What on Earth is Ball Lightning?

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[Zepplin]

Ball lightning is future humans trying to send Arnold Schwarzenegger back.

[thomaskrejci]

I’ve seen one kill a person less than hundred meters from me in 1995 in Brno, Czech Republic.
It was at a disability hospital, a four-story building forming half court-yard with a tractor parked there and a person smoking a cigarette next to it.
I watched a perfect orange sphere about the size of the football descending along lightning rod cable without touching it. It took about two seconds for it to descend the 3 stories, then about 2 m above ground it jumped horizontally towards the tractor. When it touched it disappeared, and the man on the other side of it fell down dead.
There was no smell no sound and only thing they found on the person was small burn underneath his watch.
I remember the authorities not believing me. I was 19 at the time.

[soulesslemming]

I’ve never seen ball lightning, but I’ve been in thunder snow, which is absolutely terrifying. You could feel the static in the air. All the hairs on your body stood straight up and you could see flashes around you from the lightning, but it was snowing so hard you couldn’t see 5 feet in front of you. It was like being in a neon light there was a purplish blue glow everywhere.

[Luciphell]

This is why you don't mess with a mage.

[p.r.]

I had an experience with this when I was about 8. I was sitting at the table in the dining room. The table was next to a window. The weather was bad. A lot of rain. When there was a flash of lightning an orb of light about the size of a basketball came in the window. It wasn't just a steady light. It looked like crackling electricity but no sound. It flew over the table, then dropped down to skim over the floor and flew towards the refrigerator. As it approached the refrigerator, it flew up and over the refrigerator and through the wall to outside.
My Aunt was in the kitchen and witnessed it too. I don't remember a smell afterwards. It didn't do any damage to the house. It was a spectacle I will never forget.

[ninehundreddollarluxuryyac]

Having the spectroscope and camera run for a long time to record one and get spectroscopic analysis of what it is made of was a brilliant idea.

[alvinseaside]

I got to see ball lightening during a thunderstorm sitting drinking coffee with my grandfather in the milk room on his dairy farm… coolest shit ever, greatest memory ever. Lightening struck the barn we were in, and rolled out into the yard in front of us until it got so small it disappeared… when it came off the lightening rod it was the size of a VW…. I truly feel blessed to have witnessed it. The blessing is the fact it happened when my grandfather was there… simple things in life.

[mackaronen]

I saw 2 ball lightnings on Ahvenanmaa, Finland. It was as the worst lightning storm I've ever seen was calming down. We where sitting out on the porch drinking. The sea was really wild and it rained pretty much, so there were no boats out. There were still a lot of lightnings, 5-10 per minutes. All of a sudden I see a orange ball coming out of the bay next to ours, I was emitting a warm glow, not at all blinding, distance maybe 200-250m, hovering about 2 meters over the surface, it was absolutely quiet. We discussed what it could be, UFO or ball lightning. Then my mother saw another one, exactly alike, coming out of the new bay over. They continues on a collision course for about a minute, until the got out in the waterway. There they merged went down the waterway in an incredible speed. I would say about 200-300km/h, some disagreed and said 100-200km/h, and some said a lot faster. All I know is that it was one hell of a lot faster then any boat I've seen in my life. Especially in such rough waves. The thing I thought was most eerie, was the absolute silent.

[xLoLRaven]

Honestly, with phenomena like ball lighting, it's no wonder tales of magic used to be so commonplace. After all, if nowadays we still have trouble comprehending it, what were our ancestors supposed to think? Just imagine...

During an intense storm suddenly a ball of lighting comes barreling through your home/church, bouncing and swerving, before striking someone dead. What else would you think other than "yeah, he just got smote". It's up there on the same level as getting hit by a meteorite.

