[John Waddicor]

John Waddicor asked the Naked Scientists:
   
In 1962 I saw a ball of energy bouncing along the top of some trees.

It left a vapour trail which faded. Similar to a dot on a cathode ray tube. The ball was just a bit bigger than a football. This occurred in a tropical storm with very heavey rain and lightning. ( Of course I was accused of being crazy then but I saw a programme on TV which talked about just this type of thing).

I would like to know more about these "balls of fire" now they have credence.

What do you think?

[LeeE]

What you saw fits in very well with a lot of other reports of ball-lightning.  However, ball-lighting seems to have quite a wide range of characteristics.  For example, the ball-lightning that you saw seems to have just faded away, whereas in some well documented incidents it has ended by exploding and actually killing people and/or causing damage.

The wiki article gives a pretty good summary of the current state of thinking (i.e. we still don't know what it is) on ball-lightning and mentions some of the better documented cases (I've seen a photo of the hole left in the remains of the window in the 1994 Uppsala, Sweden incident, and very intriguing it is too)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

[Karsten]

Cool. I did not think there was actually anything to it.