Re: Golka video: Ball Lightning in lab. WHAT?!!!!!

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: William Beaty <billb@xxxxxxxxxx>

On Mon, 20 Jun 2005, Tesla list wrote:

> I may stand to be corrected but one eyewitness account I heard
> related directly indicated that a lightning strike was not necessary
> for BL to form.

IN late 1996 I set up a script which allowed people to type in their
reports of unusual events.  There were a LARGE number of BL reports, maybe
a couple hundred kbytes by now, and a good number of them (perhaps half)
weren't associated with thunderstorms.  FOr a long evening's reading, see:

  http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/bl.html



Keep in mind that this is anonymous internet stuff; not proof of anything,
but not useless either.  Assume that a certain small number of reports are
from hoaxers.

Where BL is concerned, the presence of sneering and ridicule has been
known to bias the statistics (people are afraid to admit seeing real
phenomena if their reports will be laughed at.)  Years ago it seemed as if
BL was an extremely rare event.  Today the lightning researchers estimate
that several percent of the US population has seen it; not rare at all.
For comparison, this is about the same number of people who have been
close enough to see lightning strike the ground.




>  A significant problem with BL research is that there
> appears to be no tabulated data indicating environmental similarities
> or differences between accounts (one can pick the odd factor out of
> course) and to most people to whom this really matters (us!) few have
> seen it and probably no more than once. I am inclined to think that
> the only major similarity between R. Golka's burning iron expts and
> natural BL is the formation of a ball.
>


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William J. Beaty                            SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb at amasci com                         http://amasci.com
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