"Extremely interesting and very helpful as well".

I am a scientist - a physicist working in a laboratory of the Dutch electronics company Philips, but not on ball lightning (unfortunately). I have been collecting information on BL since 25 years, but not always very actively. Progress on this subject is extremely difficult because of the unpredictable nature of BL. Also most BL can only be seen from a short distance - your observation is an exception and probably one of the rare cases where a very energetic BL occured. The other problem - which is a very severe one for the serious researcher - is that nothing like a real BL has ever been produced in a laboratory. There have been many attempts, but the results are less than convincing. There are also tons of theories about BL, but since so little is really known about it, most of them can be considered as pure nonsense ( that's what a lightning researcher commented on these theories). I am trying to collect reports either from observations of multiple BL (as described in Green Mountains), or from observations where a lot is known about the event (for example your case). I hope that one can deduct what conditions are really important for BL to occur. All of the researchers which have collected reports on BL aggree that there is a very strong correlation of BL with thunderstorms and normal lightning. The sole exception is a study from Japan, where BL seems to occur frequently under fair weather conditions. Since Japan is not really short of earthquakes (I lived there for 2 1/2 years, so I know), there may be a link between BL and earthquake activity, but this link is not as strong as the link with normal thunderstorms. Some scientists think that the great pressure released in an earthquake could create a strong electric field pulse, which in turn could generate eathquake lights and BL. Thats possible, but difficult to test since one would have to be in the right place at the right time with the right equipmentand so on.

You mentioned the article on the BL events seen 1956 in the Great Australian Bight. ... As you will see, this is different from other observations and very puzzling - there is no thunderstorm involved and no seaquake...

"I was interested in your lightning photos of 1st February and the possibility that you may have captured a genuine case of ball lightning. Having done work on the physics of ball lightning in the 1960's, I kept a compendium of observed occurences in Australia for a number of years (and interviewed all the people I could locate who had seen it) but unfortunately I wasn't able to keep the dossier going - albeit I have tried to keep up with the research literature over the years".

"The exposure certainly looks interesting." "Would you allow me to include it in a collection of observations." "You may be interested in the photo we published in the latest issue of Phil. Trans. Royal Society, London (Jan 2002) of a 100 metre diameter ball photographed in Queensland, which lasted over 5 minutes."

" The photo is unusual, and could be the birth of ball lightning. It is difficult to judge the distance to the event from the photo, but it appears as though the B.L. would be quite large. It is certainly different than the normal lightning streaks seen in the rest of the photo. I would not say with any certainty that it is B.L., but it certainly is a candidate, and it suggests that in this case, it is born in the atmosphere, not from a lightning stroke."

Dear Ern,

You are so lucky.

Karl.

"Thank you very much indeed for forwarding your photographs. In my view, ball lightning is of three types (1) those that come out of the sky (2) those that travel near the ground after a lightning strike and (3) those that appear in aircraft. Perhaps your photograph is of the first type. In my view ball lightning of the first type usually initiates a lightning strike. Do you know if the path of the lightning strike, shown in your photograph, apparently joining the orange path of the ball lightning, occured after the 5 seconds of the falling ball ? Or perhaps there is no connection with the orange path and the lightning path, and it fortuitously appears that way in the photograph."