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Commentary from Loy Lawhon
Regarding Ball Lightning and UFOs:

Debunkerspeak

In the summer of 1966, a former electrical engineer for General Electric named Phil Klass, happened to pick up Incident at Exeter. Klass was a technical writer for Aviation Week magazine. After he began reading the book, noting that many of the sightings occurred near high-tension power lines, he began to formulate a theory that the sightings were caused by "ball lightning". Klass wrote an article about the Exeter sightings that would be the first of his many articles and books debunking UFOs, and Aviation Week published it. It became widely accepted as a good explanation for the Exeter sightings. So good, in fact, that you will barely see mention of Exeter in UFO lore these days.

But IS "ball lightning" a good explanation for UFO sightings, and in particular the one above? We did some investigating of the phenomena, and here's what we found:

1) There is a great deal of controversy over whether ball lightning exists at all. Many scientists think that ball lightning is just an afterimage of ordinary lightning seen after a normal lightning flash. Others say that it is an "optical illusion" or that people have mistaken meteors for ball lightning. The only evidence that exists for ball lightning is "anecdotal accounts", and not a lot of those. Anecdotal accounts are just witness accounts, the same type of evidence we have for UFOs...

2) Reports indicate that observed "ball lightning" can be white, yellow, orange, red, or blue. It is usually less than 50 cm in diameter, and it usually lasts only a few seconds. Witnesses report a strong smell of sulfur when it is nearby. Almost all reported appearances of ball lightning have followed an ordinary lightning strike and have occurred during a thunderstorm.

None of this seems to fit the Exeter sighting. The sky was clear, there was no thunderstorm. The object seen was 90 feet in diameter and lasted quite some while, possible even long enough to follow a car 12 miles. Plus, although Klass' theory relies heavily on the high-tension power lines, ball lightning is not associated with power lines, but with normal lightning.

Perhaps, rather than "ball lightning", another electrical phenomenon known as "St. Elmo's Fire" was meant instead? The first time I heard of St. Elmo's Fire was when I read Moby Dick by Herman Melville:

All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.

There was a great scene in the movie when Gregory Peck, as Ahab, held up a harpoon and the green fire glowed at the tip. But St. Elmo's Fire is a green or blue glow above a pointed object on the ground, like the masts and lightning rods of the Pequod. St. Elmo's Fire is created by a positive electric charge reaching skyward in response to an area of negative charge in the clouds or air above. Instead of generating a lightning strike, the corona discharge, as it's called, causes millions of tiny sparks to radiate from objects like the masts of ships, utility poles, antennas, the wings of aircraft, or a harpoon, causing the green glow.

Does that sound like the Exeter sighting? The Exeter object didn't stay in one place over a utility pole, it moved around quite a lot. It wasn't a soft green glow, but a brilliant red, brighter than a car's headlights.

There is a type of corona discharge that causes a glow around high tension power lines. It occurs when the air around those lines becomes highly ionized. However, the glow follows the cloud of ionized gases or air, and would not tend to move in a horizontal direction. Besides, it requires something to cause the cloud of ionized gases, and in the Exeter cases, there was no evidence of such a thing. Any other type of corona discharge from high-tension power lines would require a significant discharge of electricy from those lines, and the engineers at the Exeter and Hampton Electric Company reported no unusual voltage losses recorded at the times of any of the sightings. Once again, there was no evidence of any cause for such a discharge and no evidence that such a discharge occurred.

Whatever the Exeter objects may have been, the "rational" explanation proposed by debunkers rivals the extraterrestrial one in improbability. Brilliant red corona discharges from power lines are as rare as hen's teeth, if they occur at all, yet we are expected to believe that they occurred not once, but numerous times in and around Exeter within a short time. Where is the cause-and-effect? What conditions occurred to create these "coronas" in the fall of 1965 in New Hampshire that have not been duplicated there since and have not been reported anywhere else? Perhaps the debunkers are less critical of their own "explanations" than of those of UFO "believers"? One "debunker" (Robert Sheaffer) even suggested the planet Jupiter as an explanation for Muscarello's sightings! Sheesh!

Additionally (from CohenUFO):

Ball Lightning Experiments,
and
Their Limits to Explain UFO sightings

 

Every once in awhile someone will come up with an all-encompassing theory to expain all UFOs. Persinger and Devereux attempted to do this with their combined theories; Devereux's Earthlights via Tectonic Strain and Persinger's Hallucinations via Electromagnetic Stimulation of the brain. Both of these have been demonstrated as being insufficent to explain the leftover 10-15 percent or so of UFO cases which stubbornly refuse to acquiesce to these thoughtful explanations. (Please see: James McDonald statement number six at link)

So that people do not automatically assume that John Abrahamson and his former student Peter Coleman have solved the entire problem of UFOs with the "flame in the vortex" concept, here are some statistics I submitted to Paul Devereux. They illustrate the placement of "ball of light" UFO sightings within the total picture. One can apply same to "ball lightning" sightings as well.