In today's exciting episode, we have more UAP news coming out of Congress, an interview with a ball lightning scientist, and Enigma updates including looking at a couple more signings. Stay tuned, Welcome to Open Mind UAP News. I'm your host, Alejandro Rojas. Let's get right into the news. To start off with a little bit of sad news. Unfortunately, well known UAP researcher Bruce mcabee passed away last week. This is a post from his wife kind
of informing people. He was eighty two years old and he was very well known. He was actually a Navy optical physicist for many years and had examined a lot of UFO signings. In fact, just a couple anecdotes from my personally knowing him. I met him for the first time twenty odd years ago when I was helping Muffon put on a conference, I think the very first conference I helped them with, and it was very cool because, like a lot of hotels, there was a piano in the lobby and someone was playing
it and I thought, wow, this is gorgeous. It must be someone that the hotel hired. That was really cool of them. So I go to take a look, and lo and behold, it is Bruce mcabee here in his suit. You know, he looks like a scientist. He's there playing the piano, and he's just wonderful playing great classical music, and he was kind of known for that. I was very shocked, and I was excited because I knew who he was and I was really excited to meet him
for the first time. So I thought that was really cool. Moving forward through the conference, I was really busy and I was the last one to sit down for dinner at the big keynote talk and large you know evening dinner, and the last seat available was next to Bruce mcat. So actually I was very excited. Of course, I had a seat that was with kind of the people that were organizing the conference. They gave that away to,
you know, some researcher I think they wanted to talk to. But I was very happy to sit next to Bruce mcabee because I had several questions for him. At this time, I was a filled researcher and I had sent him some cases to look at and he had kind of poo pooed them. He was like, you know, sorry, this isn't what you think it is, and I was a little bit frustrated, but I learned something very
important when talking to him. He was like, I was saying, you know, you said this could have been a street lamp, but you know the witness said this is and that, And he made a great point. He said, I'm the photo and video analyst, so I only look at the data that the photo or the video can provide, and if I can't rule out a street light, then it's likely a street light. And he had a great point because this is data, and if you can't rule something
out using that piece of data, then he's got a great point. Then you know you don't have something that can substantiate that something abnormal happened. So I learned a very important lesson to this day. Even when we get to some of the cases we'll talk about like Egglin Air Force Base. This was an important one recently where Matt Gates, the congressman, had come forward and said, DoD have you looked at this case? The dood looks at it,
and they essentially are saying, we can't rule out a balloon. I told you all I would look more into it, and I did. There were several radar targets that they weren't able to correlate, so they didn't know what those were. The pilot did not see those targets. He only saw one object, which we can't explain. It doesn't necessarily look like a balloon. But to the point of the report from Arrow, we also can't rule
it out. There's no characteristics or no observed even or recorded movements of this object that show that it would not have been, you know, a balloon or something that isn't moving at incredible speed. So they have a great point. There's just not enough data to prove otherwise. Now, allegedly there is a video. One researcher said he is looking for a video, although the error report said there was no video. There wasn't a video able to be
captured. So again we have something that could be strange, but we don't have evidence that it. Certainly is not enough scientific data. So that was something really important that I learned from Bruce mcabee. I worked and talked with him for a lot throughout the years, interviewing him or discussing different cases. One of the most important interactions I've had with Bruce mcabee was that he was investing gating a case in late seventies where these airman had an alleged UFO sighting.
He was investigating it and found them to be credible, but they told him to talk to this guy named Dody, Richard Dody. He did this. Richard Dody guy had a lot of weird things to say, and he kind of blew it off. He said, I don't really buy this guy stuff. I think he was lying to me. When he Tooya Documents about this case. They sent him a bunch of documents about Richard Doty. He said, I don't know why they sent these to me, but I kind
of ignored them. And you can see this on his website. I'll put a link up to it. Those documents were really important to me because they told the story of this disinformation kind of thing that had happened. And I've talked about this before and I'll definitely talk about it again and I'll put a link in the show description. But it's essentially an Air Force disinformation case that has not been addressed. Even though ERO was supposed to look at disinformation and
include it in their historical report, they did not. Anyway, this led me to Foya Documents and get the same documents that he did on Richard Doty and do my investigation that I'll put in the show notes. So he was a big part of that. But he's been a big part of UFO research. He's done a lot of foil work to get a lot of CIA and FBI documents. He has some books. In fact, let me show you
here. He's got several books, the FBI CIA UFO Connection, The legacy of nineteen fifty two, which was a very important year for the topic of UFOs. And another, perhaps the most important case is he calls it three minutes in June the UFO siding that changed the world, and that's the Kenneth
Arnold siding. He wrote a book on that as well. So these are things you can get on Amazon. You'll also see that he wrote a couple forwards to some of Stanton Friedman's books, and that's what those other two you see here are so very well known figure and he will definitely be missed. He was an important guy in this field. And we actually with Open Minds did a bio for him when we gave him an award previously, and I'll put that in the description as well for everybody to see. Moving on aliens
invade Taylor Swift. So you see here you might not have seen this in bar lighthearted news. I just wanted to share this because look at how amazing that graphic is. So I don't know if any of you have gone to the concert. This is something they just added recently, but pretty amazing visuals of a UFO that she's added to her conference. And of course Taylor Swift always is big news, so that was big news out there, and I just wanted to share it with you because it just looks so cool. But
moving on to some of the more official stuff going on. This is a memo that went out May ninth and twenty twenty four from the National Archives. And why is this important because, as it states here, the NDAA for twenty twenty four, that's the National Defense Authorization Act. Essentially, these are the acts where Congress says, hey, DoD if you want to get paid,
here's what we want you to do. Because Congress is in charge of the budget for the Pentagon, and of course, as we know, they've been asked to get involved with UAP and one of the things that they're supposed to do is collect all the UAP documents and put it into this archive for the National Arts Archives, And that's what this memo was about, going out saying hey, all of you agencies, here's your directive on getting some files.
