What on Earth is Ball Lightning?

On June 7, 1195, an English Benedictine Monk named Gervase of Canterbury watched as a great thunderstorm descended on the city of London. What happened next, recorded in Gervase’s 600-page Chronicle, defied the monk’s imagination:

“On the 7th of the ides of June, around the sixth hour, a marvellous sign descended near London. For the densest and darkest cloud appeared in the air growing strongly with the sun shining brightly all around. In the middle of this, growing from an uncovered opening, like the opening of a mill, I know not what white colour ran out. That, growing into a spherical shape under the black cloud, remained suspended between the Thames and the lodgings of the bishop of Norwich. From there a sort of fiery globe threw itself down into the river; with a spinning motion it dropped time and again below the walls of the previously mentioned bishop’s household.”

Some 400 years later on October 21, 1638, another great storm descended upon the town of Widecombe-in-the Moor in Devon. Many of the townsfolk were attending a church service when the following extraordinary scene occurred:

“…and suddenly in a fearefull and lamentable manner, a mighty thundering was heard, the rattling thereof did answer much like unto the sound and report of many great Cannons and terrible strange lightening therewith… the extraordinarie lightning came into the Church so flaming, that the whole Church was presently filled with fire and smoke, the sell whereof was very loathsome, much like unto the scent of brimstone, she said they saw at first a great ball of fire come in at the window and pass through the Church, which so much affrighted the whole Congregation that the most part of them fell down into their seates…”

According to witnesses, the “great ball of fire” ricocheted around the sanctuary, demolishing stones and wooden beams and setting parishioners’ clothing alight. At one point the ball split in two, with one half smashing through a window and the other disappearing somewhere inside the church. When it was all over, four people lay dead and another 60 injured, and all that remained of the fireballs was a lingering pall of smoke and the acrid smell of sulphur.

These are two of the earliest recorded encounters with one of the strangest – and rarest – of all natural phenomena: ball lightning. Typically described as a floating orb of light or fire that moves around under its own power before suddenly vanishing, ball lightning has fascinated and baffled scholars for a thousand years. Yet while ball lightning has been witnessed by up to 5% of the world’s population, until recently this phenomenon had never been verifiably recorded, leading many scientists to conclude that it didn’t exist. Today, experts largely agree that ball lightning is a real phenomenon, but what exactly it is and what causes it remains a tantalizing mystery ripe for theoretical speculation. This is the fascinating story of the hunt for one of nature’s most elusive spectacles.

While the first written record of ball lightning only dates back to the 12th Century C.E., humans have likely been encountering this phenomenon since the dawn of civilization. For example, traditional Japanese folklore tells of Hitodama, glowing balls of lights – believed to be the souls of the departed – which follow people around at night. Similar apparitions include the ghostly Min Min Lights of the Australian Outback and the will-o’-the-wisp or ignis fatui of European folklore – a pale blue-green light seen flickering over the surface of bogs, swamps, and marshes. However, the latter two are separate phenomena, with the Min Min Lights likely being caused by car headlights and other light sources being refracted by layers of cold air; and the will-o’-the-wisp by swamp gases like phosphine, diphosphane, and methane spontaneously igniting on contact with air.

In addition to its rarity, another factor which has made ball lightning notoriously difficult to pin down is the wide range of characteristics it exhibits from sighting to sighting. Though typically associated with thunderstorms, ball lightning has been observed in fair weather, and – intriguingly – is often seen during earthquakes. Witnesses describe the orbs as measuring anywhere between a few centimetres and a few metres in diameter, with a colour ranging from pale blue to yellow, orange, red, and even pink and a shape varying from spherical to oblong, disk or rod-shaped, and multi-lobed. In many instances the orbs are completely silent and vanish without a sound, while in others they make a loud buzzing or crackling sound and make their exit with a violent bang. And while usually reported on land, ball lightning has also been encountered at sea, as crewman John Howell of the British sloop Catherine and Mary recounted in December 1726:

“As we were coming thro’ the Gulf of Florida on 29th of August, a large ball of fire fell from the Element and split our mast in Ten Thousand Pieces, if it were possible; split our Main Beam, also Three Planks of the Side, Under Water, and Three of the Deck; killed one man, another had his Hand carried off, and had it not been for the violent rains, our Sails would have been of a Blast of Fire.”

