Ball lightening is usually reported as colored balls that appear during a thunderstorm and float slowly through the air before disappearing without a trace. They can even appear inside houses and have been reported on planes. Ball lightening sometimes leaves burn marks on other objects.
What is the deal? Is there really such a thing as ball lightening? I have met people that claim to have seen it and there are some fairly credible reports on the internet. Are there any theories on what it is if it does exist? Some descriptions of it make it sound rather supernatural.
Shagnasty, I saw ball lightening once, and it was indeed an eerie experience. It had been storming all night, and the ball – actually, a bit longer top to bottom than side to side – appeared about 30 feet outside my living room window, just above the ground, just as the storm started to abate. It was a very bright light, with no particularly noticeable color, which appeared to float, and expand and contract slightly. Although size was hard to gauge, I guess it was about 10 feet tall and 6 feet across. It was accompanied by a crackling, buzzing electrical sound, and it lasted for about 30 seconds or so. It appeared over a flat, grassy lawn, not near any structures or wires.
Fortunately, two other people were with me, or I would have doubted myself after it disappeared and left no trace of ever having been there.
Background: P-3 Orion crew SS-3 (Radar/EO/ESM operator) deployed with VP-45 to Sigonella Sicily. This occurred on a late summertime event south of Crete:
We were due to check off station about 2000 (local) and return to Sig; weather was OK down low (less than 3000’) but was total kaka above that altitude. We’d already been PLE’ed on station (ordered to stay longer than planned) and needed altitude to save fuel for the ride home…so, let’s find a hole in this junk, get on top, and go home.
Climbing through about FL150 (in clear air with moderate to severe turbulence) I heard a “snap”. About 2-3 seconds later this basketball or slightly larger sized wad of … (plasma?) floated down the middle of the fuselage past my station and continued aft for another couple of seconds until it departed the aircraft through MAD boom (the extreme aft point of the airframe) with a much louder “crack”. It was orange/yellow in color, transparent with indefinite boundaries, had sort of a “writhing” motion to it, didn’t seem to be attached to anything (or attempt to touch anything in its’ path), made no noise as it passed, and seemed like it knew where it was headed.
After landing, the only damage found was a fist sized hole that had been blown in the extreme end of the fiberglass tailcone of the MAD boom. Can’t recall if the tailcone has a static dissipator mounted there or not.
Glad I was strapped in and could not get its’ way, whatever it was.
(st elmo is the patron saint of mariners) St. Elmo’s Fire is ball lightning that sometimes appears among the masts of sailing ships in an electrical storm. My mom claims to have come into physical contact with ball lightning that floated through a window during her childhood. Ball lightning is plasma–a bunch of atomic nuclei whose electrons have become so excited they have left their normal set of shells and have set up a cloud around the exterior of the ball. The light and so forth would be the result of electrons giving up their energy and returning to lower electron shells (is this language still current in chemistry?–it’s about 40 years old) and each time an electron goes from one shell to another, it gives up a photon. When the plasma has shed all of its energy, it becomes a mere cloud of ordinary atoms of dust or carbon or water too small to see. So ball lightning looks like it just goes poof and is gone. A lightning researcher has created ball lightning at will by passing two iron electrodes close to each other with a high electrical potential between them. The spark becomes a small bubble of light which lasts a few seconds.
I almost forgot–I did see a plasma ball one time. We lived near an airport where there were a lot of ancient planes, some of which had rotary engines. In a rotary engine, the spark plugs are at the outside edge of a large circle. Under certain circumstances, the high energy electrical activity will generate a plasma ball. I saw the ball first and thought it was a UFO (this was during the UFO craze of the early 1960s) but then I heard the engine of the plane and its lights. The ball floated along under the airplane. I doubt that the pilot was aware of it. I suspect that since there is virtually no matter in a plasma ball–just electrons and a few atomic nuclei–it didn’t appear to be affected by wind resistance.