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Luminous ball of light filmed in Siberia


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Beam me up, Scottie.  There's no intelligent life here!

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According to Psy.org, while scientists can't agree on how it happens, it does say ball lightning typically lasts no longer than 20 seconds. This video is a full minute. I'm wondering if it's not some sort of electrical explosion or fire or something. Of course there are probably any number of better explanations, but because whatever it is is so far away, we'll never really know.

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Looks more like a electrical arc to me, judging from the color and brightness of it. There is at least one high-voltage power line pole is visible right near it. The weather is rainy. Either a some kind of a short circuit or really a ball-lightning-like phenomena, may be somehow connected to the vicinity of the power lines. Yet all the poles are always grounded... Actually I don't know. Too bright and too big to be a ball lightning. As far as I remember, the ball lightning's plasma is usually enclosed in a sort of much cooler crust, which protects it from immediate disintegration. The crust, although very thin, usually looks pretty pale. When the crust is broken the ball breaks up with explosion. Here I see something completely different.

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34 minutes ago, Child of Bast said:

According to Psy.org, while scientists can't agree on how it happens, it does say ball lightning typically lasts no longer than 20 seconds. This video is a full minute. I'm wondering if it's not some sort of electrical explosion or fire or something. Of course there are probably any number of better explanations, but because whatever it is is so far away, we'll never really know.

Russian geographer and writer Vladimir Klavdiyevich Arsenyev observed the ball lightning in 1908 at the Russian Far East, near the place where the modern town of Sovetskaya Gavan is located, and given a very detailed description of the phenomena in his book "В горах Сихотэ-Алиня" (In the Mountains of Sikhote-Alin). He mentioned that it lasted at least for a couple of minutes. It's funny that I wanted to translate that excerpt and publish at the UM forum this spring but was too lazy at the time. Now I presume it would be interesting for everyone to read the translation.

Edited by Chaldon
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Very impressive.

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Sorry, but I don't find that very imprssive at all.  If that is shot in gloomy light, then even a tractor with a reasonably tight cluster of spotlights/headlights could look like that.  Given it never changes its distance from the ground, it looks more like a manmade light source in the absence of any other evidence..

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Pardon, may have related this story here before...As a younger fella, worked for the phone company. Went to a cabin on a lake where there was very sandy soil. We were cutting over from party to individual line service (yeah, im old). Had to check the ground connection. About 6 inches under- where the connection to rod was- there was the top of a fulgarite. Very delicate...Showed the cabin owner and he related a story.
...( this is about 30 years ago) - he said during a thunderstorm, ball lightning came out of the phone. About the size of a baseball, sizzled, bright white, took a herky jerky course for about 6 feet, and disappeared with a loud bang...I was too young and stupid to ask any good questions...He also said he smelled ozone- or the smell after a thunderstorm?

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Seems to stem from some sort of industrialized area. I'm guessing a fire of some type? Not seeing it move at all. Manmade for sure. 

Then again, who the hell knows? Russia. 

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My dad's business partner's wife was lying in bed watching t.v. when during a thunderstorm ball lightning came out of a wall receptacle and rolled across her white carpet, burning a trail into the carpet. Happened probably 50 years ago in an area know for lots of electrical storms and violent lightning. 

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Powerlines running along the same track as the light, its probably a power surge if even electric in nature. More interesting is the idea of plasma lightning from high energy powerlines. Plasma actually arched from a powerline to my car and burned a hole in the direct center of my roof, while i was in it. Same thing happened to a different car parked on the same block. Most likely it has something to do with the power lines in the background.

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3 hours ago, Razer said:

I'm guessing lightning hit power lines.  Something like this...

 

 

This is exactly what i was talking about, the lines supercharge and than arch to the ground, power companies keep this **** quiet and it is a real danger, they increased the height of powerlines in my area, NYC.

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This is what I hate about these videos. The camera is never still and is so erratic. Every freaking video that is showing something strange is always filmed incorrectly. But when it comes to filming something absolutely mundane like a birthday party, a child's first steps etc. etc. The Camera's focus is perfect. There are no tremors, no frames of someone's feet being shot etc. 

Sorry I had to vent... I was watching the video and I was genuinely interested in what was being captured but the incredibly bad camera work just irritated me so much... Next time give the camera to someone who is not drunk, has massive hand tremors and or is mentally incapable of taking a short film. 

As far as the phenomenon is concerned... anybodies guess.