Two decades later in 1749, one Dr. Gregory of the Royal Navy frigate HMS Montague reported the following encounter:

“Admiral Chambers on board the Montague, 4 November 1749, was taking an observation just before noon…he observed a large ball of blue fire about three miles distant from them. They immediately lowered their topsails, but it came up so fast upon them, that, before they could raise the main tack, they observed the ball rise almost perpendicularly, and not above forty or fifty yards from the main chains when it went off with an explosion, as great as if a hundred cannons had been discharged at the same time, leaving behind it a strong sulphurous smell. By this explosion the main top-mast was shattered into pieces and the main mast went down to the keel. Five men were knocked down and one of them very bruised. Just before the explosion, the ball seemed to be the size of a large mill-stone.”

In more recent years, ball lightning has even been observed aboard aircraft, as famous British radio astronomer R.C. Jennison reported on March 19, 1963:

“I was seated near the front of the passenger cabin of an all-metal airliner (Eastern Airlines Flight EA 539) on a late night flight from New York to Washington. The aircraft encountered an electrical storm during which it was enveloped in a sudden bright and loud electrical discharge. Some seconds after this a glowing sphere a little more than 20 cm in diameter emerged from the pilot’s cabin and passed down the aisle of the aircraft approximately 50 cm from me, maintaining the same height and course for the whole distance over which it could be observed.”

Other prominent figures who happened to encounter ball lightning include British occultist Aleister Crowley and Russian Tsar Nicholas II, who as a young child witnessed the phenomenon while visiting his grandfather, Alexander II, in Peterhof:

“I was at the all-night vigil with my grandfather in the small church in Alexandria [when] during the service there was a powerful thunderstorm, streaks of lightning flashed one after the other, and it seemed as if the peals of thunder would shake even the church and the whole world to its foundations. Suddenly it became quite dark, a blast of wind from the open door blew out the flame of the candles which were lit in front of the iconostasis, there was a long clap of thunder, louder than before, and I suddenly saw a fiery ball flying from the window straight towards the head of the Emperor. The ball (it was of lightning) whirled around the floor, then passed the chandelier and flew out through the door into the park. My heart froze, I glanced at my grandfather – his face was completely calm. He crossed himself just as calmly as he had when the fiery ball had flown near us, and I felt that it was unseemly and not courageous to be frightened as I was. I felt that one had only to look at what was happening and believe in the mercy of God, as he, my grandfather, did. After the ball had passed through the whole church, and suddenly gone out through the door, I again looked at my grandfather. A faint smile was on his face, and he nodded his head at me. My panic disappeared, and from that time I had no more fear of storms.”

These various accounts clearly demonstrate another of ball lightning’s frustratingly inconsistent traits. While sometimes the orbs seem to have no effect on their surroundings, effortlessly passing through walls and other solid objects without leaving a mark, in others they are extraordinarily destructive, smashing windows, starting fires, and even killing people on contact. Stranger still, it seems to affect conductive objects far more than non-conductive ones; indeed in many reported cases of ball lightning, metal objects such as electrical meters and conduits have been violently ripped off of houses and flung into the street.

However, one detail which does remain largely consistent between accounts is the smell left behind by the orbs, typically described as resembling sulphur or ozone.

Strangely, despite being notoriously difficult to study, ball lightning may not actually be as rare as commonly assumed. In a study published in the Proceedings of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society in 1960, J.R. McNally analyzed some 10,000 eyewitness reports and concluded that up to 5% of the world’s population have seen ball lightning at some point in their lives. This suggests that the phenomenon is actually fairly common; the problem is that the earth is a very big place, and there are not always people – let alone trained and equipped scientists – around to witness it. But a few researchers have gotten very lucky. For example, in 1965, Soviet atmospheric chemist Mikhail Dmitriev was on an expedition near Archangelsk, northwestern Russia, when a bolt of lightning struck the ground near his camp. From the bolt sprang a ball of fire around 16 centimetres in diameter which hovered just off the ground for a few moments before flying across the camp, crackling loudly as it went. It then sailed off into the nearby woods and vanished, leaving behind a trail of dark bluish smoke and a sharp, acrid smell. Thinking quickly, Dmitriev used a set of evacuated sampling bulbs to take samples of the smoke. These samples were later revealed to contain levels of ozone and nitrogen dioxide 50-100 times higher than normal. These gases are commonly produced by high-voltage discharges, handily confirming the electrical nature of ball lightning. Indeed, ball lightning has often been conflated with another, more common phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s Fire, a bluish static electrical discharge often seen on ship’s masts or aircraft wings. However, they are almost certainly separate phenomena, for St. Elmo’s Fire requires a sharp point or edge to overcome the electrical breakdown potential of the surrounding air while ball lightning is fully detached and stable.

