In 2020, a video of a luminous ball flying over railway tracks spread across social networks and a number of Russian media outlets. We checked whether it was indeed ball lightning.

The news in July 2020 was spread by such media as TV channel "Zvezda", "Moskovsky Komsomolets", "Province.Ru» and many others. Users of social networks were no less active. The virality of the video was caused not only by its entertainment value, but also by its uniqueness - it is extremely rare to capture ball lightning on camera and, as a rule, in very poor quality. The popularity of the post and numerous discussions in the comments added to its popularity.

The 23-second video shows a bright ball crossing the railway tracks, and its discharges hitting the rails and a street lamp. Many publications indicated that the filming took place in the area of the Tuchkovo station in the Moscow region. Such publications referred to the original source - a now deleted post by user andreipital on Instagram dated 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 not the first wave of video popularity. For example, a little earlier it conquered Twitter. And at the beginning of 2020 the same “Moskovsky Komsomolets” claimedthat the video was filmed in Kuban on January 6.

But that was not all. As it turned out, at the same time the video managed to become viral on Ukrainian networks, where it was presented as being filmed near Kiev. In this regard, in May 2020, the local fact-checking portal stopfake.org conducted an investigation and found out that the original source of the video was publication user Andrey Trukhonovets on YouTube dated May 27, 2019. Geotagging shows that we are looking at the outskirts of Minsk, but there is a much more important detail. In the title of the video, the author included the abbreviation CGI, which stands for computer-generated images. However, only a small percentage of people are familiar with such an abbreviation, but many people read (and believed) the caption under the video:

“Once during a thunderstorm I was walking along the tracks and then suddenly I heard some kind of crash. I turned and saw a blue-violet sphere “float out” from behind the embankment.”

Later, in connection with the excitement that arose, Andrei spoke under his video:

“I see these comments all over the internet. I also see people writing after they realize it was made with a computer. In my opinion, the negative reaction is mainly due to disappointment. This video was made when I was just starting to learn computer graphics, so it has a lot of errors. I think if you look closely, the mistakes are clearly visible. In conclusion, just don't study physics in school and your life will be full of magic and wonder."

Earlier, Trukhonovets posted his video on the portal Pikabu. There, from the very beginning, he did not hide the fact that he was experimenting:

“The goal was to simulate shooting on a mobile phone “as is,” that is, with all its shortcomings - noise, artifacts, shaking, etc. Adding to the complexity is the fact that it is very difficult to find more or less acceptable videos of real ball lightning in nature, and their quality is also very mediocre. Therefore, it was difficult to achieve realism, since there is nothing special to compare with. But that's how it is. I did it under the impression of ball lightning in the last game “Metro” (it’s so cool there, blue, crackling, throwing sparks, you want to put it in your pocket like an artifact)), slowly, for about three weeks, distracted by other things.”

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