When this went out, there wasn't much that was sent in. But now you can go look at this then that the records related to Unidentified Anomalist Phenomena at the National Archives, and you'll find there is a bunch of stuff here. So there are pictures and images, videos they call them moving images, still, Presidential library information, microfish films, a bunch of blog articles here that had been previously written on UAP, and this database is growing larger
and larger, so there's a lot of stuff in here. It's pretty cool. I mean, in some of these cases there'll be information that you can get. Otherwise it'll be stuff where it'll tell you where it is to go get it or print it. That can be a little more difficult, but there are times that you I've worked with some of these presidential libraries and they can be pretty helpful. You can call them up and say, hey, whatch you happen to have this or that, and they'll look for it for
you and they'll email it to you. I've gotten some great pictures in the past through doing that. So this is going to be a great research area resource for people, and it's not something that has been talked about much out there, so definitely want to go take a look at that. This is
some interesting news coming out of Canada. So this is CTV News. This is written by Daniel Otis, who has been doing a lot of great work writing about Canada and UAP and this one he's talking about US intelligence officials wanted to meet with Transport Canada's UFO lead. So Transport Canada, I guess their Department of Transportation has been tasked with kind of taking the lead on UFOs,
but they don't want to. Essentially, this article says, despite the US Director of National Intelligence coming to Canada and saying, hey, we would like to talk to you about your records, they're shirking them. They're saying, you know, they're setting up meetings or pretending like they will. They're saying verbiage like, you know, they don't want these kind of requests that they're calling any UFO request are harassment. But they're really pushing back having to do
anything on this topic. And so that's what this article is about pretty disheartening to see, especially given how the US government has gotten so into this. Canada just doesn't want anything to do with it. And we still have a long way to go here in the US. And here's what I mean by that. So Dean Johnson, Dean Johnson has a site here. You can find him mostly on Twitter or x and if you click on it, you know you can see some articles here. But he's been great. He's been
keeping an eye on the bills out there. He works in this area, and he's been able to kind of summarize what's been going on and in Congress, especially with legislation. One of the things he's written about in which you might have heard about is Rep. Tim Burchett, along with the UAP Caucus, have written a bill. It's a page and a half and it essentially says to release all the UAP records. Very very strange to have a proposed bill that is only a page and a half. The Schumer Amendment, for
example, on UAP with sixty four pages. If you go look at the legislation when it comes to the NDAA out there at their pages and pages. So it's certainly not going to be seen as credible, only being a page and a half. And again it's this UAP caucus group not really you know, although they're out there making a lot of noise, and we'll look at that a little bit more in a second. You know, they're not really
giving an air of credibility with stunts like this. So far. These guys are part of the Oversight Committee in the House, and the committee has not taken up this bill to look at and approve to move forward to the wider House for a vote. It may not happen. We really haven't heard much since May sixteenth when they posted this, so we'll see about that. Certainly not the best way to go to bring credibility and really prove your point,
especially when they are alleging a lot of conspiratorial things. You know, you think that you would want to substantiate that and substantiate that, you know, there's a lot of records that are being hidden and not being shared. You've got to make that argument, and that argument really just isn't made here. And that's why this probably won't be taken too seriously moving forward. And someone who has been more effective, which is Christian Deal a brand. She did
an interview with CBS News recently to talk about UFOs. Well, actually it was to talk about Israel border security and she was asked about UFO. She seemed a little surprised to get the question. It's a pretty long video, so I won't play it all for you here. You can go take a look at it. But essentially she's just talking about the importance of UAP and that the Pentagon is looking into it, so she's definitely supporting their current efforts.
But she also brings the conversation to drones and how it's important that we take a look at drones, and you'll notice drones are kind of taking over a lot of the conversation when it comes to UAP, and I think it's because of what I've reviewed in the last few shows, is that the credibility of this topic has kind of deteriorated, that the real credible cases have kind of lost kind of the attention they've gotten due to a lot of the conspiratorial
stuff that many felt has been debunked, and so we're kind of at a lull as far as when it comes to the credibility of the topic. Now, she is saying it's important that we look into this but then of course she segues into drones as opposed to talking about the real unidentified cases like the Nimitz case that we can't understand, and that has been a driving force for really kind of tackling the true unknowns. Drones are a subset of UAP when
they are not immediately identified, and that is the definition they've used. If something cannot be immediately identified, then it is a UAP until it can be identified. Often drones, just by visual inspection or by looking at photographs or video, things can be determined to be drones. But of course when they're not, they're more mysterious, and sometimes the characteristics of these objects that are captured are outside of the capability of drones, and of those are the ones
that are really interesting. But the conversation kind of keeps being brought back to drones. Drones are obviously a very important topic. There are the swarms of drones that have been seen over sensitive areas, in sensitive aerospace and training areas, even over military warships, and we don't know what they are. So it's something we definitely need to get a handle on, and Congress is very
focused on. It's just hopefully the importance, or at least the credibility of the UAP topic doesn't droop low enough where they just kind of drop it. But it doesn't seem like that's going to be the case anytime soon. So on the top of a Congress and UAP, there was a hearing by that oversight committee that the UAP caucus belongs to Timberchat, Luna, some of those others I've mentioned, And in the hearing they were interviewing the Secretary of Energy,
Jennifer grand Holme, and Timberchat asked her a UAP question. Let's take a look. Let me switch gears the responsibility. It was a responsibility of the Federal Protective Services within the Nuclear Security Administration. Are you talking about transporting fuels? No, ma'am. I wanted you to speak well. I was going to follow up with the numerous reports by the Federal Protective Services officers describing
suspicious occurrences of ups over nuclear facilities. Let me just say the Defense Department has said there is no evidence of UFOs, etc. Or aliens in the United States. However, at those sites, there may be drones that may be nefarious, and so we are definitely looking at that and making sure that our national security sites are protected. We have a whole program related to countering drones that may be coming from but this isn't about drones, and this is
prior to drones. Even what protocols Apartment of Energy have for reporting and responding to the up sidings near unclear infrastructure and people joke about this, but I get a lot of questions about this, concerning this and about this hearing today from my constituent. So I would appreciate you answering that if they're already protocols instantly, there are protocols whenever we see anything unusual around our nuclear sites or
our national security sites are large, Okay, we'll switch gears. So, on the one hand, it's great that Burchett asked the question. On the other hand, it would have been great if he would have corrected her, because that statement she made is completely inaccurate. She said the Defense Department has said there is no evidence of UFOs. Again, that is completely false. They have not said that. They have said there's no evidence of aliens,
but not of UFOs. Further, the point could have been made that the Pentagon has been directed with making sure to come up with protocols for reporting UAP, and she should be known that UAP are an issue, and drones are a subset of UAP, like we said, when they cannot immediately be identified, So she needs to be aware by somebody. Congress is the right place, and too bad or Chett didn't take this opportunity to let her know that, no, you are wrong, that is not what the DoD said.
