Does video show ball lightning on train track? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

A video claims to show ball lightning travel along a railway track before heading off into a nearby wood.

FALSE

Other versions of the same video claim it shows an atmospheric phenomenon called “St. Elmo’s Fire”.

Examples can be seen below.

Ball lighting is an unexplained and dangerous electrical phenomenon.

St Elmos fire caught on video along railway tracks in Russia

However the video shows neither of these atmospheric phenomena, both of which do not resemble what the video shows. In fact the video is the creation of special effects work.

In fact the video appears to have first surfaced online in May 2019, uploaded by the user Andrei Trukhonovets. See below.

While Andrei did not state in the video description that the video was fake, he has conceded that point multiple times in the comments section. For example…

This video was created when I just started to learn computer graphics thus it has a lot of mistakes here and there and I think if someone can look attentively that mistakes are clearly visible

As such, we rank the claim that this shows ball lightning or St. Elmo’s Fire as false.

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