Benedictine monk wrote earliest known reference to ball lightning in England | Hacker News Reader

Benedictine monk wrote earliest known reference to ball lightning in England

arstechnica.com

71 pointsTomte37 comments

I persoally witnessed ball lightning. At the time, myself nor my family members that were with me knew it was that special. I mean, not that we had witnessed this before or since, but we had no idea that this was even disputed or had a name.

This tennis ball sized ball of lightning came in the house during a storm through our kitchen back door that stood open. It very slowly swerved acoross the floor at a few centimeters height. It was so slow you could have caught it, for which admittedly I felt the urge. We just stood around an watched it. Then it made it's way to the living room, slowly but surely making it's way towards the television (which was not turned on). When it got to about 2 or 3 meters from the set, it made a curved leap, sort of like a logarithmic curve, right to the center of the CRT. This took out the electricity not just in our house, but apparenrly in several houses down our street.

This must have been sometime late 70's or early 80's. If we had known how rare this was, I'm sure we would have made some sort of report or note. I only found out many years later people even doubted this phenomenon's existence.

in the 1960s in San Antonio Texas an orange sphere about the size of a baseball floated into my aunt's kitchen and vanished with an audible pop over her stove... researchers have been studying these things for decades in northern Norway...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hessdalen_lights

they seem to be a product of interactions between the soil, the sun, the atmosphere and the Earth's magnetic field

This fascinating: a place where they happen almost often enough to study.

Hessenden is a good companion for Lake Maracaibo, in Venezuela, that sees hundreds or thousands of lightning strikes per hour on almost half of nights. Some people fish by their light. I have seen a claim that the strikes do not make thunder, contradicted by the name "catatumbo" that means "house of thunder".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning

At about the same time, when I was young, my grandmother told me a similar story from when she was young. About a century ago. I don't doubt it is a real phenomenon.

I had a similar experience as a kid. I was sitting in our living room at the desk that had our computer and modem (it was maybe 1995). All of a sudden I turn around and notice this pea-sized ball of something floating in the air. It was glowing and looked like a tiny ball of electricity. It was moving slowly through the air for maybe 15-20 seconds and then all of a sudden it sped up and curved right down into my hand, burning the hell out of my finger. It sort of felt like getting electrocuted (I got tasered once by a dumb kid around that age and it was a similar sort of shock).

I was probably 11 so I didn’t think much of it, but when I got older and read about ball lightning I realized that may have been what it was. Very bizarre experience.

I have a very similar story from around 1986 or so.

We had a big lightning strike and a ball formed, also about tennis ball sized. It traveled slowly through our dining room over the heads of all the adults sitting there, then moving into the living room. It also aimed for the crt tv, although in our case I don't think it did much of a jump as it entered it.

It switched the tv off and caused a power surge that made all the lights flicker, but everything was fine after (although the tv had a discolored spot that even with degaussing took some time to go away).

The really interesting thing for me at the time with it being some kind of lightning was how slow it moved.

We did at the time not feel any heat radiating of it. In the living room there was a wall-to-wall carpet, and it left no scorch marks or anything burned. I also can not remember any paricular smell. The color of the ball was bright white, with hints of blue/green.

At the risk of being ridiculed, when I was a lad growing up in the UK I saw something that I later learned might be described as ball lightning.

It was late winter in the South West with overcast skies and melting snow on the ground, and looking out of the window of my bedroom across the street and into the opposite neighbour's front garden - which had been dug over to prepare the ground for vegetable planting in the spring - I saw a sphere of pinkish glowing light falling slowly to the ground. At first I thought it was a balloon, but looking at it more intently it seemed perfectly spherical and as it got close to the ground it hovered there for a good 5 or so seconds, illuminating the ground below. Then it completely vanished without a sound - no bang, no fire, just... gone. I ran out of the house and over to the neighbour's garden to see if I could find any remnants of whatever it was but there was nothing to be found except for what I noted at the time was a weird sharp smell and a small dish-shaped depression in the rough ground below where it vanished.

I obviously can't say for sure that it was ball lightning, and I hadn't heard anything about such phenomena at that point so didn't describe it as such at the time, but every now and again when the topic comes up I can't help but see similarities between what I've seen and some of the reports. At the very least, it's a good excuse to retell this bizarre story from my childhood.

Going through the wikipedia article is a hoot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

I read it a few days ago while witnessing massive thunderstorms around my location.

BTW: The people maintaining blitzortung.org are awesome. I suggest monitoring https://map.blitzortung.org/ if you're in a thunderstorm. It helped me figure out when it was safe to connect expensive equipment to mains power and the house TV antenna again.

Yes, an excellent example of "citizen science".

https://www.blitzortung.org/en/live_lightning_maps.php?map=0

Among the Luba people of DR Congo, this is known as "Kansonda"[1]. It is said to be a mystical targeted weapon sent towards an individual as a punishment or retaliation for committing some grievous act.

Another lightning weapon is "Nkuba". This may sound crazy and get downvoted to oblivion but as a kid I witnessed someone invoking lightning at will - twice - on a cloudy afternoon. This person was form the Luba nation and he claimed to have the power to invoke lightning. He was challenged by the crowd to prove his claim and so he went on and on about it then started making an incantation in Tshiluba then suddenly clapped his hands: immediately there was a loud thunder and lightning. He repeated this and there was a loud thunder again. Later in life I postulated that he could have just been trained into the art of telling when lightning is about to strike, which is probably possible given than DR Congo has an unusually high incidence rate of lightning compared to the rest of the world[2][3].

[1] https://habarirdc.net/quatres-armes-mytiques-grand-kasai-kan...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/nov/23/weatherwatch-hu...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_lightning#/med...

