Re: Tesla Coils & Ball Lightning

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: William Beaty <billb@xxxxxxxxxx>

On Sat, 6 Aug 2005, Tesla list wrote:

>
> Ball lightning and the accounts of seeing it do not have nearly the
> same "hype" attraction as being abducted by aliens from Mars.  There
> is just not a lot of glory in lying about it, so we assume that most
> of the folks reporting it are probably honest.

In my encounters with the fringe, I see this "hype" factor is a myth.  Be
careful about spreading such things.  Even today victims too often attract
ridicule for claiming abduction, and the abduction experience is usually
traumatic embarassing stuff.  (Even if abduction doesn't exist: if it's
hypnogogic hallucination with nothing to do with alien spaceships... it's
still akin to a rape experience.)  Victims don't want colleagues at work
to know they were raped by hallucinations!  They'd more likely form
therapy groups with other abductees, rather than dare to go to the
newspapers.  That's what all the John Mack Harvard stuff was about: a
therapist finding many patients suffering from identical problems, and
then the therapist starts believing that the events involved real aliens.
Mack writes books and goes on lecture tours, but the indivicual abductees
don't get in the news.

The "hype" factor applies more to bigfoot and ghost sightings, where no
personal violation was involved, where the people at work won't look at
you funny, and even if you don't have photos or videos, sometimes you can
get on national TV.

> Those that tell of
> ball lightning sightings are not going to get a lot of fame from it
> other than a few folks asking for the usual details...

Ball lightning reports are strange.  And there are so many of them made
spontaneously. If many millions of people reported seeing bigfoot in the
woods... and if they came forward without knowing it was controversial,
without having heard all sorts of bigfoot stories in the past...  that
would be the situation with ball lightning today.  A large portion of the
BL reports typed into my site are from people who saw BL decades ago, but
only recently learned that it had a name, and they found my site with a
google search.  That, or they were reading some paranormal reports, found
my BL section, and realized that lots of other people had seen the same
weird thing that they'd seen (but theyd been keeping silent about it.)
If BL was as hyped and well-known as bigfoot, then we'd rightly be far
more suspicious about people who come forward.   And if BL reports were
very rare, it would easily be explained as hoaxers who knew the story.



> There are claims it is nasty:


Yep, I had one guy on my site who claimed that his younger brother had
been killed by a yard-wide horizontally-moving BL in front of his family
on a baseball field.  He said that the autopsy mentioned internal burns.
I tried to get the name of a hospital out of him, but he didn't want to
start the whole thing up again by getting that info from his elderly
parents.  SO no verification, just anonymous people on internet who claim
to be first-hand eyewitnesses.

Others claim no injury from being hit, or getting zapped and having a numb
arm from being hit.


> I wonder what the "protocol" should be for a ball lightning
> encounter?  Many of us have seen it in the past, and many will see it
> in the future.

Grab a magazine and be prepared to swat it if it approaches?



(((((((((((((((((( ( (  (   (    (O)    )   )  ) ) )))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty                            SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb at amasci com                         http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits   amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair
Seattle, WA  206-789-0775    unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci