Great balls of fire

BALL LIGHTNING IS a rare occurrence that few people have seen with their own eyes. Thought for many years to be a myth, scientists now recognise it as a genuine phenomenon, but remain baffled about its cause. Following a call in my column in AG 165 for eyewitnesses to these mystery balls of fire, many readers submitted accounts of their own close encounters.

While some of these could be dismissed as aberrations associated with standard lightning strikes, there were several reports that clearly were out of the ordinary. Among the sources for