Ball Lightning, a personal experience

Ball Lightning, a personal experience.

Years ago I had a personal experience that may interest you. At the
time, I was about 15 or 16 years old, it was about 1960 or 61 and I was in
HS at the time.

I was at home in Aliquippa, Pa working in my basement chem. lab. My
passion was rockets and rocket fuels, namely what we used to call "Caramel
Candy" or a mixture of sugar and Potassium Nitrate or my favorite at the
time, powdered Zinc and Flour of Sulfur. As it was, I was quite
busy on a Saturday afternoon mixing my largest batch of "candy " to date,
roughly 3 or 4 pounds of the stuff. I mixed it in small amounts to
be sure if one of the inevitable accidents were to occur I would only manage
to smoke the basement and not burn down the entire house.

My family and I lived on 7 acres in the country so I could get away with
making and launching rockets of all sizes in my back yard. As it turns
out, we had a well about 600 feet from the house with a circuit breaker and
pressure tank in the basement about 15 or 20 feet from my corner or "Space
central" as it was called. That particular day a rather nasty
storm was raging with more than ample thunder and lightning. As I was
carrying my latest bowl of melted and properly mixed fuel mixture, I heard
and felt what I thought was a direct hit on the house. The lights flickered
and I heard something hissing behind me. I dropped the bowl and turned
around to see what appeared to be a ball of blue/white something floating
in the air.

What had happened was the well house was hit by lightning, which found the
electrical circuit to the house and the pressure tank in the basement.
The pressure switch was fused beyond recognition and the fuse box on the
wall was totally destroyed. It is my guess that the combination of
super heated gases from the melting metals, steam from the pressure switch
and probably a few other right occurring phenomenon were enough to form a
volley ball sized globe of ball lightning. As I remember, it lasted
2 or 3 seconds and managed to travel 5 to 8 feel before it made one
last hissing sound and disappeared. The smell of ozone lingered for
another 5 to 10 seconds as well as the stench of scorched insulation and
tortured metal from the fuse box and the pressure switch.

All in all the show lasted 12 seconds from the time I heard and felt the
lightning strike until the final poof of the plasma ball.

As I look back at the moment, I feel extremely luck to have witnessed on
of nature's truly remarkable creations and only wish I could have been able
to capture it on film somehow.

This is my remembrance of the moment, I am sure some details are missing,
but I do have a vivid memory of that ball of plasma bouncing around looking
for someplace to land, I suppose. Gladly, it was far enough away from
my rocket fuels and chemicals to not cause any damage. I went on to try to
develop an experiment or two that could reproduce the conditions of that
day, but could never get close. I build van DeGraff generators, Telsa
coils, carbon arcs into which I discharged the high voltages generated by
the Telsa coil but never succeeded in generating even a hint of ball lightning,
as far as I know.

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Forbes Daniel Gilchrist (Dan)
ForbesG Laser Artistry
(847) 894-0533

info@forbesglaserartistry.com