# Ball lightning is an exotic or paranormal phenomenon (from mini black holes to alien probes) that ordinary physics cannot explain

**No verdict.** The reports are real and old: for centuries, credible witnesses have described glowing, floating spheres, often during thunderstorms, that drift, hiss, and vanish or burst. That much is documented, and laboratories have now produced short-lived, ball-lightning-like luminous plasmoids from silicon and other materials, so the phenomenon is no longer purely anecdotal. The claim we rate is narrower and larger: that ball lightning is an exotic or paranormal thing (a mini black hole, a knot of antimatter, a signal of magnetic monopoles, or an intelligent or extraterrestrial presence) beyond ordinary physics. That claim is unproven. No single accepted physical model yet explains every reported trait, but the leading explanations are mundane (oxidizing silicon nanoparticles thrown up by a ground strike, trapped plasma, and in some cases visual hallucination), and no verified evidence ties any sighting to an exotic or non-natural cause.

Category: Science, Space & Technology · Era: 17th century to present · First circulated: Descriptions long predate the term: the 1638 Great Thunderstorm at Widecombe-in-the-Moor is often cited as an early account, and systematic scientific and fringe debate over what ball lightning is has run from the 18th century to the present · Believed by: A wide public familiar with the phenomenon from folklore and news, plus meteorologists and physicists who accept the reports as genuine; the exotic and paranormal readings are held by a smaller fringe, from enthusiasts who tie ball lightning to UFOs and earth spirits to a handful of physicists who float mini black holes, antimatter, or magnetic monopoles
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/ball-lightning

## Summary
Ball lightning is the name given to a genuinely puzzling class of reports: luminous, roughly spherical objects, usually described as anywhere from pea-sized to a meter or more across, that appear during or near thunderstorms, drift horizontally through the air or even indoors, sometimes hiss or smell of sulfur, and last a few seconds before fading silently or ending in a small explosion. Sightings stretch back centuries, and in 1638 a fiery ball was reported tearing through a packed church at Widecombe-in-the-Moor in Devon. For a long time many physicists doubted the phenomenon existed at all, since it was fleeting, unpredictable, and known only from testimony. That changed as the reports accumulated from credible witnesses, as a 2014 Chinese study captured the first optical spectrum of a natural event, and as laboratories learned to produce short-lived ball-lightning-like plasmoids on demand. This case file keeps two things apart: a real, still-imperfectly-understood atmospheric phenomenon; and the claim it rates, that ball lightning is an exotic or paranormal entity beyond ordinary physics, which remains unproven.

## The claim
That ball lightning cannot be accounted for by ordinary physics and is instead something exotic or paranormal: variously a mini black hole, a pocket of antimatter, a signal of magnetic monopoles, a self-organizing plasma intelligence, an earth spirit or omen, or a manifestation linked to UFOs, and that mainstream science either cannot or will not admit what it truly is.

## Origin and timeline
- 1638-10-21: During a violent storm at Widecombe-in-the-Moor in Dartmoor, Devon, witnesses describe a great ball of fire ripping through the church of St Pancras during an afternoon service, killing four and injuring many. Contemporaries blame the devil or the flames of hell; it is now often cited as one of the earliest detailed accounts consistent with ball lightning.
- 1753: The German physicist Georg Wilhelm Richmann, studying atmospheric electricity in St Petersburg, is killed when a glowing ball is said to have leapt from his apparatus during a storm. The episode becomes an early scientific reference point for the phenomenon and its dangers.
- 1800s-1900s: Accounts accumulate across cultures, but ball lightning acquires a reputation as a scientific embarrassment: unpredictable, unphotographed, and known almost entirely from eyewitness testimony. Some physicists doubt it exists at all, while others attempt early electrical and plasma explanations.
- 1963: The British physicist R. C. Jennison reports a luminous sphere about 20 centimeters across drifting down the aisle of an airliner in flight, a first-person account by a scientist that becomes one of the more widely cited sightings and helps push the phenomenon toward serious study.
- 2000: In Nature, John Abrahamson and James Dinniss of the University of Canterbury propose that ball lightning forms when an ordinary strike vaporizes silicon in soil, ejecting a filamentary network of nanoparticles that glow as they slowly oxidize in air. It becomes the most influential mainstream physical model.
- 2007: Brazilian researchers report producing centimeter-scale, ball-lightning-like luminous balls in the laboratory by striking silicon wafers with electric arcs, lending experimental support to the silicon-oxidation idea and showing the effect can be reproduced on demand.
- 2010: Physicists including Vernon Cooray publish the hypothesis that some ball lightning reports are visual hallucinations: the rapidly changing magnetic fields of nearby lightning could stimulate the visual cortex much as transcranial magnetic stimulation does, producing perceived balls of light (phosphenes) with no external object present.
- 2014: In Physical Review Letters, Jianyong Cen, Ping Yuan, and Simin Xue of Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou report the first optical spectrum of a natural ball lightning, recorded by chance in 2012 on the Qinghai Plateau. The spectrum shows silicon, iron, and calcium, the elements of local soil, matching the silicon-vaporization model.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Ball lightning behaves so strangely (floating, passing through windows, lasting seconds, ending in explosions) that no ordinary physics can explain it, so it must be something exotic.
  Evidence: The behavior is unusual but not beyond physics. The leading mainstream model, developed by Abrahamson and Dinniss in Nature in 2000, accounts for a glowing, floating, seconds-long ball as a loose network of silicon and silicon-compound nanoparticles thrown up by a ground strike and slowly oxidizing in air, which would drift on air currents, glow while the reaction lasts, and end abruptly. The 2014 Lanzhou spectrum, showing soil elements, fits that picture. None of this requires exotic physics; it requires chemistry and plasma behavior that are ordinary, if not yet assembled into one complete, universally accepted theory.
- Claim: Ball lightning has never been reproduced, which shows it is not a normal natural effect.
  Evidence: It has been reproduced, at least in ball-lightning-like form. Laboratories have generated short-lived luminous plasmoids by striking silicon with electric arcs (Brazil, 2007) and by directing localized microwaves at silicon substrates, ejecting glowing balls that persist for a fraction of a second and contain silica particles. These are not proof that every field report is identical, but they demonstrate that self-contained luminous balls arise from mundane materials and energy, which is the opposite of what an exotic-only phenomenon would predict.
- Claim: The physics involved (a stable ball of plasma, or one that passes through glass) points to something like a mini black hole, antimatter, or magnetic monopoles.
  Evidence: These proposals exist at the far edge of the scientific literature, but none is supported by evidence, and each raises problems larger than the one it solves. A mini black hole or an antimatter pocket of the mass needed to glow would release energy on a scale no sighting reports, and would be detectable in ways no sighting shows. A 2024 preprint even asks whether ball lightning could signal magnetic monopoles, but framing a question is not answering it. Meanwhile the ordinary explanations account for the observations without invoking particles or objects never confirmed to exist. Reaching for exotica to explain a phenomenon the mundane models already largely cover is a leap, not a deduction.
- Claim: So many people over centuries have seen the same thing that ball lightning must be a single, real, physical object of an unusual kind.
  Evidence: The volume and consistency of reports is exactly why scientists now take the phenomenon seriously, and much of it is almost certainly a real atmospheric effect. But sightings this varied likely have more than one cause. Some are probably oxidizing-nanoparticle balls; some may be trapped plasma or ordinary electrical effects misjudged for size and distance; and a fraction, per the 2010 phosphene hypothesis, may be visual hallucinations induced by the magnetic fields of a nearby strike, in which there is no external object at all. A genuine phenomenon with several ordinary explanations is not evidence for a single extraordinary one.
- Claim: Ball lightning is intelligent or purposeful (it follows people, enters homes, avoids objects), which suggests something more than physics.
  Evidence: Reports of a ball seeming to follow a person, hover, or drift along a corridor are striking, but they are what a light, air-borne, electrically active object would do, carried by drafts, drawn along conductive paths, and interpreted by a frightened witness as deliberate. The human tendency to read agency into moving lights is well documented and is not evidence of actual intent. No study has demonstrated goal-directed behavior; the appearance of purpose is a perception, not a measured property of the phenomenon.

