The Minnesota Cop who drove into a ufo

originally posted by: KellyPrettyBear
It's the same with "earth lights". The piezo effect of deep tectonic stress can
generate them.. even in areas with no, or very little earthquake activity.

I have never seen this imaginative theory proven in any way.

originally posted by: rickymouse
Sounds to me like he ran into a ball of lightning. I know a guy who saw one come into his house through a window opening in the house he was building, moved around the house making burns on the ceiling and walls, went down the basement steps, then singed some of the joists then shot through the hole blowing apart the block where the wire trench went to the garage and singed the wall and damaged the foundation block in the garage six feet from the house and bounced around the garage a bit and left through the open garage door. The insurance claim from that ball lightning was in the thousands of dollars. On a shell of a house.

I saw the damage, it was unbelievable, when it went down the steps to the basement it just browned the wood and steps a bit. He said it traveled around as if it were looking for something.

Burns on the ceilings and walls, and browned wood sound like something ball lightning might do. Lightning is composed of plasma which is very hot and can certainly cause burn marks.

However the damage to the car doesn't seem to involve burn or scorch marks which would be consistent with very hot plasma (what lightning, ball or otherwise would be composed of). Whether or not plasma can break a windshield, I don't know. It's hard to do ball lightning tests in a lab because we haven't figured out exactly how to re-create it in the lab as far as I know. If he just drove his car into the plasma, it's essentially very hot gas which is ionized. Windshields are fairly sturdy and not easy to break so it's hard to imagine how a ball of gas can break a windshield just by driving a car into it, even a hot ball of plasma which is still somewhat like a gas except that it's ionized.

That being said I don't really have any theory for what happened, but I think the ball lightning idea has some problems. My expectation would be that ionized gas would just bounce off the windshield, but could certainly cause burns as you described in the incident your friend had. Since the windshield glass is non-conductive and in fact a pretty good insulator, I wouldn't expect it to have any special interaction with electrically charged plasma, as echoed here.

Can lightning smash glass?

In 2011, a 10-year-old girl called Erin Moran was struck by lightning while sitting at the window of her bedroom in Merthyr Tydfil. Glass is a good insulator, so it is very unlikely that a window pane would ever be struck directly. But a lightning strike on the roof of a house will travel down through the building through the most conductive route available. The sudden heating of a metal window frame might cause enough expansion to crack the window.

Looking at the damage to the windshield, it certainly doesn't look like damage from expansion of the frame, rather it looks like something more dense than "hot ionized gas" or plasma struck the windshield.

originally posted by: KellyPrettyBear
It's the same with "earth lights". The piezo effect of deep tectonic stress can
generate them.. even in areas with no, or very little earthquake activity.

originally posted by: Blue Shift
I have never seen this imaginative theory proven in any way.

This is an interesting topic. While I wouldn't rule out the possibility, I have to agree that proof so far seems to be lacking. It's more of an idea, than accepted science, unless there are some studies I never found in my last search or some newer research since then.

However not that long ago I could have said the same thing about ball lightning, which has since been confirmed by scientists, so that goes to show that these transient phenomena can hide from scientific proof for a long time.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
However not that long ago I could have said the same thing about ball lightning, which has since been confirmed by scientists, so that goes to show that these transient phenomena can hide from scientific proof for a long time.

I wonder what holds ball lightning together. Antimatter?

originally posted by: Blue Shift

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
However not that long ago I could have said the same thing about ball lightning, which has since been confirmed by scientists, so that goes to show that these transient phenomena can hide from scientific proof for a long time.

I wonder what holds ball lightning together. Antimatter?

This is the only scientific observation I'm aware of. I don't know if their theory of how it originates is correct, but it could be. However there could be more than one type. Maybe there are other types of ball lightning yet to be scientifically observed and documented.

gizmodo.com...

Scientists in the Qinghai region of China were observing a thunderstorm in 2012 using video cameras and a spectrometer, a device that measures light and electromagnetic waves to identify elements. As luck would have it, these instruments recorded a five-meter-wide flash of ball lightning that stayed in the air for about 1.6 seconds.

Back in the lab, the researchers analyzed the spectrometer readings to find large indicators of silicon, iron and calcium, elements present in the soil of the region. The theory is, when lightning strikes the ground, it blasts a cloud of highly-energized soil nanoparticles into the air. As those energized particles calm down, they emit light. Eerie, otherworldly light. Cool!

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
This is the only scientific observation I'm aware of. I don't know if their theory of how it originates is correct, but it could be. However there could be more than one type. Maybe there are other types of ball lightning yet to be scientifically observed and documented.

Sounds to me like they were detecting dirt and dust particles in the rain. I always kind of thought that ball lightning represented some kind of small-scale "event horizon," where a positron core attracts negatively charged plasma, but it reaches a point of saturation / balance where their similar particle charges repel each other at the same time they're being drawn to the antimatter particle. The result would be a bubble of charged particles. Eventually it becomes unbalanced, and an electron manages to interact with the positron, resulting in a small explosion.

Of course, I could be wrong.

a reply to: Blue Shift
The video doesn't show any explosion, it just fades away.

