Apart from the ball lightning, that thunderstorm looks a heck of a lot more impressive than anything I’ve seen here in Northern Ireland. We just don’t get dramatic weather here in the UK like that.
I see storms like that all summer. The ball lightning is the rarely witnessed event. In fact the tornados kept hitting 30 miles northwest of us and traveling 20 miles south of us for a month. They just missed our town by a couple miles each time. The worst spent it’s energy mostly in wild areas and sparsly populated locations. The forests are a mess.
Cool footage. The storm is quite impressive, and the ball lightning is really wierd.
My thoughts:
It looks like the thunderstorm is several miles away. You can see the “anvil” at the top and everything. Given that, those lights must be quite bright to be visible from miles away. Plus, you can see the lights clearly as they move back and forth. I really don’t think those are planes. What airplane would employ a large white light, anyway? They might be helicopters pointing searchlights at the camera, but what in God’s Name would motivate the pilots to do such a thing? And in the immediate vicinity of a thunderstorm, no less? Unless the video is fake, it’s probably genuine footage of ball lightning.
As to what ball lightning is, I’m wondering if it might be a form of naturally-occurring plasma. It’s possible to create plasma using electromagnetic energy. I’ve done it myself using microwaves, as part of a research project in grad school. I wonder if ball lightning is created when some rare combination of atmospheric conditons allows the storm’s electromagnetic energy to excite air molecules into a plasma.
It’s considered to be plasma by most people. Some scientists have made it in a lab for brief instances. I think one of the labs was in Japan. They used a glass bead of special elemental materials, and then it was subjected to high pessure or electricity and they got a plasma ball. You’ll need to look it up for the details as I have know idea where to find the stories know.
On to another topic here. Footage of sonic waves holding animals and objects in the air have recently come out. The research is for materials that need special containment without contact with a material becuse it’s highly reactive to most things. Are we about to get practical energy bottle containment fields?
Come here to the midwest USA and we’ll show you a thunderstorm worth seeing! If we’re lucky, we’ll have time to climb onto the roof for the best view. (Don’t worry, there are other taller buildings around to attract the lightening away fr--------ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTT
I take it that I should forward your post to an Administrator so that you can be given your new username?
The top of the anvil cloud, to be seen that close to the horizon instead of towering over the videographer, has to be miles and miles and kilometers and rods and fathoms and furlongs away. The lights are pretty clearly aircraft, (probably commercial aircraft in landing patterns based on the similar patterns that each follows). In some of the frames, (the ones where the planes are passing from one side to the other instead of approaching the camera), you can even see the regular pulsing of the lights flashing.
I’m not an expert in any field of meteorology, so I won’t say that this is an example of ball lightning caught on camera. But it really doesn’t look like aircraft to me.
I’m just copying + pasting one of the comments from the video’s site:
Osiris said…
Yea, ball lightning is very dangerous. I’ve seen it enter a home, rape everyone in the home, then move along. Very Scary, indeed.
Look at the street lights at the very beginning of the video, then compare them to the lights wandering around the sky. Figure the difference in size, but similarity in brightness, between a merc-vape street light at a distance of one to two tenths of a mile and the high-beam landing lights of an aircraft at a distance of three to five miles as interpreted by the lens and photocell of a video camera.
You will not see wings or fuselages, but the lights are going to be visible in the fading evening light.
Darn! I go to the link and the page doesn’t come up… it’s just a blank page. I want to see it!!