Batman Jr. said:
Are the centellas invisible to the naked eye, or are the scientists just assuming that they weren't obvious enough to have been noticed without the I.R. camera?
Now I have done some reading on those ball lightnings.
There are several kinds of ball lightning, and two types are invisible to the naked eye: Those are the types: silver and black,
they are only detectable by radar - and now IR cameras. They come in a variety of diffrent forms, shapes, colors, brightness's and behaviors. Their lifetime ranges from seconds to minutes.
They contain a massive amount of energy:
In the city of Habarovsk, Russia, a sphere of ball lightning fell into a reservoir containing approximately 7,000 liters of water. In ten second the water started to boil. It boiled for approximately ten seconds. Then the sphere of ball lightning exploded. The yield of this ball lightning was the equivalent of two tons of TNT.
Source
It's a weird phenomena. However, it's not just theory, one can actually replicate it in a
microwave oven. They often have the speed of a walking person, and they are known to get attracted by airplanes. This provides a good explanation to why these mexican pilots claimed to be followed.
The more we know about lightning, the weirder it gets. And probably the weirdest of all are balls of lightning - which have invaded high-flying jets and scared the daylights out of the passengers.
Source
If we hold all the provided data together:
- They were invisible to the naked eye.
- Detectable by radar and IR equipment.
- Were estimated by radar to appear at an altitude of 11.000 feet.
- Chased the airplane.
- Seemed to be in formation.
Then this
very much looks like the silver/black ball lightning phenomena. I think the story goes like this: They detected something on the radar in the altitude of 11.000 feet, which they couldn't see with the naked eye. They then started to use the IR equipment. Now they could 'see' the silver/black 'invisible' ball lightnings appear in front and behind/left of them. However, they only detected three of them by radar due to the nature of radars as discussed in previous posts. The ball lightning started to chase them because it gets attracted by metal objects and are known to invade airplanes.
Ball lightnings are well documented, and has been researched by several scientists:
Ball lightning bibliography
I find that silver/black ball lightning is far the best theory we have so far. It explains more than any of the other theories suggested.
The oilflare-theory fails to explain the altitude of the objects, it fails to explain the chase and it includes that the pilots and mexican researchers would have failed to consider ground objects. I find that highly unlikely. The researchers from SEDENA who have analyzed this phenomena know what there is to know about the given radars and IR equipment, they know the area the observations took place in better than we do, and I really don't think they haven't thought about alternative explanations before they published the videos. Furthermore, they have experience in analyzing observations by their own aircrews.
The flare-theory includes additional airplanes/helicopters and/or white flares with a long lifetime, at the altitude of 11.000 feet. I find that equally unlikely as it fails to explain the invisibility of the objects.
The ball lightning-theory, only fails to explain the formations of the balls, and that was what made me consider other alternatives. On the other hand, nature is known to make formations from time-to-time, and these ball lightnings are quite weird. Actually the most weird meteorlogical phenomena I can think of. However, they do indeed exist, have killed and injured several people, and are well documented.
I think the nuclear researcher Julio Herrera is right when he told the media that this merely is a ball lightning phenomena. I consider this case solved, unless new data should appear. No visits from aliens included, just meteorology - again.
(F18/F16/F15/MIG-X/Commanche/Commercial etc.)