She needs to be corrected and she should. Then the point could be made that if the Pentagon's taking this seriously and they're coming up with protocols, don't you think you should too? And I think that's where she could be challenged. And in the historical record you can see cases historically, not just in the US, but throughout the world where UAP and they have been determined not to be drones have been spotted over nuclear facilities. So it's a topic that
she could have and hopefully will be probed a little bit more on. No punintended. There was another question that came up, so Represented of Luna then followed up and let's listen to her conversation here sec Grandfall and earlier, when Representative Burchett asked you about SAP stuff, you said that the DoD essentially had denied any existence of that, and you referred to them as drones. Correct. It's my understanding that the Department of Defense has looked like it's an issue
to report about it. I have a lot of questions, so just quick and concise if possible. There have been persistent claims in reports, including those from credible whistleblowers to this committee, suggesting that the US government, potentially including the Department of Energy, has been involved in reverse engineering technologies recovered from up For example, the Pentagon's proposed ConA Blue program aimed at reverse engineering such technologies,
although it was ultimately not established. Can you clarify whether the Department of Energy has been involved in any such efforts, either historically or currently to analyze reverse engineering materials from related to you IPS, I have no knowledge of that,
Okay. There are several reports indicated frequent drone incursions over DOE nuclear facilities, including an incident on April first, twenty twenty one at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory also known as l NL. Can you detail the deey's current secretary security measures to prevent unauthorized drone activities or ups and what steps are being taken to
Hancy's measures of frequencies of incidences. Yeah, we have a whole counter drone effort to make sure that all of our national security sites in our labs are protected from incursions from drones. I'll just say that are not authorized. So there's a whole series of protocols probably not right for discussion in this public setting. Correct. So I review some unclassified materials from around the forties and fifties,
and so they weren't just being reported as drones back then. Then I encourage you to look over those materials because I think that you guys should be upgrading that program to cover down on UAPs. There have been documented sidings of metallic spheres over DEEY facilities if you want to call them drones in this instance, such as one report on April thirtieth, twenty nineteen OVERLNL. What investigations have been connected in regards to these settings and what conclusions do you guys have
about the nature and nature and origins of these objects. I'm happy to follow up with you on that. Okay, we'll be submitting also too for public records and questions after this. If you could please answer those considering the Dewy's
involvement and nuclear and sensitive research facilities. How does the DEWEY coordinate with agencies like the Department of Defense and ARROW to investigate UAP sidings we are part of We obviously are teamed with the Department of Defense because of our national security and nuclear mission. Are you able to cite any specific investigations or shared data analysis efforts? I don't have information on that, okay as of right now.
Again, we'll be submitting some questions for you after this, but I hope that you guys can answer those in a timely fashion. And again, for those that might be tuning into this, I would encourage you to look at some of those unclassified materials and we'll be happy to provide your office with that. I'll just follow up by one other question, guess to close it out. Does the Deuty currently work with Jaysock in order to handle security measures?
We work with all of the security entities around the federal government. We're part of an overall all of government effort on both cyber as well as national security. Did you guys work with Jaysock? Yes, yes, we do. Okay, all right, thank you, So there you go. This one
was interesting. I mean, it was great that she cited that there were cases historically, there are cases that are actually more recent than the fifties and sixties, but to her point, in the fifties and sixties there was more official concern and in fact you can see that in some of the CIA papers from that era, and I can post some of that also in the description below. But again she gave her a pass to let her call these these
metallic orbs drones when you know they're UAP. And I was hoping at the beginning that she was going to clarify the difference between UAP and you know, drones, but unfortunately that didn't happen. So that education still needs to happen with grand Holme obviously on the distinction between the two, especially if like she says, she's working with the Department of Defense and will cooperate with aer ROW.
So yeah, some interesting You now have the Department of Energy on the record saying they're not aware of UAP cases, you know, and they're definitely not back engineering UAP. That's not what the Department of Energy does. So that's no surprise. We really don't have except for in the conspiracy areas much in regards to UAP and the Department of Energy. I did find some files recently and I will post those in a link below. But yeah, yeah, there's a lot more to do here, I think, with educating that
group. But this is the first time I think the Department of Energy has really kind of been faced with being involved with all of this, although they have been cited by Congress in a few occasions. So we'll see what happens going forward with this. Enigma Labs. So I did want to get into and here's a piece of news out there when it comes to Enigma Labs.
They have some new state sighting pages, so and here you can see an article in the Risewell Daily Record about the siting pages in New Mexico and a really interesting sighting that they posted here. Maybe we'll look at that one later on. But I did get some really good cases out of New Mexico recently, and if you go into the app, you'll be able to see those in the content feed that first tab. But what's interesting about these pages,
and let me bring one up here for you Enigma Labs dot io. So if you go to Explore, you can go to Explore Sightings and then you're going to see a bunch of countries and the different sidings numbers of sightings they've had. Of course, we want to look at the United States right now because I want to look at the state ones. Of course, two hundred and thirty sidings. That's a conglomerate of different sightings that we've collected from many
different agencies. Of course, if we go to let's say New Mexico, you can see a graph, you can see some characteristics. You'll see like that where they are on the number of sightings. That's not per population, so you know where there's more people, there's more sightings reported. But you do get kind of top shapes, not surprising. Usually a point of light is the most common one, or spheres which is also kind of could be
a point of light. And then you'll see some videos. So if you don't have the Apple app to be able to get in there, this is a way for you to kind of look at some sightings in your area or throughout the world. So it's kind of a cool feature. So last week, the strange video that we looked at was kind of this orb traveling through the sky and it kind of looked like potentially ball lightning. There was lightning going on in the background, so I sent that to a ball lightning scientist.
