This topic confused me greatly.
I was glad to see the question and was expecting a swift “Does Australia really exist? We have about as many witnesses, but one can never be completely sure until we see it ourselves.” but instead even Cecil was uncertain. I am from Sweden and ball lightning are not uncommon enough to be doubted in my part of the world. My father watched one bounce around in the kitchen back in the 80s, my mother saw one leap from a phone a few years from then (melting the phone) and my sister and I saw one back in 2002, ours just being a bright orb shaped ~1 foot wide flash of light in mid air in the stair case when we were running around turning off TVs e.t.c. with a huge storm over our city. The thing that has puzzled people over the centuries seems mostly be about how the plasma balls manage to get created inside buildings without being connected to the outside, and what they consist of when they are the kind that bounce around in swamps, hitting trees, ground e.t.c. making strange sounds for several seconds. For me any doubt surrounding ball lightning is as amazing and surprising as if someone would question the existence of rainbows. Sure, you don’t see them every month, but they definitely exist.
Cecil is nevertheless correct; the subject of ball lightning has always been controversial among scientists.
I note you are from Sweden; are you anywhere near Hessdalen, Norway?
Unlike with rainbows, there was no theory to explain ball lightning at all. It’s not plasma, plasma (such as electric arcs) is far less dense than air, and rises quickly.
Up until the 1970s the major part of the scientific community was certain that BL did not exist, and any eyewitnesses therefore were either hallucinating, were liars, or were so incompetent that they’d mistaken retinal afterimages for a genuine object. BL was in the same class as ghosts, aliens, and sea monsters: if there are lots of eyewitnesses, it just means that hoaxers and lunatics are common!
What gets lost here is the strong possibility of selecting of evidence: self-fulfilling prophecies. We can reason thus: we can assert that BL doesn’t exist, because if it was real, then reliable witnesses such as meteorologists and astronomers would report seeing it, and they don’t. (In fact, these experts were seeing it, but they’d never honestly say this, since it would damage their reputation for sane honesty.)
The few texts which took BL seriously were asserting that BL is incredibly rare. A survey in the 1980s showed the opposite: a few percent of the population has seen it themselves. So perhaps it was incredibly rare for any reliable people to admit seeing such a ‘taboo’ phenomenon, and risk being labeled as crazy or dishonest.
My mother has always been very scared of lightning. Whenever there is a thunderstorm she disconnects all electric appliances she can. It was only last year or so she told me that when she was young she had seen a ball of light come out of a wall socket during a thunderstorm, move across the room and disappear. If that wasn’t a ball lightning I don’t know what it was.
Not to sidetrack this thread but I’d suggest to Floater that you may wish to buy a few surge protectors at the hardware store and use them to save your mom from all the unplugging. I only use them for my computer & monitor myself but they could keep power-line surges from affecting ones other appliances, too.
Nothing has happened so far (and she’s been living in that house for almost forty years now) so I don’t think there’s much need for surge protectors.
Bumped because the article is back on the Straight Dope front page.
A big development in 2014: Natural ball lightning probed for the first time | New Scientist
And here’s the Wiki article on BL generally: Ball lightning - Wikipedia
I witnessed ball lightning exactly once in my life, and it was enough. I was about 10yo, sitting in the kitchen with my mom and aunt, when the lightning shot from one end of the kitchen to the other. Scared the bejesus out of us.
Western science has done a vast amount of good for the world, but it does have two glaring weaknesses. Two attitudes are incredibly common: (1) that something cannot possibly exist unless it is witnessed by the “right” people; and (2) anything that contradicts the current state of scientific knowledge cannot possibly be correct.
If the platypus weren’t already proven to exist beyond the shadow of a doubt, and you showed a stuffed one to several random scientists, at least 90% of them would instantly dismiss it as a hoax.
This is also why so many scientists are dismissive of UFO reports: THEY can’t imagine (or more accurately, refuse to imagine) a scenario by which intelligent aliens might be visiting us, and therefore they blithely assume that such a thing is impossible, instead of bothering to look at the evidence.
This is not true at all. Many or most scientists in the SETI field are open to the idea that advanced alien civilisations, if they exist, could come here and make contact; in fact they think that this sort of contact is a very real possibility (and indeed should have happened long ago).
