Great Balls of Fire!

Ball lighting is one of those strange phenomena that rarely occurs and is not understood. Only in recent years have many scientists accepted ball lightning as other than an illusion; perhaps some still view it as such.

Ball lightning evidently can enter a house through a chimney only to roll harmlessly across the floor with a hissing noise and then vanish with a loud pop. Bright blue in color, golf ball or basketball size, ball lightning can move erratically, sometimes against the wind. Ball lightning probably is a self-contained mass of ionized air held together by its own magnetic field. As such it would be called a plasma rather than a gas, liquid or solid.

Recently a British woman reported she was struck by such an object. Her dress, made of synthetic fiber, was burned through. She received a slight burn on her finger around her wedding band as she brushed the ball away; otherwise she was unhurt.

This energy release from ball lightning is somewhat different from an occurrence I saw once in Colorado. It melted a chunk out of a piece of heavy iron rail placed in a window frame.