I've been talking to Carl Stephan and invited him on the show to talk to him about more specifics and his work researching ball lightning. So let's check out that interview. All right, I'm very happy to welcome Carl Stefan from the Texas State University, an expert on ball lightning. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me to start off. I would like to know how you got involved with this sort of work. Well, there's how I got involved and how I got
interested. How I got interested was I was in a public library in Fort Worth, Texas when I was in high school and just cruising through the science stacks, and I found a book that was titled ball lightning, you know. So I pulled it out and began reading. And I'd never heard of it, I'd never seen it, I'd never met anybody who'd seen it. But it sounded interesting. And nothing really happened at the time I except I said to myself, someday I'm going to look into that. Well about forty
years later, someday happened. Someone published a paper out of Israel claiming to have produced something that might be ball lightning. And it turns out that the equipment they were using was very similar to some equipment that a colleague of mine in Austin had in his lab. So we put some machinery together to replicate their finding and publish, you know, a paper saying, well, it has you know, a slight resemblance to ball lightning, but on the other
hand, there's these other problems. And that's that that got published, you know. And so I found that you could actually publish papers on ball lightning and respectable journals, and you know, one thing, I do another. So it's been about fifteen years ago, and you know, I have tenures, so I don't have to worry about publisher parish necessarily. But I do like publishing, although what I publish about is not something that gets a whole
lot of attention, but it's it's still interesting. Was that equipment in what way were they reproducing or potentially reproducing ball lightning? Well, it was a high power microwave generator, and they were doing something that has actually been known for many years since World War Two. Microwaves at high power used for like radars and stuff, traveled down a rectangular wave guide. It's basically a rectangular pipe, and if the power gets too high, it can actually arc over.
You'll have a spark in the waveguide and the arts travel actually towards the source of the power. These people who were publishing the paper, instead of having just an art traveling along the waveguide, they set up a tungsten electrode and concentrated the arc in a particular spot, and they found it. By withdrawing the electrode and setting up certain wave conditions, they could get a little thing that looked like a tear It was shaped like a tear drop floating at
the top of the waveguide. But it was extremely bright. You had to wear goggles to look at it without blinding yourself, and it would just kind of wiggle around and hover, and it looked almost liquid. And so they published a paper saying, oh, is this what ball lightning is? And so forth. They didn't make any specific claims that they discovered it, but they pointed out strong resemblances of this phenomenon. Two ball lightning, and we
had the same kind of high power RF generator or microwavegenerator. So we built a similar set up to theirs and managed to duplicate what they were doing. But the difficulties were that as soon as you turn off the power, it goes away within milliseconds and ball lightning. One of the big mysteries about ball
lightning is it seems to have its own source of energy. People have seen it appear inside closed rooms inside aircraft, in addition to appearing outside, where you could at least imagine it's getting energy from someplace, and a lot of the early theories of ball lightning claimed that it was getting energy from an external radio frequency field, but nobody has ever measured such radio frequency field, so that theory is pretty well disregarded by now. Whereas it was very obvious where
the power was coming from to make this object. It was coming from the generator at the other end of the wave guy. So we said, you know, perhaps there are aspects of this phenomenon that resemble ball lightning, but it's certainly not the whole show. It's not the whole explanation. And how did the term get coined? What were being observed where that, you know, created this kind of area of study. You're talking about how did the
term ball lightning get coined? Correct, I actually don't know the origin of it. Miss suspicion is it began perhaps as a translation from the German koglle blitz. I can't pronounce the Russian equivalent of ball lightning, but there are and then there's a French term google Blitz means Google being ball and blitz being lightning. A German by the name of Brand published an extensive study of ball lightning in about nineteen twenty, and I believe it has been translated into English.
But even if it wasn't, people in this country wanting to study it would have read that book and then they would transliterate the google blitz into the word ball lightning. I haven't actually done one of those Google word studies of you know, finding a frequency of appearing versus time. That's what actually be
an interesting thing to do. But I suspect that before about nineteen hundred, people would refer to balls of fire that would be seen around thunderstorms and other and sometimes volcanoes, And that there's a phrase that goes back even farther than
the term ball lightning. So the association with lightning was not always prominent, but as time went on, people started to notice that these odd, persistent spheres of light were associated with thunderstorms, and so the term ball lightning began to be accepted as a term for these The trouble is, of course, that we cannot reproduce ball lightning in the laboratory. We don't have a single accepted theory as to what it is, and so the term itself is somewhat
I wouldn't say so much as ambivalent. But people see something and they say it's ball lightning, and it's difficult sometimes to say whether it is or not. But there's been enough reports about phenomena that people call ball lightning, which have a common set of characteristics, so that at least I believe that there is an actual physical phenomenon behind these multiple sightings. And we can say that there is probably one, or at least perhaps more than one phenomenon, but
probably just one phenomenon that's actually ball lightning. What is the set of characteristics. Well, one is it's associated with thunderstorms, not all the time, but most of the time. The second characteristic is it persists for at least a second, possibly up to ten or twenty or thirty seconds, meaning it stays more or less the same shape and brightness during its lifetime. Another characteristic is it does not seem to rise like a heated gas would you know.
