Alberta: Video of Possible Ball Lightning Event
July 5th, 2025Via: Global News:
No injuries were reported after an intense night of stormy weather unfolded in central Alberta on Wednesday night, but once the storms passed, one couple was left with a strange video of something bright and shiny a few hundred metres from their home that they could not make sense of.
Ed Pardy told Global News that he and his wife Melinda stepped onto the back porch of their home near Rich Valley, Alta., just before 7 p.m. to get a closer look at the storm passing through which featured fierce lightning all around, and also at one point triggered tornado watches and warnings in the region.
“After a rather vicious lightning strike, we saw a ball of fire kind of … about 20 feet above the ground,” he recalled. “And it kind of stayed there in a big round ball.”
1. That was so cool! I’ve always wanted to see the legendary “ball lightning”, and it lived up to it’s reputation.
2. Thanks for posting that — I might never have seen it otherwise.
I felt the same way. I always wanted to see it. Videos I’d seen over the years that purported to show ball lightning showed very brief flashes that, honestly, didn’t look remarkable to me at all.
I’ve definitely never seen anything like what is shown in this video.
(Although, it might be a mistake to assume any video is real nowadays?)
FWIW, I’m convinced it’s real, there’s still a slickness about AI vids that they can’t hide. Or put another way, this one had what my old brain says is true medium-quality video artifacts/roughness, not that stupid shit that’s so artificial and obvious in some AI vids. But your point is well taken. We’re getting close…