## Why people believe it
- The sightings are genuinely old, widespread, and often come from credible witnesses, including scientists and pilots. When a phenomenon has been reported across centuries and cultures, and mainstream science spent decades unsure it even existed, it is natural to suspect that something extraordinary is being missed or suppressed.
- For a long time official science really did dismiss it. Ball lightning was treated as folklore or misperception well into the 20th century, which gives the exotic reading a real grievance to point to: the experts were wrong to deny the reports, so perhaps they are wrong now to insist the cause is mundane.
- The behavior maps onto the uncanny. A silent glowing sphere that floats indoors, seems to notice you, and vanishes or explodes fits the shape of a ghost, an omen, or an alien probe far more neatly than it fits a chemistry lecture, and the dramatic framing is more memorable and more shareable than nanoparticle oxidation.
- No single theory yet explains every reported trait. Because the mainstream account is still a family of partial models rather than one finished law, the gaps are real, and a genuine scientific loose end is easily mistaken for proof that the true explanation must lie outside physics entirely.
- It travels in company with UFO and paranormal lore. Ball lightning is frequently folded into stories about earth lights, will-o'-the-wisps, and unidentified craft, so audiences already primed to see the exotic slot it into a larger pattern of things the authorities supposedly hide.

## Open questions
- There is still no single, complete, universally accepted physical theory of ball lightning that accounts for every reported property (size range, duration, passing through glass, indoor appearances, the occasional explosion). The silicon-nanoparticle model is the strongest, but the phenomenon is probably not one thing, and the full picture remains genuinely unsettled.
- Natural ball lightning has been captured spectroscopically only once, essentially by luck, so the empirical base is thin. Until events can be recorded systematically rather than by chance, testing competing models against real data will stay difficult, and that scarcity is a real limit, not a cover-up.
- It is unresolved how many reports are a physical object versus a lightning-induced visual hallucination. The 2010 phosphene hypothesis is plausible for some cases and untestable in most individual sightings, which leaves an honest ambiguity about how much of the record is external and how much is perceptual.
- Whether the laboratory plasmoids produced from silicon and microwaves are truly the same phenomenon as the natural reports, or only a convincing analogue, has not been fully established, and closing that gap is one of the field's open tasks.

## Sources
- Ball lightning caused by oxidation of nanoparticle networks from normal lightning strikes on soil, Nature (Abrahamson & Dinniss) (2000): https://www.nature.com/articles/35000525
- Observation of the Optical and Spectral Characteristics of Ball Lightning, Physical Review Letters (Cen, Yuan & Xue) (2014): https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.035001
- First Spectrum of Ball Lightning, APS Physics (2014): https://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/5
- Ball lightning: weird, mysterious, perplexing, and deadly, National Geographic (2016): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/ball-lightning
- Observations of Ball-Lightning-Like Plasmoids Ejected from Silicon by Localized Microwaves, Materials (MDPI, via PubMed Central) (2013): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5452649/
- Some 'ball lightning' reports may be hallucinations, Science News (2010): https://www.sciencenews.org/article/some-ball-lightning-reports-may-be-hallucinations
- The Great Thunderstorm, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Thunderstorm
- Ball lightning, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
- Ball Lightning, Royal Meteorological Society: https://www.rmets.org/metmatters/ball-lightning

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/ball-lightning