CENTEYA WREAKS HAVOC
Daniel A. recalls a remarkable experience with ball lighting that his family had in 1979. He was eight then in their small town called Villa Ahumada in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, which is about three hours south of El Paso, Texas. On this evening, a huge storm was heading their way, and Daniel's dad proceeded to close up all the windows. And, storm or not, Daniel's mother told him and his sister that they had to take baths before bed, his six-year-old sister first and then he. While Daniel waited for his sister to finish her shower, he decided to turn on the TV to watch his favorite show, The Incredible Hulk.
"Lightning and thunder were booming outside and it made the windows vibrate," Daniel says. "When I tried to turn on the TV, nothing happened because my dad had disconnected the power cord from the outlet for safety's sake. Since I was a little kid, I decided to plug it in again. When I tried to plug it in, I heard the biggest bang of my life and felt a big force hitting me in the chest and laying me flat on the floor. I wasn't hurt or anything, I just felt pushed.
"Then it came. I saw a big ball of light about the size of a basketball hovering in the hallway. It made incredibly loud sounds, and there were sparks flying all over the place. This lasted about one second, and then it 'flew' away from my line of sight, through the hallway and toward the bathroom at the end of the hall. I heard my mother scream and so I ran out of my room. When I reached the hallway, it was full of smoke, and I could smell 'burnt metal,' like a soldering smell. My mother was screaming as she ran into the bathroom. She said she saw the ball of light running through the hallway and going through the closed bathroom door. Amazingly, the wooden door itself was unaffected!
"When she opened the door, she screamed again because my sister was not there – there was only a burnt hole about the size of a baseball in the mosquito net that covered the bathroom's window. My mother desperately screamed for my sister, only to discover that she was hiding behind the toilet in a fetal position, scared out of her wits. My sister later said that she got really scared because this 'big and bright scary thing' flew into the bath as she was undressing, so she hid behind the toilet until it was gone.
"No one was really harmed, and my dad couldn't believe what had happened. The whole episode was over in less than ten seconds. We analyzed the path that the ball lightning had taken through the house, and we came to the conclusion that it entered through the hallway, because there was another burnt hole in a vent that was right in the middle of the hall, on the roof. So our conclusion was that it entered through the vent and left through the bathroom window.
"The curious thing is that the vent it used to enter the house was in the middle of the hall. My room was to the left end of the hallway, and the bathroom was at the left (opposite) end. Since I saw the ball lightning first, it meant that the lightning entered the house, flew left toward my room, stopped in front of my door, and then flew in the opposite direction toward the bathroom before it exited. I had never heard of ball lightning before. That was when my dad introduced me to the word centeya (pronounced cent-a-ya) which, he said, was the exact term used by Mexicans to define ball lightning."
BALL LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE
Seeing ball lighting once in a lifetime is a special experience. Seeing twice is very rare indeed, but Rob W. says that he and his grandmother actually had that privilege. He was about four years old when he and his mother were living with his grandparents at their home in Southeast Texas.
Again, it was bad weather: a thunderstorm had rolled in and there was a large clap of thunder. "All of a sudden, a volleyball-sized ball of electricity appeared outside of my grandmother's window," Rob vividly recalls. "The ball was about 3½ feet above the ground. It moved the length of the window – about six feet – in a rolling, wave-like motion. After the ball passed the edge of the window, I distinctly remember my grandmother grabbing me as I ran toward the window to see where it went. It disappeared."
Rob doesn't remember the second occasion as clearly, and isn't sure if there was a storm or not. What he does remember is that he and his grandmother were in the kitchen. "My grandmother had a large stove, which had storage beneath the burners and a double oven above the burners," he says. "Over the oven was a hooded vent. Suddenly, we heard a crackling noise, kind of like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. The smell was also very similar. We looked up and between the vent and the oven was a softball-sized ball of electricity. My grandmother held me tight in front of her out of fear for my safety as we both watched this ball move no more than six inches left or right. My guess is it came down the exhaust pipe from the roof. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, it vanished."
