An account in Is�re, France

On September 12, 1976, at around 10:50 p.m., a family observes a luminous phenomenon near their home. On the doorstep, one of the witnesses feels intense heat around their home and their attention is drawn to an elliptical shape of incandescent white with a luminous halo. This phenomenon, which is behind trees, lasts about two minutes and descends toward the ground. It disappears suddenly. A few moments earlier, a disturbance had been noted on the television screen and an animal had been suddenly frightened. The next day, the gendarmerie finds no trace on the ground in the observation area. A neighbor will testify to having heard around 11:00 p.m. something like a clap of thunder and noted a power outage for a few minutes, but he saw nothing of the phenomenon. This observation case was long classified as C for lack of information. It was recently submitted to an expert on lightning phenomena. The atmospheric conditions at the time of the observation and the description of the phenomenon's behavior are compatible with the hypothesis of a manifestation of atmospheric electricity called ball lightning or globular lightning. This case is classified as B: probable observation of a globular lightning phenomenon.