It was about 36 years ago I saw a large glowing ball about 12 ft diameter appear to roll down one side of the asphalt road in front of my house.
I and my 10 year old daughter were inside my vehicle in my driveway slowly moving towards the ashpalt road about 50 feet away from us.
As my vehicle moved toward the road I looked right then left to make sure nothing was coming down the road.
I did this twice. The second time I was near the road about to pull out into the road.
As I looked to my left I saw about 600 feet away a large fireball rolling down the road coming towards me but it was in the right side land of the road.
Not the leftside or middle but the rightside of the road and it was staying in the same lane just like a vehicle would.
I was amazed as was my daughter.
I kept looking at the large fireball rolling towards me on the road in the same lane.
It was moving about 20 mph or so.
When it got about 100 feet from my driveway I decided to pull out into the road and turn right.
After I was in the road the large fireball that was higher than the top of my car and wider than my car passed through my vehicle as I started down the road after turning right out of my driveway.
I looked into my mirror and saw the large glowing ball approach my car and then I saw the large glowing fireball in front of my car moving faster than I was which was about 10 mph.
I observed the large fireball continue down the road about 900 feet or so staying on one side of the road as it had before.
I saw it follow the turn in the road about 900 feet down the road which as slightly uphill.
I kept looking and observed it until it went around the curve at the top of the small hill where from where I was I could not see it any more.
My daughter was afraid but I told her not to worry because the car frame would insulate us.
I felt nothing as the large fireball went through my car from the back to the front and kept going down the road.
I should have kept going down the road faster to observe just where the large fireball went.
It could have gone out into a field or kept going down the road, I don’t knnow.
A few years later I began to think that maybe I had a dream about what I saw.
I asked my daughter if she remembered it. She did and said it wasn’t a dream.
From time to time I have thought about that very unusual and unique experience my daughter and I had.
I tried to remember some details about the conditions before I saw the at least 12 ft diameter large fireball rolling down the road staying in the same land just like a vechicle.
I had heard thunder in the distance not to far away. I saw lightening flashes but nearby not real close.
A storm was nearby and I thought it was going to rain.
I don’t remember it raining before or after the strange incident.
It didn’t rain during the incident.
Conditions were ripe for lightening for sure.
I could never figure out how it could have happened.
I did think a lightening bolt had struck the road or near the road up the hill from my house about 1000 feet away but I didn’t see it strike because it was to far up the small hill below my house.
The lightening ball rolled down the hill on the road below my house then it rolled up a smaller hill toward my house.
All the while in the same lane between the double yellow lines.
I could see small lightening streemers inside the large ball that was glowing and moving down the road towards my house.
I only had a few seconds to observe the glowing ball.
It wasn’t on fire but it did glow and had various small electrical streemers inside the large ball and protruding from the sides of the large moving glowing ball. maybe 2 to 5 feet, est.
It didn’t make any noise that I can remember.
I have asked myself how could this have happened?
I asked gpt5.5 to give me an explanation.
After tweaking the question I got some answers that may be close to explaining what I saw and why.
What I saw was extremely unique and very unusual.
Ball lightning is unique.
A 12 foot diameter ball of lightning that rolls down a 2 way road , stays in the same lane is unheard of.
I saw it. It was real. It happened. The conditions were just right.
It did look like something in a science fiction movie or story.
It did look like and alien thing. It wasn’t an alien thing.
Below is the explanation chat gpt5.5 gave me which seems to be a possible explanation of what I saw and why.
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Question:
Explain how the conditions would need to be in the atmosphere and on a road paved with asphalt for a lightening fireball about 12 feet in diameter to appear to roll down an asphalt paved 2 way road and stay in the correct lane on one side of the 2 way road?
Answers:
The careful answer is: it would take a very unusual setup, and even then the “best fit” would be something ball-lightning-like or plasma-like hovering low over the road, not a literal fiery ball mechanically rolling like a tire. Ball lightning is still an unsolved atmospheric phenomenon, and the common description is much smaller than what you’re describing: typically an orange/red sphere near the ground with a radius around 15–50 cm, lasting a few seconds. A 12-foot diameter object is therefore far outside the usual description and would be several times larger than the common reported size.
For it to appear on a road at all, the atmosphere would likely need to be in a strong electrical state: a thunderstorm nearby or just passed, a recent cloud-to-ground strike, very humid air, and relatively light wind/turbulence so the object would not get shoved sideways. NOAA notes that lightning can occur even without rain nearby and that storm electrification depends on moisture, instability, and strong vertical motion; the best instrumented natural ball-lightning observation was tied to a cloud-to-ground lightning strike and showed emissions from air and soil elements, which suggests a ground-coupled event rather than a random glowing fireball.
