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Comment by jacobevelyn | Hacker News Reader

I expected ball lightning to be mentioned in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

I am a huge skeptic in general, but when I was 18 some twenty+ years ago I was sitting in my parents living room during a thunderstorm watching out the back window.

This blaringly loud blindingly bright ball of white light just meandered slowly towards the house, before striking the house and destroying most of our electronics and starting a small fire.

The noise was the most impressing part. It's difficult sound to fully explain, it sounded a lot like when a high power line fell near my house a couple years ago. Imagine you were an ant inside a running blender, it's that all-encompassing.

I will never forget it, I've never seen anything like it.

I don't believe you.

I can show you my fried HP DE100C audio player, but that's all I've got. I understand being skeptical.

My mother claims to have seen ball lightning. I was there too, but facing away from the window at the time. Sounded like regular lightning to me.

I asked her about this recently, but she doesn't remember.

It's funny how controversial this subject has been. From reading the more recent books on lightning physics, I'm convinced of the reality of it. From that perspective, I'm amused by the entry on ball lightning in the Encyclopedic Dictionary Of Physics (Thewlis, 1962). I don' have it here, but I recall he says something like, "Reports of ball lightning have generally come from unreliable characters, so we can assume it doesn't really exist."

Came up on my feed a few days ago. Looks like convincing ball lightning to me: https://youtu.be/mmOfwFHBu_o

What’s odd about that video for me is, why didn’t the person zoom in (on the lightning ball)?

Seems like human nature would be to zoom in on something of interest.

Cell phone with no zoom?

The convincing bit to me is the few frames you see when the ball "collapses".

They do at 0:25

Just a few days ago, when those sprite pictures and videos first made their rounds, I thought about ball lightnings. Back in the 90ies I had a physics teacher that was obsessed with them because he saw one as a child.

I figured, with the advent of cameras everywhere we would have much more evidence of them by now, but I found almost nothing.

>I figured, with the advent of cameras everywhere we would have much more evidence of them by now

The prevalence of phone cameras in the modern world has shown that:

-Bigfoot doesn't exist.

-Police brutality does.

There must be a relevant xkcd....

The Doom plasma rifle and BFG no longer appear completely fictional.

It's likely an arcing powerline (see the reddit comments): https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1lrk1rz/incredible_...

Reading through the comments and reviewing the video does indeed point to arcing power lines. Ive seen videos of fast moving arcs across medium voltage lines that looked like a horizontal jacobs ladder. The lines over current protection equipment might not instantly trip as the current might be limited by enough impedance in the equipment. Disappointing reveal.

That sounds plausible.

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