Ball Lightning? Video From Alberta, Canada Shows Strange Glowing Orb Moving Slowly Across A Field

Ed and Melinda Pardy, weather enthusiasts from Alberta, Canada, were attempting to look for funnel clouds after a recent storm when they spotted the highly unusual orb in a field behind their property. According to Ed, the sphere appeared to hover above the ground at a height of around 7 meters (23 feet).

“Once the lightning bolt kind of disappeared, the ball of light kind of got bigger, intensified, like, really bright,” he told Canadian outlet CTV News. “Then I was like, ‘Oh, that’ll go away really soon,’ and it didn’t.”

After traveling across the field for around 20 seconds, the orb suddenly disappeared from view.

Ed, who had read about the phenomenon as a child, wondered whether it might be the elusive “ball lightning”, potentially described back as far as the 12th century CE. Back then, an account from one abbot describes how “a sort-of fiery globe threw itself down into the river”. The next account came nearly 450 years later, highlighting how rare and elusive the phenomenon is.

“For a long time ball lightning was regarded with scepticism. Although it is now generally accepted as a genuine phenomenon with thousands of reported sightings, there is still no accepted scientific explanation of its origin,” Giles Gasper and Brian Tanner, who highlighted the 12th century account, explain in a piece for The Conversation.

“Highly complicated theories include the burning of silicon from vaporised soil. More recently, a suggestion has been made for light trapped inside a sphere of thin air. It is one of the oldest scientific puzzles that remains unsolved.”

While we know very little of the phenomenon – given its rarity – in recent years, scientists have been less dismissive of it. In 2012, researchers at the Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, China set up cameras and a spectrometer in the Qinghai Plateau, known for its frequent lightning, and recorded until they saw an apparent ball of lightning. 

Analyzing the chemical composition the team found it contained silicon, iron, and calcium.

“It is known that silicon, iron, and calcium are the main components of soil. Consequently, there are reasons to believe that our observed [ball lightning] is generated by the [cloud to ground] lightning striking to the soil on the ground,” the team explained in their paper, adding that “the radiation from soil elements is present for the entire lifetime of the ball lightning.”

According to that team, though the ball lightning observed may not be representative of all ball lightning, the evidence here pointed to lightning vaporizing the soil, followed by silicon interacting with oxygen in the air creating the distinctive glow.

So, is this new video ball lightning? Given what we know of it, and that’s not a whole lot, it remains unclear. For a start, this object appears larger than previous reports of ball lightning.

“The brightness of ball lightning is typically given by witnesses as comparable to that of a 100 W lamp,” Mark Stenhoff, the author of Ball Lighting (1999), previously told IFLScience. “In daylight conditions, it would be difficult to view it from much of a distance. It is often reported fairly close to the ground, so obstructions would also limit the distance over which it could be observed”.

As well as this, the ball appears to be quite blue in color.

“There’s actually maybe one thing that tends to produce this color, especially when it comes to lightning,” astronomy YouTuber Anton Petrov explains in a video.

“This blue white coloration is very likely the result of aluminum, and a lot of aluminum. And where do we find aluminum? Well, very often inside transmission lines.”

Though ball lightning would be awesome, something far less rare called “electric power line arcs” could be the culprit here.

“Sometimes an arc can be formed that travels across those lines, flashing with an orange and blue light, and then at the very end, it typically vanishes in a puff of sparks. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing here,” storm chaser George Kourounis told CTV News, though he added that he couldn’t be completely sure without witnessing it first-hand.

“If it is ball lightning,” he added, “then this is one of the best ball lightning videos I’ve ever seen.”