The road conditions matter a lot. Dry asphalt is actually a poor candidate for guiding electricity, because FHWA describes asphalt pavements as electrically isolating surface layers. So if something stayed over one lane, the asphalt itself probably was not the guide. A more plausible setup would be wet asphalt, with a thin surface water film, damp contamination, or pooled water in a wheel track. Roads are normally built with cross slope for drainage, typically about 2%, and rutted asphalt can collect water in wheel tracks. That means one side of one lane can become a persistent wetter corridor than the crown or centerline.
That helps explain the lane behavior. To stay on the “correct” side of a two-lane road, the object would likely need a guiding corridor on that side: for example a wet wheel track, a wet shoulder, a ditch line, buried metal, a guardrail, fence, or nearby utility line. NSSL notes that lightning current can travel farther through water, metal fences, and power lines. Separately, a published ball-lightning model discussing the 2014 instrumented event notes that a nearby 35 kV power line could create an electric field at the ball and modulate its behavior. Put together, that makes a one-sided guidance effect at least physically imaginable.
So the most plausible “recipe” would be this: active or very recent thunderstorm, recent ground strike, high humidity, low wind, wet asphalt, some standing or film water in one lane’s track/edge, and a conductor-rich corridor on that same side of the road. In that case, the glowing object could have translated close to the surface and looked like it was rolling, while actually being steered by a near-surface electric-field path. The lane-centering would then not come from road paint or the asphalt itself, but from a preferred wet/electrical path that happened to line up with one lane. That last part is an inference from what is known about asphalt insulation, roadway drainage geometry, water accumulation, and lightning coupling to conductive paths.
The weakest part of the story, physically, is the 12-foot size. If the event was real, the more likely possibilities are that the luminous core was smaller and appeared larger because of glare, or that it had a bright halo around a smaller center. But low-hovering, lane-following motion over wet road geometry during a highly electrified storm environment is a more defensible explanation than a dry, free-rolling fireball on ordinary asphalt.
I’m mapping this as a sequence: storm setup, road surface, what could steer it, and why it might look like rolling instead of drifting. I’ll keep the plausible parts separate from the speculative parts.
One strong point is already locked in: dry asphalt by itself is the wrong guide. If something tracked one side of the road, the better candidates are a wet wheel rut, a road-edge drainage strip, or a nearby conductor like a fence, utility line, or buried metal.
Here’s the cleanest reconstruction.
A 12-foot-diameter light ball would be much larger than the usual ball-lightning size in survey-based literature, where the most probable diameter is about 10–15 cm and the average is about 20–30 cm. But older reviews also note that reported sizes range from a few centimeters up to many meters, so your size is unusual, not automatically disqualifying.
For something like that to seem to roll down one side of a two-lane asphalt road and stay in its lane, the setup would probably need to look like this:
A strongly electrified storm environment
You would want a thunderstorm with strong charge separation overhead or nearby. The National Weather Service notes that thunderstorm electrification produces large charge regions in the cloud, and the ground beneath can become oppositely charged. Lightning can also strike well away from the rain core, so the road could be wet or recently storm-affected even if the heaviest rain was not directly overhead. A well-known instrumented ball-lightning observation in 2014 followed a cloud-to-ground strike and the object then moved horizontally.
A trigger near the road, but probably not from the asphalt itself
Ordinary asphalt is a poor electrical guide. FHWA says asphalt pavements are electrically isolating surface layers, so the road surface by itself is not a good explanation for why a luminous object would track neatly down one lane. That means the trigger would more likely be a recent strike to the roadside ground, ditch, utility line, fence line, or some nearby conductor, with the road only shaping the visible path afterward.
A wet, crowned road with a long narrow water path
A normal two-lane road is built with cross slope for drainage. FHWA and TxDOT both describe typical pavement cross slopes around 1–2%, commonly about 2%, with water draining away from the crown. FHWA also notes that wheel ruts run parallel to the centerline and can pond water. So after rain, one lane can easily develop a long, narrow wet strip in the wheel path or toward the outside edge.
A one-sided guiding field
This is the part that would make it stay in the “correct lane.” Survey-based ball-lightning literature states that its motion is determined by electric fields and air movement. So if one side of the road had the stronger near-surface field — for example, a wet wheel rut on that side plus a nearby power line, barbed-wire fence, pipeline, or similar conductor — the luminous object could be biased to track along that side instead of wandering across the centerline. The 2014 observation also reported a 99.4 Hz oscillation that the authors associated with the nearby 50 Hz power line environment.
