6.6 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ball lightning | 4/8 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T11:04:47.852283+00:00 | kb-cron |
Willy Ley discussed a sighting in Paris on 5 July 1852 "for which sworn statements were filed with the French Academy of Sciences". During a thunderstorm, a tailor living next to Church of the Val-de-Grâce saw a ball the size of a human head come out of the fireplace. It flew around the room, reentered the fireplace, and exploded in and destroyed the top of the chimney. On 30 April 1877, a ball of lightning entered the Golden Temple at Amritsar, India, and exited through a side door. Several people observed the ball, and the incident is inscribed on the front wall of Darshani Deori. On 22 November 1894, an unusually prolonged instance of natural ball lightning occurred in Golden, Colorado, which suggests it could be artificially induced from the atmosphere. The Golden Globe newspaper reported:A beautiful yet strange phenomenon was seen in this city on last Monday night. The wind was high and the air seemed to be full of electricity. In front of, above and around the new Hall of Engineering of the School of Mines, balls of fire played tag for half an hour, to the wonder and amazement of all who saw the display. In this building is situated the dynamos and electrical apparatus of perhaps the finest electrical plant of its size in the state. There was probably a visiting delegation from the clouds, to the captives of the dynamos on last Monday night, and they certainly had a fine visit and a roystering game of romp. On 22 May 1901, in the Kazakh city of Uralsk in the Russian Empire (now Oral, Kazakhstan), "a dazzlingly brilliant ball of fire" descended gradually from the sky during a thunderstorm, then entered into a house where 21 people had taken refuge, "wreaked havoc with the apartment, broke through the wall into a stove in the adjoining room, smashed the stove-pipe, and carried it off with such violence that it was dashed against the opposite wall, and went out through the broken window". The incident was reported in the Bulletin de la Société astronomique de France the following year. In July 1907, ball lightning hit the Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse in Western Australia. Lighthouse-keeper Patrick Baird was in the tower at the time and was knocked unconscious. His daughter Ethel recorded the event. Ley discussed another incident in Bischofswerda, Germany. On 29 April 1925, multiple witnesses saw a silent ball land near a mailman, move along a telephone wire to a school, knock back a teacher using a telephone, and bore perfectly round coin-sized holes through a glass pane. 210 m (700 feet) of wire was melted, several telephone poles were damaged, an underground cable was broken, and several workmen were thrown to the ground but unhurt. An early reference to ball lightning appears in a children's book set in the 19th century by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The books are considered historical fiction, but the author always insisted they were descriptive of actual events in her life. In Wilder's description, three separate balls of lightning appear during a winter blizzard near a cast-iron stove in the family's kitchen. They are described as appearing near the stovepipe, then rolling across the floor, only to disappear as the mother (Caroline Ingalls) chases them with a willow-branch broom. Pilots in World War II (1939–1945) described an unusual phenomenon for which ball lightning has been suggested as an explanation. The pilots saw small balls of light moving in strange trajectories, which came to be referred to as foo fighters. Submariners in World War II gave the most frequent and consistent accounts of small ball lightning in the confined submarine atmosphere. There are repeated accounts of inadvertent production of floating explosive balls when the battery banks were switched in or out, especially if misswitched or when the highly inductive electrical motors were misconnected or disconnected. An attempt later to duplicate those balls with a surplus submarine battery resulted in several failures and an explosion. On 6 August 1994, a ball lightning is believed to have gone through a closed window in Uppsala, Sweden, leaving a circular hole about 5 cm (2 inches) in diameter. The hole in the window was found days later, and it was thought it could have happened during the thunderstorm; a lightning strike was witnessed by residents in the area, and was recorded by a lightning strike tracking system at the Division for Electricity and Lightning Research at Uppsala University. In 2005, an incident occurred in Guernsey, where an apparent lightning-strike on an aircraft led to multiple fireball sightings on the ground. On 10 July 2011, during a powerful thunderstorm, a ball of light with a two-metre (6 ft 7 in) tail went through a window to the control room of local emergency services in Liberec in the Czech Republic. The ball bounced from window to ceiling, then to the floor and back, where it rolled along it for two or three meters. It then dropped to the floor and disappeared. The staff present in the control room were frightened, smelled electricity and burned cables and thought something was burning. The computers froze (not crashed) and all communications equipment was knocked out for the night until restored by technicians. Aside from damages caused by disrupting equipment, only one computer monitor was destroyed. On 15 December 2014, Loganair Flight 6780 in Scotland experienced ball lightning in the forward cabin just before lightning struck the aircraft nose. Due to subsequent confusion related to the autopilot, the plane fell several thousand feet and came within 340 m (1,100 feet) of the North Sea before recovering and making an emergency landing at Aberdeen Airport. On 24 June 2022, in a massive thunderstorm front, a retiree at Liebenberg, Lower Austria, saw blinding cloud-to-ground lightning to the northeast and within one minute spotted a yellowish "burning object with licking flames" that followed a wavy trajectory along the local road about 15 m (49 feet) over ground and was lost from sight after two seconds. It occurred at the end of a local thunderstorm cell. The European Severe Storms Laboratory recorded this as ball lightning. On 3 July 2025, following a rainstorm in Rich Valley, Alberta, a couple witnessed a lightning strike near their home and a pale blue "ball of fire" that hovered at an approximate height of 7 m (23 feet) above the ground, and moved slowly with an 'oscillating' quality for about 20 seconds before disappearing from view. The phenomenon was recorded by the couple and reported upon by news agencies.