This story concerns several people who were travelling through a Derbyshire Dale. One woman, who, one night was driving back to her home from Manchester in 1969, was shocked when the whole sky was lit up like daylight - she described seeing all the features of the terrain so clearly - everything was illuminated. The light stayed for quite a few minutes as she completed her journey and was still there when she raced into the house to call her husband. He immediately came out, but the light was gone (of course!) but curiously, the bonnet of the car, even though she had just finished a long journey, was coated in ice.

For hundreds of years, people have reported sightings of strange balls of energy floating through the air- and sometimes through walls. Ball lightning is generally accepted as concentrated energy in shape of a sphere. Although most scientists acknowledge its existence, it can not be proven due to lack of evidence. Reports date back to at least 1754 when Russian scientist G.W. Richman was killed while studying the phenomena. The most common report of ball lightning includes the energy sphere slowly floating through the air as it occasionally passes through physical objects. The energy seems to have the ability to change colors- perhaps due to its varying heat. The lightning usually vanishes in one of two ways: either a loud explosion or a slow fade into oblivion.

Ball lightning is a natural phenomenon, or debatably, a pseudoscientific theory. It is sometimes associated with thunderstorms. It takes the form of a long-lived, glowing, floating object, as opposed to the short-lived arcing between two points commonly associated with lightning. An early attempt to explain ball lightning was recorded by Nikola Tesla on March 5, 1904 (Electrical World and Engineer). Some laboratory experiments claim to produce ball lightning, but there is no consensus that the phenomenon reproduced is related to the natural one. The natural occurrences are, by their nature, difficult to document accurately. Consequently many scientists continue to dispute the existence of ball lightning as a distinct physical phenomenon (see, for example, the review by Singer (2002)). In one such occurrence, Singer reports that staff at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge apparently saw ball lightning, although Brian Pippard, the Head of Department, was skeptical on its reality.

Ball lightning is the name given to the mobile luminous spheres which have been observed during thunderstorms. A typical ball lightning is about the size of an orange or a grapefruit and has a lifetime of a few seconds. Compilations of eye-witness reports of ball lightning have been published by Brand(1923), Rodewald(1954), Dewan(1964), Silberg(1965), McNally(1966) and Rayle(1967) among others. Visual sightings are often accompanied by sound, odor, and permanent material damage, and hence it would appear difficult to deny the reality of the phenomenon [as Humphreys(1936) has done]. In a letter to the editor of the London Daily Mail, Morris(1936) described an unusual incident in which a ball lightning caused a tub of water to boil:

Ball lightning is described as a luminous sphere which seems to appear out of nowhere and vanish into thin air. It varies in size from two to ten inches in diameter. It usually is seen shortly before or after, or during, a thunderstorm. Its duration varies from a few seconds to a few minutes. "The lifetime of ball lightning tends to increase with size and decrease with brightness. Balls that appear distinctly orange and blue seem to last longer than average....Ball lightning usually moves parallel to the earth, but it takes vertical jumps. Sometimes it descends from the clouds, other times it suddenly materializes either indoors or outdoors or enters a room through a closed or open window, through thin nonmetallic walls or through the chimney."*

Ball lightning reportedly takes the form of a short-lived, glowing, floating object often the size and shape of a basketball, but it can also be golf ball sized or smaller. It is sometimes associated with thunderstorms, but unlike lightning flashes arcing between two points, which last a small fraction of a second, ball lightning reportedly lasts many seconds. There have been some reports of production of a similar phenomenon in the laboratory, but some still disagree on whether it is a real phenomenon.

A New Zealand scientist may have finally explained the mechanism behind the extraordinary phenomenon of ball lightning. Associate Professor John Abrahamson, a chemical engineer at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, explains his theory in the April issue of Physics World Digest. Ball lightning appears as a glowing, hovering ball of light that moves slowly near the ground before disappearing or exploding. The ball usually measures about 30 cm in diameter, although two park rangers in the Australian outback reported seeing one in 1987 that was 100 metres wide.

Years ago I had a personal experience that may interest you. At the time, I was about 15 or 16 years old, it was about 1960 or 61 and I was in HS at the time. I was at home in Aliquippa, Pa working in my basement chem. lab. My passion was rockets and rocket fuels, namely what we used to call "Caramel Candy" or a mixture of sugar and Potassium Nitrate or my favorite at the time, powdered Zinc and Flour of Sulfur. As it was, I was quite busy on a Saturday afternoon mixing my largest batch of "candy " to date, roughly 3 or 4 pounds of the stuff. I mixed it in small amounts to be sure if one of the inevitable accidents were to occur I would only manage to smoke the basement and not burn down the entire house.

People have reported seeing ball lightning—a rare phenomenon that resembles a glowing sphere of electricity—for hundreds of years. But scientists still can't explain what causes it, or even exactly what it is.

This author's father recounted a story from his childhood. As the family sat in the kitchen on a rainy day, lightning hit near the chimney. Moments later a plasma fire ball emerged from an open plate on the cook stove. This fireball floated across the floor, out the open kitchen door, and vanished in the garden. The Plasma ball was about as bright as a 100 watt light bulb. This story is consistent with many other ball lightning accounts. These accounts tell us something about the nature of ball lightning. From these accounts we can glean the following information: