The Lifeguard and the Ball of Light

A quick summer storm a few kilometres away. A man sweeping a lawn by the lake. A crack overhead, and then a torn-off metal lid lying by a wall, two metres from where it had been screwed on.

This is the first file in our series, and we chose it because it is so ordinary and so strange at the same time. It comes from the ball-lightning collection that Dr. György Egely gathered in Hungary in the 1980s and published in his book Gömbvillám! (“Ball Lightning!”), where it is report No. 373. The 80-second film above tells the story. This page is for what the film could not hold.

THE RECORDWhat the report says

The case reached Egely through a correspondent from Budapest, F. Gábor, and it ends with a line that matters: a site inspection, August 1987. Someone went to the beach, looked at the damage and measured it.

The morning. On 15 July 1987, at seven in the morning, a fast thunderstorm broke out a few kilometres from the eastern beach of Balatonföldvár, a resort town on the southern shore of Lake Balaton. The beach lifeguard was already out, sweeping the grass.

The crack. He heard a loud crack directly above his head. He looked up. A few metres above him floated several small, bluish-white balls, and they were buzzing.

One ball. The small balls suddenly snapped together into a single ball, fifteen to twenty centimetres across.

The pull. This is the sentence in the report that stays with us. A force strong enough to feel, and yet nothing left the ground. No heat either. He did the only sensible thing and ran.

The witness farther away. A gardener, standing at a distance, saw what happened next: the ball drifted over to the beach's ice-cream kiosk, a small pavilion clad in aluminium, and exploded at its earthed junction box.

What the inspection found. The report lists the damage with the precision of an insurance claim. Inside the pavilion, the lower plate of the electric water heater, the one covering the wiring, had been knocked off. The fuses had been thrown out of the small fuse board on the wall. On the outside wall, a 30 × 30 cm aluminium box cover had been torn off, although four 12 mm screws had held it, and flung against a wall two metres away. The marks on that wall showed it had not hit square-on but at an angle of about 60 degrees.

Afterwards. The lifeguard became very drowsy. His speech slowed. And although he had never had such complaints before, he soon began to suffer from strong joint pains. Egely's collection has a whole chapter on effects like these; in its introduction he writes that lasting headaches, hearing and speech problems cannot simply be put down to electrical or psychological effects, and that some cases “must still wait for an explanation”.

EGELY'S NOTESWhat he found remarkable

Egely prints each report with a short comment, and his note on No. 373 picks out three things.

The force. The lifeguard felt that something was trying to lift him. Egely points out that the same effect is sometimes reported in alleged UFO sightings, and he believed, as he writes in his foreword, that understanding ball lightning would help make sense of many such observations.

The merging. The lifeguard saw small balls melt into a larger one. Smaller units separating from a larger one, or returning to it, also appear in UFO reports, he notes.

The target. The ball left the beach's brick buildings alone. In Egely's words: it “sought out” the earthed wire and damaged that; “it is no accident that in some regions the phenomenon is called the rummaging thunderbolt.”

EGELY'S LENSWhy this case mattered to him, and how he explained it

Egely came to ball lightning from a very specific place. At the Central Research Institute for Physics (KFKI) he had spent years calculating how much energy a bubble of gas can give to or take from its surroundings. When he put the witness reports side by side, he writes in his foreword, it became clear that “something is wrong” with the phenomenon: by what we know, it cannot run on either an internal or an external energy source.

Report No. 373 reads to us like a small example of that problem. In the book he does the arithmetic. A ball of ten-centimetre radius, surrounded by air, cannot hold more than about three millionths of a coulomb of charge; any more and it sparks off. The electrical energy that fits into such a ball is about 0.6 joule. One joule melts roughly 0.4 cubic millimetres of aluminium, 0.2 of copper or 0.1 of steel; enough, he says, for a few millimetres of wire. Yet the damage in the reports is often hundreds or thousands of times greater. “These problems are what make the phenomenon interesting for physics,” he writes, “and solving them is not simple at all.” Read the inspection list again with that in mind: a water-heater plate knocked off, fuses thrown out, a lid held by four screws torn off and flung two metres.

His answer is a model, and he is careful to call it that. The chapter opens like this:

The idea is that the ball we see is not the whole thing. In his model it is the visible cross-section of a much larger ring of fast charged particles, a ring that lives partly outside our three-dimensional space and pierces it at two points, the way a hoop pushed through a sheet of paper would show up as two spots. The energy, the charge and the momentum are stored in the ring; what we see is a small part of it. That, in his view, is how a ball that small can do work its own charge could never pay for.

Several things in the lifeguard's report fall into place inside this picture, and Egely spells each of them out in the chapter. A grounded metal object always attracts the phenomenon, because the earth connection drains the charge the ball scatters, so the repulsion that would otherwise build up never forms; insulators always repel it. The scattered charge produces electrostatic effects: it can press people against a wall or push them down, and shove objects aside. Someone the ball passes feels at most a tingling, or hears a soft hissing from the escaping charge, but no heat, because a thin, hot gas radiates almost nothing; in some regions, he notes, people call it “cold lightning”. And a ring can split into several parallel rings that travel together and vanish together. That is his account of the group sightings in the collection, and the nearest thing in the model to the small balls that merged above the lifeguard's head.

Egely does not claim the model explains how the ring forms. He states a condition (the lightning current has to break sharply, roughly at a right angle: into the ground, into water, into the side of a tree or a pole) and then writes that the physics of why such a break would push charge out of our three dimensions is beyond the simplified model. It stays a hypothesis in his own text, and we have kept it one here.

TODAYWhere the question stands

Ball lightning still has no accepted explanation. In 2012 researchers in Qinghai, China, recorded a spectrum by chance, when a lightning strike was followed by a glowing ball that drifted for about 1.6 seconds; its light showed silicon, iron and calcium, all soil elements, which is consistent with the proposal that lightning striking soil throws up a network of silicon-bearing nanoparticles that glow as they slowly oxidise (Cen, Yuan & Xue, Physical Review Letters, 2014; Abrahamson & Dinniss, Nature, 2000). Egely's four-dimensional ring is not part of mainstream physics, and in the book he himself introduces it as a hypothesis. That is also why we think his notes are worth reading as he wrote them: the questions he raised in 1992 (where the energy is stored, why earthed metal is the target) are still open.

EGELY'S OTHER WORKFrom the files to the wheel

The man who kept these files did not stop at collecting them. In 1994 Egely built a measuring instrument of his own and refined it over the following decades: the Egely Wheel, a small wheel designed to make the connection between a person's inner state and its movement observable through direct experience. It is where his curiosity about subtle, hard-to-measure phenomena became something you can hold. If the stories in this series make you want to try it, the wheel is made and sold by us.

Sources

1. György Egely, Gömbvillám! A kulcs a negyedik dimenzióban?, 2nd ed., Háttér Kiadó, Budapest, 1992.
2. J. Cen, P. Yuan, S. Xue, “Observation of the Optical and Spectral Characteristics of Ball Lightning”, Physical Review Letters 112, 035001 (2014). journals.aps.org
3. J. Abrahamson, J. Dinniss, “Ball lightning caused by oxidation of nanoparticle networks from normal lightning strikes on soil”, Nature 403, 519–521 (2000). nature.com
4. egelywheel.com: “Invented in 1994 by Dr. George Egely and refined over decades.” egelywheel.com

AI-assisted research, writing and illustration. Edited by Egely Wheel.