During a recent lightning storm, a couple from Canada caught a rare weather mystery on camera.
Right from their porch, Ed and Melinda Pardy watched as a lightning bolt struck the land less than a kilometer from their home.
In the bolt’s wake, a brilliant ball of blue light was left hovering above the ground.
The couple managed to capture a 23-second video of the strange apparition.
“It looks like a firebolt, but not really, it’s the wrong color,” Melinda Pardy can be heard saying in the background of the footage, which was provided to several Canadian broadcasters.
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According to an interview with Canada’s CTV News, the bizarre globe of bright light was about one to two meters in diameter, and it hovered above the ground for about a minute before it went out with a ‘pop’.
Related: Astronauts Reveal The Shocking Beauty of Lightning From Space
Ed Pardy thinks it may have been a rare glimpse of ball lightning, a hypothetical weather phenomenon defined by thousands of eyewitness accounts collected over the centuries. Some have even reported fiery orbs flying through their windows.
Despite all the anecdotes, there’s no real scientific explanation for the claimed events. The size of the observed light sphere, its color, and behavior can vary quite a lot, so it’s hard to confirm if all the stories are due to the same physics.
In recent decades, scientists have tried to generate models of plasma balls in the lab, to understand how orbs of light could move around and last for so long. But because of their random and rare nature, real-world examples are much harder to study.
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In 2014, scientists in China got lucky. They filmed what they argue is the first video of ball lightning, capturing the incident by accident. Upon further analysis, they found evidence that ball lightning is composed of tiny bits of soil, which could be vaporized by lightning and set a-glow.
Their observations and measurements were published in a peer-reviewed paper, but some scientists disagree on the physics. Instead, they suspect ball lightning is the result of light, trapped within a sphere of highly compressed air.
No scientist has yet confirmed the short video from Alberta is footage of ball lightning, but the Pardy couple says they have been approached by researchers.
“If it is ball lightning,” veteran storm chaser George Kourounis told CTV News, “then this is one of the best ball lightning videos I’ve ever seen.”
But there are plenty of online skeptics.
Some have suggested the curious ball of electricity could be the result of a power flash on a high voltage line, which can’t be seen in the video, although the Pardy’s say there are no powerlines close by.
Frank Florian, senior manager of planetarium and space sciences at the TELUS World of Science, told Global News that whatever the couple saw, it was a very strange weather phenomenon.
“It could be ball lightning or it could be something that’s more of an artifact of a lightning strike itself,” he said.
This may be one of those mysteries we never get an answer to.
