New Jersey is the new Roswell – or so it might seem after a swarm of bright lights, glowing orange-red orbs and unidentified flying objects filled the skies throughout December 2024.
As expected, these strange orbs gave rise to a flood of conspiracy theories involving UFOs and foreign interference. One US Republican congressman even claimed the lights were aircraft originating from an "Iranian mothership," a theory swiftly dismissed by the Pentagon.
Although the exact source of the objects remains unconfirmed, US officials suggest that the majority of sightings were most likely caused by – you guessed it – civilian-operated drones.
The New Jersey drone saga is yet another example of how many so-called UFOs have perfectly logical explanations. But not all phenomena are so easily dismissed. For decades, scientists have been baffled by a different kind of mysterious light: ball lightning.
While it’s easy to roll your eyes at such stories, there have been eyewitness accounts of weird floating balls of light for centuries – the earliest thought to be in 1195. It’s only thanks to the sheer volume of accounts – and photographic evidence – that scientists have felt the need to investigate these mysterious sightings further.
Many of the reports are from credible sources.
For instance, in 1927, renowned quantum theory physicist Walther Gerlach claimed to have witnessed a “bright, luminous yellowish-white ball” emerge from a bolt of lightning.
Being a scientist, he used his own hastily acquired observations to work out that the ball of light had travelled 1,225m per second (a little over 4,000ft per second) – over three times the speed of sound.
Then there’s Dr Roger Jennison, a radio astronomer at the UK’s Jodrell Bank Observatory.
In 1963, he was travelling on an overnight flight from New York to Washington during a thunderstorm, when a loud, bright electrical discharge suddenly enveloped the plane. Passengers then observed something extraordinary, which Jennison later outlined in a letter to the prestigious journal Nature.
In the letter, he wrote: “Some seconds after this a glowing sphere a little more than 20cm [almost 8in] in diameter emerged from the pilot’s cabin and passed down the aisle of the aircraft approximately 50cm [19in] from me, maintaining the same height and course for the whole distance over which it could be observed.”
Descriptions around the world vary in detail, but often involve a thunderstorm and a ball of light, usually no larger than a football, in a variety of colours.
These luminous globes float through the air for a short period of time, some slowly, others extremely fast. There are reports of them disappearing, exploding or passing through walls or windows. Some leave behind an odour of sulphur.
Yet despite over 800 years of sightings, due to its elusive nature, scientists still don’t understand ball lightning. But there are clues that plasma might be the missing ingredient.
Plasma attack
Often called the fourth state of matter (the other three being solid, liquid and gas), plasma can be produced relatively easily.
“If you add high temperatures to a gas, you get a plasma – a charged, ionised gas – which can be influenced by electric and magnetic fields,” says Prof Ursel Fantz from the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics near Munich. “This is very important as you can’t do that to the other states.”
“More than 95 per cent of the Universe is plasma,” she adds. “All the stars, interstellar space, interplanetary space, aurora and standard lightning. Plasma is also used in medicine and chemical energy storage."
Plasma too, according to some of Fantz's experiments, could potentially be the source of the floating orbs.
Using just a small beaker of salt water, a couple of electrodes and a high voltage (akin to a bolt of lightning – approx 300 million volts), scientists at Fantz’s institute created a 10–20cm [approx 4–8in] diameter plasma cloud – lasting just 0.3 seconds – resembling a glowing orb.
“There are some similarities with ball lightning, but we can’t say it is [ball lightning],” said Fantz, “as it exists for less than the time of a twinkle in your eye.”
In 2020, the experiment was recreated with more water and filmed. The resulting video showed ball lightning-style plasmoids rising from the water’s surface in slow motion.
Despite not hovering, as previous sightings have claimed, could these plasmas explain ball lightning orbs? Fantz isn’t sure. “All we have are people’s reports, and pictures are really rare,” she says.
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Getting Warmer
Although floating balls of light like those that could pass through Jennison’s aircraft haven’t yet been recreated in the lab, scientists continue to speculate on how they might form without relying on plasmas.
For instance, in 2014, there were reports of ball lightning being caught on video by scientists at Northwestern Normal University in Lanzhou, China.
They were studying lightning during a thunderstorm in Qinghai and observed a ball of light form and travel about 20m (65ft) in 1.5 seconds. A spectrograph also identified the ball’s main components to be iron, silicon and calcium.
This unexpected observation chimed with one theory hypothesised by researchers in New Zealand, in 2000, which proposed that the glowing ball resulted from a lightning strike on the ground that vaporised grains of minerals (since all of those elements can be found in soil).
“There are lots of theories as to what they are, from mini black holes to antimatter,” says physicist Dr Stephen Hughes, an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia.
He examined the evidence for green fireballs and ball lightning in a Proceedings of the Royal Society paper published in 2010, which detailed multiple eyewitness sightings over Brisbane and the Gold Coast a few years earlier.
“Ball lightning is definitely some kind of electrical phenomenon,” says Hughes. “People report hissing [and] sizzling sounds, which we associate with electricity. But its mechanism isn’t fully understood.”
The mystery is understandable since many eyewitness accounts are contradictory or simply baffling, Hughes adds.
For example, in 1974, during a thunderstorm, Philip Bagnall, the network director of the British Meteor Society, awoke to find an orange ball of light at the foot of his bed. When he reached out, he could feel heat radiating from about 10cm (4in) away.
While some reports describe shocks or partial paralysis upon contact with ball lightning, Bagnall experienced nothing after clapping his hands on it. The sphere then passed through his bedroom ceiling “like a Hollywood ghost.”
“Ball lightning has travelled down an aircraft [according to Jennison] and not caused any burning, although it could still be hot,” says Hughes. “Similar to how you can put your hand in an oven when it’s 230°C (446°F) and your hand doesn’t get burned as long as you don’t touch the metal.”
