Unexplainable - It’s ball lightning!

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

For millennia, people have been reporting stories of mysterious spheres of light that glow, crackle, and hover eerily during thunderstorms. They’ve been spotted in people’s homes, and are even said to be able to pass through windows. No one knows how ball lightning forms — but that’s not stopping scientists from attempting to recreate it in their labs. For further reading, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to sign up for our newsletter, view show transcripts, and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees can grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. I was nine or ten years old. Fifteen. Twenty-one.

I was just in my living room studying. We're kicking a football, sorry, I guess a soccer ball. We were outside on the grass in front of my grandmother's apartment, and I can feel it before I can see it. I have like a creeping sense of dread and all of the little prepubescent hairs on my body stand up and the air gets much thicker and much weirder. And you know that feeling when there's something near you, there's something in the room, there's something looking at you? And it's not an issue yet, but it's about to be an instinct grabs the back of your neck and turns your head toward it.

I had this feeling and it just turned my head slowly to the left. And it's rising up out of the ground. It was a ball, this ball of light. There is a ball of lightning. It crackles upwards. It crackles downwards. It's the size of a basketball. It is blazing blue-white, like a diamond on a revenge kick.

And it moves really slowly, which is very uncanny because you think of lightning as lightning. It's something that moves fast. And, of course, my first thought is, what is that? What am I seeing? This is not real. This is not, you know, a common thing. Am I really seeing what I think I am seeing? My mom always encouraged me to research and, you know, deal in reality.

So we went down to the library. I had to go to my friend's house who had the set of Ecyclopedia Britannica. I definitely looked it up. The librarian suggested a book on weather phenomenon. And it had a section on ball lightning. And I was like, What is that? Oh, maybe it's ball lightning.

That was ball lightning. This is Unexplanable. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and your science reporter Brian Resnick. Sure am. So, Brian, what is this ball lightning I've been hearing so much about? It's a weather phenomenon. Okay. Sometimes mysterious balls of light appear in people's kitchens.

They've been known to pass through windows. And it's really rare. How rare are we talking? So rare. Super rare. But our producer, Byrd, and I were able to find people who've seen it. if it's so rare, how are there so many people out there that can talk about seeing it? Well, it's not like it never happens.

And if you saw this yourself, trust me, you would want to talk about it. Right. You know, all these people told us, they weren't going out ball lightning hunting. Like, this came to them. And because of that, it's just really hard to document. Like, it just pops up and then disappears so quickly. And that also makes it really hard to research. So we've been talking to scientists who are, like, trying anyway, and they're just still

stumbling around in the dark. So, like, who are these ball lightning-hunting scientists? Who did you talk to? Yeah, so we talked to this one great scientist and electrical engineer. My name's Carl Stephan. He even rigged up this whole contraption in his office to talk to us. Well, I'm an engineer, so, you know. And as a kid...

I was poking around in the public library in Fort Worth, Texas, and found this book by Stanley Singer on something I'd never heard of, Ball Lightning. You can't quite make a career out of studying Ball Lightning, but... It just sounded really cool. And now he has tenure at Texas State. And once I got tenure, you know, I'm not saying you should exploit the position. But on the other hand, if you go off and do something a little bit odd, and as long as you're publishing something, they were pretty well leave you alone.

Okay, so what is his new post-tenure research term? I mean, what's the scientific explanation for ball lightning? Dern to find out. Yeah, he's being a little facetious, but not that much. Very little is known about ball lightning. It's elusive, it's hard to document, so much so that, you know, for a long time, scientists weren't even sure it existed. There was a strong group of people in the 60s or 70s who said it was all, you know,

how you can get an impression on your retina. If you see a flashbulb, they'll see a flashbulb. be this shape that follows you around. There was a large contingent saying, ball lightning is all nonsense. It's just impressions on the retina. Is it all nonsense and impressions on the retina? Almost definitely no. Carl's pretty confident to exist.

Good. But there's just not that much documentation of it. There are some videos of it online. It's really not clear if they're fake or not. It can be hard to verify. And then in the scientific literature, there's like, maybe one or two videos that have been analyzed by scientists, and they're like really crappy videos.

