You know you’ve led a strange life when someone on a podcast mentions ‘glowing orbs’ as an aspect of their recent UAP experience, and you say, out loud, ‘Now that’s something I definitely haven’t seen.’
Only to remember, later the same day, that it’s something you have seen.
What is a UAP experience?
A few years back, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) replaced Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) as the term du jour for unexplained things seen buzzing around in the sky. And for good reason: we don’t know that these things are ‘Flying’, or even that they are ‘Objects’, in the traditional sense of either word.
That only left ‘U’, which was a piss-poor excuse for an acronym.
Fortunately, some clever people in the United States government came up with the term UAP, despite professing to have no interest in the existence of the very things they had just taken the trouble of renaming. More on that later.
Occasionally, ‘Aerial’ is itself replaced with ‘Anomalous’, because some of these… errr, objects… are seen zooming through the oceans, as well as the skies. Although the wet ones tend to be called Unidentified Submerged Objects or USOs, rather than UAPs.
It quickly gets confusing. Even if, like me, you take an active interest in the subject.
Why am I interested? Because I’ve seen two ‘nuts and and bolts’ objects, both in bright blue skies, that were definitely not behaving in a normal way.
But that’s another story, for another time.
Goodness gracious great balls of…
It is genuinely surprising that I forgot my orb experience, not least as it was probably my first encounter with the unusual. Let’s not call it ‘paranormal’. Not yet.
At ten years old, I looked out of my bedroom window and into the middle-distance, towards the road my Dad drove along every day on his way back from work. This thin tongue of tarmac curved and wiggled between the well-manicured fields of Epping Upland, with sufficient chicanery to force any unwary motorists into one of many deep drainage ditches or ‘grips’ that lined its flanks.
On this early summer evening the road presented an additional hazard: it glistened with the dull orange glow of a brief but heavy rainstorm.
I’d watched the storm pass by, but remained mesmerised by the angry clouds and dull, apocalyptic lighting. There had been several bright flashes and lots of loud booms, but nothing for the past 30 minutes or so.
Still I sat, staring out.
Then I saw it. A small bright light, seemingly following the line of the road, moving erratically from left to right. Oh dear, I thought, waiting for the motorbike - surely that’s what it was - to crash into a tree or plummet into one of those unforgiving ditches.
Only that’s not what happened.
Instead, after five or six seconds of sideways motion, the light hopped over a hedge and came straight towards me, bobbing gently, like a boat waiting to be moored.
And it kept coming. Ten seconds passed. Twenty seconds. Across the corn fields. Thirty seconds. Growing larger, appearing more and more spherical. Forty seconds. More…
Then it disappeared.
Question everything
How big was it? Large enough to be seen clearly, despite my relatively poor eyesight. If I was forced to attribute specific dimensions… bigger than a football, smaller than a space hopper (it was the 70s).
What colour was it - blue, as you might expect from some form electrical discharge? Orange, like a space hopper? No, just plain old white. But very, very bright.
These questions only came to me after the event. With its abrupt disappearance, the strangeness of the encounter started to hit home.
I was already obsessed with UFO's (as they were then called), but I’d also heard of ball lightning and, being an inquisitive little sod, decided to make sure that’s exactly what I had witnessed.
Of course, the Internet was still many, many years from creation, so researching such a thing was easier said than done. But I persisted, and, with the help of my local library, soon discovered that ball lightning could last several minutes, and often appeared after thunderstorms.
So this wasn’t a UFO or any other three letter acronym. It was just a quirk of nature, albeit a rare one.
Case closed.
But that’s not really the point of my story.
That day, I saw something truly astonishing, regardless of the mundane explanation. Something that most people will not see in their lifetime.
This tiny ball of light forced open a new and unusual window in my mind. It triggered a lifelong fascination with things that exist on the extreme edges of reality, including precognitive dreams, Near Death Experiences, synchronicities and, in my time as an artist, animals that hover on the brink of extinction.
For that I am truly grateful. Most of the time.
Assume nothing
At least I thought it was case closed.
In the process of writing this article, I decided to brush up on my knowledge of ball lighting. Only to discover, some forty years later, that it’s still considered to be ‘entirely unproven’.
Anecdotally it can last several minutes, and yes, it’s said to appear before and after storms. But that’s about it. There’s no concrete, reproducible data on the phenomenon, and only handful of genuine videos, despite us living on a planet with billions of mobile phone cameras.
Scientists think ball lighting is probably real, but have almost no evidence and certainly no way of explaining it. And if a scientist can’t explain something, then it doesn’t really exist… right?
There you go. This is a story about UAP, after all.
But… ’paranormal’?
The true meaning of the word paranormal is ‘a manifestation of event attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.’
So even if my experience was with down-to-earth ball lightning, and not with a mysterious, glowing orb of potentially alien origin, it still registers as a paranormal event.
Which I kinda suspected all along.
Additional Sources: ‘What is Ball Lightning?’ BBC Science Focus (September 2022)
‘Ball Lightning’ Wikipedia
* All images Wikipedia (commons), unless otherwise stated
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