PIONEERING lightning researcher Benjamin Franklin once said: “Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.”
The latest investigation into ball lightning bears him out, suggesting that magnetic fields trick the mind in half of all reported “sightings” (see “Mysterious ball lightning may be a hallucination”). They have also been linked to religious and ghostly experiences.
Magnetic phantasms probably never occurred to Franklin, but he did appreciate only too well that our brains are more susceptible to influence than we like to admit.
