‘Ball Lightning’ Soars High And Falls Short

Ball Lightning (2005) by Cixin Liu and translated by Joel Martinsen is good. It’s really good. For the first two-thirds. Unfortunately Ball Lightning changes tack and loses steam in the last third. Fortunately, though, Cixin Liu builds up enough momentum to carry the story to completion.

Chen is not your typical scientist. Traumatised as a child Chen has turned that trauma into an obsession. An obsession with finding and understanding ball lightning. Maybe then he can put his parents’ ghosts to rest.

But Chen is not alone in his obsession. The beautiful Lin Yun also wants to understand ball lightning. But for reasons entirely her own. And the too brilliant physicist Ding Yi doesn’t care about ball lightning at all except that it’s another problem for him to solve.

Working together the three sees ball lightning as the answer but to three completely different questions. With the spectre of war looming the leaders of China are impatient for results. Ding Yi, Lin Yun, and Chen could lead the world into a bright new future or end it entirely.

Ball Lightning immediately grabs the reader and sweeps them up in a world of scientific mystery. Cixin Liu poses many questions revolving around one principle question; what is ball lightning? The story revolves around Chen trying to answer this and many other questions.

If this sounds dull, I assure you Cixin Liu does not make it dull. Cixin Liu plots a story that shines a romantic light on the struggle for understanding in science. Cixin Liu makes that struggle as thrilling as any two-fisted fight for survival found anywhere else. And he does so without unnecessary technical details or dumbing down relevant concepts. Cixin Liu respects the reader enough to treat them as equals to the geniuses he writes about.

One of Cixin Liu’s great talents is to bring his characters to life with immediately relatable feelings and motivations. He does so without needing to belabour any pointless minutiae. Cixin Liu has an almost magical ability paint his characters with only a few deft strokes to reveal what we know to be there.

Ball Lightning layers mystery, intrigue, and tension as the story progresses. Chen’s story becomes our story as he and his team travel the world seeking the answer to ball lightning. But Cixin understands that no path to enlightenment is straight and that the ultimate answers may not be to our liking. This element of uncertainty remains with Chen which only strengthens his sympathetic qualities.

What becomes frustrating, however, is in the final third of the book. For the first two-thirds Chen has been the narrator and main protagonist. For some reason Cixin Liu changes style completely and Chen is only a passive observer, content to have the rest of the story related to him. It’s a big letdown to invest in a character only to have them have no influence on the ending.

That said, even though Chen becomes irrelevant as a character the story does coast to an okay ending. In the last third the story becomes more of a philosophical treatise. Like much of Philip K. Dick’s work, questions about reality and death become the focus. You might not agree with Cixin Liu’s answers but they are interesting nonetheless.

Ball Lightning is a difficult book to classify. It could be classified as hard SF but I think scientific thriller would be more apt. This is because Cixin Liu takes almost no liberties with science that even hard SF must do sometimes.

If you like stories about math, physics, philosophy, and meteorology then Ball Lightning will not disappoint. Don’t read Ball Lightning for the destination but read it for the journey. It’s one that inevitably leads to The Three-Body Problem and a greater appreciation of this great author.

Ball lightning videos everywhere

Videos purporting to show the rare natural phenomenon of ball lightning are popping up on social media. Are they real or fake?

If you are familiar with my interests, you know I love anomalous luminous phenomena – earth lights, spook lights, will-o-the-wisp, earthquake lights, ball lightning, earth glows, undersea lights, etc. – all kinds of proposed weird natural lights (except human-generated lights or alleged alien craft, which are boring).

This post is about the proliferation of videos of ball lightning. There are now lots of them thanks to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Along with videos of claimed paranormal events, these videos are almost always fake or misinterpretations, but they go viral. Comments suggests, however, that many people believe they are real.

Ball lightning is a particularly thorny issue because it’s almost certainly a real thing, just very rare and takes place under conditions where people will not see it. The descriptions of what it is supposed to look like come from eyewitnesses over the centuries. It is described in association with an electrical storm where the “ball” results from the aftermath of a lighting bolt, and lasts less than a minute traveling up or down from a cloud or along the ground.

There has been considerable scientific research into the formation of ball lightning, far more than most people will ever be able to consume. But that’s for another time, should I choose to go there. For this piece, I’m particularly interested in the videos that claim to show it and how it’s fairly easy to tell that they don’t.

