Ball lightning is real. My cite is my grandparents, whom I never knew to lie. The location was their farm house in western Kansas in the 1950s. Both grandparents were in the kitchen when the glowing orb rolled in a straight line from the bedroom, through the kitchen, and through the living room. It disappeared when it met the outer wall. Subsequently, several household appliances had to be replaced.
Unfortunately, my grandparents are gone, so I can’t ask further questions, e.g., about the weather. I’ll see if my father remembers more of the story.
Which leads us to a different principle: just because we have confirmation (and an explanation) for one manifestation of the phenomenon, it doesn’t mean we have that for other variations. The “glowing orb moving inside a house zapping appliances” requires more evidence than the 2014 incident. And for any given incident, there may be a mix of real and bogus (for example: the ball was real, but it was actually outside the house, only lasted a second, and the appliances were fried due to ordinary lightning strike).
The ball lightning I saw happened way too fast to capture, even if I’d had my iPhone back then. It just shot across the room and vanished. My mom, my aunt and I just sat there in shock for a second, before the “WTF was that?!?!” set in.
Yes, that’s the trouble. You have a very rarely occurring event that when it does occur, happens quickly and is surprising and even terrifying such that the witnesses cannot really respond to document via video, camera, etc. It is not something that can be demonstrated in the lab to occur, probably because the mechanism of how such a thing could exist is mostly speculation. Without a concept of what it could be, it’s difficult to begin trying to quantify some sort of formulas and such. Ergo, it is an unexplained phenomenon that is very rare and by reports seems to behave inexplicably. That leaves people who don’t witness it directly (the vast majority of people) skeptical. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but it does make it hard to believe that it does exist.
I’m with you on that. I suspect that even in the case where someone is, say, filming a youtube video during a thunderstorm or taking video of their friend behaving like a moron or whatever and suddenly there’s a lightning strike nearby and then a glowing orb of what appears to be electricity shoots through the room, it will be difficult to retain composure enough to keep the camera steady and film the event. Handheld camera shots are notorious for being very jerky and waving all around when something startling occurs. You might get a glimpse of whatever is occurring, then the image jumps around and starts showing the floor or the ceiling or someone’s pocket or whatever. It’s not being aimed while the operator is ducking looking around for where to go, turning and running for cover, or just plain staring stupidly at the event in shock.
However, given the growing dispersion of always-on cameras through home surveillance videos, nanny cams, security monitoring, etc, there is a growing likelihood that one of these rare occurrences should be caught on camera.
I knew ball lightning was somewhat rare or unusual but didn’t know it was controversial as such. Saw it one time many years ago when camping in the slickrock country of Utah. It skipped and rolled right through camp.
Unplugging sensitive or expensive electronics is not a bad plan as a thunderstorm approaches, btw. Unless you’ve a whole house or dedicated surge protector, forget it. The el-cheapo surge protectors aren’t going to help much. It doesn’t take a direct or even a near hit necessarily to send or induce a spike. Also the surge after an outage is restored can be a bit on the high side.
Every once in a while during thunderstorms, when a bolt of lighting fires some distance away but close enough that the sight and sound are almost simultaneous, there will be a large and loud spark pass between two objects in my living room–for instance, once between the knob on an open door and a wall. Anyone else ever get that?
Not “cannot possibly be correct,” but rather "must be extremely well documented and analyzed before being accepted as correct.
And that’s not a glaring weakness of Western science; it’s one of Western science’s main strengths.
No one is accusing anyone of lying. The assertion is that eyewitnesses are mistaken. They’re telling the truth — they’re saying what they think they saw.
Both in forensics and in psychological studies, eyewitness accounts have proven to be astonishingly inaccurate.
Something woo-claimers, from cryptozoologists to anti-vaxxers to ghost chasers, seem to either not know or ignore if they do know.
Never mind the ordinary witness, even trained scientists have fooled themselves as to what they saw. Take the cold fusion guys, Fleischmann and Pons. They were so convinced of what they saw, they left the country so they could continue to get funding.
And then the claim just becomes whether something is extraordinary, and what evidence one would expect. If Nessie were real, then it should be easy to get a good picture of it, but nobody has. On the other hand, even if ball lightning is real, it would be extraordinarily difficult to get a picture of it, so the lack of pictures doesn’t mean anything. Furthermore, we’ve already shown that at least one kind of ball lightning exists, because we were lucky enough to get a really good picture of it, so the question is just whether there’s some sort of ball lightning that behaves in the way it’s often described (like moving through walls), and evidence of that would require not just pictures, but video, which would have been nearly impossible until very recently (and which is still quite difficult).
I know this is six years old but I wanted to respond to it anyway. I’m Swedish and there is no general acceptance of ball lightning here and most Swedes have never seen it. I know exactly one person who claims to have seen one and he’s someone I knew a little as a kid and haven’t had contact with for ages. It’s rare here too. I don’t know why the thread starter would think differently.
Seems to me that eyewitness accounts should be reasonably reliable, when it comes to events inside one’s own home, which is familiar territory where unusual things would stand out. You don’t really have to be a “trained observer” to tell the difference between a normal room and a room with a glowing “something” in it.
Now, the witness’s interpretation of what that “something” is could be completely wrong - but doesn’t that call for offering an alternative that explains the observation, rather than just dismissing the experience as “a case of the vapors”?
