Weird Weather cases in The Catalog

PLATE Nº 06WEIRD WEATHERSp. anomalum atmosphericum

Engraving of ball lightning crossing a forest clearing

The Hessdalen lights have shown up on schedule for 40 years.

Ball lightning is a weather phenomenon that physics doesn't have a settled mechanism for. Eyewitness reports go back to Aristotle. The Hessdalen Valley in Norway hosts a related phenomenon — luminous balls that drift through the air for seconds to minutes, repeatable enough that a permanent monitoring station has watched them since 1984. The local field has measured radio bursts, magnetic anomalies, and rapid plasma decay. None of the four leading theoretical models predicts the observed lifetime.

40+ years

of continuous instrumented observation of the Hessdalen lights

Project Hessdalen has produced over 100 scientific reports without a settled mechanism.

Østfold University College — Project Hessdalen — Østfold University Collegeretrieved 2026-05-24

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The Hessdalen Lights

Beginning December 1981, residents of a remote valley in central Norway started seeing bright luminous objects hovering and darting through the sky — sometimes 15 to 20 times per week. Forty years later, Project Hessdalen runs an instrumented observatory there. Spectrometers, magnetometers, and radar all detect the lights. Plasma, piezoelectricity, and scandium-ion mechanisms have been proposed. None fully account for what the instruments record.

1981-12

Catatumbo Lightning

Over the mouth of the Catatumbo River, where it spills into Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo, lightning storms flare on 140 to 160 nights a year, up to nine hours at a stretch. It is Earth's most lightning-dense spot and holds a Guinness World Record. Far from a mystery, it is a textbook case of geography: mountains, a warm lake, and converging night winds that brew storms almost daily.