US Military attempts to harness Ball Lightning

www.forteantimes.com...

by Nick Redfern, FT242:

While the US Air Force was busying itself trying to determine whether UFOs were alien spacecraft, Soviet inventions, or even the work of an ultra-secret domestic project, the US Department of Commerce was taking a distinctly different approach. In its search for answers to the UFO puzzle, the DoC was focusing much of its attention on one of the most mystifying and controversial of all fortean phenomena: ball lightning.

The [DoC's] Weather Bureau’s study added: “Some of the cases of ‘ball lightning’ observed have displayed excrescences of the appearance of little flames emanating from the main body of the luminous mass, or luminous streamers have developed from it and propagated slant-wise toward the ground… In rare instances, it has been reported that the luminous body may break up into a number of smaller balls which may appear to fall towards the earth like a rain of sparks. It has even been reported that the ball has suddenly ejected a whole bundle of many luminous, radiating streamers toward the earth, and then disapp­eared. There have been reports by observers of ‘ball lightning’ to the effect that the phenomenon appeared to float through a room or other space for a brief interval of time without making contact with or being attracted by objects.”

...deep interest in the potential use of ball lightning on the battle­field can be found in a December 1965 document entitled “Survey of Kugelblitz Theories for Electromagnetic Incendiaries”. Written by WB Lyttle and CE Wilson, the document was prepared under contract for the US Army’s New Concepts Division/ Special Projects at Edgewood [Kirtland AFB]. (see attachment)

As far as the specific theories that the authors addressed were concerned, these included the possibilities that ball lightning might conceivably be explained as (a) a “plasma created by a lightning strike and maint­ained by electromagnetic standing waves”; (b) a “non-plasma phenomenon… in the form of a highly ionised gas”; and (c) the “nuclear theory”, which was “based on the assumption that the content of the ball is radio­active carbon-14 created from atmo­spheric nitrogen by the action of thermal neutrons liberated by a lightning strike”.

The article continues to assess the attempts made by military conceptualists to 'guide' ball lightning by means of laser modulation, the apparent 15 year period of research that was devoted to it at Edgewood; whereupon we have the possibility that products of such were tested in the UK:

On 13 January 1981, Colonel Charles Halt of the US Air Force, a prime witness to the curious events in Rendlesham Forest [Suffolk], wrote a one-page memo to the Ministry of Defence that outlined a wealth of extra­ordinary UFO-like activity in the area that spanned the course of several nights. In Halt’s own words: “…a red sun-like light was seen through the trees. It moved about and pulsed. At one point, it appeared to throw off glowing particles and then broke into five separate white objects and then disappeared."

The area of Rendlesham, and nearby Orford Ness and RAF Bawdsey, is touted as a "veritable hotbed of classified military activity" for years; inclusive of early WWII radar development. The article assumes a conclusion that, given the claims regarding Edgewood's Bio-Med Labs concerning hallucinogens and other chemical agents during the '52-'74 period, use of ball lightning technology might only have been to create a psychological effect on potential enemies. So, can we create ball lightning? Even if not as a means of fire-power, it might be a delightful alternative to fireworks!

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Recently I have been posting about just this sort of thing.

It is quite the interesting hypothesis.