It’s ball lightning!

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I was nine or ten years old.

15.

21.

I was just in my living room studying.

We're kicking a football, or 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 pre-pubescent 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 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 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?

Is that that?

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 Encyclopædia Britannica.

What is lightning is that?

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 lightning is that?

Oh, maybe it's fall lightning.

That was ball lightning.

This is Unexplainable.

I'm Noam Hasenfeld, and you're 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 Bird 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 Stefan.

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 pretty well leave you alone.

Okay, so what is his new post-tenure research turned off?

I mean, what's the scientific explanation for ball lightning?

Darned if I know.

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 flash bulb, there'll 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 exists.

Good.

But there's still, 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 like 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 that was like taken from a kilometer away.

She's 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.

1500, 1600s.

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.

Hmm.

This is 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, 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 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 teardrop shape.

Blue.

It's hard.

for me to describe the shaded blue, but I would call it perfect.

it's probably not moving very fast about walking pace maybe a little bit faster usually horizontally 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 um 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 shriek 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 sighting.

It rarely lasts more than like five or ten seconds.

So all the people you spoke to, Brian,

All of their accounts, they lined up with all the other stories that 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 is a coherent body of, you know, phenomenological, phenomenological, phenomenological

data that people report.

So, Noam, 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?

How has the government been covering this absurd thing up?

Right.

So you're saying like, 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 floating around in people's kitchen.

It's, it's, it's weird, you know, it's not, okay.

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.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do i present this with any class i think we're past that charlie we're past that yeah somebody call action aka charlie sheen only on netflix september 10th

unexplainable

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 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 like 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 jerby depends if you're 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 from 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 like is the source of the ball lightning.

Wow,

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 and others um 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 in the interviews you played of the people who had seen it, you know, none of them were like, oh, by the way, right before I saw 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 Ruppen, 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 ball lightning, separate instances, appeared all over the town.

Ball lightning, like going through windows, passing through curtains.

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 like takes us in a slightly different direction.

Okay.

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 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 in 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 like middle school science, and one version of it kind of looks like a little water tower, and you put your hand on it, 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 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 electrostatic 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 a 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 uh the phenomenon that these people at leeds observed actually contradicts some electromaes that

the physics of this all like doesn't really make perfect sense dang and so to like better study this, like Carl's trying to recreate this experiment.

What?

In his garage.

My wife's used to parking 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, you know, I've written a proposal to try to duplicate that experiment, basically.

So we've got two plausible buckets of explanations here.

We've got the lightning strikes the ground and ball lightning comes out bucket.

And then we've got this like electrical storm smoke ball bucket.

And I guess neither of them totally works.

Is that all we've got?

Yeah, pretty much.

This is just what science looks like in the beginning, like when you start

an exciting new phenomenon.

And it's okay to be skeptical.

Like 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, 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 nine 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 into middle school.

I learned how to use a research database.

And 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 classes 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, cause 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.

be

lightning.

Oh,

la hai bing

ball lightning.

Lightning

for lightning.

Lightning

for lightning.

Lightning

for lightning.

Lightning for lightning.

Lightning

for lightning.

Lightning.

All right, that was Noam Hasenfeld singing you 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 Elison, who also writes great science fiction stories, Ross Bence, Andrea Maxund, Elizabeth Ross, Annie Stoll, Kevin Kimball, Simon Herrowing, and Ralph Rushton.

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, Jillian Weinberger, and our senior producer, Meredith Hodenot.

Liliana Michelena did the fact-checking.

Hannis Brown did the mixing and sound design.

Thank you, Hannes.

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 it will have links to Carl's sightings collection project, and also to the videos of dancing jolly bobs 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 unexplainable 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.