Black hole hypothesis

Another hypothesis is that some Sphere Lightning is the passage of microscopic primordial black holes through the Earth's atmosphere as proposed by Mario Rabinowitz in Astrophysics and Space Science journal in 1999. Inspired by M. Fitzgerald’s account of Sphere Lightning on 6 August 1868, in Ireland that lasted 20 minutes and left a 6 metre square hole, a 90 metre long trench, a second trench 25 meters long, and a small cave in the peat bog, Pace VanDevender, a plasma physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his team found depressions consistent with Fitzgerald’s report and inferred that the evidence is inconsistent with thermal (chemical or nuclear) and electrostatic effects. An electromagnetically levitated, compact mass of over 20,000 kg would produce the reported effects but requires a density of more than 2000 times the density of gold, which implies a miniature black hole. He and his team found a second event in the peat-bog witness plate from 1982 and are currently trying to geolocate electromagnetic emission consistent with the hypothesis. His colleagues at the institute agreed that, implausible though the hypothesis seemed, it was worthy of their attention.

Buoyant plasma hypothesis

The declassified Project Condign report concludes that buoyant charged plasma formations similar to Sphere Lightning are formed by novel physical, electrical, and magnetic phenomena, and that these charged plasmas are capable of being transported at enormous speeds under the influence and balance of electrical charges in the atmosphere. These plasmas appear to originate due to more than one set of weather and electrically-charged conditions, the scientific rationale for which is incomplete or not fully understood. One suggestion is that meteors breaking up in the atmosphere and forming charged plasmas as opposed to burning completely or impacting as meteorites could explain some instances of the phenomena, in addition to other unknown atmospheric events.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

Cooray and Cooray (2008) stated that the features of hallucinations experienced by patients having epileptic seizures in the occipital lobe are similar to the observed features of Sphere Lightning. The study also showed that the rapidly changing magnetic field of a close lightning flash has a strength which is large enough to excite the neurons in the brain strengthening the possibility of lightning-induced seizure in the occipital lobe of a person located close to a lightning strike establishing the connection between epileptic hallucination mimicking Sphere Lightning and thunderstorms. More recent research with transcranial magnetic stimulation has been shown to give the same hallucination results in the laboratory (termed magnetophospenes), and these conditions have been shown to occur in nature near lightning strikes. This hypothesis fails to explain simultaneous observation of a Sphere Lightning by multiple witnesses (at the very least, observations would differ substantially).³

Chapter 2: Laboratory experiments