Glowing balls of energy appear out of nowhere only to vanish a few seconds later. Ball lightning is strange, rare, and unexplained. In this episode, we explore the mystery, prod at the boundary between folklore and science and ask how, when evidence is scarce, we can figure out what is true.

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References

Argyle, E. (1971). Ball lightning as an optical illusion. Nature, 230(5290), 179–180. https://doi.org/10.1038/230179a0

Cen, J., Yuan, P., & Xue, S. (2014). Observation of the Optical and Spectral Characteristics of Ball Lightning. Physical Review Letters, 112(3). https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.112.035001

Cooray, G., & Cooray, V. (2008). Could some ball lightning observations be optical hallucinations caused by epileptic seizures? The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2(1), 101–105. https://doi.org/10.2174/1874282300802010101

Jennison, R. C. (1969). Ball lightning. Nature, 224(5222), 895–895. https://doi.org/10.1038/224895a0

Neil deGrasse Tyson Videos. (2018, March 6). Neil Tyson Answers “Do You Believe In UFOs?” & Sets The Record Straight!! YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZDjel3dyv0

Parks, J. (2024, September 19). Is ball lightning real? The science behind nature’s strangest light show. Discover Magazine. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/is-ball-lightning-real-the-science-behind-natures-strangest-light-show

PowerfulJRE. (2021, May 26). Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Skepticism Over UFO’s. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u0VDFppCI4

Sagan, C. (2008). Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark. Paw Prints. (Original work published 1995)

Stephan, K. D., Sonnenfeld, R., & Keul, A. G. (2022). First comparisons of ball-lightning report website data with lightning-location-network data. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, 240, 105953. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jastp.2022.105953

Weeks, L. (2015, May 28). The windshield-pitting mystery of 1954. Npr.org. https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/05/28/410085713/the-windshield-pitting-mystery-of-1954

Wikipedia Contributors. (2025a, April 29). Sprite (lightning). Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)#History

Wikipedia Contributors. (2025b, May 3). Ball lightning. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning#Historical_accounts

Image Credit: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/

Intro

Hook

“It was following me,” she said, “And, whatever it was, I could tell that it was aware.”

We were sitting on the old porch of a farmhouse in the tiny, remote village of Halifax, VT. Outside, summer twilight was descending on the fields. It was the perfect setting for a ghost story. And our host, Edie Bickle, a gregarious old woman with twinkling eyes, was the perfect person to tell one. I don’t remember how the story came up. But I do remember the rapt attention on everyone’s ’ faces.

“Wait! What was following you?” Lisa asked.

“I don’t know what it was,” Edie said. “I was out in the fields. I was, maybe, fourteen and alone, except for the cows. There was a storm coming in … and coming across the field, floating over the grass, was this orb. I didn’t see where it came from. It was glowing. And like I said, it was following me, and I could tell that it knew that I was there.”

“Were you afraid?”

And Edie shook her head, “I knew it didn’t mean me any harm.”

“How long did it follow you?”

“Only a minute or so.”

“Where did it go?”

“I don’t know.” Edie shrugged, “It was there for a moment, and then it was gone.”

My friends and I looked at each other, and I felt the tickle of goosebumps on my arms.

Or how about this?

In March of 1963, Roger Jennison, an English radio astronomer was on a late night flight from New York to Washington, D.C. when the plane flew into an electrical storm. Five minutes after midnight, there was a bright flash of lightning and a loud peal of thunder. Then, Jennison would report, he saw something truly extraordinary. A glowing sphere, about the size of a soccer ball, emerged from the pilot’s cabin and floated down the aisle, passing right next to him before it disappeared.

Or how about this 1936 report from a Mr. Morris of Dorstone, England? “During a thunderstorm I saw a large, red hot ball come down from the sky. It struck our house, cut the telephone wires, burnt the window frame, and then buried itself in a tub of water, which was underneath. The water boiled for some minutes afterwards, but when it was cool enough for me to search I could find nothing in it.”

