For centuries, witnesses have reported stories of a rare and as yet unexplained natural phenomenon. Airborne spheres of pure light and energy. Appearing. Disappearing. Passing through closed windows and solid walls. Lasting seconds. Just what do we understand about ball lightning?

While it has puzzled scientists and fascinated observers for generations, its exact nature remains elusive. Little is known about ball lightning.

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Historical Accounts of a Glowing Mystery

One of the earliest anecdotal accounts of ball lightning dates back to 17th Century England. In 1638, a giant glowing ball flew into a church window in Widecombe-in-the-Moor.

At the time, people described seeing a large fiery sphere crashing into the church during a big thunderstorm, nearly destroying all the edifice. It vanished without a trace after filling the air with thick smoke and a foul sulphurous smell.

That dramatic incident left many observers questioning what they had witnessed, sparking centuries of speculation.

Since then, countless reports of ball lightning have emerged, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries. Many incidents describe eerie luminous orbs entering houses, floating unpredictably and terrifying witnesses, before suddenly disappearing.

Scientists actively investigated this mysterious phenomenon. But the reason it is so very difficult to study, is that the fleeting nature of the ball lightning phenomenon makes it difficult to capture.

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Real or Hallucination?

Half of all of reported cases involving ball lightning are believed to be hallucinations induced by magnetic fields during thunderstorms.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), a technique invented back in the 1980s, has become a powerful way of investigating how the brain works. Because the fields can be tightly focused, it is possible to stimulate specific areas of the brain to investigate what they do.

Experiments have shown that focusing on the visual cortex caused the subjects to ‘see’ lights that appear as glowing discs and lines associated with the induced eddys of the magnetic field. Shifting the field focus within the cortex also caused the subjects to see moving lights.

All that much is repeatable in the lab, using giant superconducting magnets capable of creating fields of as much as 0.5 Tesla inside the brain.

In 2010, researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria analyzed electromagnetic pulses from repeated lightning discharges and compared them to the magnetic fields used in clinical TMS. They found that they yielded similar results.

The results showed that the variable magnetic fields produced by lightning are of the same order of magnitude and frequency as those applied in TMS experiments that stimulate hallucinations.

Such findings suggested that some cases of ball lightning could actually be cranial phosphenes – hallucinations caused by electromagnetic stimulation of the human brain, occasionally reported during thunder and lightning storms.

But scientists could not wholly dismiss the existence of all ball lightning.

Indeed they obtained strong evidence that the mysterious phenomenon had a physical presence in many instances. They agreed that it had to exist and ought to be studied further.

So if it’s real, then what is its nature?

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Physical Theories – A Glimpse at Reality

If ball lightning is real, what is its composition?

Researchers studied the behaviour of thunderstorms using video cameras and spectrometers. They saw an unusual lightning strike after which the ball of light appeared.

In 2014, a rare instance of ball lightning was captured in China using high-speed imaging cameras and spectrometers.

It flew horizontally about 10 metres (33 ft) before it disappeared.

The spectrometer showed the glowing sphere consisted of silicon, iron and calcium. All of them were elements commonly found in the ground.

So, perhaps the ball lightning occurs as a result of a lightning strike on the ground?

Lightning Strikes and Plasma Bubbles

One prominent theory suggests ball lightning can form when regular lightning strikes the ground, vapourizing silicon and other minerals.

Oxygen and evaporated elements from the soil can combine to create a reaction that may generate microwave radiation, causing plasma to take on a spherical shape and hover in the atmosphere momentarily.

Scientists pointed out that this microwave radiation could form a plasma bubble.

The floating electric plasma takes a rounded shape and hovers in the air for a few seconds.

This provided evidence in favour of ball lightning being a solid material body, rather than a purely electrical phenomenon.

However, there are yet other theories. The next one we can look at says that glass or perplex can generate these plasma bubbles.

Glass Surface Ionization

In the water discharge experiment where a high-voltage potential initiates a discharge inside a bubble of water, the plasma forms due to the ionization within it, generating reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS).

Ball lightning can form inside enclosed spaces, such as buildings or airplane cockpits. The following may explain reports of ball lightning passing through windows.

Atmospheric ions can accumulate on a glass surface and create an electric field, by reacting together with a lightning strike. This reaction produces a floating discharge or plasma bubble.

Charges of opposite sign to those outside of the window surface accumulate on the inside surface of the glass, leaving a ball of net charge moving inside of the cockpit of a plane or within a room to produce a pulsed discharge on a microsecond timescale.

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This electric field turns into ball lightning.

The “ball” region of the discharge has a small negative charge equal to the total of the positive charges at the inside surface of the window, as ionization processes of the discharge always produce equal numbers of positive and negative charges.

Again, that checks up with the many instances when witnesses reported seeing a glowing orb fly into a building through the closed window without breaking it.

Earthquakes and Ball Lightning

Beyond thunderstorms, ball lightning has been linked to other natural phenomena. Notably, earthquakes can cause ball lightning too during ground tremors.

In 2014, scientists studied earthquake lights and found that some rocks emit electrical discharges during seismic events.

Their laboratory experiments showed that under specific circumstances, flashes of light can appear from the depths of the crust.

It looks very much like lightning that appears to come, not from the sky but, from the ground.

Some of these lights look like floating blue orbs.

This explains why the spectrometer in 2012 recorded the same calcium signature in the ball lightning as it did in the ground.

Long story short, ball lightning is a high frequency electrical discharge, burning in the air due to the action of an alternating electric field or a continuous current generated by an external source of energy.

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Ball Lightning in the Lab

In 2006, researchers at the University of Tel Aviv created a laboratory to study ball lightning. They used microwave radiation to recreate a lightning-like electric charge and produced a small, glowing ball that behaved similarly to naturally occurring ball lightning.

In 2018, quantum physicists made a complex synthetic magnetic field similar to ball lightning.

Additionally, physicists, chemists, meteorologists and other scientists have also conducted research and laboratory experiments many times to determine the exact nature of this mysterious phenomenon.

At the Cutting Edge…

The most provocative new theory comes from physicist Ariel Zhitnitsky, who proposes that ball lightning may be a manifestation of dark matter physics – specifically, Axion Quark Nuggets (AQNs).

The key idea from this study is thatAQNs are hypothetical dark matter objects made of standard model quarks and gluons.

These nuggets could internally generate the energy needed to power ball lightning events.

The model explains:

Ball lightning represents a profound manifestation of the DM physics represented by the AQN objects.

Ariel Zhitnitsky

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Scientists could test this theory by using instruments tuned to specific frequency bands in order to detect AQN-related emissions and investigate UAP sightings for ball lightning-like signatures.

Despite these innovations, ball lightning remains experimentally elusive. There is no universally accepted model. Ball lightning has only rarely been captured on video or spectrographs, and laboratory recreations are inconsistent.

And so far, no one has succeeded to unravel the full scientific mystery. In many instances, the nature of such lights remains unknown.

Ball lightning continues to fascinate scientists, storm chasers and everyday observers alike. Whether it is a hallucination caused by electromagnetic pulses, a plasma phenomenon or an entirely different entity, its fleeting nature makes it one of the most difficult natural phenomena to study.

Yet, with advances in laboratory experiments and high-speed imaging, researchers may one day unlock all its secrets.

Until then, if you ever spot a glowing orb hovering through the air during a thunderstorm, consider yourself lucky to have witnessed one of nature’s most elusive mysteries.

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