All over the world, scientists have shown interest in ball lightning for a long time. Over a century and a half of their scientific study, dozens of conceivable and inconceivable hypotheses have been put forward to explain the nature of such a phenomenon. It is often identified with such an anomalous atmospheric phenomenon as UFOs. This is just the case when they try to explain one incomprehensibility to another … We will try to touch this mystery of nature.
It is not difficult to imagine what horror our distant ancestors could experience when they met such an incomprehensible and frightening phenomenon. The first mentions of ball lightning in Russian archives are a vivid example of this. 1663 - one of the monasteries received a "denunciation from the priest Ivanishche" from the village of Novye Ergi, which said: "… fire fell on the ground in many courtyards, and on the paths, and in mansions, like towers of grief, and people ran from him, and he skated after them, and did not burn anyone, and then climbed up into the cloud."
In ancient times, myths and legends represented ball lightning in a variety of guises. More often she was portrayed as monsters with fiery eyes or as Cerberus, a satanic dog that guards the entrance to hell. At times he goes out for a walk on the surface of the earth. Meeting him brings grief, and sometimes Cerberus leaves behind charred remains. The well-known Serpent Gorynych from fairy tales is from this series.
On the bank of the Vakhi River (Tajikistan) there is a mysterious high mound made of rounded stones. Scientists claim that it appeared during the time of Alexander the Great. But local folklore from generation to generation passes on the legend of the fiery underground kingdom and the evil spirits living there. From time to time, they appear at the top of the mound, surrounded by the "black glow" and the smell of sulfur. These demons are always described as a huge dog with burning eyes.
English folk lore is full of stories of "ghostly dogs spewing fire from their mouths."
There is the first documentary evidence of ball lightning from the time of the Roman Empire. The ancient manuscripts describe the events of 106 BC. BC: “Giant red crows appeared over Rome. They carried hot coals in their beaks, which fell down and set fire to houses. Half of Rome was on fire."
There is documentary evidence of this kind of phenomena in medieval France and Portugal. Magicians and alchemists, from Paracelsus to the enigmatic Dr. Toralba, have looked for ways to gain power over the spirits of fire.
Almost all the peoples of the world have myths and legends about fire-breathing dragons and similar evil spirits. This cannot be explained by simple ignorance. There were scientists interested in this topic. Large-scale studies were carried out, and the conclusion was quite unambiguous: many myths, fairy tales, legends are quite possibly based on real events. All this looks like evidence of some mysterious natural phenomena. The presence of a glow, the ability to penetrate through material objects and explosion hazard - why not "tricks" of ball lightning?
Promotional video:
Ball lightning encounters
• A group of enthusiasts led by the Moscow electrical engineer S. Martyanov became interested in an unusual phenomenon near Pskov. In a quiet place of the Pskov region. there is the so-called Devil's Glade. In summer and autumn, according to the stories of the local population, there are so many mushrooms in those places that even a scythe. However, old-timers bypass this place, and visitors will be sure to tell about a strange black creature with burning eyes and a fiery mouth.
Here is how S. Martyanov described his impressions of visiting the Chertova Polyana: “It was there that a mysterious black ball rolled out of the bushes at me. I was literally stunned: fire flashes ran across its surface. There was a huge puddle of rainwater nearby. The dark object sparkled and hissed across the puddle. A thick cloud of steam rose into the air and a loud bang was heard. After that, the ball instantly disappeared, as if it had fallen through the ground. Only withered grass remained on the ground."
S. Martyanov tried to find a solution to this natural phenomenon. His research group included theoretical physicist A. Anokhin. On the next visit to the Chertova Polyana, several electrical devices were taken that are capable of registering powerful electrical discharges. The sensors were placed around the clearing and began to watch. A few days later, the arrows of the instruments shuddered and went sharply to the right. A crimson flame flared up in the middle of the clearing, which soon went out. But suddenly "something dark gray" appeared from the ground. The black color of the ball is by no means a curiosity, since scientists have long ago recorded dark ball lightning. Then continuous miracles began.
The ball began to behave like a sentient being - it went around the entire clearing in a circle, alternately burning out the sensors there. An expensive video camera and a tripod melted, and "something dark gray" returned to the center of the clearing and sucked into the ground like blotting paper. The members of the expedition were in a state of shock for a long time. The riddle did not give rest. Ball lightning is known to occur most often during a thunderstorm, but the weather was perfect that day.
A. Anokhin suggested a possible solution to this mysterious phenomenon. Scientists have long known that thunderstorms also occur underground. In different regions of the Earth, fractures of the crystalline rocks of the earth's surface constantly exist or appear unexpectedly. During deformation, high-power electric potentials appear in crystals and a piezoelectric effect takes place. Probably underground lightning strikes the surface.
