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.
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.
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.
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.
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.