Ball Lightning

The captain said, “Sure. I said that what I saw that time is without a doubt the thing you’re talking about. It was during the Yangtze River flood of 1998. I flew out toward the disaster area for an airdrop. I was at an altitude of seven hundred meters when I carelessly flew into a thundercloud. Totally a no-fly zone, but for a while I couldn’t get out. The air currents in the cloud buffeted the aircraft like a leaf, and my head kept bumping against the hatch. Most of the instruments were jittering randomly, and nothing was clear on the radio. It was pitch black outside. Suddenly a bolt of lightning lit up, and then I saw it: about the size of a basketball, giving off orange light, and when the bolt appeared the static on the radio grew even worse…”

“Listen carefully to what he says next,” Lin Yun told me.

“…The ball of light floated around the craft, not too fast, first from the nose to the tail, and then vertically up through the rotors, and then back down through the rotors into the cabin again. It floated for about half a minute, and then it suddenly disappeared.”

“Wait. Replay that last part!” I shouted. Like Lin Yun had said, this eyewitness account was unusual.

The video rewound, and after it replayed that section, it continued with Lin Yun asking the question I wanted to: “Were you hovering or flying?”

“Could I hover in a thundercloud? Of course I was flying. Speed at least four hundred. I was looking for an exit from the cloud.”

“You must have remembered incorrectly. You must have been hovering. It’s not right otherwise.”

“I know what you’re thinking. That’s what’s so weird about it. The airflow had no effect on it at all! Even if I’m misremembering, or had the wrong impression at the time and I really was hovering, the rotors were still rotating constantly, and that airflow was enormous. Besides, wouldn’t there be wind? But the fireball just turned very slowly around the helicopter. Taking relative speeds into account, it was moving very fast, but it wasn’t affected at all by the air.”

“This is really important information!” I said. “There’s evidence of this in lots of previous records, like eyewitness accounts saying that when ball lightning entered a room through a window or door, wind was blowing in, or other accounts that straight-out describe ball lightning as moving against the wind, but none of them are as believable as this. If the motion of ball lightning really isn’t affected by air currents, then the plasma theory is untenable. But that’s what the majority of current ball lightning theory is based on. Can I talk to the pilot?”

“Impossible.” She shook her head. “Well, let’s get down to business. First off, I’d like you to take a look at what we’ve been doing the past two years.” She picked up the phone and seemed to be arranging a tour. Evidently Gao Bo’s mission would be easily completed. I took a look around Lin Yun’s desk.

The first thing I noticed was a group photo of her and several PLA Marines wearing blue-and-white marine camouflage. Lin Yun was the only woman, and she looked quite young, with a childish face and a submachine gun clutched in her arms like a puppy. A sergeant. Several landing craft were on the water behind them, and there was residual smoke from explosions in the vicinity.

“You went from the army to university?” I asked, and she nodded, still on the phone.

Another photo caught my eye, this one of a young navy captain, handsome, charismatic, against the background of the carrier Zhufeng, which appeared so often in the media. Immediately I had the fierce desire to ask Lin Yun who he was, but I held back.

She had finished her call by this point, and said, “Let’s go. I’ll take you to see the non-results we’ve come up with in two years.”

As we left and took the elevator downstairs, she said, “We’ve put tremendous effort into lightning weapons these two years. Two subprojects, neither successful, and now the project has been canceled. This weapons system went the furthest and had the highest funding out of all of New Concepts, but it ended badly.”

In the lobby, I noticed lots of people smiling at Lin Yun and greeting her, and I sensed that her status exceeded that of an ordinary major.

Exiting the building, Lin Yun took me to a small car. As we sat in the front seats, I caught another whiff of that bitter aroma of grass after the rain, so carefree. Yet this time there was a more ethereal aroma, like the last wisp of cloud in a boundless clear sky, or a fleeting chime in a deep mountain valley. I sniffed once or twice to capture it.

“Do you like this perfume?” she said, glancing at me with a smile.

“Oh… don’t they stop you from wearing perfume in the army?” I played innocent.

“Sometimes it’s allowed.”