Learn to fly
While details differ, there’s something many ball lightning accounts have in common: the phenomenon is seen in and around aircraft.
For instance, in November 1944, during World War II, members of the US 415th Night Fighter Squadron reported seeing “8–10 bright orange lights off the left wing… flying through the air at high speed” north of Strasbourg.
At the time, there was a popular American comic strip called Smokey Stover about fire-fighters where the character Smokey was often referred to as a foolish ‘foo’ (fire) fighter. This led to the lights being called “foo fighters” by one of the crew.
This name for UFOs caught on and was used by Japanese, German and Allied pilots too when they filed similar reports of strange lights in the sky.
These ‘foo fighter’ lights could be red, orange or green, appear solo or in groups, and sometimes in formation. They accompanied aircraft flying at several hundred miles an hour, didn’t show up on radar and could outmanoeuvre any plane that tried to follow them – similar descriptions to many UFO sightings today.
“Some of the UFO reports talk about objects accelerating extremely fast, at impossible rates of acceleration. Fighter aircraft can’t stop and change direction that fast, but electrical phenomena can,” says Hughes.
“Electrons are very light and the electromagnetic force is so strong you get this insane acceleration. In just over 1cm (less than 0.5in), electrons can accelerate to half the speed of light.”
In 2024, scientists at the University of California, the University of Arizona and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, published their theory on the origin of ‘foo fighters’: plasmas in the thermosphere.
This is a region from about 90–600km (approx 56–370 miles) above Earth’s surface, where temperatures at the higher altitudes can reach 2,000°C (3,632°F) or more.
Although the story made national news in one UK paper, the theory was published in the Journal of Modern Physics, a publication that charges authors to publish their work. The theory asserts that the plasma in this region of the atmosphere could be a form of “pre-life”, one that’s “completely different from life as we know it.”
While the paper is speculative, it raises the question of whether these sightings of strange glowing balls might be interpreted as potential evidence of aliens.
Fantz, however, is far from convinced. "Plasma is atoms, ions, electrons and photons," she says. "And that's it."
Eyes on the skies
Be it plasmas, lightning vaporising minerals on the ground, or extraterrestrials, all current theories about the glowing balls of light remain exactly that – theories.
You might, like others, also think that the many accounts of these balls, from the foo fighters to Jennison’s plane aisle, can be explained through psychological means.
But evidence from scientists, such as Fantz’s floating plasma ball experiment, leaves little doubt there remains a lot to uncover about many phenomena on this planet. This is why government agencies are changing their approach and are now more prepared to keep an open mind.
“Just because we observe something we don’t understand and even surprises us, doesn’t mean that we’re crazy or wrong,” says ETH Zurich’s Prof Thomas Zurbuchen, the former associate administrator of NASA’s science directorate, who commissioned an independent study of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) in 2022.
“I believe in the power of science and the power of data,” he adds. “I’m not telling people what to believe and not believe. I think to some people [the report] demystified what was happening.”
The study, which features the likes of former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and an array of prominent academics, included numerous images of known natural phenomena that are of ten mistaken for UFOs: such as the aurora borealis (northern lights), the Perseid meteor shower and red sprites – an eerie form of crimson lightning that resembles a glowing squid and shoots up, instead of down, into the atmosphere.
The final report stated: “It’s increasingly clear that the majority of UAP observations can be attributed to known phenomena or occurrences.” It found no evidence that UAPs were extraterrestrial, but it didn’t rule out the possibility.
It therefore surprised many people when, in November 2024, two US subcommittees held a hearing in Washington DC titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.”
The aim was to discuss the Department of Defense and the wider intelligence community’s lack of transparency regarding UAPs, and to increase disclosure.
The testimonies attracted a global audience who heard pilots testify that they saw unidentified objects, such as balls of light, on an almost “daily basis”. One former military intelligence officer even stated: “We’re not alone in the cosmos.”
The conclusion, however, was that there was no evidence for extraterrestrial life, but that such sightings should be studied further.
“So often, puzzling and disturbing observations indicate new discoveries. For example, we now know that a specific set of observations were indications of a new type of cloud we hadn’t known previously,” said Zurbuchen of the NASA report.
“Similarly, weather-related phenomena, such as temperature inversions or electrical phenomena in the atmosphere can lead to surprising observations that may, at first glance, look like UAPs, but are atmospheric science in action.”
This brings us back to ball lightning.
Unfortunately, we’re no closer to understanding how it forms, and whether it is or isn’t a plasma. Some have even referred to its elusive qualities as “tracking the Sasquatch of meteorology.”
Like Sasquatch, it can be faked too. A 2020 video of ‘ball lightning’ travelling above railway tracks went viral on Twitter (now X) and is still doing the rounds today, even though its Russian creator admitted he was testing visual effects.
Science, meanwhile, continues to unravel the cause of the glowing orbs and use the properties of plasma. In fact, a number of classified US research projects are now pivoting to research plasma.
While some have speculated that this is new evidence relating to UFOs, others have pointed to how plasmas could be used for military applications.
Whether these new studies eventually reveal the mysteries of plasmas, or if other scientists unlock hidden truths about the behaviour of lightning on Earth, the truth remains out there… for now.
About our experts
Prof Ursel Fantz is head of ITER Technology and Diagnostics Division at the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics near Munich, Germany. She has been published in the likes of Frontiers in Physics, Nuclear Fusion and Fusion Engineering and Design.
Dr Stephen Hughes is an honorary senior lecturer of mathematics and physics at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, The Physics Teacher and Physics Education.
Prof Thomas Zurbuchen is the leader of ETH Zurich and former associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate. He is an international speaker and appears in Netflix documentary film Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine. He is also published in Scientific American.
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