Talk:Ball lightning

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An Observation dated 2014 April 21th, Easter Monday 2014

My parents watched in their home the development of what appeared to be an impressive thundercloud. There was no rain yet. My father watched in the direction of the could at the back of the house, my mother watched through a windows in the front of the house in the opposite direction. My mother then saw a ball of orange roll through the street, an estimated one meter in diameter. She described its texture and colour like the sun's granulated surface, as "shown" in fake-colour images. As my mother stood perplexed and the ball rolled out of view my father ducked for cover. He saw an "enormous" orange sphere envelope a forested cemetery, at about one kilometer distance. It took several seconds for the sound of the strike to reach their home.

It is unclear what happened first: the lightning strike at the cemetery or the ball in the street. The distance between the lightning ball and the site of the strike is about one kilometer.

No damage in the street was recorded due to the ball lightning. But the cemetery was devastated by the strike. An oak of about 20 meters was reduced to shreds of wood. The mourning center's back wall, double brick masonry 10 meters long and 3 meters tall, was obliterated and rubble was blown inward. Marble tomb stones got shattered. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxAVeI7aF-4 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.83.108.100 (talk) 10:33, 15 August 2022

(UTC)

Is the existence of the phenomenon even confirmed?

I've found no hard evidence of any ball lightning phenomenon ever existing. It seems that it's somewhere between urban legend and hallucination. Please provide some hard evidence of existence of this, otherwise this article should be rephrased to reflect the supposed existence of the phenomenon. BratPit24 (talk) 20:52, 13 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There's quite a few documented well documented sightings.

Probably a better question would be : Are all the sightings describing the same phenomena? It seems like "Ball lightning" is a catch-all for any freak glowy thing that's associated with lightning in any way.

It's not really surprising that lightning occasionally produces unusual sparks, embers, optical illusions, and perhaps even little bubbles of plasma. Heck, even a moth whose wings caught on fire would fit the description. Does "ball lightning" describe all of those things? Or is there one particular thing that is "ball lightning" and some of the sightings are describing something else? ApLundell (talk) 17:31, 15 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Existence

Why does it say in the lede its existence is unproven but later explains the very detailed January 2014 recording with spectra in China? — THORNFIELD HALL^(Talk) 10:36, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You're right, I've modified the text. Evgeny (talk) 08:08, 15 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]