There's one of them from 2014. I was taken from a kilometer away. So, like, just this, like, little speck of light in the background. So there's not much evidence. But what we do have is, like, thousands of years' worth of stories. There have been recorded instances of what was probably ball lightning, possibly back in, you know, ancient Greece even. The Middle Ages.

Fifteen, sixteen hundred. And there's this, actually I'll show you, there's this famous engraving of a ball lightning sighting from 1901. If you could just take a look. Huh. This is like intensely detailed. This is like a giant kind of disco ball of light flying through the window. And then there's these really shocked bearded men kind of getting up from a table and knocking

over their chairs. This is kind of intense. Yeah, it's shocking. So, like, we have centuries of records of ball lightning. We've got a single crappy video. I mean, it doesn't, it just kind of sounds like UFOs. I understand why you say that. Like, there's definitely a bit of a conspiratorial vibe here, you know.

But the thing about all of these accounts that Carl emphasizes is that they're consistent, they're specific. Suppose you saw a ball lightning. And you can tell me afterwards how closely this is to what the people you've talked to have seen. Probably there's a thunderstorm going on. Very dark outside and lots of thunder. You either look up or you see a light. It's like an electrical spark. A spherical object.

A perfect round sphere of light. The color could be white. Kind of a white, bright point. Orange. An orange sort of tear drug shape. Blue. It's hard. for me to describe the shade of blue,

but I would call it perfect. It's probably not moving very fast. About walking pace, maybe a little bit faster. Usually horizontal. It never deviated up or down. You know, it didn't seem to be affected by gravity. You have never seen anything like this in your life. I thought of, you know, an alien movie.

I was just freaking out. And you will watch it very closely. Yeah, I just kind of stood there mesmerized by it. It'll either go out of sight. It disappeared behind the angle of the next wall. It will vanish. It makes this little squeak noise and it disappeared. Sometimes it explodes.

It goes above my height. It goes to maybe like 10 feet in the air and then explodes. That's, I mean, kind of a composite of the typical ball lightning. It rarely lasts more than like five or 10 seconds. So all the people you spoke to, Brian, all of their accounts, they lined up with all the other stories that Carl gathered. Carl gathered. Right.

Well, see, if this was just totally random nut people cases making up stuff, I wouldn't be able to do that. And so, you know, there's a coherent body of, you know, phenomenological data that people report. So, no, I'm like, when I asked him, is ball lightning real, he said? Well, there's not a lot of scientists going around saying it's not real. Okay.

I hear this argument, but I'm also just still thinking, like, UFO sightings have consistency. I mean, are we so sure that ball lightning is that different? Yeah. So for something like UFOs to be real, we would need a lot to be real. A lot of things we have no evidence for right now. Like, how did the aliens get here across light years? Right. How has the government been covering this absurd thing up?

Right, right? So you're saying, like, that ball lightning, it sounds kind of fanciful maybe, but I don't know, it's not as out there as aliens coming to visit us. Balls of light flowing around in people's kitchen, it's weird. It's not, but their existence doesn't, like, make us question reality. Okay, okay, I get that. And it's not just that it's plausible. There are actually, like, little beginnings of explanations for what it might be. What are the potential explanations? I will tell you that. just after this break. It's all about you.

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podcasts. Okay, unexplainable. Brian, we're back. Hey. Just to recap what we know so far, we are talking about ball lightning. It's this weird weather phenomenon. It's kind of ghostly. It goes through walls. It appears in kitchens. You said before the break, though, that there were these like plausible scientific explanations here. What do we know about how ball lightning works? Yeah. So, So really not much at all. Carl was explaining there are really dozens of hypotheses out there. There's kind of like just a million flowers blooming on this, and it can get overwhelming if you start Googling.

But to simplify things, there's really like two main buckets of explanations that Carl says are worth paying attention to. Okay. Sounds like we can handle two. What's the first bucket of hypotheses? So this first group, I think of it as lightning hits the ground. And then ball lightning emerges from that spot. Got it. Lightning hits the earth. Ball lightning comes out.