I read a lot about ball lightning in the past. And from what I gathered, there are a couple of different phenomena that are described as "ball lightning".

The one that is most prominent in literature is that of a glowing ball that sometimes can pass through solid objects (windows, sometimes even walls) without any problems, and that stays a couple seconds to minutes.

I think that in this case the best explanation is what Wikipedia describes as "Transcranial magnetic stimulation", i.e. a sort of hallucination created by electromagnetic stimulus in the brain, like an optical illusion. It has been shown that strong magnetic fields in the brain can cause "light-effects" to appear which stay for seconds to minutes and then vanish. Having seen what the EMP from a nearby lightning can do (like fry electronics), it's not a long stretch to think that it could cause some EMP-like effects in our brains too...

Other phenomena, like the one that was filmed in China (I think?) are probably plasma discharges that are similar but unrelated to "classical" ball lightning.

When I was child, ball lightnings was very hot topic, together with UFOs. Ball lightnings were much more respectable than UFOs, I mind you, they were studied by some respectable scientists, and all that, and UFOs were for crackpots.

But what is interesting: where ball lightnings and UFOs now, when each person and their dog has high-quality video camera in the pocket?

I saw some ball lightning in the sky several years ago and did try to take pictures with my phone camera but could not get any good shots because my phone helpfully cranked the exposure way up to see better in the dark and destroyed any amount of detail in the lightning.

We need some lucky video shots I guess, and not just a few. Something that makes it undoubtable that it's a real phenomenon (not that I'm doubting).

I've always assumed that ball lightning is a myth. Wikipedia describes it as "rare and unexplained".

Why has there never been any video of it? Understandable before the ubiquitous smartphone. Suspicious, now.

Right at the end of the article is mentions it being captured on film once by researchers.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...

These recent videos, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1bBNeyrMOJ

They look very suspicious, artificial? And what are those sound effects?

This video isn't available anymore

Weird that it disappeared after posting

I must have deleted the last letter of the URL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bBNeyrMOJE

Note, the video is likely fake.

If this one isn't real, they did a very convincing job of simulating it.

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/VNztmK8bARc

Ah that's the same video that I linked to. Except the version I found was wrapped in a history channel introduction. Artificial is what i said, it doesn't seem real.. thanks for the link

You should do more research then, it's not just multiple sightings but there's ample physical evidence and has even caused injuries and death. Don't know what's suspicious about it, beyond being an extraordinarily rare and barely understood phenomenon

Since we're talking anomalous orb phenomena, there's been common sightings of floating corporeal "orbs" for lack of better term captured by consumer ring security cameras: https://microufostudy.medium.com/the-micro-ufo-phenomenon-d2...

The article appears to have a wide sampling of videos featuring these orbs and make convincing claims they're not conventionally explainable (not bugs, camera artifacts, etc).

Anyone with experience of such sightings?

There would have to be extraordinary evidence to convince me that this is not dust or pollen floating very close to the lens and illuminated by the IR lights. This happens to my cameras quite often, and looks exactly like the first photo in that link.

The fact that they've never been seen directly, only on camera, seems to back that up.

The first video (actually, most of the videos) is very obviously an insect stuck to a spider web.

The article on ball lightning in Thewlis' Encyclopedic Dictionary of Physics (1967) judged that it didn't really exist. Although it is still not understood, and even not established to be a single phenomenon, there seems to be wide acceptance of its reality.

One thing to keep in mind if you ever see ball lightning, the larger ones appear to emit lethal amounts of ionizing radiation.

Technical book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2872589-ball-lightning)

Good intro to lightning physics (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21566597-an-introduction...)

Unrealistic but enjoyable sci-fi (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32076670-ball-lightning)

A lot of these instances seem to describe meteorites. I don't see a connection to lightning at all. Also, it's pretty crazy that the ball lightning phenomenon has been around for a while, yet it hasn't been replicated in a lab.

Yet, it has been. But no one can be sure that what is produced in labs is actually the same.

I think ball lightning is likely responsible for a lot of uap sightings. It may explain the phenomena to such a degree that we can consider it solved. But to explain ball lightning I think we are going to need some pretty unusual physics. My bet is on electromagnetic solitons in 3 dimensions, there are a few cool papers on the possibility. My other guess is that they are energy based life forms that aren't especially intelligent, drifting through looking for energy sources, hence the preoccupation with nuclear power sites. Half joking. Watch the film "nope" it's an excellent twist on the mystery.

If it were (always) a vaporized dirt clod, it could not start out up by the cloud.

What else is available to vaporize, there? Water, of course, but we would need a different reason for its rarity then. A meteor? Rare enough.

We should not assume there must be just one phenomenon that gets this name. There could easily be more than one. If there is more than one, a theory would not need to account for all observations; leftovers would need other theories.

Related, 2017 story with a number of decent links:

"A New Explanation for One of the Strangest Occurrences in Nature—Ball Lightning" [https://nautil.us/a-new-explanation-for-one-of-the-strangest...]

Another amazing form of lightning I've personally witnessed in action is "sheet lightning" (starts at one end of the sky and travels across in a sheet). Pretty wild and crazy the many different and often unexpected forms that lightning can take. Quite an incredible light-show nature can provide at times…

They were known to fighter pilots as “foo fighters” in WWII

My assumption is that foo fighters are a different but related phenomena.

Foo fighters were likely not weather, but a product of the aircraft themselves.

The most likely theory I've seen for foo fighters, is that the massive propellers on WWII era aircraft , spinning at high altitude in super dry air, collected a ton of static electricity, which caused a phenomena similar to ball lightning.

Quite possibly right. Hard to reproduce in either case.

I find this very shocking

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