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I recall my mother telling me of her relatives witnessing a ball lightning many decades ago. So they are reported also in the Nordic lands.

12 hours ago, Chaldon said:

Looks more like a electrical arc to me, judging from the color and brightness of it. There is at least one high-voltage power line pole is visible right near it. 

If you look closely, you'll notice that the ball doesn't move at all at the height level of the eletrical cabling between the poles, as seen in Razer's embedded video, but at far lower height. Nor is the speed and behaviour of the thing similar, either: its movement is steady and constant, unlike the ones we saw in Razer's video.

2 hours ago, Nzo said:

Next time give the camera to someone who is not drunk, has massive hand tremors and or is mentally incapable of taking a short film.

I understand your frustration, but you're being too hard here. Ball lightnings are so rare that it would take a serious lightning photographer hobbyist or researcher to get a proper footage and even they might die of old age before catching a good photo. The person in this video is likely filming with his handheld smartphone pointed to the far-away distance, as seen from the zooming at the beginning (0:02). This means that any slight movement in the hand holding the camera looks like a major earthquake to the viewer. I guess the person filming was also looking at the thing with his own eyes at the same time or alerting neighbours/relatives/others to the phenomena, so that's why the camera might have been pointed at wrong directions at times. A proper and steady footage of ball lightnings might be possible acquired from a CCTV cameras, though such a material is not manually checked without a reason, meaning that it has to be first reported by humans and only then could the researchers access the CCTV footage.

Perhaps this phenomena could be connected to so-called sprites and elves of the atmosphere and is a low altitude variant of them. Please see here and here.

I concur with Ashyne that likely some of the uknown flying objects reported were of this type. I recall reading earlier of super bright lights moving over passenger cars, with the car engines shutting down. I wonder if that's connected somehow to the electrical phenomena like this from the link above:

Quote

Chen says the models show that elf hotspots may increase the electron density of the ionosphere by up to 5% which “could interfere with ground and space communication as well as navigation,” he says.

The result of such close encounter between a passenger car and a ball of light was usually the people woking up from the stagnant car, or suddenly realising that they are still driving the car, but feeling quite dizzy with a memory loss. The actual encounters with aliens and high tech space vehicles are in such cases usually reported much later under a hypnosis. I cannot but to wonder if in such cases the car has been hit with a bright ball lightning of some sort, causing the super bright epiphany, electrical problems with the car engine and finally the memory loss and experiences of high tech aliens reported by the passengers caused by a sudden surge of the DMT chemical in their brains. Please read for yourselves more about that here.

Edit: it seems that the ball of light in this video is moving just above the ground. It would be interesting to know if that effects the fields nearby in any way. I say this because there have been earlier reports of people witnessing the birth of crop circles before their own eyes, in a sudden fashion with no humans at work. As some crop circles are of human work, this kind of eletronical phenomena could explain the cases like the one described above, with the non-mechanical and electrical effects on the straws. Round patterns like spirals and ying and yangs all occur in the space and nature as electronical phenomena, so that could explain also some of the crop-circle patterns, as the electrical phenomena are known to be scalable in nature.

Edited by FromFinland
Added the crop circle stuff.
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This is far too big to be ball lightning. The round, white, shining phenomenon is very similar to something I saw some years ago on a sunny Sunday. I was going on the short road from Coldred in East Kent to join the A2, when I saw a round, seemingly flat, shining white orb, the size of the one in the video here, and suspended about 200 feet up. A line of trees blocked my view as I continued on the short run to the A2, and when I got to the end the orb was nowhere to be seen. By the way, it couldn't have been the sun, which was located elsewhere in the sky.

Edited by Ufomek1
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4 hours ago, Ufomek1 said:

This is far too big to be ball lightning. The round, white, shining phenomenon is very similar to something I saw some years ago on a sunny Sunday. I was going on the short road from Coldred in East Kent to join the A2, when I saw a round, seemingly flat, shining white orb, the size of the one in the video here, and suspended about 200 feet up. A line of trees blocked my view as I continued on the short run to the A2, and when I got to the end the orb was nowhere to be seen. By the way, it couldn't have been the sun, which was located elsewhere in the sky.

Well, I guess ball lightnings are different. The whole term "ball lightning" is more of an umbrella word for several types of rare electrical phenomena. There are different testimonies and different videos and photos. It's still quite a mystery.

