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Comment by zeroonetwothree | Hacker News Reader

That link says: “Owing to the lack of reproducible data, the existence of ball lightning as a distinct physical phenomenon remains unproven”

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My father saw ball lightning. He described it as occurring near a small fence -- really a couple stakes and string with flags for visibility hanging off it. Said that the ball would hover as it jumped from post to post then fizzled out.

Ball lightning is one of those things that you'd expect to be easier to detect because of the increased use of cameras. Why isn't Youtube flooded with dozens of videos showing lightning balls? There are a few, but none of them are convincing. (One is clearly a drone being flown in a thunderstorm.) Most are fakumentaries. (3 seconds of shaky zoomed-in "proof" and 5 minutes of a so-called expert breathlessly talking about it.) How can ball lightning both have lots of people claiming to see it, but is infrequently caught on video?

My suspicion is people are encountering normal lightning discharges at close range and the "ball" is an illusion caused by how eyes work. If someone attempted to get ball lightning on camera they'd be disappointed to see the recording look nothing like how they remembered it.

There are videos of it, and lots of people have seen it, not sure how much more proof you need:

> An optical spectrum of what appears to have been a ball lightning event was published in January 2014 and included a video at high frame rate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bBNeyrMOJE

I think what that sentence is saying is that we don't know how to reproduce it in a lab. We don't know what exactly is happening in the real world that is causing us to perceive this. It could be an illusion I guess, but I think it's undisputed it's a real phenomenon.

The History channel is junk, sadly. They're perfectly willing to promote false things. Both of the two recordings shown are likely not ball lightning.

I personally agree that ball lightning probably exists. However, there is another interesting phenomenon where a brilliant blue/white "spark" of electricity can travel along a wire. I don't have a name for it but power companies are certainly familiar with it. I've seen footage of it happening repeatedly along the same stretch of wire after a storm as an automated system tried to restore power a few times before keeping the power shut off.

> There are videos of it, and lots of people have seen it, not sure how much more proof you need

That describes Bigfoot. I’d hope your epidemic standard is beyond anecdotes + videos that report to show what they report they’re showing. Else you can be made to believe anything.

I don’t know enough about ball lightning to care one way or another.

This is a dishonest comment.

No one has dressed up and walked in front of a camera as ball lightning

This is an even more dishonest comment because the answer to the question "can evidence of ball lightning be easily faked using video editing?" is quite obviously "yes".

Talk about a dishonest comment. You are literally replying to a thread in which a History Channel feature of a confirmed CGI video was used as evidence that "there are videos of" ball lightning.

Not yet they haven’t.

Haha look Hold my beer

At the end of the video you linked, they admit it was CGI.

admitted one of the 2 videos were cgi but the other one is not conclusive.

We had ball lightning blow a painting off of our wall in front of 30-odd people at Thanksgiving.

It’s possible it was a mass delusion or a ghost but both of those strike me as less likely.

The theory is that it's regular lightning, and the rest is a retina-caused illusion? So people actually see ball lightning, but it would be almost impossible to get on a digital camera. So it does, in fact "exist", just not physically.

The 31st person dressed up and walking behind the painting may have had something constructive to say about the situation

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