Flames are a form of plasma, just ordinary flames coming out of a campfire or your gas burner on a stove, But because they're hot air, they rise by convection. Ball lightning does not often seem to rise by convection. Sometimes it falls from the sky. It's been observed to move against the wind. It typically move when people see it move. It moves more or less horizontally at you know, three to five feet per second, at almost a
walking pace, sometimes higher. But its motion is unusual compared to any kind of glowing object that people see, which is one so they remember it so easily. It's just like nothing they've ever seen before. The size is typically it can be as small as a baseball, large as a basketball. Grapefruit is about the average size. The colors can vary from white. Orange, yellow, red are the most typical colors. Occasionally blue, very rarely green,
sometimes multiple colors. It doesn't seem to have a structure. Most people can't see inside it, you know, but sometimes sometimes people can and when at the end of its lifetime or at the end of when people can see it, it either goes around a corner and goes out of sight, or if it's insight, when it gets to the end of its lifetime, it either vanishes or sometimes it explodes, and when it explodes sometimes it damages things. Wow. So those those are the common features of most sightings of ball
lightning that would qualify as quote unquote genuine sightings. Yeah, I've reviewed a video from Enigma Labs last week on the show, and I sent that video to you, and I'm kind of excited because it could be about lightning. It didn't move horizontally, but of course we need to get more information, but it might be an example. Yeah, there are You know, the
distance from which an object is cited is important. If I'm recalling that video correctly, it appeared to be an object that was, you know, hundreds or thousands of feet away from the camera, which is okay. I mean, you can't do more than you can do. Another question is was somebody
watching the object in addition to recording the video. I don't know the answer to that question, because if people are watching it, they may get from you know, environmental clues a better idea of how far the object was away. But a simple, you know, two dimensional photograph with a bright spot on it, you can't immediately tell the how far away it was. It
could be a great, big object miles away. It could be I've had people send me videos of things that from security cameras that are probably gnats flying within a few inches of the lens, but it looks like this big, mysterious blowing orb, you know. And so without further information, sometimes you just can't decide where it was exactly or what it was. But certainly, you know, the motion and the brightness are somewhat consistent with ball lightning,
but I wouldn't make any definite conclusions without getting more information. Have people been hurt by a ball lightning? Yes, there was a case of a child sitting in front of a fireplace with his father and ball lightning came down the chimney. Back when people use chimneys a lot, at least in this country,
instances of ball lightning coming down chimneys were fairly common. It struck the child, and when the child was taken to a medical facility, the people there took photographs of the abdominal area where this child was struck, and there
were what are called Liechtenberg figures. It looks like a little lightning bolt itself, a little branched lines on the skin, which is something that can happen with conventional lightning, and apparently this ball lightning also created those Liechtenberg figures. There are records of people being killed by ball lightning. A scientist named Richmond I believe in Russia was killed by ball lightning or what appeared to be ball
lightning. There's some reports out of Russia of people being killed by ball lightning. It's very unusual, but it has there are records of people being killed by it. Yeah. My advice to people who see it is don't stick your finger in it, you know, get out your phone, get out your cell phone and take pictures, but don't stick your finger in it. Which gets me to the next question, which is they can also be close to the ground, I guess, and even inside of buildings. Definitely,
yes, people, We have dozens of reports. We have a ball lightning report website and we've collected over eight hundred raw reports, just the numbers, many of which are probably genuine ball lightning, and many of these describe ball lightning appearing in bedrooms, living rooms, in front of televisions, you know, showing up along a staircase and going down the hall and out the front door. Things like this. They can move through closed glass windows, which
is pretty remarkable. Wow, from outside to inside or vice versa. But you know, that's one of the most paradoxical features of the object, the fact that you know, inside a room or even a metal airplane, ball lightning has been seen several times inside metal aircraft. That's the difficulty because metal typically shields the interior from electromagnetic effects, and that would be one of the obvious sources of power for ball lightning is some kind of electromagnetic you know,
electric or magnetic field. But they don't seem to be bothered by that much, and they show up wherever they want to more or less. Wow. So in those cases where they've gone through material or even affected people, what are the kind of things have they recorded, such as maybe electromagnetic or other types of effects. Well, there are not a great many instances of ball lightning causing electromagnetic effects that had been registered. One exception is a report by
a qualified scientist named Dimitriev that was out of Russia. Oh, I think it was in the fifties or sixties. I don't remember the exact date. He was camping on a river bank and had a portable radio with him and it was playing presumably some local station, and there was a boom, which is a series a chain of logs that stretched out into the river, and he saw ball lightning appear on this boom and move toward him along the river
bank or toward the river bank. He noticed that the AM radio I presume it was an AM radio, was overcome by static as a ball lightning came closer. He also had a lot of other equipment with him, a device to measure ionizing radiation and a device to take air samples. The device to measure ionine using radiation registered a very high level, and the samples he took of a kind of a smoke trail that the ball lightning left indicated elevated levels
of ozone. So he is probably one of the persons who got the most objective data on a ball lightning sighting, and other people have seen it interfere with televisions back when TV's had the rebbit ears, you know, and the antenna was basically mounted on top of the TV. So there is some evidence that ball lightning produces electromagnetic radiation that can interfere with radios and televisions. Yeah.
Interesting, And then you know, it seems doesn't have characteristics you talked about it moving strangely that people may ascribe to, you know, it being having some sort of intelligence or some kind of method to the madness and how it's moving. You know, are there properties like that where it could change direction? The emotions that people describe are somewhat erratic. You know, they'll say it moved around the table and down the hall like you know, it
was walking. Not many people say that, you know, a tribute kind of an intelligent controlling agent behind the object. We don't see a lot of people claiming that it does seem to avoid obstacles. This could possibly be a purely physical phenomenon, though there's you know, current air flows or something that would just make it avoid obstacles. Sometimes it does land on metal obstacles.
The the reason the reason it moves is unclear, and I would not venture to guess what the total net forces are on it that causes it to move. It doesn't seem to be much heavier or lighter than air. Because it was heavier in air, it would go down to the ground all the time. If it was lighter than air, it would float up all the time.
And it does neither in many cases. So it must have approximately the same density as air, if that's an appropriate term to use for it, you know, And are you aware of places where it happens more often? I wish I were. It does. It doesn't seem to favor any place other than locations where thunderstorms typically occur. Places where there are no thunderstorms are
very few thunderstorms. Also do not report many ball lightning sightings. But there aren't any you know, favorite places it always shows up, you know. I maybe I may remember one incident of a of a stove, you know, with a stovepipe that maybe somebody saw ball lightning coming out of it two
or three times or something like that. But and there's there's been one or two reports that we haven't been able to follow up of people saying that the thing shows up, you know, in their hall closet several times, or
you know, on a weekly basis or something like that. Not quite that often so there are little isolated possibilities that you know, the things have shown up, but we have not been able to track down any location where you know, it's it's regular, like old faithful, and we can just you know, set our watches and go watch it the next time it shows up.
