It drifts. It hisses. It smells of sulfur. It has reportedly rolled down aircraft aisles, killed a man through his chimney in 1638, and hovered over a Canadian couple's yard before popping out of existence. Ball lightning was long dismissed as a hallucination — until a team of Chinese scientists accidentally caught one on a spectrometer.
News footage of a glowing orb that lingered after a lightning strike near a home — one of the rare modern candidate sightings caught on camera, and the kind of clip that reopens the whole debate.
Centuries of accounts, from a Benedictine monk in 1195 Canterbury to the deadly Great Thunderstorm of Widecombe. Sizes from a pea to several meters, lifespans of seconds to minutes, and no accepted theory.
BBC Science Focus on the defining weirdness: it moves independently of the wind, passes through glass, and behaves nothing like the split-second flash of an ordinary bolt.
A CBS report walking through the phenomenon and the footage — a good primer on why eyewitnesses number in the thousands yet hard evidence stayed almost nonexistent for centuries.
National Geographic on the darker history — accounts of ball lightning entering homes, burning victims, and even a theory that it caused sailors' deaths — and why it stayed on science's fringe so long.
In 2012, researchers studying ordinary lightning in China pointed their instruments at the sky and by pure luck recorded a ball's spectrum. It glowed with silicon, iron, and calcium — the elements of soil.
An explainer running through the leading hypotheses — vaporized silicon nanoparticles, trapped microwave plasma, oxidizing metal vapor — and why none of them quite accounts for every reported trait.
A recent theory proposes ball lightning is an atmospheric optical effect — and even that some sightings are hallucinations induced by a bolt's magnetic field. The argument, and why it's not the last word.