Documents / Document
This is Volume 2 of the Ministry of Defence report 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region', Defence Intelligence Staff Scientific and Technical Memorandum 55/2/00, dated February 2000 and received 7 December 2000. It gathers 25 working papers on natural and man-made phenomena, meant as a reference for analysing UAP reports. The papers cover ball lightning, radar detection, balloons, satellites, mirages, plasma and similar subjects. One paper compares magnetic field experiments on human volunteers with close encounter reports. It concludes that effects from such fields are 'uncannily similar' to what witnesses describe.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
the propensity of balls to 'dart' towards power cables or any object where the radial does not exceed the local positive value. 52. In-Structure Phenomena The fact that the plasma phenomena can reportedly exist in closed metal structures suggests that, contrary to expectations, the existence of the ball is apparently not dependent on an external source but must retain it's own electric or magnetic field in order to exist and, once formed, is self-sustaining until its demise. Within the past year some researchers have suggested that atmospheric plasmas may owe their duration to a combination of both vertical and horizontal (i.e. orthogonal) magnetic looped fields which contain and sustain the phenomena. If this is the case the process may be applicable to any atmospheric plasma - however formed, if the field are strong enough. It has been proposed [6] that the stability of a volume (ball) of air at 16,000 to 30,000 degrees Kelvin might be contained within linked magnetic lines. Discharge arcs (e.g. lightning) advance along narrow tracks 50-100 $ \mu $ m in diameter in air. These streamers would only occupy a small volume of the ball. It is postulated that some of these form short circuits, resulting in circulating currents, each loop acting as a coil. the physical appearance of the charge-contgined ball would be shining and diffused. It can be shown by Maxwell's equations that a 'magnetic knot' is feasible and this has now been observed under laboratory conditions. The conducted energy cannot be stationary and is postulated to produce a slowly-varying magnetic field. The magnetic energy is a function of the ball radius, the vacuum magnetic permeability, the number of magnetic lines which are linked and a field normalising function. It is not within the scope of this study to pursue this important phenomenon further, other than to emphasise the likely connection between this, the formation of plasmas by meteors and the effects of varying magnetic fields on humans (Working Paper No 25), in the UAP context. 53. Demise For those balls/beads visible to humans it is reported that the silent demise is normally a simple fade in brightness and diameter, while the explosive demise is sometimes preceded by an increase in brightness and a colour change. Similarly, plasmas of other origins than ball or bead lightning may also decay in the same way. Hence, in the UAP sighting reports it is almost impossible to determine the origin of a particular UAP because, it is believed, the behaviour is very similar. Further, if the premise that meteors (see Working Papers and statistical results at Volume 1) also cause the formation of UAP, then a UAP could be formed during a thunderstorm (as well as from ball or bead lightning) and similarly persist afterwards. ## SUMMARY - RELEVANCE TO UAP 54. An examination of a wide range of research into ball and bead lightning has shown that it is certainly connected with a proportion of the UAP reports received from within the UK airspace. Descriptions of these particular forms of lightning correlate in time, colour and motion with qualitative description often given by reliable UAP witnesses. Because those UAP which are formed and then reported as a result of lightning are, of course, transitory in nature and their form is apparently changing as they head towards demise, it is reasonable that the colour descriptions vary, that they exhibit strongly influential electrical field characteristics, exceptional motion and pyrotechnic displays. All of which are unfamiliar to the majority of the population. ## REFERENCES: 1. "Ball and Bead Lightning" J.D. Barry Plenum 1980. 2. "The Nature of Ball Lightning" S.Singer Plenum 1971. 3. "Hydrodynamic Model of the Interaction of Ball Lightning with the Airstream of an Aircraft in Flight" N.I. Gaidukov. Technical Physics 38(9) Sep 1993. 4. Turner D.J. "Ball Lightning" Phil Trans. Royal Society, London 1994. 5. Fryberger D. "A Model for Ball Lightning" Ostfold College Norway Report No. 1997:5 Part 1 (1994) Proc.
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 258 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.