Ball Lightning Explained: What Scientists Know About the Glowing Orbs of Thunderstorms (2026)

For centuries people have described the same impossible thing. A thunderstorm rolls in, and a glowing ball, somewhere between the size of a grapefruit and a beach ball, drifts through the air, sometimes into a room, hovers for a few seconds, then fades away or bursts with a bang. Scientists call it ball lightning. Most of them now agree it is real, yet almost nobody has measured one, and no single theory explains every report.

The short answer: ball lightning is a rare, glowing sphere seen during thunderstorms, usually lasting a few seconds. The best evidence so far, a lucky 2012 recording in China, points to soil vaporized by a lightning strike, with silicon, iron and calcium burning in the air. Lab teams have made convincing look-alikes from burning silicon, microwaves and, in April 2026, a laser-driven bubble of trapped radiation that held itself together far longer than ordinary hot gas should. Some sightings may not be objects at all but tricks of the eye and brain caused by a nearby strike. Here is what witnesses report, what instruments have caught, and what each explanation gets right.

What ball lightning looks like

Descriptions vary, but a few features come up again and again. In a 1966 NASA report, Warren Rayle of the agency’s Lewis Research Center surveyed about 4,400 colleagues and got 1,764 replies. Roughly one in ten said they had seen ball lightning, and 112 filled in a detailed follow-up questionnaire. Combined with thousands of other reports, the picture looks like this.

Size: most balls are described as roughly 10 to 50 centimeters across. In their 2000 paper in Nature, chemical engineers John Abrahamson and James Dinniss summed up the "average" ball as a 30-centimeter sphere lasting about 10 seconds and glowing about as brightly as a 100-watt lamp.

Color and brightness: orange, yellow, white and blue are common. Rayle found that 87 percent of his witnesses called the ball round, and most said it was bright enough to see clearly in daylight. Many reported surprisingly little heat.

Movement: the balls tend to drift slowly and mostly horizontally rather than simply rising like a hot-air balloon. Some appear to follow wires or slip through windows, chimneys and even closed rooms.

The ending: some fade quietly; others burst with a sharp crack and leave a smell often compared to sulfur or ozone. A minority leave scorch marks, melted wiring or blown fuses.

The timing: almost all sightings come during thunderstorms, frequently just after a cloud-to-ground strike nearby. That link is the main reason scientists treat ball lightning as a lightning phenomenon rather than folklore.

Famous sightings, and one famous myth

Ball lightning has a long paper trail, and some of the most cited cases are worth a closer look, because a few do not hold up.

Widecombe-in-the-Moor, 1638

On Sunday, October 21, 1638, a violent storm hit the parish church of St Pancras in Widecombe-in-the-Moor, on Dartmoor in Devon, during an afternoon service of about 300 people. Contemporary pamphlets describe a "great fiery ball" coming through a window, followed by fire, smoke and a stench of brimstone. Four people died and around 60 were injured, and the church was badly damaged. Local legend blamed the Devil. Modern writers usually list it as one of the earliest detailed accounts of ball lightning.

Georg Richmann, 1753

You will often read that the Baltic German physicist Georg Wilhelm Richmann was killed by ball lightning in St. Petersburg while repeating Benjamin Franklin’s experiments. A popular engraving even shows a glowing ball striking his head. But a 2021 review in the journal History of Geo- and Space Sciences by Alexander Keul points out that the investigation and autopsy published in 1755 describe a conventional lightning accident caused by an ungrounded conductor. The deadly fireball, in other words, is mostly a later legend.

Eastern Air Lines, 1963

One of the most quoted modern reports comes from a radio astronomer. Roger Jennison of Jodrell Bank was on a late-night Eastern Air Lines flight from New York to Washington on March 19, 1963, when lightning struck the plane during a storm. He described what happened next in Nature in 1969:

A glowing sphere a little more than 20 cm in diameter emerged from the pilot’s cabin and passed down the aisle of the aircraft approximately 50 cm from me, maintaining the same height. (Roger Jennison, Nature, 1969)

He estimated it moved at about 1.5 meters per second and glowed blue-white at roughly 5 to 10 watts. Keul’s review collects 41 similar reports from scientists, weather observers and other trained witnesses between 1868 and 2020, including balls that entered a Cambridge physics lab in 1982 and rolled out of a mortuary in Austria in 1955.