In the western part of Novosibirsk, near the Tokhmachevo airport and in the area of the Krasny Prospekt metro station, fire objects have been observed for several years. They have diameters from several centimeters to several meters, appear at different heights, and sometimes burst right out of the ground. Geologists attribute this phenomenon to the fracture of crystalline rocks.
Researchers who study ball lightning often affectionately refer to them as "balls" or "koloboks".
• 1902 - a curious incident occurred on the Estonian island of Saaremaa. 9-year-old Mihkel Myatlik walked with friends along the shores of Lake Kaali. Suddenly, a mysterious creature appeared in front of them - a small gray ball "no more than a span in diameter", which silently rolled along the path. The boys wanted to catch him, but, forcing him to run after him, the "bun" disappeared into the roadside bushes. The search led nowhere.
• The famous Russian writer Maxim Gorky became an eyewitness to the unusual phenomenon. While resting in the Caucasus with A. P. Chekhov and V. M. Vedeneev, he watched as "the ball hit the mountain, tore off a huge rock and burst with a terrible crash."
• In the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" dated July 5, 1965, an article "The Fiery Guest" was published. It contained a description of the behavior of ball lightning with a diameter of 30 cm, observed in Armenia: “Having circled around the room, the fireball penetrated through the open door to the kitchen, and then flew out the window. Ball lightning hit the ground in the yard and exploded. Fortunately, no one was hurt."
• The mysterious properties of ball lightning can also be judged by the case with the Oryol artist V. Lomakin. 1967, July 6 - working in his workshop, at 13.30 he saw a creature covered with wool, with two dark brown eyes, very slowly crawling out of the wall with a rustle reminiscent of the rustle of book sheets. The length of its body was about 20 cm, on the sides there was a kind of wings.
Having flown a little more than a meter from the wall, the creature hit the ruler with which the artist was working and disappeared. On the floor V. Lomakin saw a ball that looked like a ball of twine. The surprised artist bent down to pick it up and throw it away, but found only a thick cloud of gray. In a second, it dissolved.
• 1977, November 20 - at about 19.30 on the highway not far from Palanga, engineer A. Bashkis was driving his "Volga" with passengers. They saw how an irregularly shaped ball about 20 cm in size was slowly passing across the highway. Above the "bun" was black, and at the edges - red-brown. The car passed over him, and the "creature" turned in the other direction and continued on its way.
• 1981 - retired colonel A. Bogdanov saw fireball over Chistoprudny Boulevard. A dark brown sphere, 25-30 cm in diameter, suddenly heated up and exploded, stunning numerous passers-by.
• In the town of Mytishchi, near Moscow, in March 1990, two female students, returning to their dormitory, encountered a mysterious dark crimson ball. He slowly floated through the air, half a meter from the ground. Arriving at the hostel, they saw the same ball on the windowsill. Frightened, the girls crawled headlong under the blankets, the ball at that time began to decrease in size and changed color. When they dared to look out, nothing was there.
• 1993, October 9 - The Youth Gazette of Karelia also published an article about the mysterious ball. Mikhail Voloshin lived in Petrozavodsk in a private house. For some time now, a small ball with a diameter of 7 to 10 cm began to appear here, it moved absolutely silently and arbitrarily changed its direction. Always disappeared suddenly, in the morning.
• In the same year, a curious incident occurred with a resident of Ussuriysk M. Barentsev. On the Shlotovsky plateau, near the cliff, he saw small globular fogs rolling along the ground. One of them suddenly began to grow, clawed paws and a mouth with bared teeth appeared. A sharp headache pierced M. Barentsev, and the ball returned to its original size and disappeared.
• In the summer of the same year, engineers from St. Petersburg had a chance to encounter ball lightning. The husband and wife rested in a tent on the banks of the river. Vuoksy. A thunderstorm was approaching, and the couple decided to bring some things into the tent. And then, in the middle of the trees, they noticed a flying ball, behind which a thick foggy train stretched. Object moved towards the river parallel to the bank. Then it turned out that their transistor receiver had failed, and the husband's electronic clock had broken.
• Western sources of information have earlier evidence of this mysterious phenomenon. During a thunderstorm on April 14-15, 1718, three fireballs with a diameter of more than one meter were seen in French Cuenion. In 1720, during a thunderstorm, a strange ball fell to the ground in a small French town. Rebounding, he hit a stone tower and destroyed it. In 1845, on the Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris, a fireball penetrated a workman's room through a fireplace. The gray lump moved randomly around the room, then exploded up the chimney.
