Strangest Weather On Earth: Balls of Lightning!

So you telling me a random ball of light will just stroll into my house and explode

Impressed me how many people on the internet has seen this extremely rare phenomenon

My dad's seen ball lightning. He said he was about 4 or 5 years old and he was staying at a relatives house for the night during this really bad thunderstorm. He said there was a really close strike and he saw this huge ball of light. It came down, hit the ground and exploded. He also said the place smelled like brimstone for the rest of the night. He told everyone the next morning and nobody believed him, but they started to believe him as they got older. I hope that I get lucky enough to experience something like that someday

I experienced ball lightning back in the mid 80's during a torrential thunderstorm, in my bedroom just a few feet away from me. It was amazing, I'd love to experience it again and get it on video. It was free floating, it looked as though it was a miniature star(sun) about the size of a tennis ball, it was orangelike in color. It expanded to the size of a large grapefruit and lit the room up then within seconds reduced to the size of a golf ball and exploded. Scared us to death but it was amazing!!!

Believe it or not, I have actually seen this once. It was many many many years ago. Probably 30 years ago. We were having a thunderstorm and after it stopped I was looking out my parents bedroom window into what was then our backyard. There was this weird purplish lightning colored thing about the size of a tennis ball floating through the air. It was about two maybe three feet in the air and moving very slowly. It did not come into the house -- it just floated along, and the instant it ran into the chain-link fence that surrounded our yard, it disappeared. Not a sound. It was incredibly odd. Because I had no idea what it was, and yet I knew damn well what it was. It was ball lightning! I knew it but I couldn't believe it because it was right in front of me! It was totally totally silent. It looked peaceful. It was perfectly round!

This explains a lot of supposed UFO sightings

People who are metal workers and welders know that sparks (which are pieces of glowing hot metal) chip off as metal is heated and sometimes larger sparks may form tiny runaway balls that may linger and dance/float around for a few seconds. The floating/dancing is probably due to Leidenfrost effect where the spark heats up the air immediately surrounding it and creates a cushion of warm rising air that keeps the spark afloat and dancing. Typically a few seconds later, after most of the heat energy has been given away by the outer layers of the spark to the air surrounding it, the ball extinguishes itself and since there is no more "fuel" to keep the Leidenfrost effect going, the floating stops as well. Sometimes, probably as the outer layers of the spark start compressing as they cool down, just before the spark extinguishes, we may observe a zzzap (equivalent to that burst or explosion that people talk about when describing how ball lightning disappears). That's probably the still warm and liquidy inside of the large spark being squeezed out due to the compression of the cooling outer layers. Now, why wouldn't the same thing happen with the air or perhaps certain elements dispersed in the air? People have reported the odor of sulphur. Are there any sulphur producing man-made structures or natural sources of sulphur near where ball lightning has been reported? The things I've read about it thus far, if you ask me, a ball lightning is simply a spark made up of gas that is analogous to a spark of metal.

Strange. It almost looks as if its lightning that, for some reason, cant ground itself and is stuck in mid-air until it hits something thats grounded.

I and my mother saw a ball lightning in our garden in Russia back in the 1980’s: we were having tea in our kitchen during a thunderstorm and the big European windows were wide open. Suddenly a luminescent ball appeared among the trees, having a violet halo around it and floating randomly about one meter and a half above earth. We did not have time to react, because it suddenly exploded with a sound that resembles to someone’s violently tearing apart a big piece of silk. We instinctively run out to the bathroom and locked the door. Thank God, because of heavy rain, there was no eventual fire in the garden, but the area where the explosion took place remained burnt all over for quite a while.

I have experience ball lightning 3 times in my life, all three times for in the Mojave desert in California. All three times I was a kid. #1 A basketball size ball shot across the road in front of the car while we were driving down the road. It was following the terrain, going through sticker bushes and everything. Nothing caught on fire from it. #2 my family and I were at a river bed collecting driftwood for yard ornaments. Then ball lightning hit the telephone pole close to us & exploded the telephone pole into toothpicks! #3 The most memorable and most awesome experience, I've ever seen! There was a thunderstorm about 15 miles away. We lived next to a set of railroad tracks that I could see about 10 miles of railroad. There were telephone poles running alongside the railroad tracks. I heard a noise and looked toward the railroad tracks, then seen a single ball of lightning about 7 - 10 ft wide, rolling down the wires on the telephone poles. It was riding the wire like a car rides the road! Just Beautiful! It had little fingers of lightning bolts shooting out from it. You could hear the buzzing noise from it, like electrical arcing noises. It was a bright blue and white, with the little fingers of electricity shooting all around it. I stood there and watched it moving around 40-50 miles an hr. It would go up the power line, down the next power line, up the next power line, down the next one. I watched it for a couple of minutes, or more. it traveled several miles. I would hate to have been at the end of the power lines, wherever it ended! I've lived in Southern Illinois for over 32 years now and have never seen ball lightning once! I think it happens in the Mojave Desert a lot because the ground is full of iron. You can take a magnet drag it to the ground end up with metal shavings can fill a bag up. I used to do that and play with it when I was a kid .

This is one of the mysteries that still is not resolve. They are so rare that it is almost impossible to study them.

so they called it "Ball Lighting"? erm, what was wrong with the more obvious "lighting ball"? seriously, the people who name these things...

I saw this just twenty minutes ago when I was outside watching the lightning. it was sooo weird. it was like a bright ball that had lightning branching out of it.

And I witnessed it when I was a little girl! It came in one window and exited the other window!

I saw an instance of ball lightning in 1998 when I was living in Pueblo, Colorado. This video is pretty much identical to what I saw, and I would say it lasted for 5 seconds at least before blinking out.

Me: touch it Also me: Aaahhhhzzzzaaahhhhggga

I had my bedroom window open and there was a storm but it wasn’t raining yet, a golf ball or so sized blue ball of plasma looking light came slowly floating through my window, went around my bed, and went into an electrical outlet, then a smaller blue ball of light, exactly the same just maybe a third or half the size came through the window and followed the first ball of light into the outlet exactly the same way. I remember thinking for the first one oh no it’s headed for the outlet and everything is going to explode… but it didn’t.

Ball lightening seems to display intelligence. It came through my back door and travelled through the house backtracking it's path, I was totally in awe.

I’ve witnessed this too!! It was actually 2 big lightning balls and a lightning shaft in between! Scary!

goodness gracious, those were some pretty great balls of fire.