It doesn't do anything like that. The most I can say is a conditions under which a very large area or volume highly intense electric field appears seemed to favor the formation of ball light There was one famous incident in the city of neu Ruppin, which was in East Germany at the time in the nineties. There was a thunderstorm in the middle of the winter and an extremely bright
and intense lightning strike outside the town proper few kilometers outside the town. Within minutes of that strike, the weather station began getting dozens of phone calls about people seeing ball lightning, and a person wrote a paper about this new Ruppin incident and counted at least eleven or twelve almost simultaneo, almost simultaneous appearances of
ball lightning within or near the town of neu Rope and Germany. So you know, there was apparently some condition probably having to do with electric fields They also saw spots coming out of telephones and jumping off of fences, and so there was obviously an intense momentary electric field over large areas of the town, and so there were many ball lightning sightings as well. So you know, any place that large intense electric fields happen over large volumes of space seems to
favor the occurrence. But there aren't any places on Earth that I know of that just typically have large volumes of electric fields showing up. So the other case I would imagine is volcanic eruptions. There have been reports of volcanic eruptions, like from a ship at sea. They were actually in the ash field that was coming down from the volcano and they were seeing ball lightning all over
the place at their location. But again, there are often conventional lightning strikes that occur in conjection in conjunction with volcanic eruptions, and so that's not surprising that you'd see ball lightning there as well. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, with those last couple of questions, one of the places I had in mind was his place at Hasdelen familiar with I think, yeah, it's either Norway or Denmark. Norway? Yeah, I am not that familiar with the Hestealin
stuff. There's there's a project there which has been attempting to document something and the journey. The papers I've seen out of there have either not been specific enough or uh, I'm not sure what's going on there. It's a difficulty
that I have not investigated myself. Uh. That brings up the topic of what we are called earth lights though hesteline is what people call an earth light, which is a locality where you know, lights that glow for some amount of time tend to show up. I spent six weeks in West Texas investigating something called Marpha lights, which reportedly are similar to Hestealin lights. They just show up at random times and move around, and there may be some connection
between ball lightning and earth lights. Unfortunately, the information we have on earth lights is not sufficient to make a definitive judgment as to whether they have characteristics of ball lighting or not. The eyewitness reports differ from ball lightning, and that the earth lights, at least the Marpha lights that Colling of Mind research
tended to last a lot longer than ball lightning typically lasts. The typical ball lightning site sighting is between five and ten seconds before it either disappears or goes out of sight. The earth lights can last up to minutes, and that's a significant difference. I don't know whether it means anything in terms of the physics or what other than that. Just the appearance of earth lights, according to people who have seen them close up enough to describe them, resembles the
appearance of ball lightning, you know, mm hmm. Yeah, That's what I was going to ask you about next, is earthlight. It's very interesting. So when it comes to earth lights or or I guess I either I had seen an experiment, and I believe this is when I was in Colorado, and I think it might have been a school of minds where they had compressed rock and there was some sort of plasma that came off of it. Is that that is experiments which a guy named Friedaman Freud has done. He's
associated with NASA. It turns out that certain types of igneous I think the igneous rocks I don't remember Gabbro I think is one of the types of rocks. If they're subjected to sudden stress, something goes on which creates a large electric field in the rock. And they've got photographs of the thing blowing from the corona that comes off of it. This is a pretty well documented and reproducible effect. This may be part of the explanation of what are called earthquake
lights. Numerous people and even photographs exists of lights generated before, during, and after certain earthquakes. They can be lights in the sky, they can be ball lightning, light glowing objects on the ground. They can be kind of a sheet of glowing blue on the ground, kind of traveling. Even there was an earthquake in Canada several years ago that people published about regarding these
earthquake lights. And if you allow for the possibility that the types of rock which generate large electric fields are present in the locations where these earthlights occur, then it makes sense if there's you know, stresses caused by earthquakes, or
even without the earthquakes being there, the stresses can be there. These electric fields could give rise to phenomena similar to ball lightning, because, as I've said, ball lightning tends to show up when there are high electric fields over a large volume of space, and that could occur with these rocks being subjected
to stress that is high enough to produce electric fields from them. Really interesting and then, of course, in the subject they showed you AP what I find as interesting as you know, to me, ball lightning would be a subset. It would be a phenomena that we haven't explained yet that we're trying to research. Have you you know, really interface that has there been much interface in UAP research as far as you know, and ball lightning research not
to my knowledge. One difficulty I face is that I want to preserve my bona fides, if you wish to call it that as a scientific researcher. The entire field of what used to be called UFOs does not enjoy a good reputation in the science community. Let's put it that way. In that you know, if you just write a paper following all the rules but saying that you've seen a UFO or UFOs or this, and that, you're very unlikely
to get it published. So, in order to remain believable to the types of people I want to reach, who are physicists, basically in geophysicists, I have stayed away from any kind of publications that smack of unidentified aerial phenomena or UFOs or things like that. I try to stick to you very credible
witnesses objective evidence when at all possible. A lot of my papers have been on laboratory experiments, and you know that's you know, anybody can reproduce those as the right equipment, and so there's no issue there with regard to what was it. I know exactly what it was. I built a machine that
did it. You know, this is not to say that there could be some fruitful interaction with what you might call the UAP community, because the average person seeing ball lightning for the first time, it is an unidentified aerial phenomenon to them. They've never seen it before. Most people these days have never
heard of the phrase ball lightning. Apparently it was more publicized in the sixties or seventies, but I talked to people under thirty, and I'd say nine or nine point five out of ten people I ask have never heard of ball lightning. Wow. So when they if they see it, they're not going to know what it is and call it an unidentified aerial phenomenon if they have
to call it something. So, you know, if we can get more information out about what this thing called ball lightning looks like, we can't quite say that it's identified in the same sense that conventional lightning is identified. I mean, we know a whole lot about the physics of conventional lightning. We can generate, you know, imitation lightning and laboratory all that kind of stuff.
So it's not identified in that sense. Ball lightning isn't, but it is a recognizable category of observed phenomena which other people have seen and which appears to be fairly consistent. So it's identified, and that we have a name for it, ball lightning. And so if you if you say that it, you know, naming something identifies it, then it's not an identified it's
you know, so it's almost a semantic question. M M. Well, knowing so many people don't know about it makes me even more excited to do this interview and educate people on what's going on, because you know, you have even you hear of stories of balls of light. Even people ascribe like paranormal or ghostly kind of answers to it, but it could be, of course a natural phenomenon that they're observing. Yeah, and you know, I'm
not logically speaking, and I can't rule out paranormal or supernatural phenomena. In fact, a book I was reading recently actually takes that tact toward unidentified aerial phenomena. They they went ahead and claimed it. I just got to the part of the book where it says, well, I think some of them are demons. Wow, So you know, I'm not going to go around investigating demons. That's that's another department entirely theology rather than astronomy or physics.