• An article about ball lightning was published in the Daily Mail (England) on November 5, 1936. A witness reported that he saw a red-hot ball descending from the sky. He hit the house, damaging the telephone wires. A wooden window frame caught fire, and the "ball" disappeared into a barrel of water, which then began to boil.
• The crew of the US Air Force KS-97 cargo plane experienced several unpleasant minutes. 1960 - at an altitude of almost 6 km, an uninvited guest appeared on board. A luminous round object about a meter in size has penetrated the aircraft cockpit. He flew between the crew members and just as suddenly disappeared.
Tragic encounters with ball lightning
However, a meeting with ball lightning does not always pass without consequences for a person.
• Lomonosov's assistant, Russian scientist G. V. Rikhman died in 1752, struck in the head by ball lightning that appeared from a broken conductor from a lightning rod.
• A tragic incident took place in Tucumari, New Mexico, in 1953. A fireball flew into a large reservoir of water and exploded there. As a result, several houses were destroyed and four people died.
• 1977, July 7 - Two large balls of light descend on the territory of an open-air cinema in Fujian province, China. Two teenagers died, and about 200 more people were injured in the panic.
• A group of Soviet climbers high in the Caucasus Mountains was attacked by fireball. 1978, August 17 - a bright yellow glowing ball flew into the tent to the sleeping athletes. Moving around the camp, he burned sleeping bags and attacked people. The wounds were much more serious than simple burns. One climber died, the rest were seriously injured. The results of the examination of the athletes baffled the doctors. The muscle tissue of the victims was burned to the very bones, as if a welding machine had worked here.
• 1980 - in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), the appearance of a luminous ball also led to a tragedy. Several houses burned down, the ball chased people, setting fire to their clothes.
• In the "Literaturnaya Gazeta" of December 21, 1983, the explosion of ball lightning is described. Local residents worked in the mountain valley. A huge cloud appeared in the sky, as if glowing from within. Rain poured down, and people rushed to the mulberry tree for cover. But there was already a fireball. She literally scattered people in different directions, many lost consciousness. As a result, three people died.
What is ball lightning?
The list of tragic consequences from meetings with ball lightning can be continued, but let's try to figure it out - what kind of phenomenon is ball lightning? Scientists estimate that about 44,000 thunderstorms rage on Earth every day, and up to 100 lightning strikes the earth every second. But these are, as a rule, ordinary linear lightning, the mechanism of which is well studied by specialists. Conventional lightning is a type of electrical discharge that occurs when high voltages are applied between different parts of a cloud or between a cloud and the ground. The rapid heating of ionized gas leads to its expansion - this is a sound wave, that is, thunder.
But no one has yet been able to give an unambiguous explanation of what ball lightning is. According to the researchers, it will require the efforts of specialists in various fields of science, ranging from quantum physics to inorganic chemistry. At the same time, there are clear signs by which ball lightning can be separated from other natural phenomena. Descriptions of various theoretical models of ball lightning, laboratory studies, thousands of photographs enable scientists to determine many parameters and characteristic properties of such a phenomenon.
1. First, why were they called spherical? The overwhelming majority of eyewitnesses say they saw the ball. However, there are other forms - mushroom, pear, drop, torus, lens, or simply shapeless foggy clots.
2. The color range is very diverse - lightning can be yellow, orange, red, white, bluish, green, from gray to black. By the way, there is a lot of documentary evidence that it can be of an uneven color or can change it.
3. The most typical size of ball lightning is from 10 to 20 cm. Less common sizes are from 3 to 10 cm and from 20 to 35 cm.
4. Experts differ on the temperature. The most commonly mentioned are 100-1000 degrees Celsius. Lightning can melt glass by flying through a window.
5. Energy density is the amount of energy per unit volume. Ball lightning has a record one. The catastrophic consequences that we sometimes observe do not give an opportunity to doubt this.
6. The intensity and time of the glow fluctuate from several seconds to several minutes. Ball lightning can shine like a regular 100 W bulb, but sometimes it can dazzle.
7. It is widely believed that ball lightning floats, rotating slowly, at a speed of 2-10 m / sec. It will not be difficult for her to catch up with a running man.
8. Lightning, as a rule, ends its visits with an explosion, sometimes breaks up into several parts or simply fades away.
9. The most difficult thing to explain is the behavior of ball lightning. She is not stopped by obstacles, she loves to enter houses through windows, vents and other openings. There is evidence of its passage through the walls of houses, trees and stones.
