I am a huge skeptic in general, but when I was 18 some twenty+ years ago I was sitting in my parents living room during a thunderstorm watching out the back window.
This blaringly loud blindingly bright ball of white light just meandered slowly towards the house, before striking the house and destroying most of our electronics and starting a small fire.
The noise was the most impressing part. It's difficult sound to fully explain, it sounded a lot like when a high power line fell near my house a couple years ago. Imagine you were an ant inside a running blender, it's that all-encompassing.
I will never forget it, I've never seen anything like it.
It's funny how controversial this subject has been. From reading the more recent books on lightning physics, I'm convinced of the reality of it. From that perspective, I'm amused by the entry on ball lightning in the Encyclopedic Dictionary Of Physics (Thewlis, 1962). I don' have it here, but I recall he says something like, "Reports of ball lightning have generally come from unreliable characters, so we can assume it doesn't really exist."
Reading through the comments and reviewing the video does indeed point to arcing power lines. Ive seen videos of fast moving arcs across medium voltage lines that looked like a horizontal jacobs ladder. The lines over current protection equipment might not instantly trip as the current might be limited by enough impedance in the equipment. Disappointing reveal.
Just a few days ago, when those sprite pictures and videos first made their rounds, I thought about ball lightnings. Back in the 90ies I had a physics teacher that was obsessed with them because he saw one as a child.
I figured, with the advent of cameras everywhere we would have much more evidence of them by now, but I found almost nothing.