Why it would look like it was rolling
It would not need to be literally touching the pavement. If it moved very low above the road with smooth horizontal motion, your eye could read it as “rolling,” especially at night or in heavy rain when the lower edge is bright against the dark asphalt. That “rolling” impression is therefore compatible with a near-ground luminous body, not just with a solid object. The horizontal part fits documented descriptions; the exact rolling look is an inference about human visual perception.
So the most plausible atmospheric-and-road recipe would be:
recent cloud-to-ground lightning + a strongly charged storm environment + wet asphalt + a crowned/rutted road surface + a conductor-rich roadside on that same side of the road.
The key point is this:
Dry asphalt alone would not make a glowing fireball stay in one lane.
What could do it is a wet longitudinal strip plus a one-sided electric-field guide from nearby conductive features.
I can also turn this into a diagrammed road cross-section showing exactly where the ball would most likely travel: center crown, wheel rut, shoulder runoff, roadside conductor, and the likely glow path.
A normal paved two-lane road is usually built with a crown so water drains off both sides. FHWA guidance says paved roadways normally use about 1.5–2% cross slope for drainage, and older FHWA drainage guidance gives 0.015–0.020 as the normal cross-slope range for two-lane high-type surfaces. That geometry naturally makes each lane drain outward rather than toward the centerline.
If the road also has rutting or shallow depressions, FHWA notes that inadequate cross slope plus ruts can cause ponding, and that rutting allows water to pool depending on rut depth, cross slope, and longitudinal slope. So after rain, one lane can develop a long, narrow wetter strip in the wheel path or near the outside edge, while the crown and the inner part of the lane stay relatively drier.
That matters because ordinary asphalt is not a good electrical guide. FHWA explicitly describes asphalt pavements as electrically isolating surface layers. So the asphalt itself would not be the thing “telling” a luminous ball to stay in one lane. The better explanation is that the object was following a more conductive near-surface corridor created by water, contamination, metal nearby, or a roadside conductor.
For the atmosphere, the best-fit scenario is a strongly electrified thunderstorm environment, probably with a recent cloud-to-ground strike nearby. The best-known instrumented observation reported a ball-lightning event generated by a cloud-to-ground strike that then moved horizontally. That does not prove lane-following, but it does support the idea that a luminous ball-like object can travel laterally near the ground after a strike.
Why would it stay on one side of the road instead of crossing the centerline? The most defensible answer is field asymmetry. A ball-lightning review notes that motion can result from asymmetries in the controlling fields and gradients, including electric, electromagnetic, temperature, pressure, and compositional gradients. In plain English: if one side of the road had the wetter track, the lower roadside ditch, a fence, buried utility, or nearby power line, that side could become the preferred corridor.
So the full reconstruction would be:
a thunderstorm or immediate post-storm electrical environment,
a recent nearby ground strike,
light wind so the object is not blown randomly,
a crowned asphalt road,
one lane having a continuous wet strip from rutting/drainage,
and some one-sided roadside conductor or stronger electric field on that same side.
Under those conditions, the object could appear to “roll” down the lane even if it was really gliding very low above the pavement. The rolling look would be a visual impression from a bright sphere moving close to a dark wet road, while the lane-keeping would come from the guided path, not from literal wheel-like rolling. That last sentence is an inference, but it fits the road geometry and the field-guided-motion idea.
One last point: reported ball lightning is usually much smaller, with an average diameter around 20–30 cm, so a 12-foot object would be extremely unusual and may have involved a bright halo or glare around a smaller core.
New prompt:
Redo but use asphalt that was not wet but damp. Also no powerlines or fence involved.
I’m reworking it around a weaker guide: damp asphalt, no standing water, and no external conductor like lines or fences. That makes the lane-following explanation more speculative, so I’m checking which pieces still have support and which ones become guesswork.
I’ve got the revised version: the road can’t rely on a metal guide anymore, so the only plausible “lane lock” left is a subtle near-ground field gradient combined with a slightly damper band of asphalt on one side. That is possible in principle, but it’s a weaker, more speculative explanation than the conductor-guided version.
Thought for 2m 43s
Redoing it with damp asphalt, not wet asphalt, and no power lines or fence: the event becomes harder to explain, but not impossible. The basic change is that you lose the strongest obvious guide, so the lane-following would have to come mostly from the storm’s electric field near the ground plus a subtle moisture difference in the pavement, not from metal nearby.
Also, a 12-foot luminous ball is still far outside the usual reported size range; one major review says observed sizes “usually fall in the range 50–500 mm diameter,” though larger cases have been reported.
