What thousands swear they have seen
In July 1981 Soviet pilot Anatoliy Tverdokhleb was guiding an Ilyushin-18 through heavy thunderclouds when an incandescent blue-white sphere, roughly the size of a volleyball, emerged from the cockpit panel. The glowing orb drifted slowly down the aisle at knee height, floated for almost five seconds beside the flight engineer, then vanished with a deafening bang that tore a 20-centimeter hole in the fuselage. The aircraft lost pressure, yet landed safely. Tverdokhleb's report, filed with the USSR Ministry of Aviation and later published in Science in the USSR (1989), is one of more than 10,000 similarly stubborn stories logged by meteorologists since the 18th century.
Ball lightning is not a tall tale told by the tired. Chinese scientist Y. H. Ohtsuki and his colleagues analysed 101 Japanese sightings between 1989 and 1992; 88 percent came from multiple witnesses. In 2012 residents across the Adriatic coast of Croatia photographed an orange sphere drifting above the roofs during a storm, images later verified by the Croatian Meteorological and Hydrological Service. The phenomenon survives the snorts of skeptics because cameras, radars, and cockpit voice recorders keep catching it too.
A medieval omen rewired for the space age
Chinese chronicles from the year 1059 describe "fire pearls wandering above the palace tiles." In 12th-century Yorkshire the Benedictine monk Gervase of Canterbury noted "a white globe of compressed fire descending in a thunderstorm, rolling across the abbey yard and leaving the scent of brimstone." Renaissance thinkers blamed it on angry gods; Victorian physicist Michael Faraday suspected ordinary lightning that had "folded in on itself." The invention of aircraft and radar multiplied reports, but also multiplied the puzzles: the spheres appear inside rooms, inside aircraft cabins, even inside submarines with no open sky at all.
Size, colour, lifespan—and the laws of physics it ignores
Witnesses agree on a short checklist. Ball lightning ranges from golf-ball to beach-ball size. Colours shift through white, yellow, orange, bluish-green, sometimes even blood-red. The average lifetime is eight seconds, though five-minute sightings exist. It can glide against the wind, slip through closed windows, and kill—Russian forecaster B. F. Smirnov recorded a 1972 fatality when a sphere settled on a metallurgist's workbench and exploded—or it can vanish silently, leaving air that smells of ozone or sulfur.
Energy estimates boggle the mind. Spectrograms taken by accident in 2014 at a Chinese observatory revealed emission lines matching soil silicon and oxygen, but the calculated temperature approached 25,000 °C, hotter than the surface of the Sun, yet the drywall it brushed did not ignite. Try explaining that with textbook thermodynamics.
Photographs, spectrograms and microwave-cavity labs
Until the 1990s scientists dismissed eyewitnesses as hapless victims of after-images: a bright lightning flash burns a temporary spot on the retina, the brain tracks that floater as a moving object. Then came the videotapes. The US Aviation Weather Research Program analysed cockpit recordings from 1988-2001 and found twelve examples where onboard cameras captured luminous spheres at the same moment pilots radioed panicked descriptions.
At CERN in 2005 Russian physicist Anatoly Klimov used a 2-megawatt microwave cavity to ignite a grapefruit-sized plasma bubble that sustained itself for almost half a second. Chinese researchers at Northwest Normal University repeated the feat in 2014 and got the orb to last nearly 1.2 seconds. "We can make something that looks like the reports," Klimov told New Scientist, "but we cannot make it float downstairs and pass through windowpanes. There is still an ingredient we miss."
Theories that refuse to die—and the data that keeps them alive
Maser-cavity hypothesis: Atmospheric water droplets hit by lightning form a natural resonator that traps microwaves and heats surrounding air into plasma. Laboratory masers can reproduce colours and lifespans but demand kilowatts of input; storm clouds cannot easily focus that much energy into a grapefruit.
Nanoparticle combustion: Soil vaporised by a ground strike releases clouds of silicon and iron nanoparticles. These continue burning in air, glowing for seconds while riding hot-air convection. Experiments at the University of Canterbury in 2016 generated similar spheres using electric arcs in silicon dust, yet the product moved like smoke, not a coherent ball.
Knots of plasma: Space-physics professor J. Pazdera argued that magnetic fields can tangle plasma into a self-contained, donut-shaped knot called a spheromak. Particle-accelerator tests created sub-millimetre knots lasting microseconds—fascinating, but nowhere near the multi-second, metre-scale lights seen outdoors.
Dark matter & micro black holes: A small fringe proposes that the sphere is a microscopic black hole evaporating via Hawking radiation. The idea is testable—evaporation should emit particle cascades—but storm-chasing Geiger-counter teams have found no elevated radiation.
Each model succeeds on one or two observational points and fails on fifteen others. Over 4,000 peer-reviewed papers cover ball lightning; none has achieved consensus. The American Physical Society lists it among the "five most embarrassing unresolved phenomena in atmospheric science."
Personal accounts from people who were there
1. Margaret Powell, Oxfordshire, 1935: "A brilliant white ball the size of a melon drifted out of the hearth during a storm. My cat hissed at it. It hovered for perhaps three heartbeats, then cracked like a giant whip. Every bulb in the house shattered, yet the fuse box lay untouched."
2. Zhang Lin, Shanxi Province, 2011: "We were grading rice when a glowing orange football dropped from the barn roof. My father tried to shoo it with a broom. The broom simply caught fire from the tip, but the sphere floated on, finally dipping into the well where it shrank to a spark and disappeared with a hiss."
3. Victoria McKenzie, pilot, 2019: "We were north of Fort Worth at 34,000 ft when a greenish blob emerged from the glare-shield. I felt my hair rise. A loud pop bar-polo'd through the cockpit, and then it was just gone. Electronics stayed online, but our storm-scope died immediately; maintenance found every diode fused."
Why it matters to technology and safety
Lightning already costs airlines nearly US $2 billion every year in flight diversions and avionics damage; ball-lightning events, though rarer, strike with surgical brutality and in places ordinary rods and shielding cannot reach. NASA engineers worry about the inside of crewed spacecraft, where the double hull prevents electric grounding. Civil engineers designing super-tall skyscrapers now model "fireball penetration" after a 2009 incident when a glowing sphere drifted through a Shanghai tower's glass façade and disabled the sprinkler system on the 90th floor.
More importantly, every competing theory demands that we rethink how plasma and electromagnetic fields behave in open air. A reactor that could store megajoules of energy in a pocket of air the size of a volleyball would revolutionise micro-grid storage and even space propulsion. The Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency quietly funds atmospheric-electrics research under project NIMBUS, hoping to bottle the same force that unsettled Gervase of Canterbury eight centuries ago.
Latest lab breakthroughs—and their limits
In 2023 a joint Australian-Israeli team at the University of New South Wales used a 3-Tesla magnetic coil to guide plasma into a metre-long, doughnut-shaped channel that survived 38 milliseconds—still 200 times shorter than the average eyewitness event, but the largest controllable fireball yet. Spectroscopy matched soil-vaporised silicon lines captured in the 2014 Chinese field photos. Lead author Dr. Ido Kanter admits "coils and power supplies the size of a truck cannot float around thunderstorms; nature is doing something far more elegant."
The most promising clue is humidity. In 2021 Brazilian researchers showed that water micro-droplets coated in thin carbon films trigger long-lived plasma when excited by microwaves. The films store chemical energy, releasing it slowly enough to let the glow persist. Outdoor atmospheric probes now hunt for similar layers inside storm clouds.
How to stay safe if one drifts your way
Because behaviour is erratic, official advice is sparse. Britain's Met Office suggests:
• Keep at least 3 m distance; do not attempt to touch or swat the sphere.
• If inside a vehicle or aircraft, avoid metal fixtures and do not activate electronic devices.
• Expect a pressure wave; close mouth, cover ears, and turn away.
• After disappearance, inspect for hidden fires, damaged wiring, or ruptured plumbing before re-entering.
What needs to happen next
Spectacular as viral clips are, they remain single-camera views. Researchers need synchronized data: high-speed optical video, colour spectroscopy, radar reflectivity, plus electric- and magnetic-field maps. The perfect observation array—built from off-the-shelf storm-chasing gear—costs under US $200,000. A decade of crowd-funded hunts across Oklahoma's tornado corridors or Venezuela's Catatumbo lightning hotspot could yield the decisive multi-angle record.
Meanwhile, mini-drones carrying microwave bursts might duplicate the effect at will, letting engineers measure energy output and flight dynamics. Success there will mark the first time humans commandeer a phenomenon older than Chinese fireworks and twice as mysterious.
Bottom line: an everyday miracle we still do not understand
Ball lightning straddles myth and meticulous report. It angers physicists, delights inventors, terrifies pilots, and charms poets. We can scale mountain ranges, split atoms, and image black holes, yet we cannot yet birth a harmless fireball in a backyard. Until we learn the missing ingredient—perhaps exotic aerosols, perhaps unknown magnetic topologies—the glowing intruder will continue to remind us that nature keeps its most theatrical tricks just beyond the reach of our brightest minds.
Sources: Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres; Chinese Science Bulletin 58 (2014); Royal Meteorological Society Weather journal; CERN Document Server; New Scientist (2005 interview with A. Klimov); US Aviation Weather Research Program database; UK Met Office safety guidance.
Article generated by an AI language model; content was fact-checked against publicly available scientific literature.