Given the great difficulty of observing ball lightning “in the wild”, the majority of research has involved trying to replicate the phenomenon in the laboratory. Among the first to succeed was patron saint of the internet and everyone’s favourite Serbian mad scientist, Nikola Tesla, who in the March 5, 1904 issue of the journal Electrical World and Engineer, claimed that in the course of experiments with high-voltage electrical transformers:

“I never saw fire balls, but as compensation for my disappointment I succeeded later in determining the mode of their formation and producing them artificially.”

Contemporary newspaper reports also claim that, for the amusement of guests, Tesla frequently produced and played with lightning balls a few centimetres in diameter. However, for Tesla, this phenomenon was merely an unexpected byproduct of his work on wireless energy transmission, and he wrote little more on the topic. We should also probably mention at this point that, as covered in our previous videos The Many Myths Surrounding Nikola Tesla and Most Everything You Know About Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison is Probably Wrong, much of what was reported about Tesla during his lifetime was highly sensationalized, so claims such as these should be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, Tesla’s tantalizing experiments would serve as inspiration for generations of ball lightning researchers to come.

The next major figure to investigate ball lightning in earnest was British physicist James L. Tuck. An expert in explosives, Tuck was a member of the British delegation to the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. After the war, Tuck remained at Los Alamos National Laboratory and was intimately involved in early research on fusion power. During this period, Tuck learned that many WWII submariners claimed to have accidentally produced ball lightning when closing the switches connecting the submarine’s batteries to its electric motors. These fireballs, the sailors claimed, hovered just above the deck for several moments and sometimes burned their legs. These stories intrigued Tuck, who believed that solving the elusive mystery of ball lightning might help crack another, more important scientific puzzle. At the time, most fusion research was based on the principle of the “pinch” – using a magnetic field to contain and compress a tube of plasma to high pressure and temperature, hopefully inducing the atoms within to fuse and release energy. Unlike in later fusion reactor designs like the donut-shaped Tokamak, no attempt was made to contain the plasma for long periods; instead, the approach was to induce fusion as quickly as possible and collect the energy before the plasma leaked out and dissipated. Unfortunately, all the earliest experimental fusion reactions like Lyman Spitzer’s Stellarator and James Tuck’s amusingly-named Perhapsatron failed time and time again due to instabilities within the plasma that prevented it from compressing evenly.

By this time, it was widely assumed that ball lightning was also some kind of plasma – a superheated soup of ionized, high-temperature gas. But unlike in the Stellarator and Perhapsatron, the plasma in ball lightning somehow remained fully contained and stable for minutes on end. Finding out why, Tuck believed, might just hold the key to perfecting fusion power. In an extraordinary stroke of luck, Tuck soon stumbled upon a complete submarine electrical system gathering dust in a Los Alamos storeroom. He convinced a group of colleagues to help him set up the equipment in an abandoned test bunker, and over the next two and a half years proceeded to charge and discharge the batteries thousands of times, recording the results on film. Some of these experiments involved discharging the batteries through a box filled with methane, as methane gas from decomposing matter in the submarine’s bilges was suspected to play some role in ball lightning formation. Most of these experiments yielded nothing but a shower of regular sparks, but while reviewing the footage from one test, Tuck spotted something in four frames: a glowing white orb, around 4 centimetres in diameter, travelling rapidly just above the floor. Unfortunately, the test bunker was condemned and bulldozed shortly thereafter, and Tuck was unable to continue his experiments. He retired from Los Alamos in 1973 and died in 1980 at the age of 70.

Among the many people Tuck shared his ball lightning photographs with was one Robert K. Golka, an independent experimenter from Brockton, Massachusetts. An acolyte of the work of Nikola Tesla, Golka was obsessed with realizing Tesla’s dream of transmitting electricity around the world wirelessly – as well as developing fusion power into the clean, limitless energy source of tomorrow. In 1974, Golka moved to Wendover, Utah, where he took up residence in a 600,000 square foot abandoned hangar on the nearby Wendover Air Force Base. Here, he proceeded to assemble the world’s largest Tesla Coil from army surplus parts and scrap from the local junkyard. Over the next several years he fired off the massive coil thousands of times, generating crackling showers 20 million volt lightning bolts several metres long. But only on a handful of occasions did this impressive light show produce anything resembling ball lightning. Then, in 1980, Golka’s experiments came to an abrupt end when the Air Force, who had been leasing him the hangar for a token $1 a year, transferred the property to the town of Wendover, which promptly raised the rent by 2400%. This precipitated a long and bitter legal battle between Golka and the town, whose residents and government saw Golka as little more than a freeloading crackpot.

In the end, Golka left Wendover and returned to Massachusetts, where he decided to replicate James Tuck’s submarine battery experiments. But as by this time WWII submarine batteries were rather hard to come by, Golka instead contacted the president of the Boston and Maine railroad and persuaded him to supply two locomotives, a few box cars, and a mile and a half of track – as one does. As Golka later wrote in the March 1985 issue of Radio Electronics:

“To perform my experiments, I grafted a submarine circuit breaker into the high-voltage circuit between the million watt, 1600-horsepower diesel generator and the 2000-horsepower motor trucks beneath the locomotive. By opening the circuit breaker (using a long broomstick handle), I was able to generate ball lightning.

The effects of opening the circuit breaker were quite astonishing. Temperatures in the cab of the locomotive would go instantly from 60°F to 110°F. As you might imagine, there was an overwhelming desire to leave the train cab for some fresh air. I, of course, could not do that since the train was still moving (at a speed of about 20 miles an hour), and the likely result would have been running the train off the end of the track and destroying the experimental setup…that was probably the first plasma physics experiment ever performed on a moving train!

What an absolute Mad Lad…

Based on these experiments, Golka came to some intriguing conclusions regarding the physics underpinning ball lightning:

“After redoing the experiment countless times, I was able to convince myself that the fireball effect was due to the elimination of turbulence. In fact, I found that when I closed the door and windows of the cab, the effect was most likely to occur…I now feel that it is more of a particle rotation flow than a high voltage electrostatic effect; that is, more like a giant plasma vortex donut with a tiny hole than an electrostatic sphere. Now, there are a whole host of phenomena in aeronautical engineering, particularly in the area of fluid dynamics, that are not yet fully understood. One of those is the physical properties of vorticies. One can blow smoke rings inside of smoke rings, and have the inner ring move back and forth. You can also blow smoke rings that stand perfectly still. In liquids, rings can form spheres and other shapes.”

Golka would continue to experiment on ball lightning, wireless energy transmission, fusion, and other projects – scraping together money and equipment however he could – until his death in 2018 at the age of 80. It is important to note here that as an unaffiliated independent researcher and member of “fringe science” community, Golka’s methods and conclusions should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Indeed, for many decades about the only people investigating ball lightning were fringe scientists like Golka, meaning the subject has unfortunately become confusingly entangled in pseudoscience. For example, one commonly-circulated account claims that one of James Tuck’s submarine battery experiments ended in an explosion that completely demolished the test bunker – an explosion far out of proportion to the tiny amount of methane gas used in the experiment. It is also widely claimed among conspiracy theorists that Tuck’s research – and ball lighting research in general – has been actively suppressed by the U.S. Military to protect its own research into directed-plasma weapons. Thankfully, in more recent years ball lightning has attracted the attention of more mainstream scientists, who are drawing ever closer to finally solving the enduring mystery of this elusive natural phenomenon.

