Judy Parker was sitting quietly on her sofa reading in the living room of her GHI home on Ridge Road near Laurel Hill Road on Friday, June 30. Her Senegal parrot Nori was chattering in her cage nearby. It was late afternoon and a storm was rolling through. With the sound of what she described as “the loudest crack of thunder she’d ever heard,” she looked up and saw a strange light in front of the hutch that holds her television set. She described it as a yellow-gold disc, “like a slice of sunshine,” not on the hutch, but in front of it. It was about two feet in diameter, she said, and it hovered above the ground for about two to three seconds before disappearing. Parker wasn’t sure what she’d seen and she didn’t have time to react before it was gone. She sat there perplexed, wondering what it was, but since it appeared at the same time as the lightning strike, she figured it must be related. Nori had nothing to say about it.
Parker called her son Jamie, who also lives in GHI, to tell him what she’d seen, but knew it sounded odd. She said, “I’m not crazy, and I’m not making this up.” He came to her house and they looked around to see if there was any sign of a lightning strike or damage, but they found none inside or outside. Her daughter-in-law Amy, working from the description, googled “balled lightning” and found ball lightning, a rare and unexplained phenomenon described on Wikipedia as luminescent, spherical objects that vary from pea-sized to several meters in diameter. Parker had never heard of it.
According to a July 18, 1997, article in Scientific American, ball lightning has been seen and consistently described by people in all walks of life since the time of the ancient Greeks. “Ball lightning,” it says, “usually moves parallel to the earth, but it takes vertical jumps. Sometimes it descends from the clouds, other times it suddenly materializes either indoors or outdoors or enters room through a closed or open window.” Parker’s windows were closed.
How rare is it to see ball lightning? A September 12, 2022, article in BBC Science Focus magazine says, “A study conducted in the 1960s for the US Atomic Energy Commission found that ball lightning has been seen by five percent of the world’s population – about the same proportion as those who have seen a bolt of normal lightning strike up close.”