But I'm not going to, you know, say that I'm not I'm not going to be so doctrinarious to say those things are impots. You know, if you just take the philosophical point of view and want to base your conclusions on evidence, then you know, that's probably the last alternative I'm going to turn to after I've eliminated absolutely everything else. But I'm going to turn to
the most familiar, you know, physical causes first. If we have to eliminate those, then I will maybe look at the possibility of ball lightning. If it can't even be ball lightning, then maybe we can talk about other things. But there's there's a kind of a series you work down and and paranormal and supernal supernatural stuff is kind of the last alternative that we turn to, and that that that's outside the realm. Of science. Really, it's
not science as science is currently practiced. M And do you feel like we're getting closer to answers? Do you feel like it? You know, this field is making progress. Well, a couple of things have happened in the last decade or so which are encouraging. For one thing, everybody is carrying
around a high quality video camera in their pocket. And another thing is high quality video cameras are popping up on millions of homes and so what you know in nineteen fifty would have cost Untold billions of dollars to do, namely, put video recorders on every street corner has happened. Now the question is can we look at you know, can we look through what they are recording and
find what we're looking for? That's the next challenge. It turns out that the lifetime of typical ball lighting is just about the amount of time it takes to take out your phone and push the camera and get it going. You know, we haven't yet, I haven't, at least on our report website, encountered anyone who has successfully Well, I won't say that I haven't encountered anyone. There have not been a lot of encounters with very close objects that
have been filmed by you know, someone's cell phone camera. There have been a lot of people shooting stuff with their cell phone cameras that they didn't know what it was, but it's typically far enough away that we can't tell what it is either. There is one exception with regard to a security camera.
I'm currently working on a paper which has some security camera footage of an object that was about forty feet away from the camera, and there are lots of details, and so I won't say anything more about that because it's in process
now. But you know, I think other recordings like that are going to come to light as we just have more stuff out there and more people become aware of what could be ball lightning and they can send, you know, reports to our ball lightning report website or to you or to other things. And I think that's an encouraging development, simply that there's a lot of equipment out there capable of generating data that may be usable. It's not ideal.
We don't have networks that are set up with spectrometers and other instruments to get more you know, simultaneous data, images and other interesting things. We'd like to do a colleague of mine and myself have proposed to the Air Force to do just that actually, but you know, it's a start, and so just citizen science raising awareness of ball lightning and other things and having people look at their cell phone videos and security videos and if it looks interesting send it
to somebody who could use it. That would be great. Well, I'm really excited about your work. I've always been really interested in this topic since I came across it, especially because you know, it's one of the answers. It could be a big answer to the type of thing where looking at when we're looking for UAP, and it's something that to me seems like some low hanging fruit when it comes to actual scientific discovery related to this sort of
work. So I'm excited to gathering more data and hopefully being around when when you when you figure it out. Well, if I don't figure it out, somebody's gonna figure it out. But right, you know, we we can, we'll we'll progress comes kind of when it feels like it, but you know, we can do everything we can to encourage it. You know. Well, thank you so much for coming on. You know, hope to interface with you more, maybe hopefully it gets you some great videos and
some data and information to help your work. But thank you so much for coming on and sharing this information. Well, thank you. I enjoyed it. Thank you so much. To Carl. I personally get really excited with the ball lightning stuff just because I think that, you know, this is an area where we can really make some progress. This is an area where maybe we can help discover something about ball lightning and prove that the study of
UAP can help with science and scientific discovery. And that's what makes me so excited. Not only that for any long time UAP researcher, you know, people don't understand why we get so excited about debunking things. And the reason
why is it's good to roll things out. Let's role out what is not mysterious so we can focus on what is mysterious, because the mysterious objects are the ones where we can grab data and figure more out about them and potentially discover something really novel, really different and weird, something that hasn't been discovered
before. And if we can figure out the nature of ball lightning, then we'll be able to be able to figure out you know, what UAP out there are ball lightning and what out there is something more mysterious and strange. And you heard those characteristics that he gave when it came to ball lightning. So that's something important to consider as we're investigating UAP cases. Speaking of which, let's look at a couple of UAP cases in today's Enigma Sightings of the
Week. We have partnered with Enigma Labs to bring you interesting UAP cases weekly that they collect via their app and website. If you have a report to submit, you can download the app at the Apple App Store or submit it via the website at Enigma labs dot io. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a pay consultant for Enigma, and that's how I can keep up to date with the best videos that come to light. In fact,
I look at them daily to find the good ones. And I've got a lot of good ones that we're working on, and I'm getting to researchers and we're looking at more closely to figure them out. Girl Stephan will be looking at the video and hopefully we can get a hold of the witness and do some more evaluation on that one. But we have other exciting ones, including one of the videos I want to show you today that I'm super excited about.
But first, one of the things I think you can be really excited about is that you're getting a preview on some of the sightings that are kind of getting on the internet and making news on my show before they get out there. So, for instance, the New York siding, I was talking about that one quite a bit before it got out there in the news and made quite a buzz, and we have some more information on that one, so we did do some investigation. We had a Twitter spaces like I talked
about last week. Hopefully some of you were able to join that. I'll put the link below, But we invited a scientist, doctor Doug Butner, who has a PhD in aerospace engineering. He's done a lot of work with the Pentagon and otherwise. Of course, we also had on researcher Ben Hansen. Now, when I first saw this video, I thought, you know what, that looks like a balloon to me, in particular, I thought
perhaps it was a solar balloon. Now Ben Hansen had looked at it and said he didn't think so, because he has actually done some experiments with solar balloons, and solar balloons are essentially long trash bags that you fill with air. They're black, so when the sun hits it, the heat from the sun makes the air inside of it more hot, and so it begins to float because of hotter air, of course is lighter than cooler air, so
it's going to float. That's the case with these. However, they're very flimsy, and Ben had estimated the wind at the altitude of this object that was seen over New York out of this aircraft. Because of the winds we're at thirty miles per hour, it probably would have made that solar balloon collapse. It can't float in that big of wind, so that was kind of ruled out. So what could it have been? Some people said it looked like a giant rumba lying in the sky, and if you look at this
picture, it kind of does. In fact, we'll look at the video here a little bit upper in the upper right boom, you see it there just very quickly go by. Was it moving, was it not moving? How big could it be? So we did some estimates. Now some online people did some estimates as well, and people are thinking, well, it's
