Ball Lightning

[scoobyxj]

Something interesting to discuss. Has anyone had the experience of seeing it, or other unusual lighting phenomenon?

Once when I was a boy I recall waking up during a thunderstorm looking out the window I saw what I think still to this day was ball lightning. It was a bright yellow sphere hovering about a foot off the roof line of the house across the street. I also recall a horrendous clap of thunder with the event.

Another time I was sitting on a couch on my fathers back porch (he was standing in the doorway to the house) watching a storm when about the last eight inches or so of a bolt of lightning came down below the edge of the gutter. It was close enough that we could smell the ionized air, feel the heat off it, and heard the snap of the electricity before the clap of thunder.

 

[RichP]

I was up a Ft Drum one mid august summer on OP8 firing artillery missions, 90F out, about 1400 this storm front blew in across the st lawrence from canada, it hailed close to 3 inches in 45 min, temps dropped to ~25F and then it snowed almost 4 inches on top of the hail in another 30 minutes, then it changed to rain and the lightning strikes started, meanwhile 2 of us are huddled in a 8x12 steel reinforced concrete bunker on the top edge of a mesa over looking the impact area, next to us is 4 concrete pylons with these massive steel bolts sticking out of them from when there was some kind of tower on it.
Had a PRC-77 outside on a RC292 antenna with the wired comm unit sitting on the bunkers front windowsill. We felt the first lightning strike 10 seconds before the flash through our boots, by the second one we were standing on two wooden foot lockers. On the second strike the remote comm unit got this really bright purple corona around it and made this massive snap sound. Oh, on the other side and 50 meter behind us were 4 M113 mortar tracks with 500 rounds of 4duce HE stacked outside each one. We decided to bug out during a lull when we heard this sizzling sound and a 2ft ball of lightning rolled past the door to the bunker heading down off the mesa and into the river, this happened maybe 3 or 4 more times. It finally tapered off for a few and we got back to our bivouac position where we had the tents setup, two guys there were hit twice, called for a medivac and they would not fly so me and mark took him by open topped quarter ton 20 miles back to main post and the med center thru the storm, saw ball lightning 2 more times on the way in. Got em into the med center and we headed to the barracks to wait it out. Next day it went back up into the 90's... I had never seen weather that freaky in my life.

I also now know why and how those massive steel bolts on those pylons got all pretzeled up. The other amazing thing was the RC292, PRC77 and the remotes were not damaged and still worked once we put new batteries in.

 

[XJ Dreamin']

my Dad, is a machininst and an Electrical Engineer. His professional career - 34 years with McDonald Douglas - centered around air data and flight control systems for every fighter that McD/D built from 1950 to '84. His knowledge of electricity and fluid dynamics was developed over a career of anylizing air flow, fuel flow, combustion, and exhaust flow combined with the development of data collection and real-time computational analysis. He is one of the most logical and cynical people that I have ever known. If you ask him about ball lightning he will tell you about a night that he and Mom spent in a motel room (they were married [get your minds out of the gutter]) during a storm watching ball lightning roll around the parking lot, bouncing off of parked cars. It was some time ago - maybe even before any of us were born. He was talking about it just last summer. IIRC, they saw three or four separate 'balls' of lightning during the course of the storm.

Growing up in tornado alley in Missouri, I have been waaay too close to lightning a few times. It'll scare the crap out of ya', I know that much, but myself, I haven't seen any ball lightning. I gotta say, though, if my Dad suddenly decided UFO's were real aliens I'd have to change my mind on that subject. So, I gotta say ball lightning is a big YES!

 

[Matthew Currie]

When I was a kid we lived in a house with a big back porch, and for some odd reason there were about 4 disused wells out back. We got near hits by lightning with great frequency. One day as I sat on the back porch watching an approaching storm, I saw a glowing ball that looked about the size of a softball go darting around near one of the wells for a few seconds, and then Blammo! a lightning strike nearby (not right there, though). I guess that was ball lightning. Of course since I was 7 years old nobody believed my story, but I'm sticking to it!

I came close to indoor ball lightning some years later, or perhaps indoor St. Elmo's fire. I was in my garage (again in an area that seemed to get a lot of hits, perhaps owing to the limestone ledge we were on), as a storm approached. The garage got its power from the house via a sub feed with overhead wires. I had a big old tube-powered hifi receiver in the corner, and suddenly the whole corner glowed with an intense blue flash, and about a second later, lightning hit the well about 30 feet away. It fried the pump, destroyed about half of the circuit breakers in the house and the garage, killed the TV, the telephone and a couple of other appliances as well. No computer back then, fortunately. The shop receiver was also not helped by the experience, and it blew the cone out of the 15 inch woofer to which it was attached. There's no adequate word for the loudness of this.

