Original headline:
Great balls o' fire
"What was that?" Chris Hardy asked his uncle.
Brad Hardy didn't hear the question. He was keyed in on the thunderstorm he was watching through the viewfinder of his camcorder.
He had not seen what Chris saw, an eerie ball of light crossing the sky near their Osceola home about 9:30 p.m. Aug. 21.
Chris was spooked. He decided he had seen enough for the night.
"I went inside the house, bolted the door and went to bed," he said.
Hours later, about 3 a.m., Brad Hardy woke Chris up. "You have to see the tape," he said.
They ran the videotape again and again. What was it? What sort of thing would float across the sky like that?
"They just went running around the house looking for encyclopedias," said Connie Hardy, who is Brad's mother and Chris' grandmother.
"We thought about a shooting star," Chris said. "But it was too cloudy for that."
A jet or a helicopter? No pilot in his right mind would be flying on a night like that.
A UFO?
That idea was in the back of his mind when Chris, a sophomore at Penn High School, took the videotape to school.
He showed it to some teachers there, and that's how the Hardy family began their research into ball lightning.
They found that ball lightning is one of those quirks of nature that scientists haven't quite figured out.
For years, some scientists even argued that ball lightning didn't exist. Several sources indicated ball lightning has never been caught on videotape.
"We got it," Brad Hardy said.
They're trying to contact a variety of experts to see just how unique their videotape is.
Is this like having photographic evidence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot or men from Mars?
Or is it something that will raise the eyebrows of just a few meteorologists?
The people who study lightning likely will want to see the tape, said Nancy Roth, marketing manager for Vaisala Inc. of Tucson, Ariz.
Vaisala operates the U.S. National Lightning Detection Network, which provides lightning strike information to the National Weather Service.
"Ball lightning is not well-studied and it's not well-documented," she said. "If there are photographs, they're very unusual.
"A videotape would be very much of interest to the lightning community," she said. "But the lightning community is fairly small."
Rick Mecklenburg, WSBT-TV meteorologist, had a chance to see the videotape.
"It's amazing," he said.
"I can't believe you got that on tape," he told the Hardy family. "There's no doubt in my mind that you have it."
Brad Hardy said ball lightning is rare because the conditions that cause it are so unusual.
Aug. 21 was one of those stiflingly hot nights. Oddly, as the evening storm rolled through, the temperatures seemed to go up instead of down.
It was such an unusual storm, with a constant flashing of lightning, he decided to make a videotape for his mom, who was visiting a friend in the hospital.
Brad Hardy is a carpenter by trade but a weather watcher by preference, a passion he developed at an early age.
Years ago, he would be playing outside in the puddles during storms that sent the rest of the family into the basement for cover, his mother said.
"He'd be soaking wet," she said. "He's been like this since he was 6 or 7 years old."
For the past year or so, he's interested his nephew in the hobby.
"Whenever there's a good storm, I ride with him," Chris said. "We've chased storms all the way to Ohio."
On Aug. 21, they were watching from their yard. The tape's soundtrack shows it was a relatively quiet evening, except for an unusual number of crickets.
Chris said the ball lightning made no sound at all as it loped across the sky.
"It looked like it was really close to me," he said. "It looked like it skimmed across our tree line.
"It happened so fast, I didn't have time to think."
