It was twilight, among towering clouds, high over some mid state when I
saw a bright signal flare sweep up to about the plane's altitude from
clouds below, and fall back. Then a second, from a different location.
No lightning. Paths and velocities very projectile-ish, not rockets. But
considering the altitude, definitely not signal flares.
Unless they were "tracer" artillery shells. Wildly unlikely, but so
-they say!- is ball lightning.
As for those links, #3 conveniently ignores all the recorded cases of BL
going through walls and windows. #2 has NOTHING to do with the subject,
and #1 obviously is a hyper-skeptic jumping through haystacks to find an
excuse not to address the facts. Marsh gas, anyone?
Say, doesn't our host Bill keep an extensive collection of BL sightings?
Ol' Bab
On 8/27/2013 2:25 PM, pagnu...@htdconnect.com wrote:
It's interesting to note that the still unexplained and controversial
phenomenon of ball lightning is derided as mass delusion, e.g., --
Is Ball Lightning Just a Shared Hallucination?
http://www.universetoday.com/64560/is-ball-lightning-just-a-shared-hallucination/
- despite that probable ball lightning has also deluded video cams, e.g.,
"UFO" Shoots Missile with beams - Vandenberg Air Force Base
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO4FhJ3mjrE
Challenging established orthodoxy endangers reputation, career, income, ...
This recent (open source) paper --
Interrelation between ball lightning and optically induced forces
http://iopscience.iop.org/1402-4896/88/3/035402
-- begins with the observation -
"The phenomenon of ball lightning (BL) remains unresolved
up to the present moment. No satisfactory explanation of
enigmatic natural phenomena (observed and examined by
scientists for many centuries) has been found up to now.
More than 200 different BL theories are known, and their
systematization and classification have been carried out.
However, neither of them can even approximately explain the
enigmatic and intriguing behavior of BLs, which to a certain
degree reminds one of the behavior of some highly organized
matter. Physicists cannot imagine an object, submitting to
conventional physical laws, whose properties coincide with
BL properties. This is something perfectly new."
It seems that the same laws of social psychology are operating
to discourage investigations of BL and LENR.
BTW, the following paper --
Tracks of Ball Lightning in Apparatus?
J. Condensed Matter Nucl. Sci. 2 (2009) 13–32
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LewisEtracksofba.pdf
- speculates that micro-BL might explain the topography of
pock-marked, streaked, ..., metal surfaces seen in LENR.
Any opinions on the reality of ball lightning?
-- Lou Pagnucco