 

[Stumpalump]

I was sitting on a couch next to the open front door in an apartment. It was the ground unit built on a slab. All of a sudden you could hear this static crackle as all the electrons raced acroos the carpet and out the front door. As we looked out the door it apeared that a really bright movie camera light was comming down the breezway and then we heard the pop.
Funny thing was how it all seemed to happen in slow motion.
When I was a kid I lived on the Mullica river in NJ and my basic transportation was a 10' flatbottom boat with a Johnson 6 HP. I waited out a storm till it got dark and started to go home when the lighting hit the trees right over my head. Again just like slow motion I could see the whole boat light up and turn 180 towards the bank where I parked for the rest of the night.
Another time just two years ago I was at the water park in OKC. It was just cloudy all day but there was lightning like 30 miles out. I went up on I swear my last ride of the day and when I was on top waiting to get in the tube I could see all the girls laughing about the static that was making their hair rise. I yelled "lighting we have to get down" and I bolted down the steps. Very few followed and they quickly shut the rides down. It never hit but that is a classic sign that it is trying to strike.

 

[XJ Dreamin']

There was a storm approaching one day (I was HS age at the time) and Mom sent me outside to make sure everything was battened down. Yeah, Mom sent me out into a thunderstorm The wind was just starting to kick up and it wasn't raining yet, but the thunder had been rumbling for some time, and anyway, we'd been watching the storm's approach since the dog had went and hid herself in the basement earlier that morning (better sense than us ). As I was headed back into the house an arc jumped between the electric supply and return lines, about 10' from the side of the house. As I recall, I made the last 10' to the back porch without touching the ground just as a bolt hit the top of the windmill tower that sat about 30' off the back corner of the house. When the flash and the concussion are one and the same, you are too close!!

Here's a few ball lightning articles.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s520317.htm

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020209/bob8.asp

Playing with the microwave oven
http://jlnlabs.online.fr/plasma/gmr/index.htm

 

[XJ Dreamin']

I was on top waiting to get in the tube I could see all the girls laughing about the static that was making their hair rise.

There was an article in BassMasters years ago about fishing in front of squall lines. The author recounted how he and his buddy were pushing their luck trying to get in a few more casts before the storm would force them back to harbor. They both cast at the same time and when their lures hit the water their lines rose up to form arcs rising from their rod tips instead of drooping down. They cranked in fast and hit the throttle. Just as they started moving a bolt hit a tree on the shoreline about 100 yards away.

OK, just one more. I was home visiting between school and my summer job when my buddy called to ask if I could help him out. His cousin was re-roofing his trailer and there were storms predicted for later that day. Could I ocme with my buddy and his dad to help his cousin and his dad shingle the roof of his cousin's mobile home? Yes, I do have redneck friends

So anyway, my buddy, his dad, his uncle, his cousin, and I are all up on the roof of this mobile home hammering away as huge, black, roiling anvil-heads are getting higher and higher in the sky. About 11:00 the women folk (redneck, remember) call us younger guys down for lunch. I'm sitting at the dinner table in front of the big bay window at the end of the trailer, where the powerlines are strung. I take a bite of sandwich, lift my glass of soda and 'crack' - an arc jumps between the powerlines, just outside the window. "Oh chit," I think (having fore-knowledge from my post, above). Almost immediately, before I could give and warning - BOOOM!!!

The next thing we heard was STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP across the roof of that trailer and down the ladder. You never seen two old geezers move so fast!

 

[8Mud]

I was watching an old black guy working on an aluminum car port connected to a friends house. He was under the roof, tightening some bolts, standing on an aluminum ladder and lightning hit the house roof. Like mentioned, the whole thing was in kind of slow motion, it was like a million glowing yellow and blue worms were crawling all over the car port, down the ladder and the steel pipe uprights from the roof into the ground. The poor old guy kind of staggers out from under the car port, in jerky movements like a zombie, eyes wide open, hair frizzed out to the max. He didn't say a word for at least an hour, we took him to the hospital for an Electrocardiogram. My hair was also sticking out in a halo and my thinking was kind of fuzzy for days afterwards, I was maybe 20-30 feet away from the strike.
I've only seen ball lightening once, it was the size of a volleyball (maybe a basketball) and reminded me of one of those round glass static electricity generators. It was stable for a moment, hovered in the air, it never did touch the ground. Then began erratic movements in about a half football field sized area, to maybe a 40 foot height. Almost like it was trying to escape an invisible cage. I could hear it crackle. Wow! It was just before dusk, most of the light generated from it was a reflection off of the surrounding houses, constantly changing color (yellow to blue, violet). It didn't seem to generate much illumination that I could see (probably mostly in the UV), but the reflected light was pretty darned bright.
I walking inside and tried to tell my wife about it, she looked at me with one raised eyebrow.
It kind of reminded me of heat lightening, which happens around here on occasion. Usually just before dark, at the end of a hot humid day, with a clear sky.