In 2020, a video with the flight of a luminous ball over the railway tracks was dispersed along social networks and a number of Russian media. We checked whether it was really ball lightning.

The news in July 2020 was distributed by media such as TV channel "Star", "Moscow Komsomolets", "Province.ru" And many others. Users of social networks showed no less activity. The viral of the video was caused not only by entertainment, but also by uniqueness - it is extremely rare to capture the ball lightning on the camera and, as a rule, in very poor quality. Records and numerous discussions in the comments were added popularity.

The 23-second video shows how a bright ball crosses the railway tracks, and its discharges are hit on rails and lamps of street lighting. Many publications indicated that the shooting was carried out in the area of the Tuchkovo station in the suburbs. Such publications referred to the source - the now remote post of Andreipital on Instagram on July 9. In it, however, the author reported that he did not shoot the video himself.

Upon closer examination, it turns out that this was far from the first wave of popularity of the video. For example, a little earlier it conquered Twitter. And at the beginning of 2020 the same "Moscow Komsomolets" assertedthat the video was shot in the Kuban on January 6.

But that was not all. As it turned out, in parallel the video managed to become viral in Ukrainian networks, and there it was presented as shot near Kiev. In this regard, in May 2020, the local factor portal Stopfake.org conducted an investigation and found out that the primary source of the video - publication User Andrei Trukhonovtsa in YouTube on May 27, 2019. Geotheging shows that we have the surroundings of Minsk, but there is a much more important detail. In the name of the video, the author included the abbreviation CGI, which denotes images generated by a computer. However, with such a reduction, only a small percentage of people are familiar, but the signature for the video read (and believed her) many:

“Once during a thunderstorm, I walked along the paths and then suddenly heard some kind of crack. He turned and saw a blue-violet sphere "emerged" because of the embankment. "

Later, in connection with the stir, Andrei spoke out under his video:

“I see these comments throughout the Internet. I also see that people write after they understand that this is done using a computer. In my opinion, a negative reaction is mainly caused by disappointment. This video was created when I just started learning computer graphics, so it has many mistakes. I think if you look closely, then the mistakes are clearly visible. In conclusion: just do not study physics at school, and your life will be full of magic and miracles. ”

Previously, Trukhonovets posted his video on the portal Pikabu. There, from the very beginning, he did not hide that he experimented:

“The goal was to simulate the shooting on a mobile phone“ as it is ”, that is, with all its shortcomings - noise, artifacts, shaking, etc. The difficulties added that it is very difficult to find more or less acceptable videos with real ball zippers in nature, moreover, their quality is very mediocre. Therefore, it was difficult to achieve realism, since there is nothing to compare with. But as it is. I made it impressed by the ball lightning in the last game Metro (it is so cool, blue, cracking, sparkling with spars, I want to put it in my pocket like an artifact)), slowly, for about three weeks with distraction. ”

Thus, ball lightning in the popular video is just the result of experiments with computer graphics of a user from Belarus named Andrey Trukhonovets.