Published spectrum and high-speed frames of a ball-lightning event, plateau observation, July 2012
- Origin
- A physics journal and its supplementary material
- Dated
- observed July 2012; published January 2014
- Extent
- paper 5; supplementary 14 pages
- Status
- accepted
- Redactions
- None. The bracketed note is ours and is marked as ours.
Chain of custody
Downloaded from the journal, where it has been available since publication. This newspaper obtained nothing that was not already public. We are filing it because it is the only measured spectrum of a phenomenon that was reported by witnesses for two hundred years and disbelieved, and because the instrument that caught it was pointed at something else.
Held by: They Buried, document room
Excerpt
Emission lines identified: Si I, Fe I, Ca I — the principal constituents of the local soil. Atmospheric species (N, O) are weak throughout the event. [Event onset follows a cloud-to-ground stroke at approximately 900m from the instrument. The instrument was deployed to observe ordinary lightning.]
Transcribed by the data desk. Line breaks follow the original. Bracketed matter is ours.
Editor's note
Filed alongside PX-2107 deliberately. One is a document that fails to contain the thing everybody remembers; the other is a measurement nobody was looking for, of the thing nobody believed. The vault holds both because the difference between them is the whole of this newspaper's method.
Cited in
- Fifty-One Seconds, Nobody In Frame: The Barley Went Down In Three Places At Once.Suppressed Science · Sep 4
- For Two Centuries It Was Folklore. It Turned Out To Be Dirt.The Sky Desk · Aug 10