It is noticed that she is partial to sockets, switches, contacts. Once in the water, ball lightning can quickly bring it to a boil. Moreover, the balls burn and melt everything that can be encountered on their way. But there were quite amazing cases when lightning burned linen, leaving outerwear. She shaved off all hair from the person, pulled metal objects out of her hands. At the same time, the man himself was thrown over great distances.
There was a case when ball lightning melted into a common ingot all the coins in the wallet without damaging the paper money. Being an intense source of electromagnetic ultra-high-frequency radiation, it is capable of disabling telephones, televisions, radios and other devices where there are coils and transformers. Sometimes he does unique "tricks" - when people encounter ball lightning, rings disappeared from their fingers. Low-frequency radiation has a bad effect on the human psyche, hallucinations, headaches, and a feeling of fear appear. We talked about the tragic encounters with ball lightning above.
The emergence of ball lightning
Let's consider the most typical hypotheses of the origin of this mysterious natural phenomenon. True, it should be immediately noted that the stumbling block is the lack of a reliable method for the reproducible production of ball lightning under controlled laboratory conditions. Experiments do not give unambiguous results. Researchers studying this "something" cannot claim that they are studying the ball lightning itself.
The most common were chemical models, now they have been replaced by "plasma theories" according to which the energy of tectonic stresses of the earth's interior can be released not only through earthquakes, but also in the form of electrical discharges, electromagnetic radiation, linear and ball lightning, as well as plasmoids - clots concentrated energy. The German physicist A. Meissner is an adherent of the theory that ball lightning is a ball of hot plasma revolving madly due to some initial impulse given to the bunch by linear lightning.
During the Great Patriotic War, the famous Soviet electrical engineer G. Babat carried out experiments on high-frequency currents and unexpectedly reproduced ball lightning. So another hypothesis appeared. Its essence lies in the fact that the centripetal forces striving to break the fireball into pieces are opposed by the forces of attraction between the stratified charges appearing at a high speed of rotation. But even this hypothesis is unable to explain the duration of the existence of ball lightning and its grandiose energy.
Academician P. Kapitsa did not stay away from this problem. He believes that ball lightning is a volumetric oscillatory circuit. Lightning picks up radio waves that occur during lightning discharges, that is, it receives energy from the outside.
Francois Arago was also a supporter of the chemical model of ball lightning. He believed that during the discharge of an ordinary linear lightning, burning balls of gas or some kind of explosive mixtures appear.
The well-known Soviet theoretical physicist J. Frenkel believed that ball lightning is a formation caused by the creation of gaseous chemically active substances during an ordinary lightning strike. They burn in the presence of catalysts in the form of smoke and dust particles. But science does not know substances with such a colossal calorific value.
B. Parfenov, an employee of the Research Institute of Mechanics of Moscow State University, believes that ball lightning is a toroidal current shell and an annular magnetic field. When they interact, air is pumped out of the inner cavity of the ball. If electromagnetic forces tend to break the ball, then the air pressure, on the contrary, tries to crush it. If these forces are balanced, then ball lightning will acquire stability.
From purely scientific hypotheses, which remain so, we will move on to more accessible, and sometimes naive versions.
The supporter of a rather original assumption about the origin of ball lightning is the researcher of anomalous phenomena Vincent H. Gaddis. He believes that, for a long time, in parallel with the protein form of life, there is another one on Earth. The nature of this life (let's call it elementals) is similar to the nature of ball lightning. Fire elementals are creatures of alien origin, and their behavior speaks of a certain intelligence. They can take a variety of forms if desired.
Physicochemist from Maryland David Turner has devoted several years to the study of ball lightning. He suggested that supernatural phenomena such as poltergeist and pyrokinesis are associated with ball lightning. These mysteries are based on similar electrical and chemical processes. But in laboratory conditions, they have not yet been able to confirm this assumption.
Attempts have long been made to link the UFO phenomenon with ball lightning. However, they all turned out to be untenable - the sizes, duration of existence, forms and energy saturation of these two phenomena are too different.
There are supporters of even more original versions of the origin of ball lightning. In their opinion, they are just … an optical illusion. Its essence lies in the fact that with a strong flash of linear lightning due to photochemical processes, an imprint in the form of a spot remains on the retina of the human eye. The vision can last for 2-10 seconds. The inconsistency of this hypothesis is refuted by hundreds of real photographs of ball lightning.
We have considered only some hypotheses and theories concerning such a mysterious phenomenon as ball lightning. You can accept them or not accept them, agree with them or reject them, but none of them has yet been able to fully explain the riddle of strange "koloboks", which means that they can prompt a person how to behave when meeting this natural phenomenon.
O. Ochkurova, V. Syadro