These ‘reliable observers’ also reported ‘purple flak’, which did not exist.
Curiously enough, we still don’t know what ‘ball lightning’ is, so any ‘knowledge’ they may have thought they had back in the 1940s, they were mistaken.
The longest confirmed recording of any phenomenon resembling ball lightning lasted only 1.6 seconds, so it probably wasn’t responsible for the foo fighter phenomenon.
I’m currently reading Annie Jacobsen’s book about Area 51, and last night, it finally clicked for me why commercial pilots talking about UFOs could mean the end of their careers, and it was this: At least in the 1950s and 1960s, many of the “UFOs” they saw were actually classified experimental aircraft.
In the early 1990s, I had a pen pal who had served in the Air Force, and she said that when she first saw a Harrier jet, she knew that this craft accounted for a lot of UFO sightings around military bases at one time.
I don’t believe it is an “either/or” type of thing. I’ve no doubt static discharge phenomenon are responsible for some of the reports. But if you read the primary documents, the after-action reports they are most definitely not always talking about ball lightning or anything of the sort.
I’ve seen ball-lightning on the ground. I’d no idea it was rare, but it was really strange. It was in the western mountains, probably a national forest campsite in Colorado or Utah. I heard and saw a lightning strike some distance away. After maybe 10 seconds, something like that, a glowing ball about the size of a volleyball maybe bounced and whooshed, making a kind of sizzling or frying noise right through my camp, between me and the campfire ring and disappearing under my parked pickup. I thought it was going to hit me at one point, and wondered what that would feel like. It was cool, like a glowing ball of whitish plasma. I would sort of liken it to the sparks flying off a welder on the ground maybe, it was clearly an artifact or something derived from the lightning strike itself. Maybe a piece of dirt or sand maybe.
Interesting!
The seconds-long delay is also interesting.
If I’d been there, I might have suspected that some local piece of manmade equipment such as an insulator or transformer had been damaged by lightning, and took a few seconds to finally fail and disrupt. The hot particle you saw could have been a small piece of incandescent insulator or something. Maybe a real electrical engineer or atmospheric scientist might have a different explanation.
In any case, it doesn’t sound much like the foo-fighter phenomenon, so we agree that ball lighning is not the explanation there.