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Comment by animal531 | Hacker News Reader

When I was a kid in the mid 80's we had a ball lightning incident.

Some family was over visiting and the adults were sitting in the adjoining dining room with us kids in the living room by the TV.

Lightning struck somewhere close by and a tennis sized ball of electricity entered the dining room through the outside wall. It crossed the room in about a second, went through the wall to enter the living room and then accelerated towards the TV.

When it hit the TV box the TV went out and the house lights flickered for a bit, but everything seemed fine. We turned the TV back on and it had a big purple corner which the degauss function couldn't fix.

Overall it probably lasted about a week before the effect faded enough that it was no longer visible.

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From what I can tell, ball lighting doesn't exist. We have lots and lots of people who think they've seen it. But there doesn't seem to be any legitimate footage, which is pretty damning considering there are cameras everywhere now.

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/5 ?

what about the 2014 spectrum discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning ?

Yeah, there’s one paper from a decade ago saying they think a spectrograph was showing it. That’s the same paper another response posted, and the same one that kept popping up when I searched for evidence of it. It's the same single piece of evidence that someone brought up when ball lighning was discussed previously on HN[1].

It's telling that the Wikipedia article only lists once occurrence where scientists think they might have seen it, and devotes several paragraphs to it.

I’m not going to say it’s definitively wrong, but when people are reporting it all over the place, and there’s only one scientific paper from years ago that says they might have seen it on the other side of the world a decade ago, it’s hard for me to take it as solid evidence that it exists.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552081

You’d think skeptics would learn their lesson after rouge waves. Tons of eyewitness accounts going back to antiquity but no footage, considered a myth for ages.

We even had a bunch of math saying they weren’t possible/probable! (Ex once in an 100M years or so) so they were quite sure of themselves.

The we started to get large scale buoy data and sure enough, rouge waves! (the math was wrong).

Our understanding of earth phenomenon is far from complete. For lightning, red spites/green ghosts/etc are all relatively new discoveries.

Could the same be said about ball lightnings? Many common things became suspiciously rare after invention of pocket cameras.

I’m not questioning gp’s credibility, because I also found myself in impossible situations like kitchen pot overheating and exploding dramatically, which supposedly should only happen in controlled lab circumstances. But I understand when people can’t believe.

Added: we also should look for easier explanations, especially when it comes to early memories. Kid’s imagination is a powerful thing.

Rogue waves are actually a good example. They occur in places where there’s usually no recording equipment, and almost no one claims to have seen one. Yet numerous ones have been identified.

Ball lightning supposedly occurs in places where there’s recording equipment everywhere, and people all over the place claim to have seen it. Yet we don’t have any evidence for it yet.

You could close your eyes and then as far as you could tell nothing would exist. Then you could go around calling everyone a liar who claims that reality is still there even though you aren’t seeing it.

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