Scientists around the world are struggling to unravel the nature of ball lightning
Summer is a time of special activity of ball lightning. Olga Vasilievna P. from Fryazin near Moscow "got acquainted" with ball lightning in her childhood. She is 13 years old. She lived with her parents in the Urals. It was August, it was getting dark, the weather was clear. Olga was already getting ready to go home when she suddenly noticed a motionless bright spot in the air that flashed and disappeared. Suddenly, the stain began to move directly towards her. The ball quickly flew past, scalding him with hot air.
For about five minutes he seemed to tease the girl, making incredible aerial somersaults. Angry at the air bully, she grabbed a huge stick and went at him, saying: "Go where you came from!" Olga threw the stick after her. There was a loud crack, and in front of the frightened girl's eyes, the stick flared up and burned out like a match.
20 years have passed. Olga Vasilievna lived with her husband and two children already in Tashkent and began to forget about that childhood adventure. But one day, while walking along the shore of the lake, a 12-year-old son called out to her: "Mom, look what a ball!" She looked around and saw a ball about 15 centimeters in diameter hovering over the water, bright as an orange. Suddenly, he began to turn around in the air, as if choosing a target. “I felt horror, although not timid by nature. She shouted to the children to lie on the ground, while she herself stood and waited with the certainty that "it" came back for me."
Presentiments were not deceived: the ball moved towards her, flew around her head several times, burned her ear, and then rushed towards the forest. The woman felt a strong heat from her back. Her husband ran up and pulled off her burning jacket.
For the third time, ball lightning visited Olga Vasilievna last winter.
- I was in the garden when she appeared in the air and hung, as if she was scouting something, and then rushed into the house, - says the pensioner. - Hearing glass clinking, I ran into the bedroom. And there is a broken mirror, on the floor - photographs of the husband and children, the curtain on the window is on. There is a hole in the window pane. Through this hole, she left. Probably, he takes revenge for the fact that I then drove her with a stick, wants me dead. Here is the mirror and broke …
Nothing in which everything
“Ball lightning is one of the most exciting mysteries of modern science,” says Valery Rudakov, a leading researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Earth (RAS), Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. - Scientists have been puzzling over its nature for a long time. It is only known for certain that it is a plasma clot with spherical shape and luminescence. The rest is sheer riddles.
Ball lightning and its "cousin" poltergeist often behave as if intelligently. The same people are chosen for "communication". They enter into a kind of contact with them, "take revenge", "forgive", "have fun" … The victims then long cannot recover from nightmares, severe headaches. Not to mention personal injury and property damage.
Recently, such a hypothesis has often been voiced. Say, ball lightning is a product of a quantum vacuum reigning around us, concealing gigantic energetic possibilities. This is probably where the fantastic energy she possesses comes from. Following Einstein and Paul Dirac, we are getting closer and closer to the conclusion that vacuum is not emptiness at all, it is nothing, in which everything is contained. And people, as if attracting such phenomena to themselves, apparently have increased sensory abilities. At the subconscious level, they are able to capture such phenomena.
There is, of course, no reason to believe that ball lightning is capable of thinking, as some researchers of anomalous phenomena claim. Most likely, we subconsciously set one or another of their "behavior" ourselves. It is not for nothing that children often manage to "make friends" with a "bright ball" or "little bastard", talk to them and even enter into "correspondence". At the same time, the main thing remains unclear: how does this happen?
Fire Beast Sanctuary
The head of the public-scientific association "Cosmopoisk" Vadim Chernobrov
believes that he managed to get closer to solving the mysteries of ball lightning.
Long-term observations of the behavior of the fiery wanderers on the Medveditskaya ridge in the Saratov region helped Vadim to do this.
“There are legends about the existence of enchanted places in this area, about forest people who hid untold wealth under the ground,” says Chernobrov. - The passage of time is supposedly disrupted here, and in the so-called Devil's Lair there are whole flocks of ball lightning.
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The Scythians lived in these places three thousand years ago, as evidenced by the numerous burial mounds. Locals believe that the mounds are connected underground into a complex system of labyrinths. There, they say, and now is full of untold riches. But you can't dig: a terrible curse has been imposed on them, which will turn into a big disaster for violators. And rightly so, all attempts to find out the secret of the tunnels seemed to run into obstacles. The research teams returned with nothing.