Yeah, there are a lot of different versions of this. Basically, like, lightning hits the ground, creates a cloud of material that then burns. So that's one version of it. Another version of it is lightning hits the ground and creates something that becomes a plasma, which is this, like, superheated, electrified gas. why do scientists think that this might be what's explaining ball lightning? Because they've seen it. Really?

In lab experiments. Exactly. Exactly. We talked to this one scientist. Eli or Ellie Gerby. Depends if you are an American or Israeli. And he made something that looks a lot like ball lightning on accident. Wait, he made it? Yeah.

The way he tells us, like, This sounded like a scene out of a comic book. 20 years ago, he was in his lab, and he was doing his normal work, which is basically aiming powerful beams of microwaves at stuff. Suddenly, we saw form the molten material, a kind of plasma ball, which was expanded, and then ejected and emerged like a ball lightning.

Do you want to see what he saw? Wait, seriously? Let's play the clip. So there's like this ball of light, and then all of a sudden it just kind of explodes up to the top of the screen in a pillar and then starts dancing off the ceiling like some sort of upside-down jelly candy. Yeah, so what's happening is the microwave beam is like our stand-in for a lightning bolt.

And it hits this material, and the material then, like, vaporizes and there's some of it in the air. And it's like that vapor of the material that then is the source of the ball lightning. But this is really cool. I'm not a religious person, but this is the closest experience to a kind of a religious vision. Mother Nature is saying something and you were lucky to be there to listen. So this first group of hypotheses, you know, of lightning hits something and then ball lightning comes out of that spot. You know, it seems great.

We have this experiment in others. Like, the science makes plausible sense. Okay. I can sense that you're leading to a butt. Yes. There is a problem here. And the problem comes in when you start to think about

what happens in the real world. Okay. So in this experiment, you have a source of energy. The microwave, it hits a spot. In the real world, that source of energy would have to be lightning. Right, right. And I guess, you know, like in the interviews you played of the people who had seen it, none of them were like, oh, by the way, right before I saw a ball lightning,

I was almost struck by an actual bolt of lightning. Exactly. And this wasn't just, you know, in the interviews we gathered. Carl says this explanation doesn't fit a lot of observations of ball lightning in the real world. There's a very interesting case in New Ruppin, Germany. It's 1994. It's winter, and there's this rare winter lightning storm. And a lightning bolt strikes a few miles away from the town.

At the same time, that stroke happened, though, at least a dozen instances of fall lightning, separate instances, appeared all over the town. Fall lightning, like going through windows, passing through curtain. One was above the bridge across the river. And, you know, the guy who was in charge of the weather station there, this phone started ringing off the wall.

What do I see? Well, I think it's ball lightning. This German case here, it's not alone. There are many examples of ball lightning that occur not anywhere near a lightning strike. So overall, this first group of explanations, there might be something here. It might explain some instances of ball lightning. It might even explain some aspects of it physically, but it's incomplete.

It's not the good stuff, you know. Okay, so you said there was like a whole second bucket of explanations. Is that the good stuff? Yeah, so the second group takes us in a slightly different direction. It's also got Carl's little pet theory. But like most pets, you know, they don't last forever. So this little kitten of Carl's, it was in an old copy of, of Nature, one from 1931, Nature, the Scientific Journal.

And in this journal, a group of scientists from Leeds, England, reported this kind of amazing thing they saw. So they were chemists, and they had built this box and filled it with this fine layer of smoke. And I have no idea why they tried this, but they said, hey, let's stick that big electrostatic generator over there and here and see what happens. And what is an electrostatic generator exactly? You've probably seen one of these before.

If you're ever in middle school science, and one version of it kind of looks like a little water tower and you put your hand on it and hair stands up. It's a lot of fun. Got it. And they turn on the generator, and about after a minute, this reddish ball forms in the middle of the chamber.