Famous video of the ball on the railroad tracks

Many people might be familiar with what is almost certainly the most popular video that was labeled as ball lightning. It was the electric blue sparking sphere traveling across railroad tracks supposedly taken in Belarus by Andre Trukhonovets in May 2019. Andre posted it to his YouTube channel at that time. But it was stolen and re-posted in lots of other places lacking important context. Andre had labeled it as CGI that he had generated. But it went viral as “real” ball lightning.

So, it didn’t take much detective work to figure this one out. However, the video had obvious clues for the careful viewer that it was not genuine. And, it was not believable as ball lightning because it wasn’t in association with typical lightning discharges.

Swooping ball video 2023

A video came to my attention this week as an example of ball lightning. This version was, on its face, really poor CGI. The video is taken by someone on a porch or covered area during a storm. After a lightning bolt, a ball manifests and swoops dramatically around the sky in an area defined by the edges of the viewing area (a red flag). The ball looks cartoonish with a glowing trail. The video didn’t come with any provenance so I had to go looking. I found it active on Reddit (r/bizarrelife). Searching the other usual sources, I tracked it back to a May 4, 2023 post on TikTok by the user N-COG (incognitogamestv) who is @antoniotheleo on Instagram. His channel is full of bad paranormal fakes. I don’t know if he makes them or he just posts them. As with typical hoaxed videos, the background content is real but the ball lightning has been added.

I’ve embedded the cropped version that I first saw. (It’s hosted on my own channel so no one is making revenue off it except YouTube.)

Ball lightning has not been credibly reported to look or behave like this. Fake all the way. There are LOTS of these fake videos. Many come from eastern countries.

Kazakhstan, August 2021: A video shows a small child playing when a ball of light enters the window and travels through the house. This is fake.

Yet, once again, it’s assumed to be real because people can only imagine what ball lightning looks like. We have no standard to judge. Or do we?

Has ball lightning ever been captured on video?

The answer to this appears to be “yes”. Unfortunately, we are not able to view the entire definitive video that was inadvertently captured on 23 July 2012 by Chinese researchers studying cloud to ground lightning. They recorded digital video of the entire process. The ball itself was generated from a cloud to ground lightning channel and lasted 1.64 seconds. But even the researchers who wrote up the results of the find noted that there may be different means of generation of ball lightning because not all reports are at ground level following a cloud to ground strike.

There are several videos in the public sphere that show specs of light floating in the sky in proximity to an electrical storm. We can’t confirm that any video shows actual ball lightning because the conditions are entirely uncontrolled and usually not verifiable. They could be aircraft, reflective balloons, sky lanterns, insects, birds, light reflections, or something else mundane.

Lyons, Colorado, June 2001: Glowing ball is seen between two lightning bolts for about 10 seconds. Featured on TWC’s Strangest Weather on Earth.

Unknown location, June 2019: One glowing ball appears near the middle of the image and floats slowly to the right. Another ball appears near the base of the cloud. Posted by Tina Davies.

Sioux Falls, SD, July 2015: Excellent, clear video of a fantastic lightning show. Suddenly, a ball rapidly descends from the cloud to the ground.

Note that it would be easy to miss these specs of light, particularly if you are not keen to stand outside in dangerous conditions.

Not ball lightning

There can be other reasonable explanations for the lights including electrical arcing and unanticipated light reflections.

Novosibirsk, Russia, August 2016: Bright blue light appears on the ground during a storm. Video by Roman Tregubov. This bright blue color and location near the ground is indicative of electrical arcing from a power line, not ball lightning.

Sometimes these videos make thew news. The term “ball lightning” is used but it’s clearly NOT that.

Sacramento, CA, August 2020: The news announcer doesn’t say what is “ball lightning” in the video – the ground lights or the lens reflections of those lights that appear like balls in the sky. Nothing in the video shows ball lightning.

Finally, some people call them UFOs instead.

Fort Lauderdale Beach, Florida, June 2023: A man is filming a lightning storm when a beam zips through the sky. The media called this a UFO, some commenters said ball lightning, but it was a reflection of the car headlight. The light on the right is probably a plane. Video: Carmen Rich

I’ll remain on the lookout for the best ball lightning videos but, for now, assume that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

#anomalousNaturalPhenomenon #ballLightning #hoaxes #UFO #weather

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