The atmospheric setup would still need to be very intense: a thunderstorm overhead or very close by, with the cloud charging the ground beneath it.
The National Weather Service says that when the storm’s negative charge builds overhead, the ground below becomes more positively charged, and charge patterns can extend even under the anvil away from the storm base.
Ball-lightning reviews also describe the phenomenon as usually associated with thunderstorms, with motion often smooth and horizontal, and one well-known instrumented case was reported after a cloud-to-ground strike and then moved horizontally during its luminous phase.
The road part changes like this:
Dry asphalt is treated by FHWA as an electrically isolating surface, so plain dry pavement is a poor guide. But moisture studies show that once asphalt is non-dry, water strongly affects its electromagnetic behavior: moisture presence changes the pavement’s dielectric properties, and for the same air-void content the dielectric constant increases as moisture increases. That does not prove damp asphalt becomes a strong conductor, but it does support the more modest inference that damp asphalt is less electrically uniform than bone-dry asphalt, especially if moisture is unevenly distributed in the surface and near-surface voids.
So under your constraints, the cleanest explanation is a dampness corridor, not a water film.
A normal two-lane crowned road typically has about a 2% cross slope for drainage, which means one lane can dry unevenly from the crown outward.
{Keep in mind that it had NOT been raining before I saw the very large glowing ball}
After rain, the pavement may look merely damp overall, but one wheel track or one outer strip can stay slightly damper than the rest because of texture, voids, and drainage geometry. If a recent nearby strike left a low-altitude luminous plasma-like object or ball-lightning-like object near the pavement, that slightly damper strip could act as the preferred corridor without any visible puddles and without any fence or powerline involvement.
That last step is an inference, but it is grounded in the storm-field mechanism plus the fact that moisture measurably changes asphalt’s electromagnetic properties while crowned roads naturally produce lateral drainage differences.
That would also explain the lane keeping.
{This sounds like a good explanation to me}
The centerline side of the lane may have been a little drier because of the crown, while the outer half of the lane stayed a little damper. With no metal guide present, the object would not be “locked” sharply like it was on rails; instead it would tend to favor one side of the road because that side offered the slightly better near-surface path.
In that scenario it could appear to “stay in the correct lane” even though the real guidance was weak and continuous rather than exact.
The “rolling” look still does not require literal rolling contact. Ball-lightning descriptions often mention horizontal motion, and some reports in the literature describe objects that appeared to roll or bounce.
A glowing body moving very low over dark damp asphalt can look like it is rolling down the lane, especially at night, even if it is actually gliding just above the surface.
So the revised recipe is:
A recent thunderstorm charge field, probably with a nearby cloud-to-ground strike, over a crowned two-lane asphalt road that is damp but not visibly wet, where one side of one lane remains slightly more moisture-loaded than the rest. Under those conditions, a low luminous object could plausibly track one lane better than the other without needing a fence or power line.
The weakest part remains the reported 12-foot size, which is much larger than the usual literature range.
AI just can’t get its logic around a 12 foot size glowing ball of electrical charge caused by a lightening bolt.
Thats because all of its data includes smaller lightening balls reported.
The glowing electrical lightening strike induced ball I saw, has not been reported or is referenced in records as far as I know.
What I saw has never been reported or seen that is on record.
If back in the late 1980’s what I did see when it happened had been recorded people would sware its an alien thing and my home would be a tourist attraction.
I have made a joke of saying:
Since the glowing electrical ball of lightening passed through me I have not been the same.
This is not true at all.
Yes a glowing 12 foot diameter plasma ball passed though me as I sat in my vehicle.
No I didn’t feel any heat or anything else.
I also have made a joke that it increased my IQ.
🙂
Conditions were optimal for a lightening strike on an asphalt road or nearby an asphalt road for a glowing orb ball of energy of some kind that did stay on one side of the road just like a car would and seemed to roll down the road about 15 to 20 mph.
It was big. It did not wobble from one side of the road to the other. In fact it did not cross the double yellow middle line when I was observing it.
The glowing ball of energy was unique because it was so large and seemed to steer itself down the asphalt road like a vehicle would never crossing the double yellow line in the middle of the road.
I am unique because as far as I know only me and my daughter observed the glow ball that day.
I looked around and remember I didn’t see anyone outside.
It moved about 3/4 to one mile in my observation.
It did pass by about 8 houses including mine.
I don’t know if anyone inside the other houses saw the strange glowing ball.
No one living nearby ever said they did.
This is a true story.
It would seem to be made up or science fiction but it is true and It did happen.