Compare this with, say UFO sightings - there are a huge number of common, well-understood alternatives to explain “a light in the sky” as being something other than a craft filled with little green men.
Scientists could provide a list of commonly understood glowing items that can appear, float thru a room, and disappear as alternatives to “ball lightning”. If they don’t have such a list - well, isn’t that the sort of thing scientists are supposed to be curious enough to investigate?
I didn’t know what it was when I saw it in 1983 (i was already an adult, well educated, and an acknowledged skeptic of many ‘scientific mysteries’) I had not yet heard the term ‘ball lightning’.
I was seated indoors, next to a window on the 3rd floor, during an electrical storm. I was using a sewing machine, and had the stereo on in a distant room, but there was a speaker on the far side of the room I was in. I watched the storm move over the Bay and come closer to my part of the city.
Suddenly, a streak of bright light passed thru the window and made a loud noise as it hit the metal sewing machine. I pulled my hands back instinctively and only felt a mild electrical shock. Then I watched as a ball of “sparkling light” (a bit smaller than a soccer ball) travelled across the floor -rapidly- and seemed drawn to the speaker, as it curved in that direction and hit the speaker with an even louder bang than the first noise. It blew the speaker (damaged the electrical system).
I was stunned, and immediately replayed the incident in my mind several times, as I questioned what I just saw. I was surprised that the lightning hadn’t damaged the sewing machine. I was also confused, as I had no idea that lightning would pass thru window glass, strike something, and then form a ball of light/energy that could travel across a room and ‘disappear’ when it came in contact with an electrically-charged object (the speaker).
After a lot of searching scientific articles (this was before the Internet, so there wasn’t a lot of bogus stuff to wade thru, but not much on the subject of lightning that hadn’t killed or injured someone) I came across the term ‘ball lightning’ and my experience fit the description.
I (the skeptic) wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t happened to me. I say to the other skeptics on this thread: you will believe it exists when you witness it. I hope you get the opportunity. It was one of the most fascinating experiences and one I will never forget. Witness ball lightning and you too will believe!
All these descriptions of ball lightening seem close to a description of the “spook lights” that have been seen (and, a few times, photographed) in a small area known locally as the “Devil’s Promenade”, on the border between southwestern Missouri and northeastern Oklahoma west of the small town of Hornet, Missouri.
I first heard of it in a book entitled “Ozark Superstitions”, written by Vance Randolph back in the late 1940’s. Other sources (there are lots of these on the Internet) give examples dating back a century or more.
That is how it is suppose to work, but that does not mean it is how it actually works.
Peer review was never intended to be a verification authority of the nonsense you wrote despite that being what people believe it to be.
Peer review isn’t even repeating the experiment and seeing if you get the same results.
Peer review is SUPPOSE to be simply providing all the data required so that we know exactly how you manipulated your trials and fudged your data to get the results you’re so happy about.
Yes… I am implying BOTH that stuff that gets through peer review clearly has manipulated data… but also that should not be a reason for excluding something. Even taking the mean is “manipulating” your data, it’s hard to really say when the manipulation is done with malicious intent or with ignorance… nor is it easy to say when manipulations are some how intrinsically “bad” or “wrong”.
See, **Flyer’s ** claims is about the reality we live in, not the reality we claim we live in.
There is PLENTY of time to write a rebuttal to any article published in an academic journal that “contradicts the current state of scientific knowledge” or even completely refutes what is considered “absolutely true”…
Plenty of people choose to do so when researchers are pushed into those “non-academic journals that don’t have a peer review system that we agree with”.
Really, we live in a world that is obsessed with appeal to authority, appeal to novelty, and bandwagoning. So yes, by the way academic currently works “something cannot possibly exist unless it is witnessed by the “right” people.”
If you were once one of those ‘right’ people, the very act of contradicting what people currently agree on gets you slammed with a permanent “Ad Hominem” label that cannot be removed and hence means that no one bothers to actually read your works… they just say “yep, this guy wrote this, thus it is wrong”
I think you are mistaken. Peer review serves the role of checking for mistakes. The first level mistake is not including the details of your methodology. That is certainly a key role for peer review, to point out where you have omitted something that is key to the process of how you achieved your results.
But what if during peer review, the reviewers identify a simple arithmetic error that you made in a series of steps, such that your answer is off by a magnitude of 10, and what looks like significant results is not actually significant when that error is corrected? Do you agree that the role of peer review is to catch that kind of mistake?
If so, then what level of error is appropriate and what level of error should be ignored?
Making a basic logical or standard process error is just as questionable as an arithmetic error. The reason science generates standards for how to conduct research is precisely to try to eliminate all the known causes of getting wrong answers, whether through missing some key observational difference, or making some error in judgment, or injecting places that are known to disturb the results of experiments.
There may be some validity to a criticism that scientists as a whole are too dismissive of some ideas that go against [del]conventional wisdom[/del] current consensus, and that there is a certain amount of ad hominem that attaches to researchers who choose to study certain topics, but that is a different issue than the role of peer review per se.
I would argue that peer review doesn’t end once the paper is published, either. When another group performs a similar experiment and compares their results to yours, that’s a form of peer review, too, one which continues indefinitely after the original result.
Science is certainly an ongoing and cumulative endeavor. I’m not sure I would carry that under the heading “Peer Review”, which is typically used to refer to a particular step in the publishing process, but I certainly acknowledge the value of repeating experiments or doing alternative versions of experiments to explore the parameters.