- We decided to use available means to trace where the strange voids under the steppe area lead, - Chernobrov continues. - We found out that the tunnel stretches for many kilometers, then expands sharply. Only the most persistent made it to the top. Many of them had a sudden headache during the ascent, the equipment began to heat up, the devices went off scale. When we finally got upstairs, we experienced a shock: over the ground at a meter height … hundreds of red-hot fireballs were flying in formation! As if an unknown force was pulling them strictly along the underground void towards the top.
The balls approached the forest, greedily eating tree trunks, burning round holes and bizarre spirals in them. The members of "Cosmopoisk" talked to scientists, and it became clear that only ball lightning or its technogenic "relatives" could leave such traces in the forest …
But do “flocks” of ball lightning exist in nature? Probably, these are the so-called geophysical meteors - a rare and little-studied natural phenomenon, which is one of the mysteries for modern science. This version is adhered to by a specialist in ball lightning, doctor of physical and mathematical sciences Andrei Olkhovatov. Yuri Bazhutov, a leading researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, believes that the members of the expedition witnessed hundreds of wandering plasmoids, which contain enormous energy reserves.
“The last expedition in May turned out to be very fruitful,” says Vadim Chernobrov. “With the help of special equipment, the scientists carried out geophysical measurements and found out an amazing pattern. Ball lightning, it turns out, strikes exactly where the underground holes are.
And the larger the void, the stronger the discharge. It turns out that lightning and underground tunnels are interconnected. At the same time, a certain order remains, as if invisible power lines lay here. This confirms the hypothesis that a giant energy object is located underground. Maybe this is an underground spaceport adapted for UFO landings? Or suddenly ball lightning - bunches of energy jumping through the so-called wormholes of the universe? Then they can be messengers from parallel worlds or time travelers …
Is lightning the daughter of radio waves?
To this day, scientists argue heatedly about the nature of the incandescent beasts. Some believe that they do not exist at all, attributing everything to a rich human fantasy. Indeed, most of the hypotheses sound fantastic. Meanwhile, the first serious scientific work on ball lightning, written more than half a century ago, belongs to the pen of Academician Pyotr Kapitsa. In it, the Nobel laureate puts forward a brilliant hypothesis that explains the behavior of these mysterious objects from the point of view of the law. Due to what the ball lightning shines, the academician raises the question. If the source of the glow is in itself, then what is this source? Indeed, even with an atomic explosion, the glow is not observed for long, while a tiny ball lightning glows for a long time. And it behaves differently: it does not go out, but glows evenly and moves along a complex trajectory. Its size also remains unchanged. It is clear that we are talking about colossal energies coming from nowhere. On the basis of the law of conservation of energy, it is necessary to accept that energy is continuously supplied to the ball lightning during the glow. And we are forced to look for this source outside the scope of ball lightning.
What is this external source? Maybe it is powered by foreign spaceships or tracking stations of "brothers in mind", the ufologists will happily assume? The opinion of an outstanding scientist is much more earthly:
- Since ball lightning is usually observed "hanging" in the air, without directly contacting the conductor, the most natural and, apparently, the only way to supply energy is to absorb intense radio waves coming from outside by it.
So, according to Kapitsa, ball lightning is a product of intense radio waves. The academician's hypothesis can provide an explanation for what is perhaps the most incomprehensible of the properties of ball lightning - its penetration into a room through windows, cracks, and more often through chimneys.
“Once in the room, the glowing ball either hovers or runs along the wires for several seconds,” notes Kapitsa. - There are so many such cases described that their reality is beyond doubt. A very interesting case was when ball lightning flew into an airplane crossing a thundercloud at an altitude of 2800 m. All these phenomena are explained by our hypothesis as follows. The penetration of ball lightning into closed rooms occurs due to the fact that they follow the path of short-wave electromagnetic oscillations, propagating either through holes or through chimneys or wires as along waveguides.
True, it is still unclear where the fiery "wanderers" came from on the Medveditskaya ridge, if they really are. There are still more questions than answers. But even on this occasion, Academician Kapitsa has a statement that has not lost its relevance:
- Scientists should remember that the most important and interesting scientific discoveries are those that cannot be foreseen. Perhaps the mystery of ball lightning will turn out to be such a discovery for humanity.
Andrey AFANASIEV