And that ball of smoke? It just lingered. Is this idea basically that ball lightning could form? like this ball of smoke formed, and that would mean it could form without a bolt of lightning? Yeah, so the idea here is the electric static generator basically represents

like the electric field of a storm, so not a single lightning bolt. And somehow, like that whole storm, that electric storm, influences material and causes them to like coalesce together and basically hold charge, like as if they were a battery. Okay, but

you said these were only kind of potential explanations, right? I assume there's a problem here? Yeah. The phenomenon that these people at Leeds observed actually contradicts some electrome aesthetic principles. The physics of this all doesn't really make perfect sense. Dang.

And so to like better study this, Carl's trying to recreate this experiment. What? In his garage. My wife's used to park in her car outside. Before we were married, my mother told her now, keep an eye on your pots and pans. One of them may end up as an antenna.

So he built his own version of the smokeball box. And has he made any smokeballs successfully? No, not yet. I couldn't quite do what they did, but I've written a proposal to try to duplicate that experiment, basically. So we've got two plausible buckets of explanation. here. We've got the lightning strikes the ground and ball lightning comes out bucket. And then we've got this like electrical storm smokeball bucket. And I guess neither of them totally works. Is,

is that all we've got? Yeah, pretty much. This is just what science looks like in the beginning, when you start exploring a exciting new phenomenon. And it's okay to be skeptical. There just isn't a lot of evidence here. Right now, what this science most desperately needs is just more documentation from people. Yeah, like a real video would be good. A real video would be fantastic. So this is what my hope is.

Ball lightning will just one day pop up like it does. And when it does, it will appear in front of the right person. Someone who will make an observation and maybe lead us even to the next breakthrough. Until then, we just have to keep waiting. I was about 9 or 10. I heard about fall lightning, and I thought that was just so cool.

And I was really obsessed with trying to see it for a few years from the time I was 10 to the time I was 12. I would go outside every time there was a storm. And my mom was like, there's a lightning. You have to get inside. I was like, no, there's lightning. I have to get outside. And it never happened.

I knew it was incredibly uncommon. In fact, I stopped looking for it when I was 13 because I got in a middle school. I learned how to use a research database. I started doing my own research and found out that it maybe didn't exist. And I was like, oh, no. So then I became a skeptic. Like, I kind of forgot about it for almost a decade. And then I'm 21.

I'm sitting in my living room. I'm working on homework for one of my last class. before I graduate. And then I looked outside and we're in front of these giant sliding glass doors. And there was just like this ball of light. So grapefruit size and like a little fuzzy around the edges and just really, really bright. And so I'm looking at it and I'm like, okay, am I seeing what I think I'm seeing? And then I was like, I can't be, right?

Like, because I had convinced myself that it wasn't real. But then I was looking at it and I was like, that has to be. And I'm like, oh, wow. I wasn't wrong. It's really, like, out there. That was Ball Lightning. All right. That was Noam Hassamfeld, singing a little song. But before that was Emily Clanton talking about her own ball lightning experience. We are so grateful to everyone who told us their ball lightning stories. So that's Meg Ellison, who also writes great science fiction stories. Ross Bence, Andrea Maxand, Elizabeth Ross, Annie Stoll, Kevin Kimball, Simon Harrowing, and Ralph Rushden. Thank you all. This episode was produced and co-reported by Bird Pinkerton. That's me. Noam wrote the music for it.

We also had editing from Noam and Brian Resnick, Gillian Weinberger, and our senior producer, Meredith Hodnott. Liliana Mitchelina did the fact-checking. Hannes Brown did the mixing and sound design. Thank you, Hannis. And Liz Kelly Nelson is the editorial director of Vox Podcasts. If you want to know more about how to report, say, your own ball lightning sightings, sign up for our newsletter. Also, just sign up for it anyway, because it's great. You can find a link to that in our show notes, and we'll have links to Carl Sightings Collection Project, and also to the videos of dancing Jolly Bob's of Light, as well as a beautiful set of illustrations, courtesy of Elizabeth Galleon. In the meantime, please feel free to send us your thoughts.

We love thoughts, and we are at Unexplaintable at Vox.com. All right, Unexplainable. It is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back in your feed next Wednesday.