[jpdemer]

I saw ball lightning once, around 1990. A summer thunderstorm had just ended - at least, the rain had ended - and I was standing on a 2nd-story porch overlooking the street. It was dark, perhaps 10 pm, and the air was very still. A ball of white light about the size of a basketball came drifting down the center of the street, about five feet above the pavement, accompanied by a hissing/fizzing sound. The ball passed in front of me, traveled another 20 feet or so, and then vanished with a slight pop. No steam, no smoke, and if there was any odor it didn't drift my way. I knew what it was immediately, but to this day I remain astonished by the sight. I have an extensive technical background, but nothing I know of physics and chemistry could come close to explaining it.
The number of reports where the ball travels straight down a defined path (e.g. a street or a church aisle) seems to be significant, but I have no clue what that suggests.

[janetchennault]

My father saw two instances of ball lightening, when he was flying in the Aleutians during WWII. In the first case, he noticed it on the wing of his P-40. He tilted the plane and the ball rolled down the wing, through the fuselage, and out onto the other wing. He did this several times, rolling it back and forth from wingtip to wingtip - but each time it got a bit smaller. Finally, when it was quite small, it dropped over the wingtip and was gone.
In the second occurrence, he was test flying a transport (don't recall the type) and the ball lightening appeared inside the plane, ricocheting from side to side and melting the floor and seats wherever it touched anything. When it got to the rear of the plane, it went out through the tail and was gone. (He had to report this as 'a lightening strike' since ball lightening 'did not exist'.)

[RHCole]

3:58 "The Hunt For Ball Lightnign" 🤣

[owen]

20:50 Girlfriend's eyes now tracking me as I suspiciously walk over to the microwave, whistling, with a box of matches...

[danielhathaway]

I saw it once, when I was young. We were driving down the highway in Texas during a storm. Out the window, on the side of the car I was sitting on, I saw a blueish white orb skipping down the side of the highway, even with our car. My whole family saw it, as did the people behind us. I saw them pointing. It kept pace with us for about 15 seconds before turning off into a field and dissipating. It was terrifying!

[Thebrainymonkey]

I had ball lightning in my living room, near my records for about a second about 2 years ago. (too quick for me to grab my phone as it vanished as quickly as it appeared) at the end of a thunderstorm. It fried my TV and the macbook that was connected to it. I managed to fix the TV with a replacement motherboard. I needed a new macbook though and unfortunately I hadn't done a recent backup!

[danf]

Dang! Ball Lightning would have been a good story for X-Files!

[whippet]

I heard an extremely large explosion in my backyard one summer afternoon. I had earlier been on my roof blowing out gutters and noticed some dark clouds several miles away. I had used a 20 ft aluminum ladder to get on the roof and left it there while I cleaned up inside the house. After the explosion, all my electrical went off in the house. I called my neighbor across the street with my iPhone to see if his power was off. He said he was standing at his front door and had seen a large white light ball above my house. The explosion literally shook my house. I soon found out that it took all the electrical devices in four nearby houses out, garage door motors, microwaves, tv's, computers, etc. I had to replace every electric device in my house. My neighbor who saw the ball said it was not a streak of lightning. He was certain it was a light ball! Now, I know what it was. Thanks for the video.

[billyt.]

I've heard old people in the southern US talk about blue balls of fire rolling down rural roads. They say its spirits of the dead. Maybe what they saw was ball lightning?

Edit: Has anyone else heard of the Appalachian practice of "talking the fire out" of a burn/wound?

[Sarge-at-Large]

26:46 this theory of hallucination also seems not not account for why multiple people would witness the ball of lightning in the same place behaving the same way; as it moves around, people would almost certainly experience seeing slightly different locations of the phenomena instead of a shared experience all seeing the ball of lightning occurring in the exact same place

[chadjones]

We used to see this rather frequently when I worked for a 50, 000 watt AM radio station at the tower array location. Sometimes during or right before a storm it could be seen rolling between the towers. The chief engineer said sometimes when the main transmitter tube was close to needing replaced it would form in the tube cubicle and fall to the concrete and dicipate like marbles when the larger ball broke up.