My grandfather saw ball lightning when he was a child. It blew in through the screen door during a thunderstorm, bounced off the wall, and drifted out through the screen door on the other side of the house. He was the only one who saw it, but it left a round scorch-mark on each of the metal screens it passed through, and singed the wallpaper where it bounced off the wall.
He grew up to be an engineer, and always stuck to his guns about what he'd seen, through *decades* of ball lightning being considered some kind of primitive folk belief, impossible, hallucinatory, anything but a real physical phenomenon. He couldn't be swayed: knew what he'd seen. It was only toward the end of his life that The Science deigned to admit the thing was probably real-- just rare and difficult to observe.
I've always wondered just how much more *stuff* there is out there, that we've been loudly insisting isn't real, just because nobody's been able to catch it in a bottle, weigh it, measure it, dissect it... I don't think anything with a will of its own would stick around for that kind of treatment.
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My grandfather saw ball lightning when he was a child. It blew in through the screen door during a thunderstorm, bounced off the wall, and drifted out through the screen door on the other side of the house. He was the only one who saw it, but it left a round scorch-mark on each of the metal screens it passed through, and singed the wallpaper where it bounced off the wall.
He grew up to be an engineer, and always stuck to his guns about what he'd seen, through *decades* of ball lightning being considered some kind of primitive folk belief, impossible, hallucinatory, anything but a real physical phenomenon. He couldn't be swayed: knew what he'd seen. It was only toward the end of his life that The Science deigned to admit the thing was probably real-- just rare and difficult to observe.
I've always wondered just how much more *stuff* there is out there, that we've been loudly insisting isn't real, just because nobody's been able to catch it in a bottle, weigh it, measure it, dissect it... I don't think anything with a will of its own would stick around for that kind of treatment.