, have you any details of your sister’s experience?
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My sister was sitting alone in her lounge when a small light (slightly bigger than a golf ball, I seem to recall) came through one wall and moved around a little bit before heading straight to a socket on the other side of the room. When it went into the wall socket, it made a slight crackling sound. It was a slight thunderstorm outside (I think).
 
Mythopoeika said:
My sister was sitting alone in her lounge when a small light (slightly bigger than a golf ball, I seem to recall) came through one wall and moved around a little bit before heading straight to a socket on the other side of the room. When it went into the wall socket, it made a slight crackling sound. It was a slight thunderstorm outside (I think).
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Ha, classic ball lightning manoeuvre. The thing I experienced, though I’ve described it as ‘spherical’ didn’t have a definitive clear orb-like shape, and, in comparison with descriptions I’ve heard of ball lightning, didn’t appear solid or well-formed - it barely had any substance at all. It was more a kind of dissipation, if that makes sense.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The impression I get from your descriptions is that of a transient flare effect, perhaps representing some sort of ionization anomaly in the air above the heater.
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That’s roughly how I’ve explained it to myself over the years. Perhaps some sort of interaction between the heater, the extremely cold outside temperature and the power cables combining to produce…something. A discharge of some kind that clearly happens very rarely.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The impression I get from your descriptions is that of a transient flare effect, perhaps representing some sort of ionization anomaly in the air above the heater.
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Or maybe a watered down distant relative of the blue-white phenomenon at the Tower of London that one time? :chuckle:
 
Welcome @Mik Bulk! That a great story and so good you had a second witness. I'm imagining parallel worlds and time travel and ray guns opening portals! Haha.

I had a similar experience with a light source in my living room but it was very small, like a small dot and very very bright, like a bare filament from a bulb. It zigzagged around in front of me for a few seconds and then, before I had chance to alert anyone else, it disappeared, just blinked out of existence. It moved fast and almost with a purpose, like a fly might, but was far too bright for anything natural and I'm in the UK so unlikely to be a firefly.

Absolutely nothing compared to your experience, which sounds amazing! This still shook me up a little though.
 
Rabbit Will Run said:
Welcome @Mik Bulk! That a great story and so good you had a second witness. I'm imagining parallel worlds and time travel and ray guns opening portals! Haha.

I had a similar experience with a light source in my living room but it was very small, like a small dot and very very bright, like a bare filament from a bulb. It zigzagged around in front of me for a few seconds and then, before I had chance to alert anyone else, it disappeared, just blinked out of existence. It moved fast and almost with a purpose, like a fly might, but was far too bright for anything natural and I'm in the UK so unlikely to be a firefly.

Absolutely nothing compared to your experience, which sounds amazing! This still shook me up a little though.
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Love it!

It was amazing - but at the exact moment it happened, frightening. I think I braced myself for something unspeakable to happen, as you do when a totally inexplicable and not-experienced-before occurrence suddenly intrudes on your bedtime! Still, I’d love for it to happen again…I think.
 
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