The first time instruments caught one

For most of its history, ball lightning research rested on eyewitness memory. That changed by accident in July 2012 on the Qinghai Plateau in northwest China. A team from Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, led by Ping Yuan, had set up two slitless spectrographs, cameras with a diffraction grating in front of the lens, to study ordinary lightning. During a late-evening storm, a cloud-to-ground strike hit a hillside about 900 meters away, and a glowing ball rose from the ground near the strike point.

The cameras recorded it for about 1.64 seconds. The ball drifted horizontally for roughly 10 meters, rose about 3 meters, and changed from white to reddish as it faded. Crucially, the spectrographs split its light into a spectrum. Published in Physical Review Letters in 2014 by Jianyong Cen, Ping Yuan and Simin Xue, it showed emission lines from silicon, iron and calcium, all common in soil, along with nitrogen and oxygen from the air. The team also saw the brightness flicker at about 100 hertz, possibly because the ball sat near 50-hertz high-voltage power lines.

Lightning researcher Martin Uman of the University of Florida, who was not involved, told APS Physics that it was "a unique observation that is probably of ball lightning, or one type of ball lightning," adding: "This one certainly seems to be made of dirt." In 2025 the same Chinese group returned to the recording in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. Working out how much power each spectral line carried, they concluded that the ball had a hotter, pulsing core glowing mainly in near-infrared oxygen light, while most of the visible glow came from soil material burning around it, and that the ball was moving toward a nearby power line.

The main explanations

There are dozens of theories. A useful way to think about them is by asking where the energy comes from, since an ordinary blob of hot air would cool and vanish in a fraction of a second.

Burning soil: the silicon theory

The leading idea for balls born from a ground strike came from Abrahamson and Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in 2000. When lightning hits soil, the intense heat strips oxygen from silica and turns it into silicon vapor. The vapor condenses into a fluffy, floating web of nanoparticles that slowly burns in the air, giving off light and heat for seconds rather than milliseconds. In the lab, they zapped soil with a lightning-like discharge and collected chains of nanoparticles that oxidized at about the right rate.

In 2007 a team at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, led by Antonio Pavão and Gerson Paiva, put the theory to a dramatic test. They vaporized thin silicon wafers with an electric arc of up to 140 amps and produced glowing balls 1 to 4 centimeters across that floated, spun and lasted up to 8 seconds, as reported in Physical Review Letters and described by Physics Today. One burned a hole in Paiva’s jeans. The 2012 Qinghai spectrum, with its silicon, iron and calcium lines, fits this picture well.

A ball of burning dirt, bright enough to see in daylight, would explain a lot. It cannot explain a ball that appears inside a sealed airplane.

That is the theory’s weak spot. A ball of burning dirt, bright enough to see in daylight, would explain a lot. It cannot explain a ball that appears inside a sealed airplane. The theory also struggles with balls that show up indoors or high above the ground, far from any soil.

Trapped electromagnetic energy

A second family of theories says the ball is fed or held together by electromagnetic waves. The Soviet physicist Pyotr Kapitsa proposed in 1955 that radio-frequency energy from a storm could sustain a glowing plasma. Japanese physicists Y. H. Ohtsuki and H. Ofuruton made plasma fireballs from crossing microwaves in 1991, and in 2006 Vladimir Dikhtyar and Eli Jerby at Tel Aviv University used a "microwave drill" to pull glowing fireballs out of molten hot spots in silicate materials such as glass, as they reported in Physical Review Letters. Those fireballs lasted only about 30 to 40 milliseconds once the microwaves were switched off.

Plasma blobs from water

Researchers have also made floating plasma balls, sometimes called plasmoids, by discharging high-voltage capacitors over a tank of water. These glowing blobs can rise from the surface and last a fraction of a second, and groups including one at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics have studied them as possible cousins of ball lightning. They look the part, but they last far less time than the typical natural report.