probably not that far from the aircraft. It's probably moving around two one hundred and fifty miles per hour relative to the person taking the image, and if it is not too far away from the aircraft, let's say fifty sixty feet, then it is about the size of a regular party balloon. And in fact, I argue one researcher said it looked like maybe one that was a shape like a seven. I don't think so. I think this is a soft edge that we see here, not a hard edge like a seven would
be. But doctor Buttner, who we had on our Twitter spaces with us, he says he thinks it's a zero shaped balloon, and I think he's probably right, So this one probably does turn out to be a blue. Now you're probably saying a balloon going at two hundred and fifty miles per hour, that is the speed relative to the person taking the picture, and they're
able to determine that. The speed is determined by how quickly it moves through the screen and also how many frames that the image is caught in, because there is a certain amount of frames per second that these videos take. By measuring those things, you can determine, you know, its speed at different distances, and if it was I'd say about sixty feet and it would be traveling at about two hundred and fifty miles per hour as relative to the person
taking the photo. So in other words, it could have been perfectly still. But the aircraft is moving at about two hundred and forty miles per hour. So the object then maybe is moving at ten miles per hour in the wind, or if it's moving at thirty miles per hour, it's still within the range of that speed being you know, a combination of its speed and the aircraft speed. So that really fits. And like I said earlier, is kind of a case of also, can we rule that out. Can
we say it definitely wasn't a balloon? We can't, and it really does fit closely. Now there are going to be some exercises to try to mirror this. Some people have already done it online. I think Ben Hansen wants to do something like that. To me, I think case closed. I mean, other people have already done it and shown that it can look very similar. I don't think we need to repeat that. To me. I
think the work's been done. And when it comes down to, like I learned from doctor Bruce mcabee, if you can't prove that it's not a balloon, then you really don't have much more to work with here. Still a really good case and a very compelling video. So very thankful to Michelle Reyes, the witness, who is able to share this with us. Great catch. We just got to keep examining these because that's kind of the name of the game. It's a numbers game. We don't have very many videos that
are definitively un identified, you know. So the more of these at we get, the more we learn and the more we can prove something unusual is going on. That's what's so exciting about Enigma and people sharing their videos is that it's better data. It's more data, and that's what we need. Speaking of good and better data, this is a video that I'm really excited about. So this video was taken near Signal Mountain in Tennessee on September thirtieth,
twenty twenty three. And I've got to say Dustin from Utah movef On is the one who pointed this one out to me, and it is a really good one. And I'll make this full screen so you can see it now. It's a ten minute video. We're not going to look at all of the video, but i'll go over the highlights here for you. Let's
go ahead and start at the beginning. So it's a great video. First, nothing happens for about a minute and forty seconds, but if you go forward, let's go forward a bit here, so at about a minute and forty seconds you'll see an object. Right now, you just see stars. These are just stars. But at a minute forty you'll see an object coming in from the bottom right, moving towards the center. Here it comes. It's from the bottom right, moving to the left, and then it moves
and starts going up. So not a satellite, a very weird movement. It's also very slow, so not a bug. A bug would be moving pretty quickly. But it moves up and stops, stops just for a second, and then moves up again again. Something stopping and hovering. A drone. But look, it looks just like the stars in the video, so really weird. This is weird too. So it keeps moving up slowly, kind of slowly, kind of going up, and then it stops and it
stops for about a couple minutes. For a couple minutes, it just sits perfectly still here. What I love about this is that it fits in with the stars. It looks exactly like any of the other stars up there, and it's just sitting there very still. So I'm going to fast forward this because it sits for about two and a half minutes just perfectly still there. Then about five minutes into the video, in just a few seconds here we'll
see it start to move again. So fascinating that it just sits perfectly still there. It does seem a little bit dimmer than before, but here we go. There you go starts moving again slowly across the screen to the left. And just for people who know this looks like a camera that is on somebody's roof. It is a sort of kind of security camera. We are in contact with the witness. The camera is looking up at the sky in
between a couple trees. You just see stars and then this object. Now, this object is kind of more quickly moving through the screen from the right to the left. It's not going in a straight line. And then at about this point it turns around and then it goes back. Now we're about five and a half minutes into the video. Now it is traveling in a straight line back the way it came from. So it's moving fairly quickly. Now it's getting really close to the spot where it hovered for a couple minutes.
It's kind of moving downward a little bit, so it's changing direction once again, just kind of quickly moving and then leaves the screen to the right. How weird is that. This is a really strange video. The period of time where it just sits there. I kind of want to go back to that here it is where it just kind of sits there for a couple of minutes, completely still, and then moves off again. This is a really weird video. It's one solid light that looks like a star that is
moving. Now when it moves around on a screen, you do you see kind of a trail, but that is likely an effect from the camera because it's kind of a it's a you know, it's using the night vision and so anything that will move through the screen will kind of leave a tale like that. We're going to do more analysis on this. In fact, we are getting more videos from this camera to show like how it reacts to maybe a satellite or other things, to see what those look like as opposed to
this object. We're getting information on the direction, you know, trying to figure out elevations, all of this kind of stuff. So we'll be doing an analysis on this. Ben Hansen is helping me out with that. We'll probably get Doug involved with this again, but really really interesting case. I'll post this in the show notes for you guys to watch it if you're listening, and if anybody has any ideas on what this is, let us know, because this is such a weird one. I really don't know what the
heck this is. This is an exciting one for me, so weird, and I've got more. So keep tuning into the show, and don't get disappointed if we figure out what this one is. And I doubt it, I really a this is one that I think it's going to go down as unidentified. But let's say we do figure it out, like we figured out New York. That's okay, because there's more out there. We're getting more and more videos every day, so there's more and more videos like this to
look at every day. So keep an eye on the Enigma Lab social media, keep an eye on my social media because I'm sharing these good ones. And if you've got the app, and I really implore you to have it, be sure to check that content feed and when you open up the app, that'll be the first button on the left, and it's just videos. We're going to be putting more stuff in there, but it's just good videos that I found that I'm posting there that are either really mysterious or cool looking.
We know what they are, but they look really cool. So for instance, you might find some starlink or some rockets or some fireballs like we've seen in the news lately in there, but they're just really cool looking. But what a cool and mysterious video that is. Well, thank you too, Carl Stefan, and thank you to all of you for tuning in once again, o cape an eye on the show notes for links to all of the news and the items that we talked about. And again I just want
to emphasize that we don't have to chase the government for information. We certainly don't have to get conspiratorial in order to just start gathering data and analyzing data on our own as citizens, scientists, as people out in the public,
public citizens interested in this topic. We can gather a lot of data and we have a lot of our own ability to do our own analysis and research and to bring to some of this mysterious information, so thank you so much for joining, and we'll catch you next time.