I wanted a story ingredient that would yield the power to change everything yet is real, although elusive. You have probably never seen ball lightning. I may have witnessed one during a TV weather report of thunderstorms--a bright ball of light leaped from the ground into the night sky. The weatherman did not comment on the phenomenon.
There is plenty of information discoverable with a quick Web search. A good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning. Several historical anecdotes are humorous, but almost all events occur during extreme weather and electrical storms. The earliest accounts are full of religious foreboding but hard to take seriously. The earliest describes a 1638 storm with ball lightning that entered an English church, injuring or killing several parishioners.
A nineteenth-century account describes Tsar Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, witnessing "a fiery ball" in a church with his grandfather, Tsar Alexander II.[1] Another 1875 French science textbook has a story of ball lightning colliding with a pig. “This ball rolled across without doing any harm to two women and a young man who were here; but on getting into an adjoining stable it exploded and killed a pig which happened to be shut up there, and which, knowing nothing about the wonders of thunder and lightning, dared to smell it in the most rude and unbecoming manner.” [2]
More recent anecdotes include ball lightning passing through airplane cabins and a 1966 Michigan lightning storm account, "…several bluish-white glowing balls (about soccer-ball size) emerged from under the tree and floated in random directions. Three came towards our house at a height of six to eight feet off the ground. The first hit a wellhead in the barnyard and exploded with a noise like a transformer burning out. The second struck the base of our windmill and expired with a crackle… The third ball … drifted left, right, and back. Then it started to grow larger (about beach-ball size) whereupon it made a fizzing sound and disappeared." [3]
But nobody knows what ball lightning is, let alone what creates it, or what power it might have. Ball lightning is so rare that we may never know for sure...
[1] New Russian Martyrs, "Tsar Nicholas and His Family", May 17, 2006, Russian Orthodox Church Website, http://www.pravmir.com/article_101.html
[2] de Fonvielle, Wilfrid (1875). "Chapter X Globular lightning". Thunder and lightning (full text). translated by T L Phipson. pp. 32–39. ISBN 978-1-142-61255-9.
[3] April Holladay, “Cyberspeak”, USA Today, July 30,2004, https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2004-07-30-wonderquest_x.htm
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