A Harvard Professor's Musings on "UAP Orbs"

 Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has just written a post entitled "Are UAP Orbs an Extension of Ball Lightning?" He states this:

"Ball lightning represents a mysterious phenomenon in atmospheric physics, reported for centuries, photographed rarely, and still lacking a fully confirmed physical explanation, even though it’s almost certainly real.

Witnesses reported a luminous, roughly spherical object, typically of basketball size, lasting for a few seconds to a few minutes. The average ball lightning appears as a sphere with a diameter of 30 centimeters, a luminosity similar to a 100-Watt lamp, and a lifetime of about 10 seconds (as reported here). This duration is much shorter than most orbs associated with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), which were reported by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to have lasted hours (for example, here)."

There have been very many reports of mysterious orbs seen with the naked eye. You can read about such reports in my 200+ posts with a label of "orbs visible to naked eye," which you can read by using the link here, and continuing to press Older Posts when you come to the bottom right. The vast majority of these reports cannot be classified as "ball lightning." The flow chart below gives a reasonable method for whether a mysterious orb seen with the naked eye should be classified as "ball lightning."

Scientists have no understanding of how lightning or electricity could ever form into balls having the visual characteristics of the spheres reported in observations classified as "ball lightning." Experimentation fails to ever produce such spheres. So you are not doing much of anything to explain the phenomenon of people seeing mysterious orbs by saying that they are seeing ball lightning. 

At the end of the article Loeb says that "the uncertainties inherent in current interpretations of UAP orbs" will be resolved by "high-quality data collected by state-of-the-art instruments." He lists 13 types of technological gizmos that he thinks will reveal the nature of UAP orbs: acceleration/distance sensors, spectrometers, Geiger counters, wide-field visible camera arrays, high-resolution global-shutter tracking cameras, long-wave infrared thermal cameras, event-based cameras, short-wavelength infrared cameras, radio-Frequency spectrum analyzers with direction finding, precision clocks with atomic holdover,  cloud sensor/ceilometers, star tracker/astrometric calibration cameras and acoustic microphone arrays with infrasound sensors. 

But given how infrequently people report seeing mysterious orbs, it is very unlikely that any such devices will be of much use. You could also invest in such fancy and expensive technological devices to try to unravel the mystery of apparition sightings. But it would be a misguided approach, because it would be very unlikely that such a device would be present at the rare times when someone reported seeing an apparition. 

There is a much better and much simpler approach: spend lots of time gathering, classifying  and studying existing reports of mysterious orbs and all other spooky unexplained phenomena, instead of being so prone to discard and ignore reports of mysterious explained phenomena, which tragically is a very bad tendency of the average materialist science. During the past 70 years most physical scientists have been guilty of extremely bad dereliction of duty, by following a "nothing spooky allowed" principle under which they would discard or ignore any type of report that does not fit in with their assumptions and beliefs.