Unfriendly Fire - Ball Lightning and UFOs What s the difference between ball lightning and a UFO?

Good question. We sent Dav id Hambling to find out why military scientists are taking an interest in the an swer By David Hambling November 2002 Something is happening on a highway cutting through the US southwestern desert. A string of cars has pulled over on the hard shoulder, the drivers standing toge ther and pointing into the distance. Another car is flagged down as it approache s. You have got to see this, urges the breathless onlooker. It s aliens for sure. He points to a bright light moving in the sky. It is not an aircraft, a star, or anything else any of them have seen before. The driver is in the uniform of a M ajor in the USAF. He gives a wry smile. Don t worry, he says. It s probably one of ours . If the Major was referring to ball lightning and not an advanced craft, he migh t be right. Ball lightning is the most curious of unexplained phenomena. Witnessed by as man y as five per cent of the population, it was dismissed as an optical illusion fo r many years. Then, after repeated sightings by accredited scientists, it gradua lly won acceptance as a real, if mysterious, effect. It appears as a glowing sph ere, ranging in size from a tennis ball to a football. It floats around slowly, and after a period of several seconds it disappears, either silently or with a b ang and a shower of sparks. Generally yellow or blue, it can leave a strange sme ll of ozone. It is often associated with thunder storms or electrical apparatus. The problem is that although we know what it looks like, there is no scientific agreement over what ball lightning actually is. Several competing and radically different theories are battling for acceptance. The contest might be resolved if someone could convincingly create ball lightning in the laboratory. This has ne ver been done, or at least not officially. The military interest in ball lightni ng dates back several decades in both the US and Russia, and the fruits of their research have largely remained secret. One theory may have had confirmation in 1943, when Allied bombers over Germany s tarted spotting strange lights that would approach and track them. No larger tha n a basketball, the lights sometimes appeared to interfere with the aircraft s ele ctrical system but were otherwise harmless. Some have tried to claim that these lights nicknamed foo fighters were some form of Nazi secret weapon. However, the d escriptions of foo fighters (the size of a basketball, shimmery gold colour) mat ch ball lightning very closely. The timing is also significant, as they seem to have started appearing when the Germans deployed radar, and it is quite likely that they were caused by the inte raction between German systems, or the combination of the German radar and the a irborne H2S radars carried by allied aircraft. From the few tantalising scraps of information available, it seems that there ar e devices which can produce varieties of artificial ball lightning. Some exist o nly in the laboratory, others are prototypes and some have been fielded already. They comprise an arsenal of unorthodox weapons, from missile shields and soft b ombs to high-powered lasers and ion torpedoes. It has long been suggested that ball lightning could be caused by microwaves1. A ccording to this theory, the concentration of charge in a thundercloud leaks out as electromagnetic radiation powerful enough to ionise the air, creating distin ctive globes of light and that ozone smell. On 2 April 1993, the front page of the newspaper Izvestia carried a story on Pre sident Bush s proposed sharing of Star Wars technology. In exchange for details of

the American SDI system, the Russians offered information on their own plans. T hese included high-power microwave generators whose beams were directed to inter sect at high altitude. At the point where the beams cross, the combined field is so intense that air molecules are ripped apart to create plasma, the stuff of l ightning. The microwaves would maintain a plasmoid a stable ball of plasma in the path of an oncoming missile. Running into it at high velocity, the missile would be destroyed by a combination of thermal, magnetic and rodynamic effects. Western analysts were dubious, but the Russians are known to have experimented e xtensively with high-powered microwave weapons, and they are some years ahead in this area2. It has even been suggested that some Russian installations identifi ed as phased-array radar could have microwave projection capability. This might provide some local defence for Moscow; not an invulnerable shield, but enough to sow doubt in any opponent considering a first strike against the Kremlin. The s ame principle was tried as an experimental form of street lighting in the Soviet Union in the 1960s3. The project was