I have witnessed ball lightning along with my wife. 3 years ago in August we returned home to oklahoma city from a trip to texas. we were unpacking the car parked in our driveway. it was late afternoon. Very humid and lofty thunderheads building and slowly drifting to the n.e. occasionally a distant sound of thunder. temerature was very warm maybe high eighties. As i was getting the luggage out of the trunk, I looked up and saw my wife looking at the sky, I asked 'what are you looking at ’ then looked where she was looking. A lone lofty thunderhead was slightly south of our location. pretty much alone with no other clouds close to it. a really bright orb, almost pure white was moving just outside the cloud. due to the distance from us to the actual cloud, I could not tell how big the org actually was. the sun to the west was obscured by all the other thunderheads and scattered clouds so was not the cause of the light. we both froze as we watched the orb move as if being guided internally. it remained just outside the cloud but moved parallel around the perimeter of the cloud. about several hundered feet later as it moved, it turned and disappeared into the cloud. shortly afterwards, a bolt of lightning came out of the cloud. my wife turned to me and asked ‘what was that?’ she nor I had ever seen anything like it in our lives and haven’t since. I like science and had read about this before and that was what I mentioned that I thought it was.
Bumping this for the crowd.
A fascinating description of your observation, no doubt in relation to this article.
I had always thought that my mother is overly afraid of lightning until she told me that she had witnessed a ball lightning move across a room when she was young.