---
title: "For Two Centuries It Was Folklore. It Turned Out To Be Dirt."
dek: "Sailors and farmers reported it for two hundred years and were told they had imagined it. In July 2012 a spectrograph on a plateau was pointed at ordinary lightning when a ball appeared 900 metres away."
kind: explainer (Explainer)
desk: The Sky Desk
author: Ray "Sunshine" Pell (fictional)
published: 2026-08-10T06:00:00Z
updated: 2026-08-12T09:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/ball-lightning-made-of-dirt
tags: ball lightning, spectroscopy, witness testimony, Qinghai, 2012
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# For Two Centuries It Was Folklore. It Turned Out To Be Dirt.

*Sailors and farmers reported it for two hundred years and were told they had imagined it. In July 2012 a spectrograph on a plateau was pointed at ordinary lightning when a ball appeared 900 metres away.*

I have been forecasting weather for this newspaper since 2006 and publishing my error rate every Friday. Sixty-four point nine per cent wrong, running total. So I know something about being told you are unreliable.

Here is a story about people who were told that for two hundred years and were right.

> **Figure:** What the light was made of — see https://theyburied.com/article/ball-lightning-made-of-dirt

## What they reported

A glowing sphere, roughly the size of a grapefruit, drifting rather than falling. It appears during or just after a thunderstorm. It lasts seconds. It sometimes passes through a window or down a chimney. It goes out, or it bursts.

Sailors reported it. Farmers reported it. Pilots reported it. Almost none of them could get anybody to believe them.

The standard treatment for two centuries was that these people had seen ordinary lightning and misremembered it, or had an afterimage, or had made it up.

## Why nobody could settle it

Professor Idrissa Bergqvist-Achebe was firm with me about this and he is right.

The phenomenon is rare, brief, unpredictable and impossible to produce on demand. You cannot build an experiment around something that shows up for four seconds once in a decade in a field you are not standing in.

So it stayed where unrepeatable things stay, which is outside.

## The accident

In July 2012, a team on a high plateau had a spectrograph and a high-speed camera pointed at ordinary lightning, which is what they study.

A strike came down about nine hundred metres from the instrument. A ball appeared, and drifted, and the instruments were running.

They recorded it: a spectrum, and video. The paper came out in January 2014.

## What it is made of

Not air.

Nitrogen is seventy-eight per cent of the atmosphere the thing was floating in and it is barely in the spectrum. Oxygen likewise.

What is in the spectrum is silicon, iron and calcium — which is what is in the ground underneath.

A lightning strike vaporises a patch of soil. The vapour condenses into a cloud of extremely fine particles that stay hot, oxidising as they go, and for a few seconds that cloud is a glowing ball drifting on the wind.

It is dirt. It is a burning puff of the field it came out of.

> If that instrument had been pointed nine hundred metres in a different direction, we would still be telling those people they were mistaken.
>
> — Prof. Idrissa Bergqvist-Achebe

## The part nobody reports

A hypothesis published in 2000 predicted this composition.

Fourteen years before anybody measured a spectrum, somebody worked out from first principles what a lightning strike does to soil and said: if this is what ball lightning is, here is what you will find in it.

Then somebody found it.

This desk thinks that is the most impressive thing in the entire story and it is in none of the coverage, because a correct prediction that waits fourteen years for its confirmation is not an event and nothing happens on a Tuesday.

## Eleven letters

I asked in this column in May whether any reader had seen one, and eleven wrote to me.

Nine of the eleven had told almost nobody. Two had told nobody at all before writing to a weather column.

One of them, Ivy Latchford, a retired district nurse — named here at her daughter's request after her death on 1 August — described watching one come along the hallway of a farmhouse in 1961 and out through the open front door, and finished her letter like this:

"I told my husband and he was kind about it. I did not tell anyone else for sixty-four years. I am writing to you because you print how often you are wrong, and I thought you would not laugh."

## What this desk owes people

Professor Bergqvist-Achebe's full answer runs at the foot of this page and it makes a distinction I intend to keep.

There is an enormous difference between *we cannot study this yet* and *you did not see it*. The first is honest and free. The second is a claim about somebody's mind that we were never in a position to make.

His field said the second one far more often than it had to. So, historically, has mine.

I have never seen ball lightning. If I do, I will report it in this column, and I will put it in the same notebook as everything else, and I will expect to be asked for the spectrum.

> **Caution.** **Updated 12 August 2026.** Mrs Latchford was described in the original version of this story as a retired district nurse in her eighties, which is how she was quoted with her consent while she was alive. She died on 1 August, eight days before this story appeared, and her daughter has asked that she be named. She is. Her [obituary is here](/article/obit-ivy-latchford).

## Sources (invented)

- The 2014 paper and its published spectrum, Peer-reviewed physics journal — Read in full, including the supplementary material (2026)
- The 2000 hypothesis it supports, Peer-reviewed — Read; it predicted the composition fourteen years before anybody measured it (2026)
- Prof. Idrissa Bergqvist-Achebe, Atmospheric physicist — Interviewed by video call twice (May 2026)
- Eleven readers of this desk who have seen one, Named in our notes with consent — Wrote to us after the desk asked in print; interviewed by telephone (June 2026)

## Documents cited (invented)

- PX-2113: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2113

## What we could not confirm

- How it forms in every case. One good spectrum is one good spectrum. The soil mechanism is now the leading account and it is not the only proposed one, and the number of measured events remains close to one.
- Whether every historical report describes the same thing. Two centuries of accounts almost certainly contain several different phenomena and a quantity of ordinary misidentification, and separating them is not possible from here.
- Our eleven correspondents' accounts. They are testimony, gathered by a newspaper, from people who read this desk. That is a self-selecting group and we say so.

## Right of reply

**Prof. Idrissa Bergqvist-Achebe** (Asked whether his field owes anybody an apology and requested that his answer run whole rather than as a quote. Printed unedited.):

> You asked me whether physics owes an apology to two centuries of farmers and I want to give you a real answer rather than a gracious one.
> 
> Partly yes and partly no, and the split is not where you think.
> 
> No, in this sense: the reason ball lightning was not accepted was not arrogance. It was that it is rare, brief, unpredictable, and nobody could produce one on demand. A science that accepted every unrepeatable eyewitness report would be useless within a year. Requiring measurement is not contempt for witnesses. It is the only thing that has ever worked.
> 
> Yes, in this sense: there is an enormous difference between saying 'we cannot study this yet' and saying 'you did not see it'. My field said the second thing far more often than the first, and it did not have to. The first sentence is more honest, costs nothing, and would have kept several thousand people from feeling like fools for fifty years.
> 
> And here is the part that should be uncomfortable for everybody. The 2012 observation was an accident. They were not looking for it. If that instrument had been pointed nine hundred metres in a different direction we would still be telling those people they were mistaken, and we would still be wrong, and we would have no way of knowing.
> 
> That is not a comfortable thought and I would like it printed in your newspaper rather than in mine.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.