24 October 2020 | New Scientist | 47>field that is strong and compact enough to
generate a lightning bolt is created inside a
storm cloud. For an everyday phenomenon,
lightning remains surprisingly mysterious.
Few of its manifestations, however, are as
poorly understood as ball lightning.
Aiello is far from the first to claim a
sighting. Ball lightning has been repeatedly
reported over the centuries. Tsar Nicholas II
of Russia claimed to have seen a glowing ball
glide through a cathedral during a late-night
storm when he was a child. Laura Ingalls
Wilder, who wrote Little House on the Prairie,
described a winter storm during which balls
of fire rolled down the outside of the
stovepipe inside her home. They rolled onto
the wooden floor, but left it unsinged. The
physicist Nikola Tesla even claimed to have
artificially produced ball lightning in his
Colorado Springs lab.
Despite such apparent sightings, though,
concrete evidence remains hard to come by.
All records are anecdotal, and no image or
video purporting to show the phenomenon
has stood up to scrutiny.
There is no network to detect something
like ball lightning, either. Rachel Albrecht
at the University of São Paulo in Brazil has“ The ball
floated there
for 10 seconds
before vanishing
silently. He didn’t
even have time
to be scared”