Comments on: 09-12-23

By: Chris in Sweden

Chris in Sweden — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:08:41 +0000

The entire article is basically an argument from ignorance. Reasoning like this is what give skeptics a bad name, shape up.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:01:31 +0000

I guess it’s easy to dismiss ball lightning if you’ve never seen it. It does sound fantastical. But I have seen it and can never forget it, or doubt its existence. Several years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I was teaching English in Poland. I was living on the 2nd floor in a dorm room which had floor to ceiling windows. It was late evening with an overcast sky but no rain. The lights were off and the drapes were left open. I heard what sounded like firecrackers and then saw a basketball sized object move slowly across the windows. It was glowing yellow/green/blue and looked to be spinning. It left me speechless. I had no idea what it was and had never heard of ball lightning at the time. I talked about it in the staff room the next morning with my colleagues but nobody else had seen it. It would be almost 10 years later when I recounted that story to my then boyfriend who said it sounded like ball lightning. Indeed it does.

By: shane

shane — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:32:27 +0000

I had an experience of BL when I was about 13yo.
I was sitting in the kitchen of our house on the westcoast of New Zealand .It was a very stormy morning with a lot of sheet lighting and thunder when suddenly a blue-ish white soccor ball sized ball of light appeared close to the window i was sitting beside and moved along the side of the house for about 5 seconds with a sizziling sound before dissapearing . Thunder and ligntening storms are very common in the area and i would watch them all the time but never experienced that phenomena again. Hmmmmm…..

By: Jack

Jack — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:41:47 +0000

I had a situation where I was sure I “encountered” a yellowish ball of lightning that seemed to hover along a golf course for a couple of seconds and disappear into a tree. After being “weirded” out, I came to my own conclusion that it was maybe a visual artefact from the original strike, as it was very similar in motion and speed to an eye floater.

By: Lawrence Mayes

Lawrence Mayes — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 16:12:49 +0000

A good article – I have always found the idea of ball lightning being an objective occurrence a difficult one to accept. BL and its inconsistent and implausible properties put it closer to ghosts, yeti and UFOs than to a real electromagnetic phenomenon.
Surely some of the believers have not read the article in its entirety – particularly the title – and so are unwarrantedly surprised and dismayed by its conclusions. Perhaps a believer could write “The Case For Ball Lightning” that would be as equally well-argued.

By: Jeffrey Hazzard

Jeffrey Hazzard — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:52:20 +0000

I was standing in my kitchen in Valrico, Florida, USA, facing the back yard. I had a screened lanai, an uncovered pool, and a big tree in the back yard.

Anyway, lightning struck the tree, or just in front of it, flashed several times in an instant, and then seemed to crackle, pop, zig-zag to the house very slowly (as if burning through the air), pass through the aluminum screen frame, through the aluminum window frame and to my telephone on the wall about 2 feet from the window. It seems to me that I don’t know precisely when the lightning/electricity going through the air got to the phone, but I recall it was after the thunder of the initial flashes of lightning in the back yard, and so I’d say at least 3 seconds for the event to happen. Because most of the movement of the sparking traveled horizontally directly toward me, I am not able to say if it was linear or ball in shape. Interestingly the path of the electricity I witnessed more or less was over the ground path of the buried phone cable, but the visible electricity in the air was head height to me and I was standing up (ground graded slightly down hill away from the house). The sod was not scorched and the phone line didn’t seem to be damaged. I never found any damage on the tree and it lives to this day.

Later, there was a small mark to be seen on the screen room where the lightning (?) or electricity (?) struck it and the phone was dead –had to be replaced. The phone line was fine. The window frame had a clear mark right where I saw the spark pass through it. Was that static electricity or ball lightning, or what?

By: Erik from Sweden

Erik from Sweden — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:33:04 +0000

I am rather insulted by the article. As a boy, me and my family lived in a small house on the Swedish west coast. One summer a thunder storm roared outside. As always during storms, the telephone was unplugged and we were watching the lightning outside in an adjacent room. I can not remember if there was any particular sound but what I can remember I remember clearly. From the direction of the telephone socket, a lightly yellow football (soccer) sized ball was moving about one meter per second, it went around a corner, accelerated and dissapeared through a closed wooden door. Nothing happened to the door.

I do not know what was the purpose of the article, if it was to ridicule lightning bolt observers or to make us be more skeptical. If it was the first, I am offended by the ignorance, if it was the latter I think Skeptic is the wrong forum.

