Ball lightning: Reality or myth?

A flash of lightning. A thundering boom. And then a curious light floating through the air, illuminating the dark room, and bouncing off surfaces. "I was so terrified, I hid under my blanket," says Millie Drozda, my grandmother, "as if that would do anything." It was thirty-odd years ago, and she was more than 20 floors up in her Chicago apartment when she witnessed a deeply mysterious yet well-documented phenomenon: ball lightning. People have been swapping stories about ball lightning for hundreds of years. An illuminated manuscript written by an English monk in 1195 may be the oldest report. It describes a "sort-of fiery globe" descending from a storm cloud and falling into the river Thames ( Weather 2022, DOI: 10.1002/wea.4144 ) . Nearly 600 years later, scientist Georg Richmann was killed inside his Saint Petersburg lab by "a Globe of blue and whitish Fire" that struck his head while