The ball lightning is on the left. The rainbow colors in the rest of the screen are from the spectrometer.



An optical spectrometer may not detect gamma rays, but there are gamma ray spectrometers. The scientists obviously used the former but maybe not the latter. Electron-positron annihilation emits gamma rays which might be detectable with some kind of gamma ray detector, but since the literature has no mention of gamma rays they either didn't use a gamma ray detector or if so they didn't see fit to mention what the gamma ray detectors found. The way the light fades makes it seem like just glowing particles from the dirt that were kicked up and maybe the wind was blowing them. I am not sure anything really "held it together".

originally posted by: Blue Shift

originally posted by: KellyPrettyBear
It's the same with "earth lights". The piezo effect of deep tectonic stress can
generate them.. even in areas with no, or very little earthquake activity.

I have never seen this imaginative theory proven in any way.

"proven" is one of those words...

but there's a ton of scientific research on this.. it used to be one of those
fringe topics, but in recent years it has become recognized as legitimate.

this is the man famous for starting the research:

www.pauldevereux.co.uk...

but it's mainstream now..

Kev

originally posted by: KellyPrettyBear
but there's a ton of scientific research on this.. it used to be one of those
fringe topics, but in recent years it has become recognized as legitimate.

I'm familiar piezoelectricity. Bite on a Certs in the dark, and you'll see a flash spark because of the compression of the crystals and release of photons. But how it manages to separate itself from the crystals and hold together and float in the air... well, that's where the questions begin.

but it's mainstream now..

Yeah. It sure is.

originally posted by: KellyPrettyBear
but it's mainstream now..

Kev

I don't know what you mean by that. There's no good science in your link, quite the opposite, and I still haven't seen any good science. That doesn't mean I doubt the phenomenon may exist, and I'm open-minded to such possibility, but I need to see some better links than that to convince me there's a mainstream foundation for the science.

Here's a link for you to consider:

Earthquake Lights: Do They Exist?

A staggering volume of literature has been written. Science journals are full of proposed explanations for how such things might be. Legitimate journals, too; with articles co-authored by credentialed, serious academics and their similarly-adorned colleagues. Each is followed with pages of references. But when we look closer, we see that hardly any of these papers agree on anything; and that their proposed mechanisms for the lights are all over the map: bizarre, hypothetical if not fantastical, and not one has ever been conclusively observed. I'm forced to wonder how many of these eager researchers are familiar with Hyman's Categorical Imperative: "Do not try to explain something until you are sure there is something to be explained." ...

But have there actually been any confirmed observations? He provided numerous studies, and there are a lot of cases where measuring equipment has been set up along earthquake-prone fault zones; and, sure enough, voltages have been detected before, during, and after quakes. It's highly inconsistent, but it does happen. Links to a few such papers are in the references below. As far as reliably observed lights, though? Still zilch.

So we are still waiting for some kind of scientific confirmation like we had with ball lightning as far as I know. They found the voltages, but no lights, unless you know of more recent findings.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Nope, you've got a handle on the current status.

Kev

a reply to: Blue Shift

Plasma due to the ionization of gas is the usual explanation.

Now ball lightning seems established.
earth lights may (apparently) be on the edge of established.

There's lots of reputable stuff written on the subject, but I won't argue with Arbi on this one..
it's probably not 100% "there" yet.

I just bring it up as it's a lot less flaky of an explanation than most stuff in this forum.

Kev

a reply to: rickymouse
The actor Phil Daniels from the 1979 film Quadrophenia once said in the interview that he was followed by ball lighting while on his bike and always wondered if ball lighting is some sort of entity ?

a reply to: 808Funk

Well there's the rub.

Are some of these phenomenon sentient or not?

People often think they are..

they seem to respond to the thoughts of the viewers,
sometimes.

Now that may be delusion, as the EM fields generated
by such phenomenon can affect the brain.

the phenomenon can follow certain conductive paths
that make them appear as moving with purpose.

On the other hand, I'm open to the concept that some
similar phenomenon might be sentient.. my grandma
as a medicine woman after all..

Lakota Sioux would use smoke from a pipe to "attract
spirits".

Well that smoke was full of charged particles..

So I'm very open to such ideas.

No proof of course.

Kev

originally posted by: 808Funk
a reply to: rickymouse
The actor Phil Daniels from the 1979 film Quadrophenia once said in the interview that he was followed by ball lighting while on his bike and always wondered if ball lighting is some sort of entity ?

I have seen ball lightning a few times, kind of cool. I thought a meteor was ball lightning at first but realized it was a meteor after watching it go a long way. It hit in Canada somewhere I read in the paper three days later. Cool meteor. The balls I saw were maybe about a foot or so in diameter, moved around kind of weird, and they had a weird halo around them. I assume they were ball lightning as they flew in the sky, I cannot say for sure that they were though. Maybe they are actually something else, they fit the description I had learned after seeing them from talking to a meteorologist and from looking them up in books years ago. I have not personally seen one in over twenty years now, lots of lightning but none of them like the little ones I saw before during a thunderstorm before it rained. I see big ones sometimes going from cloud to cloud, but none just above the trees lately.