One of the first comprehensive theoretical explanations of ball lightning formation was the Maser-Soliton Theory, first posited in 1955 by Soviet scientist Pyotr Kapitsa. In simple terms, Kapitsa proposed that under certain conditions, a lightning bolt can turn a large volume of air around it into a giant maser. Short for Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, a maser is the microwave equivalent of a laser – and for a more detailed explanation of the physics behind those fascinating and endlessly useful devices, please check out our previous video Who Invented Lasers and How Do They Actually Work? The powerful pulse of microwaves generated by this atmospheric maser causes the dielectric breakdown of the surrounding air, creating a ball of plasma. This maser effect can theoretically persist for some time following the lightning strike, the resulting microwave pulse feeding and sustaining the plasma ball.

Kapitsa’s theory neatly explains many of the more puzzling attributes of ball lightning. For example, ball lightning almost always forms in open countryside and never near mountain peaks, high-rise buildings, or other tall structures that typically attract lightning. This is because such objects concentrate electric fields, and cause lightning to strike at lower potentials and effect a smaller volume of surrounding air, precluding the formation of the atmospheric maser effect. Furthermore, ball lightning which forms inside closed, conductive structures like aircraft fuselages and submarine hulls tends to be low-energy and relatively harmless, while that which forms in more open areas tends to be more destructive. This, too, is explained by Maser-Soliton Theory, which predicts that the maximum energy of a maser in such enclosed environments is limited to 10 joules – as compared to 100-1,000 joules in a more open environment. Finally, Maser-Soliton theory explains the tendency of ball lightning to violently explode at the end of its life and to disproportionately affect conductive objects. According to Kapitsa, when the plasma ball runs out of energy and starts to decay, the photons inside the ball which drive the maser effect are suddenly released and begin to multiply via a phenomenon known as a photon avalanche. This in turn creates a large burst of heat and a powerful magnetic field that can tear apart composite objects made up of both conductive and non-conductive materials.

Incredibly, a version of Kapitsa’s microwave-generated ball lightning can easily be recreated in an ordinary microwave oven. Simply place a burning candle, match, or other source of carbon inside turn on the power, and within seconds glowing white balls of plasma will burst from the flame and skitter about along the roof of the oven, sustained for several seconds at a time by the concentrated microwave energy supplied by the oven’s magnetron. In 2009, Israeli physicists Eli Jerby and Vladimir Dikhtyar replicated this effect in a more controlled manner by converting a commercial 600-watt microwave oven magnetron into a “microwave drill” capable of projecting a concentrated microwave beam 2 millimetres in diameter. The team aimed this device at a variety of materials including glass, pure silicon, copper, carbon, water, and various salts and observed what happened. In many cases, the superheated material erupted into a glowing, jellyfish-like blob of plasma that floated and bounced around the inside of the metal containment vessel for around 10 milliseconds. Further investigation revealed that these plasma balls are composed of tiny vaporized particles with an average diameter of around 50 nanometers.

These findings seem to support a theory first proposed in 2000 by British chemical engineering professor John Abrahamson. Humorously known as the “dirt clod hypothesis”, the theory holds that ball lightning is caused by regular lightning striking soil containing the element silicon. The intense heat of the lightning strike vaporizes the silicon in the soil and blasts it into the air. If carbon – such as from organic matter – is also present, it will react preferentially with the oxygen in the air, leaving a ball of pure silicon vapour. Soon, however, oxygen re-combines with and rapidly oxidizes the silicon, the resulting exothermic reaction creating a white-hot ball of plasma that burns for several seconds. This theory is further supported by experiments conducted in 2007 by Antonio Pavão and Gerson Paiva of the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, in which they exposed wafers of pure silicon to powerful electric arcs, producing balls of plasma that persisted for several seconds.

Other experiments, however, suggest that other elements might be at play in the production of ball lightning. In 2006, a team at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute led by plasma physicist Gerd Fussman sparked high-voltage electric discharges at the bottom of a container of water, creating luminous balls they dubbed “plasmids” that rose out of the water and persisted for around 300 milliseconds – nearly 100 times the period a regular plasma of this type is expected to last. Furthermore, the plasmoids appeared to be relatively cool, not even singeing a piece of paper held in their path. These results are intriguing as ball lightning is often seen forming near bodies of water; indeed, Mikhail Dmitriev’s fortuitous 1965 encounter took place on the banks of the Onega River.

