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Alberta Couple Films Rare Blue Ball Lightning During Severe Storm
Credit: Global NewsA powerful storm swept through central Alberta on Wednesday night. While no injuries were reported, one couple near Rich Valley captured something strange on video—a glowing blue orb hovering just a few hundred meters from their home.
Ed and Melinda Pardy stepped onto their back porch around 7 p.m. to watch the storm, which brought intense lightning and even triggered tornado warnings. Then, after a particularly strong lightning strike, they noticed something strange.
“After a rather vicious lightning strike, we saw a ball of fire kind of… about 20 feet above the ground,” Ed recalled. “And it kind of stayed there in a big round ball.”
Melinda quickly grabbed her phone to record it. The footage shows a bright, bluish sphere lingering in the air before vanishing seconds later.
“I was like, ‘What is that?’ It wasn’t even the colour of fire,” she said. “It was bluish in colour.” Ed described it as a “bright orb of blue light,” roughly three to six feet wide, moving slowly before disappearing with a small pop.
Global News shared the video with Frank Florian, a space science expert at Edmonton’s TELUS World of Science. He called it “an incredible video” of something “very strange associated with severe weather conditions.” His best guess? Ball lightning—a rare and poorly understood phenomenon.
Florian explained that lightning is essentially a burst of plasma—superheated gas—cutting through the sky. Normally, it flashes and vanishes in an instant. But sometimes, under the right conditions, the plasma lingers.
“Lightning itself is a plasma,” he said. “You have an electrical path going through the sky from the cloud to the Earth… it superheats the air really, really quickly, and it creates a plasma.” When that plasma sticks around in a spherical shape, scientists call it ball lightning.
These glowing orbs are rare and unpredictable. Some reports describe them floating through open windows or even bouncing along the ground before vanishing.
Scientists still don’t fully understand ball lightning. Because it’s so rare, researchers struggle to study it—though some have tried recreating it in labs.
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