Fireballs? Luminous orbs? Glowing spheres? What the heck is going on here?

Ball Lightning (The Phenomenon)

These three stories are just a sampling of similar reports of encounters with strange, short-lived, floating glowing balls of … of something. The accounts range back over centuries, and there are thousands of them. The particulars of the accounts differ, but they all share several things in common. The apparitions are almost always spherical. They never get much bigger than a beach ball. They usually last between ten and thirty seconds. They move, often erratically, and usually at about the same speed that a person might walk. And, they occur during electrical storms, but not immediately near a lightning strike.

Some observers report a hissing or crackling sound. Sometimes they explode, damaging ships or buildings or sometimes even people. Sometimes they just disappear. Sometimes they smell like sulphur or ozone. Most intriguing to me, some observers report that they pass right through solid walls.

How frickin’ cool!

People interested in these strange reports have given the phenomenon a name. They call it ball lightning. But a label, however badass it sounds, is not an explanation. So … I want to know … what the heck is going on?

The Hypotheses

The short answer is … that we don’t know. We don’t know. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to explain them. Candidate ideas include:

maybe lightning ionizes air molecules and turns them into a plasma–basically the air becomes a flame without a fire
or maybe that happens to dirt vaporized by a lightning strike
or maybe charged particles are held in place by a strangely stable electromagnetic field
or maybe they’re caused by exotic states of matter like Rydberg particles
or maybe its an optical illusion like the kind of thing that happens when you get an afterimage from a bright flash that stays in your vision even after the light source is no longer glowing.
It could be a misinterpretation of some phenomenon we already know about but just aren’t recognizing.
It could even be a hallucination. Epileptic seizures in the occipital lobe, produce similar experiences where people see bright lights. One 2008 study demonstrated that the changing magnetic fields of electrical storms could induce such seizures. After all, our brains operate with electrical signals.

Why Ball Lightning Shouldn’t Exist

What makes all of this especially cool and mysterious is that ball lightning shouldn’t exist. It shouldn’t be lightning anyway. It lasts too long to be an electrical discharge (actual lightning). And most of the other ideas about it being some kind of plasma shouldn’t work either. Plasmas aren’t usually stable unless there a whole lot of energy. And even if they were stable, why would they keep a ball shape if they’re not contained.

And whether you’ve followed all of that scientific name-dropping or not, you can still appreciate that the claim that there are glowing floating, soccer balls of colored light hanging out in lightning storms is a truly extraordinary claim. Should we take such claims seriously?

Should we Take it Seriously

Look, if all you want is a cool story to tell around the campfire, you don’t have to take it seriously. There’s a ton of bizarre reports of people’s experiences with ball lightning. So read up online, hold the flashlight under your chin and … y’know … just rock on with your bad self.

But if you’re anything like me, you just can’t quiet the questions that come up. Wait. Do these orbs really exist? If so, then what the f__ are they? I want to know the truth.

You might just discount the ideas because it’s weird. But there is no weirdness screening for reality. Weird things frequently turn out to be true. The Earth is round even though it looks flat from here. It’s moving even though it doesn’t feel that way. And it really is mind-bogglingly old. The continents move. Black holes are real. In a faraway land, there really is an egg-laying beaver with a duck-bull and a venomous spike on its hind foot. Weirdness apparently is just in the eye of the beholder.

Consider, for example, another storm phenomenon. For a long time, people reported these towering flashes of reddish light that exploded upward out of storm clouds like something from an Avengers movie or a portal to the demon realms. These sprites as people called them were so exceedingly rare that people doubted their existence, and all we had were occasional eyewitness accounts until … until … some were captured in video footage in 1989. Since then, thousands of sprites have been photographed from the ground, from airplanes, and even from space. We still don’t really know what they are. But nobody really doubt anymore that they are there.

