A luminous floating sphere of what could be electricity was spotted near Brisbane, Australia, according to a video posted on YouTube.

The cameraman filmed the UFO at a distance in January last year, and believes it was ball lightning.


As the object moves across the sky, it behaves similarly to lightning, flickering orange and yellow, and is accompanied by thunder.

It looks like a small moving sun and its size oscillates with each flicker as it travels around throughout the video which lasts over a minute.

Ball lightning is so rare that no reliable scientific data are available. It is said to appear after thunderstorms and be visible for several seconds, ie a hundred thousand times longer than flash lightning.

Some research has been done on ball lightning. In 2006, German scientists made plasma clouds like ball lightning above water. The balls lasted almost half a second and had diameters of 10 to 20 centimeters.

Last year, lightning researchers at the University of Florida used tethered rockets to trigger and direct lightning to the ground with a variety of materials, and managed to create some short-lived balls of fire.

However, based on these luminous events, ball lightning could simply be a vaporized material that is ignited by lightning and burns briefly.