It might be in your head

In 2010 Josef Peer and Alexander Kendl at the University of Innsbruck proposed that some sightings are phosphenes, the patches of light people see when the visual system is stimulated directly. Doctors trigger them deliberately with transcranial magnetic stimulation, and the physicists calculated that the rapidly changing magnetic field of rare, long, repeated lightning discharges could do something similar to a person within a few hundred meters. A correction later that year, written with Vernon and Gerald Cooray, found that the effect on the brain itself was likely much weaker than first estimated and that stimulation of the retina was the more plausible route. The idea may explain some reports, especially ones with no physical traces, but it cannot explain a ball caught on two cameras and a spectrograph.

2026: a ball of trapped light in the lab

The newest twist comes from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In a paper published in Nature Photonics on April 16, 2026, a team led by Liwei Song, Ye Tian and Ruxin Li reported making what they call a ball-lightning-like relativistic terahertz soliton.

How they did it: they used an intense laser pulse to launch a terahertz wave along a metal wire and focused it onto a nanometer-scale needle tip, where the field topped 10 billion volts per meter. Pointed into a fast jet of argon gas, that field ionized the gas and carved out a glowing spherical bubble.

What they saw: the sphere started about 80 micrometers across and lasted more than 100 nanoseconds, 10,000 to 100,000 times longer than earlier laser-made solitons, according to the institute. It glowed from ultraviolet to infrared, and its electrons cooled only slowly, from about 70,000 degrees Celsius to about 6,000. That slow cooling, the team argues, shows energy was still being fed in by terahertz waves trapped inside the plasma shell, with the pressure of the trapped radiation balancing the pressure of the hot gas.

Why it matters: scaled up, the authors say, the same physics corresponds to meter-sized balls lasting seconds, which is the right range for natural ball lightning. That makes it the strongest lab support yet for the idea that some ball lightning is a self-contained package of electromagnetic energy rather than a burning cloud of dust. It is still a microscopic, nanosecond-long object made with lab equipment no thunderstorm has, so it is evidence for a mechanism, not proof of what happens in nature.

So which explanation is right?

Probably more than one. In their standard reference work Lightning: Physics and Effects, Vladimir Rakov and Martin Uman wrote that there may be more than one type of ball lightning and more than one mechanism that makes it. Balls that rise from a strike point outdoors, like the Qinghai event, look like burning soil. Balls that appear inside aircraft or rooms need something that travels without fuel, such as trapped electromagnetic energy, or may be perceptions rather than objects. Other glowing phenomena, such as the steady blue glow of St. Elmo’s fire on masts and wingtips, probably account for some reports too.

The real bottleneck is data. In 1975 a team searching about 12,000 photographic records from a U.S. network of night-sky cameras found only two probable ball lightning events. Today, phone cameras, dashcams and lightning-location networks offer a better chance of catching one with a time stamp and a position, which researchers can then match to a specific lightning strike.

If you ever see one

Get to safety first: ball lightning almost always comes with a thunderstorm, and the storm is the real danger. The U.S. National Weather Service advises going indoors as soon as you hear thunder and waiting 30 minutes after the last thunderclap before heading back out.

Keep your distance: do not touch or chase it. Reports of burns, shocks and damaged wiring are rare but real.

Record what you can: if it is safe, film it, note the time to the second, your location, the direction you were facing, and how long it lasted. Note any smell, sound or marks afterward. Researchers can check a precise time and place against lightning-detection records, which is how scattered sightings become evidence.

The bottom line

Ball lightning has moved from folklore to physics, but not yet to a solved problem. One natural ball has been measured, and it was made of vaporized soil. Labs have produced convincing imitations from burning silicon, microwaves, water discharges and, most recently, laser-made terahertz bubbles that hold themselves together. The likeliest answer is that "ball lightning" is a name for several different things that all happen to glow during storms. If you are drawn to strange lights in the sky, our guide to why auroras glow green, red and purple covers a glow that science has fully worked out.

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