On the other hand, as Richarch Feynman reminded us, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” Smart, rationally-minded people have convinced themselves that vampires are real, that their neighbors were witches, that the way to cure diseases was to make patients bleed, and that insects could spontaneously form from rotting flesh.

And it is especially easy to fool ourselves with something like ball lightning because we have so little evidence to challenge our credulity. If ball lightning exists, it is incredibly rare. So far, there’s no credible pictures or videos or measurements. This means that all we have to go on are eyewitness testimonies. And unlike in a court of law, in the court of science, it is better to assume that all eyewitnesses are guilty until proven innocent.

For one, people make shit up all the time. Two, even if aren’t making shit up, people exaggerate. Everybody loves a good yarn, so there’s strong incentive to tell a good one. Even when we’re trying to be truthful, we exaggerate without trying. It’s not our fault. It’s just part of the architecture of our brains. We are biased to remember the most dramatic parts of an event and forget the details that would make it less extraordinary. Three, humans are terrible at separating our observations from our explanations. Our brains immediately start making up stories to explain what we see. And what we remember is often twisted and changed by the stories we tell ourselves. And, four, even our own memories betray us. Every time we retell events, we’re not only at risk of changing the story, we’re also at risk of changing the memory. Because every time we draw up a memory, our brains re-encode it. It would actually be more accurate to say that we don’t remember events; we remember our most recent memories of an event.

So where should we be on the skepticism scale? How can we be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brain falls out?

Three Tests

When faced with extraordinary claims, the best thing to do, of course, is to test them. It would be awesome if we could get some ball lightning in the laboratory and test our ideas about what it is. But clearly … that’s not an option. I mean, we can’t even get a good picture.

But laboratory tests aren’t the only kind we have at our disposal. Philosophers of science have given us some logic tests for dealing with anecdotal claims. Here are three.

First, Current theory: How does something stand up in light of ideas that we’ve already extensively tested. Most extraordinary things don’t fit with what we think we already know. That’s what makes them extraordinary. And, today especially, what we “know” reflects the results of so many tests over so much time. In light of this, if centuries of ruthless and rigorous tests conflict with a handful of eyewitness accounts, I’ll err on the side of the centuries of testing.

Second, simplicity (or as the fancy science philosopher folks say, parsimony): If there are multiple explanations for something, like there are for ball lightning, in the absence of other evidence, the simplest explanations tend to be right. Suppose I’m trying to explain the origin of what seems to be a human face on the planet Mars. Given the choice between it being 1.) a fortuitous coincidence of hills and shadows or 2.) the product of some alien civilization that’s left no other obvious traces on the planet and just happened to somehow know what a human face looked like and then built a monumental image of one that they couldn’t even see from the ground where they were building it … yeah, I’ll go with the coincidence for now.

Third, not finding something. Yes, I know, I know … absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or said more simply, just because you don’t see something, that’s not proof that it’s not there. But … if you’ve been looking for something rigorously, for a long time, and in a place where you should find it … and you don’t find it … you tend to give up after a while. You can never be sure that it’s just hiding really well, but … the longer you look, the higher the probability that the reason you’re not finding it is because … it’s not there.

Reasons to Be Intriguing

These three tests reframe what open-mindedness really looks like. We’re not actually better off by endlessly giving unsubstantiated ideas the benefit of the doubt. In fact, we do better … we are more likely to end up closer to the truth … if we err on the side of skepticism. And that’s why I find ball lightning so intriguing–so much more intriguing than other so-called mysteries based on eyewitness accounts like a plesiosaur in Loch Ness or alien spacecrafts at Roswell.

Consider how ball lightning fares against our three tests:

Test #1: Does ball lightning call current theory into question? Well … kind of. It certainly seems unlikely in light of theories about electricity and plasma, but it’s also possible to see how it might fit. It’s right on the edge. It challenges current theories without completely undermining them. That’s the kind of thing that makes me sit forward in my chair a little.