But if ball lightning really is a mass of superheated plasma, what keeps it contained within the orb? After all, in plasma physics experiments like fusion reactors plasma has to be contained using an externally-generated magnetic field. The answer may lay in a unique physical entity known as a magnetic skyrmion, a mass multiple magnetic vortices linked together to form a stable, self-contained, and self-reinforcing wave packet or soliton. Such an assembly of magnetic vortices could theoretically keep plasma contained within itself for several minutes on end without the need for an external power source. Though first theorized in the 1970s and proposed as an explanation for ball lightning in the 1990s, skyrmions were not observed in the lab until 2018, when at team of physicists from Amherst College and Aalto University succeeded in creating one out of Einstein-Bose condensate – a strange form of matter that forms when atoms are cooled to temperatures near Absolute Zero – and to learn more about just how bizarre things can get at these temperatures, please check out our previous video The Weirdest Substance Known to Science. While considerable research still needs to be conducted to confirm whether skyrmions are in fact the key to ball lightning’s longevity, this finding points the way forward in ball lightning research and suggests that Robert Golka’s speculation that ball lightning being a stable magnetic vortex was very close to the mark.

But while most current models of ball lightning are based on plasma, there are stranger theories. For example, Vladimir Torchigin of the Russian Academy of Sciences postulates that ball lightning actually consists of a mass of photons trapped inside a thin bubble of air – rather like a soap bubble – which refracts the trapped light in on itself and prevents it from escaping. Meanwhile, Ukrainian researcher Oleg Meshchyreyakov has proposed the nanobattery hypothesis, positing that the nanoparticles inside ball lightning act like an electrochemical battery, generating a continuous electrical discharge that can sustain the orb for long periods. As for ball lightning’s mysterious ability to pass through solid objects – even conductive ones like metal plates – theories range from the orbs creating and squeezing their way through microscopic holes to the plasma generating a shower of neutrinos – infamously inert particles that can pass through almost anything.

But perhaps the most far-out theory regarding the nature of ball lightning comes from J. Peer and A. Kendle of the Institute for Ionic and Applied Physics in Innsbruck, Austria, who in a 2010 paper made a bold proposal: ball lightning doesn’t actually exist. Instead, the pair posit that the orbs so often seen during thunderstorms are actually optical hallucinations induced by the electromagnetic pulses generated by nearby lightning strikes. To support this hypothesis, Peer and Kendle point to the technology of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation or TMS. Widely used in neurology research and in the experimental treatment of several illnesses including depression and epilepsy, TMS works by non-invasively stimulating different regions of the brain using highly-concentrated magnetic fields. Depending on which region of the brain is stimulated, TMS can induce all sorts of hallucinations, including moving points or “orbs” of light known as magnetophosphenes. Peer and Kendle have demonstrated that at distances under 100 metres, lightning strikes can produce electromagnetic fields powerful enough to stimulate the brain’s visual cortex just like TMS, meaning that “ball lightning” may in fact be a magnetically-induced hallucination. However, while intriguing, this theory does not account for the well-documented physical effects of ball lightning, such as the smoke, sulphur smell, and – in some cases – widespread death and destruction left in its wake. Still, magnetophosphenes may account for a small percentage of reported ball lightning sightings.

But until real-life ball lightning is finally captured and studied, all these theories remain pure speculation. Thankfully, in 2012, a team from the Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, China, did just that. The team had set up spectrometers on the remote Qinghai Plateau in northwest China to record regular lightning strikes – which are very common in the region. During a thunderstorm in late July, a lightning strike around 900 metres from the instruments spawned ball lightning, allowing the team to capture both high-speed footage and spectral data of this elusive phenomenon. Spectral analysis revealed high concentrations of silicon, iron, and calcium – all elements found in abundance in the local soil. These findings provide compelling evidence for the so-called “dirt clod hypothesis”, which holds that ball lightning is composed of nanoparticles of soil vaporized and ionized by lightning strikes.

Nonetheless, much research remains to be done, and for now, at least, the enigmatic phenomenon of ball lightning continues to jealously guard many of its secrets. If and when these secrets are ever cracked, it will not only put to rest a millennia-old scientific mystery, but may also reveal the key to achieving clean and sustainable nuclear fusion power. Then physicists will really be having a ball…

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