ConceptsBall lightning
Concept · atmospheric physics · in 3 mysteries
Ball lightning
A reported luminous sphere that floats for seconds during thunderstorms, not yet reproduced in the laboratory.
Thousands of witnesses over centuries describe a glowing ball, the size of a fist to a football, drifting for seconds and vanishing quietly or with a bang. One has been recorded with a spectrograph, in 2012. No laboratory has made one that behaves as the reports describe, and the competing physical accounts are what the site's ball-lightning mystery tests.
Where it comes up
Marfa lights
Ball lightning produced by piezoelectric effects in quartz-bearing bedrock under stress.
Ball lightning
It was a related but different phenomenon, such as a long-lived luminous ground-strike remnant, not representative of ball lightning in general.
Q: Is ball lightning a physical object, distinct from afterimages, hallucinations and misperceived ordinary lightning?Q: Does ball lightning form at the point where lightning strikes, or in the electric field near storms?Q: What forms and powers ball lightning?It was a related but different phenomenon, such as a long-lived luminous ground-strike remnant, not…Ball lightning is a physical luminous object produced in or near thunderstorms.Martin Uman called it probably ball lightning, or one type of ball lightning.
Hessdalen lights
The EMBLA team compared the light profile to the silicon-nanoparticle model of ball lightning .
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Ball lightning [Concept CPT0DECW07S9ZXB]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW07S9ZXB
@misc{mysteriesdept_cpt0decw07s9zxb,
title = {Ball lightning},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Concept, catalog key CPT0DECW07S9ZXB},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW07S9ZXB}
}