Test #2 (Parsimony): Are there simple explanations that could account for ball lightning? Well …kind of. It could be an optical illusion or an electrically induced seizure in the occipital lobe, but frankly these explanations are just as awesomely complicated as some of the explanations put forward to explain how ball lightning might be an actual thing. None of the explanations that we have, physical or illusory, account for the whole range of phenomena that have been reported. So … hmm … that’s cool. I’m sitting forward a little more.

Test #3: (Absence of evidence): Have we been looking for ball lightning and NOT found it where we should have? Well … kind of. Some scientists actually have actually looked at the various ideas about where ball lightning might come from and then tried to set up the conditions that, if those ideas are right, might lead to its formation. And … we haven’t gotten ball lightning … but they have gotten eerily stable plasmas that might be like ball lightning. So … hmm … Add to that, a 2014 report from some scientists studying lightning in Tibet, that they captured and made spectrographic measurements of what might have been ball lightning … and now I’m on the edge of my seat.

This is the coolest place to be. Right on the edge of the mystery. The usual tools of skeptical science don’t weed it out. If ball lightning is a thing, if all of these mysterious events and strange sightings are caused by a physical phenomenon … then it must be a really weird phenomenon. And if we investigate something like that, we are bound to learn something new, something that just might topple old ideas and take us one step closer to understanding another piece of the world we live in.

Why People Don’t Like Skepticism

People all over the world are captured by stories of alien visitors or stories of past lives or homeopathic remedies or miracles of the saints. And when they are faced with scientific skepticism about those things … they often write it off as close-minded curmudgeonry. They’ll accuse the skeptics of being protective of their pet theories or being uncomfortable with the unknown.

Conclusion: Why Skepticism is Great

And while it may be true that scientists can be closed-minded. This isn’t because of the science. The principle that “I could be wrong about this.” is what the entire scientific enterprise is built on. That’s why science is built the way it is, with repeated trials and peer review. It’s not built to protect theories. It’s built to break them. On purpose.

Rather than being protective of theories, science is institutionally committed to being ruthless with them. If we have confidence in evolution or germ theory, it’s because some of the most brilliant people have been subjecting them to abuse for centuries and not one of them has found a crack in the armor. Sure, maybe we make minor modifications to them, now and then, but the core remains unbroken.

Scientists aren’t skeptical because they are uncomfortable with mystery or the unknown. As Neil Degrasse Tyson put it, “You can’t be a scientist if you’re uncomfortable with ignorance. That’s where science lives!” They are skeptical because they are open to the unknown.

The people who are really uncomfortable with the unknown or mysterious or just weird are the ones who immediately jump to an explanation. “What’s that thing in the sky? It’s nothing I recognize. It must be an alien spacecraft.”

The willingness to sit with skepticism, to baste in the mystery without having to have an answer until you’ve got one that survives the best criticisms that you can hurl at it … that strikes me as a sign of the truly open mind. Remember what the U in UFO stands for.

In my view, science doesn’t have anything against the Loch Ness monster or sasquatch or alien visitors. It would be totally badass if they were real. If you find sasquatch bones in the woods or a plesiosaur washed up on the shore of a lake, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m wrong. But you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not holding my breath. Not when so many people have looked for so long and have only found evidence that can be explained with much simpler stories.

As my buddy, Carl put it, “There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.”

This is the best thing about ball lightning. Nobody knows what it is, what causes it . . . we don’t even know if it’s a thing. And it’s not like dark energy or consciousness or quantum entanglement, where you need to on-ramp a bunch of knowledge just to ask question. You can tell a third-grader a story about ball lightning, and they get it. They get the mystery. They get that it’s weird. And they can get how we have no idea. Real or imagined, this is what ball lightning reminds me of … that the mystery is just as much fun as the finding out.

Ball Lightning: Weather’s Strangest Mystery