abandoned because of the plasmoid s tendency to be attracted to passing aircraft. American military scientists followed a similar path using lasers in the 1980s4. Using intersecting beams of infrared or microwave frequency, they found they co uld create a glowing sphere. Repeating the laser pulses produced a continuous li ght with a loud crackling, hissing sound. This light could be moved around by mo ving the beams, but what intrigued the scientists most was that the sound could be altered by changing the laser pulses. With some refinements it could be modul ated at will, with high enough fidelity to carry a human voice. In 1991, it was proposed that the talking fireball should be put to use in the Gulf, appearing a s the Voice of Allah and calling on Iraqi troops to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Th e idea was rejected by military planners5, but the technology is still available . Another theory about ball lightning holds that it is something like a fluorescen t light, where impurities in the air glow under the right stimulus, probably the electric field associated with a thunderstorm. This effect is being put to use in astronomy to improve the resolution of telescopes. Turbulence in the Earth s atmosphere distorts light passing through it. This makes the stars twinkle romantic lighting for lovers, but a frustration for astronome rs who want to see the stars clearly. Adaptive optics offers a solution; instead o f a fixed mirror, the telescope uses a flexible one which shifts constantly to c ancel out atmospheric distortion. To do this, it takes information about atmospheric distortion by looking at a re ference star and comparing its distorted image with its true appearance. These r eference sources are known as guide stars but, unfortunately for the astronomers , they form only about one per cent of the sky, too rare for adaptive optics to work practically. So, when the scientists at the Lick Observatory near San Jose in California need a reference star, they make it themselves. By pointing a laser into the sky, they can create an artificial star 70 miles (1 13km) overhead6. The key is the frequency of the laser, which is exactly the rig ht wavelength to stimulate a band of the atmosphere called the sodium layer. Thi s contains sodium ions which absorb energy from the laser and release it in the form of visible light. Some of the resulting guide stars can be bright enough to s ee with the naked eye. Needless to say, adaptive optics have been put to military use. Just as it warps starlight, atmospheric distortion will scatter a laser beam, an effect which ca n be cancelled with adaptive optics. At the forefront of Ballistic Missile Defen ce planning is the Airborne Laser (ABL), a modified Boeing 747-400F freighter ar med with a powerful laser. The ABL will carry out its first live firing test thi s year, and current plans call for a fleet of laser aircraft to be operational i

n 20087. The ABL is undoubtedly state-of-the-art and incorporates an adaptive system that is 10 times faster and has twice the number of active elements as the system at the Lick Observatory. The guidance involves a Beacon Illumination Laser. In the ory, this relies on light reflected from the target missile, but since this coul d be thwarted by painting the missile black, a laser guide star is likely to be deployed as a backup. This would be far more powerful and sophisticated than the civilian version. Like the laser dots used by high-tech marksmen, the guide sta r from the ABL would dart across the sky to pinpoint the target, performing man uv res impossible for a material craft. Another idea about ball lightning is that it actually comprise a burning gas, or a suspension of burning powder (probably carbon or silicon) created by a lightn ing strike, or even of plasma remaining after the lightning. This theory has the advantage that it does not require abnormal radiation or electric fields as the preceding theories do; but it does pose the obvious question of how a cloud of burning gas or plasma can remain stable for any length of time. There is a familiar example in which gas stays in a coherent mass rather than di spersing. It s called a smoke ring. To physicists it s an example of an annular vort ex, possessing some unusual physical properties; one of these is stability. If t he ring is less dense than the medium surrounding it (such as warm smoke in cool er air), it can hold together as long as it keeps its spinning momentum. Vortex rings occur everywhere in nature, from tiny ones in the blood flow throug h the heart to gigantic ones in the atmosphere sustaining weather systems. Volca noes can blow steam rings which last for several minutes. It is not unlikely tha t lightning could do the same. A cloud of minute burning particles or plasma cou ld be sucked in and remain stable for