Edited by Chaldon
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I've completed the translation of the excerpt from Arsenyev's "In the Mountains of Sihote-Alin", where he describes his encounter with the ball lightning. Sorry if the translation is clumsy, English is not my native language.:)

Quote

I stopped for a while and at that very time saw ahead of me some peculiar kind of light. Someone was walking in my direction with a torch.

'What a geezer', I thought, 'Walking with a torch in a bright night like this'.

I took s few steps and saw that the torch was round and matte.

'This is bizarre', I thought again, 'Who would come up with idea to walk through the taiga under the moonlight with a paper torch?'

At that moment I noticed that the bright object was floating rather high above the ground, much higher than a man's height.

'That's more than I need', I muttered, 'Someone's carrying the torch on a stick'.

The weird light was coming closer. As the place was rather uneven the path was going up and down a little, and the torch, as it seemed to me, was going up and down according to the movements of a strange walker. I stopped and listened carefully. May be there was more than one man walking, two may be, and they undoubtedly should be talking to each other...

But the silence was complete. Not a single voice, no patter, no coughing, nothing was heard. As I didn't want to scare the approaching men, I intentionally loudly coughed, then started to sing a tune, then stopped and listened again. It was absolutely quiet in the sleeping air. Then I looked around and asked, 'Who's there?' No one answered. Suddenly I saw that the torch wasn't moving along my path, but rather in the distance, to the left of me, right through the bushes.

I was frightened by the thing I could not explain, I didn't know what or who I am dealing with. It was some kind of a glowing ball, size of two fists, matte white. It was slowly floating through the air, adapting to the topography of the place, lowering itself if there was a pit or the vegetation of lower, and rising up if the ground or the bushes were getting higher; at the same time it was avoiding contact with tree branches, the grass, and carefully floating around every single twig or leaf.

When the glowing ball approached, it was no farther than ten steps from me, therefore I could examine it very well. Two times its outer crust was breaking, and the bright bluish-white light was seen inside. Leaves, grass and tree branches were lighted dimly when it was going by them, and at the same time it looked like they were moving. The lightning ball emanated a very thin glowing tail behind, like a string, which was sparkling in certain places from time to time.

I realized that I am dealing with a ball lightning, under the totally clear skies and in the dead calm. I guessed that every single blade of grass was charged with the same electricity as the lightning ball; that's why it avoided contact with them. I wanted to shoot it but could not resolve.

The shot would stir up the air, and it would undoubtedly carry the ball away. If it touched some object it would disappear without a sound, but could blow up as well. I stood like a statue, afraid to move. The glowing ball was moving steadily in one and the same direction. It crossed my path diagonally and started to raise uphill. It climbed up pretty high, came over a shrub, then lowered and hid behind the hill.

A bizarre feeling took me, I was both frightened and interested by the phenomenon. The fear was taken by the interest quite soon and I quickly walked back, up the hill to the very same shrub where the ball was last seen. The ball lightning has gone. I was looking around, searching for it for quite a time but could not see it. It disappeared without a trace. Then I returned to the path and continued my walk.

 

Edited by Chaldon
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On 8/4/2016 at 8:05 PM, Sundew said:

My dad's business partner's wife was lying in bed watching t.v. when during a thunderstorm ball lightning came out of a wall receptacle and rolled across her white carpet, burning a trail into the carpet. Happened probably 50 years ago in an area know for lots of electrical storms and violent lightning. 

So, what happened? Did it explode or vanish, how big was it, did it make noise, did she get insurance to pay for it...anecdotal info is good.

Who knows- maybe ball lightning could be associated with human combustion.

Edited by Poppi
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2 hours ago, Poppi said:

So, what happened? Did it explode or vanish, how big was it, did it make noise, did she get insurance to pay for it...anecdotal info is good.

Who knows- maybe ball lightning could be associated with human combustion.

Well, it was a long time ago and I was just a wee lad, but if I remember correctly it was about the size of a soft ball and it made a sizzling sound. I think there may have been a popping or explosive sound when it finally vanished, but I'm not certain. As for insurance, I have no idea. Probably not many policies specifically cover ball lightning, lol!

I do know lightning can enter a house this way because I personally saw sparks come out of our wall receptacles in our basement when lightning hit our house and took an indirect hit as I had a hold of a radial arm saw. Felt like I was hit by a hammer. Sparks came out of all or most of wall receptacles. I probably was not hurt worse or killed because most of the bolt apparently went into the copper plumbing where it blew out a water pipe. All in all not a pleasant experience. 

 

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