By: bob becht

bob becht — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 20:13:49 +0000

When I was 8 I walked into a dark room. I turned on a lamp hung on the wall. I blue softball sized ball of light came through the outside wall into the room. The ball traveled 10 feet across the room hitting the lamp. The lamp shorted out. I was unhurt. I didn’t learn about ball lighting until 20 years later but this sounds like it. Being a skeptic I know youth and tricks of memory make my account doubtfull. There is a 2007 article in NG about lab production of BL. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070122-ball-lightning.html

By: Jim Williams

Jim Williams — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:08:10 +0000

I had heard of BL from several different sources over a number of years. In January 2005, while living in west central Michigan we had a somewhat unusual mid winter thunderstorm. My wife and I had just gone to bed around 11:00 PM. She really hadn’t heard of BL. I had wanted to see it for 40 years. Just as I closed my eyes she yelled with alarm “what’s that”? I of course missed it. She described a soccer ball sized globe hovering, for a few seconds, in our back yard. It disappeared in a flash. Our neighbor, up the road about a quarter of a mile, was out feeding his horses. He saw it floating and heading in our direction. He phoned us at that somewhat late hour to see if we were alright. Anecdotal? You bet.

By: Armando Simon

Armando Simon — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:45:40 +0000

Leaving aside the question of ball lightning, the argument put forth does not make sense: anecdotal evidence should be disregarded. First, if a phenomenon does exist but it is exceedingly rare, anecdotal evidence may be all that is available at the present time. Second, for many years, there was anecdotal reports that Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa had snow, but they were disregarded. Also, that in the Antarctic there were occasional green icebergs. Both were eventually proven to be true. By all means, let us be skeptics, but let’s not throw out the baby along with the bathwater.

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:32:55 +0000

Twice my wife and I “saw” a bluish ball of light about the size of a soft ball come from the area of our exposed water pipes in the kitchen of our old farm house. Both times it appeared to move rapidly (but slower than a thrown object), bounce off the wall and disappear as it crossed the kitchen. After the first encounter, we later found our twin hermit crabs dead. This happened years ago, but never reoccurred after we had our house covered in steel siding and rewired. We have retold this story many, many times.

Hey, I consider myself an educated, scientific minded skeptic. I don’t know if what we saw was BL some other phenomena and one of us influenced the other, but it seems as real to me as anything I have observed.

By: Rusko

Rusko — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:51:58 +0000

I liked the article. I don’t think the author was trying to prove the non-existence of BL. Rather, he is exercising what we should all use as critical thinking and examining the quality of the evidence.

“His lack of exposure to an event is hardly evidence of the lack of existence of an event.”

This statement reminds me of the Carl Sagan story called “The Dragon in My Garage”, where Sagan posits, “What is the difference between and invisible, hovering, cold-fire breathing, ethereal dragon and no dragon at all?”

In science, we can’t prove the non-existence of anything, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it seems that the pool of evidence for BL is not very extraordinary.

By: Jon G

Jon G — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:42:11 +0000

Reasonable comments, Larry.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2562/does-ball-lightning-really-exist

By: Larry Johnson

Larry Johnson — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:34:52 +0000

I find Steuart Campbell’s article “The Case Against Ball Lightning” to be shockingly poor, and a bad example for skeptics everywhere.

His piece is full of examples of poor or frivolous logic, and is biased beyond all reason.

Let’s look at just 3 examples found in the first couple paragraphs:

“Further, it has not been created in laboratory conditions….”
The fact that BL has not been created in laboratory conditions is a poor argument that it does not exist in nature. Firstly there are few working on recreating the phenomenon, and secondly, there are many examples of natural events that cannot be created in the lab, such as Sprites, which were reported for 100 years before being clearly photographed, and have never been reproduced (obviously).

“There is no photograph, film or video recording that can be accepted unreservedly….”
It is 1) an unreasonable expectation to have anything “accepted unreservedly”, and 2) not valid evidence for or against BL in any case. Take the holocaust as an example. There are a large number of people who still believe it never happened, and who don’t “accept unreservedly” the photographic evidence. Is it therefore reasonable to deny its reality? Hardly.

“More recently, Karl Berger reported that, in over 20 years of study as a meteorologist and lightning investigator, he had never observed BL.” If he never saw a sprite, is that “evidence” that they don’t exist also? His lack of exposure to an event is hardly evidence of the lack of existence of an event.

Similar comments could be made on nearly every bit of logic in the article, and I find that insulting. Hopefully others look critically, in the tradition of Skeptic thinking, at the article, and the logic, before being swayed one way or the other.

I understand this is tricky territory. I understand that the evidence for BL is similar to that of extraterrestrials, Lock Ness Monsters, and many many other phenomenon. I understand that disproving an existence is impossible.

But let’s not lose or pervert critical and logical thinking and barrage readers with 1651 faulty logic words in order to shove one point of view down reader’s throats.

Come on Skeptic, let’s step up the quality a little okay?

Larry