Ball Lightning Spared Spotter's Mansion
Lightning bolts can be terrifying enough, but ball lightning is something else again. Floating horizontally only a few feet off the ground, these glowing plasma globes, generally associated with thunderstorms, can bob, weave, change direction, even “follow” observers in ways that seem unnervingly intelligent. They have been known to roam the interiors of houses, and they have a nasty habit of “exploding” when they hit something solid. Once ball lightning was dismissed as folktale or hallucination, discussed seriously only on woo-woo TV shows such Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World – where, on Episode 13, Sir Arthur called ball lightning the “most important of all mysteries,” because of the tantalizing prospect of plasma technology. Today, if not quite “tweedy with respectability,” as Ryan Shirlow put it recently in Fortean Times , ball lightning nevertheless is regarded as a real – but really weird – weather event. “Scientists say they have much to learn about the mysterious p...