But after looking in depth at the reports almost all of them reject the idea that UFOs have anything to do with this possibility. And they are almost certainly correct.
Thi sis a bit of nonsense; the criteria for the validity of a phenomena isn’t that “the ‘right’ people” observe it, but that there is objective external evidence. All eyewitnesses, including trained observers, are at best suspect at making reliable and quantifiable observation of events. And while we tend to prefer explanations which fall within the conventional understanding of science and view explanations which require changing the existing paradigm (hence the mantra that “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,”) but after some natural resistance science welcomes novel explanations because they can open up entirely new fields of research and application, e.g. quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, endosymbiotic theory.
Scientists are dismissive of reports of purported UFOs not because the lack imagination or “blithely assume that such a thing is impossible,” but because these observations are inevitably inconsistent with any physical or objective evidence despite decades of reported observations and abductions. Reports of interactions with or abductions by supposed aliens show a distinct trends that can be readily attributed to cultural influences e.g. the reporting of “Greys” after the publication of Whitley Streiber’s Communion and Jimmy Guieu’s docu-dramas and promotion of the description of Grey-type aliens. If aliens were actually coming to Earth in such a way as to be visible to random observers in such a flagrant fashion and leaving the evidence from crashes or implants, we’d expect to have a large body of documented public evidence. But we don’t; even a cursory examination into the “evidence” offers nothing of substance.
Many reputable scientists do, in fact, believe that aliens (or at least extraterrestrial life) exist, and would welcome contact and communication with them; hence why we have a SETI program, and while exobiology has gone from being a fringe discipline to a field of study driving many of the mission goals of our interplanetary space exploration program. But there is no credible evidence that personal observations of UFOs actually represent aliens come to visit us, nor that the supposed evidence for previous alien visits in the artifacts of ancient cultures are anything more that weaving together misinterpretations of ancient legends and artifacts.
Stranger
Those aren’t weaknesses of Western science. They’re weaknesses of people in general. Scientists try to avoid those biases, but we’re only human, same as anyone else.
If ball lightning exists, there ought to be a bunch of cellphone videos of it by now.
The key point is lack of a Scientific explanation. No one has an acceptable explanation for the phenomena: creation, duration, motion, appearance, etc.
There have been claims of creating ball lightning in the lab but they don’t seem to match the observations very well.
So there are 3 criteria:
- Very common public observation.
- Repeatable laboratory observation.
- An explanation of the phenomena with formulas, etc.
You need at least one of these in order to establish something as real. Ball lightning doesn’t have any.
So–
You take a phenomenon that is quite rare, and when it does occur, is very often terrifying; and you think that there should be lots of videos of it?
Seriously???
When somebody sees ball lightning, it’s a mighty good bet that they’ve never seen it before in their lives. If they’re not petrified with terror, they’ll be busy trying to figure out just what exactly the thing is. If they’re too frightened for that, then they’ll be too frightened to even think about recording it.
Yes, much like your UFO idea above… paranormal activity claims seem to have really died down since nearly EVERYBODY has a high-quality camera with them at all times. If these things were even half as common as claimed 30+ years ago, evidence should be mounting wildly now. Instead, we get… nothing.
If ball lightning happens, even rarely, SOMEBODY will catch it on video at some point. Until then, we have the always-sketchy eyewitness reports as the best evidence, which is not super useful.
But there are videos of natural ball lightning, at least the 2014 one if not before.
It’s a rare phenomenon that occurs during a thunderstorm, so understandably there are not lots of videos of it, but it is an exaggeration to dismiss all the existing ones as “sketchy reports”.
ETA the 2014 recording was not made by a cheap mobile phone, either.
Is there any reason to think ball lightning has a single common cause? Since it’s not readily reproducible or explainable we only have the description of something like a blob of fire or a plasma that moves around. There could be many different explanations for the observations.
I remember seeing a few years back the idea that ball lightning was hallucinations caused by strong electrical fields affecting part of the brain.
The 2014 one may have been vaporized dirt (indeed, being caught by a spectrograph leaves little doubt as to that), but that doesn’t explain the common reports of ball lightning moving through walls. I’m inclined to agree with TriPolar that there are at least two different phenomena that get called ball lightning.