What’s the deal with ball lightning? Is it a real, verifiable phenomenon or is it’s existence still under heavy scrutiny?
A Theory of Ball Lightning as an Electric Discharge - A CSIRO Division of Applied Physics report.
I saw ball lightning once when I was about 14. I was out walking the dog, it was probably seven or eight at night, summertime, and fairly dark. There was no storm or any kind of foul weather, just a typical Wisconsin summer evening. I heard a whooshing sound and looked up to see a ball of light with a streaming tail of light behind it. It was about twenty or thirty feet over my head, traveling about the same speed a car might have on a residential street. I watched it as it headed up the street, and then it veered between some houses–maybe even my parent’s driveway, but it was too far away to tell–and went out of sight. I waited for an explosion, which never came. It seemed like there should have been some kind of reaction from something like that, but it just disappeared from sight, with no sign that it had ever existed.
I didn’t mention it to anyone, that night or ever, until I took a meteorology class in college and when we began to study lightning. When the Professor asked if anyone had ever seen ball lightning, I very tentatively raised my hand and said…“Well, maybe I have…” He asked me to describe what I’d seen, and I related the above story. As a preface to telling my story in class I said that I had not been drinking or smoking anything the night I’d seen it, and then launched into my story.
The Professor said that every time he ever heard someone defend their sobriety before talking about ball lightning he knew that the story he was about to hear was probably the real thing. He also asked me if the lightning had run parallel to any nearby power lines, and I only realized at that moment that it had. He said this was a common theme of ball lightning, though very little can be said to be ‘common’ when speaking about this phenomenon.
My impression is that most, but not quite all, physical scientists accept its existance. The obvious question then becomes what produces it? Theories are regularily kicked around without a consensus ever having emerged.
Basically, it’s an example of a phenomenon that hasn’t been truly submitted to rigorous experimental examination. As a result, there’s very little in the way of experimental facts to constrain speculation. The theoretical literature is therefore pretty much a mess.
I think that the existence of it is real because when I was 14 - 15, living in Brookings, South Dakota, I observed 4 fiery balls rolling accross the sky from North to South quite rapidly and in close succession. Not like a flash of lightning, but just balls rolling. I suppose that most scientists do not believe in this phenomenon because they have not witnessed it. But, I know what I saw and I believe. This happened during a fierce thunder storm with ample amounts of normal lightening.
My father told me that when he was a teen-ager (he was born in 1910), he was delivering an automobile that had been purchased from my grand-father. He said that it had a canvas roof, with wooden supports and that the wooden supports burst into flame when the car was struck by ball lightning. While he was driving the thing, if that wasn’t clear.
That’s it.
I have also heard that Nikola Tesla was able to produce ball lightning at will, and did so regularly during his electrical experiments in the very early days of the study of electricity, lightning and the like.
This site has directions for generating ball lightning in a microwave oven. I haven’t tried it myself but it looks like it would work.