During a Staffordshire, England, storm in 1983, a woman saw a glowing red ball hurtle
toward her house. It blew a five-foot hole in the roof, then hit a neighboring house,
where it shattered windows, popped electrical outlets, and left another hole in the
ceiling.
About one hundred years earlier, a French tailor also witnessed a similar experience. He
had just finished eating dinner when a board covering his fireplace fell over. Out of it
came a fiery ball the size of a child’s head. It then rose five feet vertically into the
air, toward a stovepipe hole above the mantle. The tailor stated that the ball removed
the paper without burning it, and then went on to disappear up the chimney. Moments
later, a huge explosion ruined the top of his chimney and cast chunks of stone through
nearby houses.
Both of these events involved a phenomenon known as ball lightning. The average ball is
about six to twelve inches across, with a steady red, orange, or yellow glow. Unlike the
conventional, fast bolt of stroke lightning, a ball moves at a slower pace of a few feet
per second. Few of these electrical bodies exist for more than three seconds.
Because of its short lifespan and the inability to reproduce ball lightning in the
laboratory, it still remains unexplained. There are many scientists who think it is just
a figment of imagination, not a force of nature. Other researchers hypothesize that they
are plasma, a superheated gas whose atoms have been stripped of electrons.
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