RICH VALLEY – Rich Valley residents, Ed and Melinda Pardy, saw something unusual and filmed a lightening ball on July 2 in the evening during a storm happening in that area.
“Once the lightning bolt kind of disappeared, the ball of light kind of got bigger, intensified, like, really bright,” said Ed Pardy to Global News.
“I’ve never seen this before,” said Melinda Pardy to Global News.
There were some severe lightning strikes during the storm.
Around 7 p.m., after a particular strike, the Pardys saw the ball of light floating about 20 feet in the air.
The ball of lightning did not move but had the characteristics of lightning in the shape of a circle and was bluish in colour.
The Pardys were able to capture 23 seconds of video of this amazing spectacle of nature.
The ball was approximately a couple of hundred metres from the Pardy house.
There were no changes in shape or colour while the ball danced above the ground before it disappeared in a flash.
There had been a tornado watch and warnings in the area during that evening.
No one was injured during the event.
Pardy said that the ball looked like it was approximately two metres wide.
Lightning strikes are tracked by Environment Canada, and they show that the Edmonton area receives over 32,000 lightning strikes a year.
There is a lightning ball sighting website that tracks reports from all over the world, which was started in 2020 to track lightning location data, according to sciencedigest.com.
There is a Government of Canada lightning map available online where you can track lightning strikes in real time.
