Ball lightning, does it exist?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
The Wikipedia article talks about the ball lightning as "an unexplained atmospheric electrical phenomenon". I am going to argue that the ball lightning almost certainly does not exist as a physical phenomenon. Instead, most sightings of the ball lightning are probably optical after-images in the eye of the observer.

Advent of camera phones and the ball lightning

According to the Wikipedia article, in year 1960, 5 % of U.S. population claimed having seen the ball lightning. The phenomenon is described as a light ball lasting up to 20 seconds. Sometimes the ball lightning appears indoors. I personally had a close relative who said that he had seen a ball lightning hovering above their kitchen stove.

Now that almost everybody is carrying a camera phone in their pocket, we would expect to see an explosion in the number of photographs and videos of the ball lightning. Thousands of such pictures should be snapped every year!

But from the Internet I can find few modern pictures of the ball lightning. A Google image search brings up some old drawings of the ball lightning inside a house, and some outdoors shots of various lights. Looks like the ball lightning has become very "shy" at the advent of camera phones. It no longer appears so often. The simple explanation for this is that the phenomenon never existed physically.

Ball lightning likes houses and humans?

The classic ball lightning story is that it enters a home through a chimney, moves around in a room, and throws small objects, like books, around. The father of my best friend told that as a child, during World War II he was reading a newspaper, when a ball lightning appeared and behaved just like in the classic story. He said that he did not notice any ball lightning by himself, but the other people present in the room were terrified and told this story afterwards to him.

The question is, why does a ball lightning enter homes? Is the ball lightning an intelligent being who likes to frighten humans? If a ball lightning by chance goes inside through a narrow chimney, we should have at least a thousand times more ball lightnings circling around in the yard of the house! The simple explanation is that the phenomenon does not exist physically, but only in the minds of humans.

Automatic cameras

There are probably millions of surveillance cameras in the world which record video. Using a Google search, I was not able to find a single surveillance video which would contain a ball lightning. This is in a huge contrast to the fact that several percent of people claim to have observed a ball lightning, often only a few meters away.

Scientific explanations for the ball lightning

Wikipedia lists several hypotheses which attempt to explain the ball lightning as a physical phenomenon. For some of the hypotheses, there exist laboratory experiments that create some kind of a glowing ball. But there is no adequate explanation how the glowing ball could form in nature, or even inside a house. For example, the vaporized silicon hypothesis has hard time explaining how the burning silicon can enter houses.

Ball lightning as an after-image in the eye

I believe the after-image hypothesis can explain many ball lightning observations. A lightning strikes close to the observer, and the bright flash of lightning leaves an after-image in the eye of the observer. The after-image may appear like a glowing ball to the perplexed observer. After-images in  the eye tend to "float" slowly as the eye turns. That would explain the typical floating slow movement which is reported about ball lightnings.

Ball lightning as a sociological phenomenon

It is natural for a human being to be impressed by the power of a thunderstorm, a giant and violent act of nature. Stories of ball lightning can spice up ordinary stories of thunder. This may explain why people like to interpret what they see as a semi-mystical phenomenon. They like to tell about these experiences to other people.

Relationship to UFO's and ghosts

The ball lightning could be classified as a subcategory of UFO's, Unidentified Flying Objects. Stories of the ball lightning can also be compared to stories of ghosts. Stories of UFO's, ball lightnings, and ghosts serve a psychological and sociological purpose. What are the common characteristics of these stories, and what are the differences? I will later write some thoughts about this.