some time in a high-velocity vortex ring. The ability to keep a ball of high-temperature gas together and project it at hi gh speed opens up interesting possibilities for weapons. One of these was studie d under a project called MARAUDER in 1993 at the USAF s Phillips Laboratory8. Mara uder stands for Magnetically Accelerated Ring to Achieve Ultra-high Directed Ene rgy and Radiation surely a prize-winning acronym. Utilising the awesome Shiva St ar power system, experiments spat out toroids (donut-shaped rings) of plasma9. O ther experiments have involved containing toroids (in strong magnetic fields) to produce hot nuclear fusion, but the aim of Marauder was to project a minute pla sma toroid at high velocity. As with lightning, the tiny, hot core of the toroid would be surrounded by a glo wing ball of excited air. On striking a solid target, the toroids produced extrem e mechanical and thermal shock and a pulse of electromagnetic radiation. These ion torpedoes would be highly effective against missiles and aircraft. They would al so be useful for zapping command and control centres as the electromagnetic puls e will scramble or destroy electronic equipment such as computers. Having shown early promise, this technology now seems to have dropped out of vie w. It may be that the idea has simply not been pursued. It is also possible that it has disappeared into the black and is now important enough to be veiled in sec recy, as happened with Stealth in the 1970s. If this is the case, then it is any one s guess how far these ideas have advanced. Yet another theory holds that ball lightning is an electrical discharge involvin g a fine suspension of particles or filaments in the air, lighting up in a simil ar way to an electric light bulb. A leader in the field is Dr James Corum, whose work on electric fireballs is well known. Using a powerful Tesla coil, he has p roduced tiny, short-lived balls of light under laboratory conditions. Though sma ll, they behaved in many ways like classic ball lightning. Dr Corum has been inv

olved with finding military applications for his work in the past 10. Dr Corum s research suggests that electric fireballs can be created in which a lar ge concentration of carbon or vaporised metal particles encounter a region of po werful electrical fields. During Desert Storm, Iraqi power lines were shorted ou t by the BLU-114B, a bomb which scatters lengths of conducting carbon fibre. A m uch more sophisticated weapon was used against Serbian power stations in Operati on Allied Force a bomb which produces a cloud of fine carbon dust11. Known as a s oft bomb because it does not use explosives, the device causes short-circuits, ar cing and fires, forcing power-generating equipment to be shut down very swiftly. It is reported that the weapon has an effective radius of several hundred feet, and that the high energy arcs can cause small explosions. It would be interesti ng to see whether these arcing effects resemble a swarm of ball lightnings buzzi ng around the generator halls and bursting in showers of sparks. However, althou gh the Pentagon acknowledges the existence of the soft bomb, it has explicitly r efused to provide details. After passing through several gates manned by armed guards, the man in uniform a rrives at the heart of the military base. As he gets out he is greeted by a coll eague. Did you see the show from the highway? Pretty good, huh? Not bad. That should take their minds off the really sensitive projects. Make your own ball lightning In the spirit of kitchen-table inventors, a number of pioneering amateurs have b een looking into how to create artificial ball lightning, using a candle and a m icrowave oven. We strongly advise against trying this yourself, and the writer a nd FT take no responsibility for your experiments. The experiment goes like this: place a lighted candle or toothpick in the microw ave for a few seconds, then take it out and start the microwave. The result is a small luminous plasmoid floating to the top of the microwave. Some of the best photographs of this effect may be found at http://members.nbci.com/ jlnlabs/html/oa-plsm3.htm. Proof of the microwave-ball lighting theory? Or somet hing else entirely? Links to these experiments can also be found at: http://jnau din.free.fr/html/plasma.htm http://www.jlnlabs.org According to recent research, humans are not the only ones who can make ball lig htning. Snapping shrimps (Alpheus heterochaelis) can create balls of plasma with a tempe rature of 5,000C (9000F). When the shrimp snaps its outsize claw, it makes a strea m of tiny bubbles which expand and then collapse. It is this collapse which prod uces the plasma balls. However, with a range of three millimetres and a duration of less than a billionth of a second, it is unlikely that it has much effect be yond a flicker of light 12.