Aleister Crowley's Alleged Ball Lightning Encounter (1916)

In 1916, the occultist and mountaineer Aleister Crowley claimed to have witnessed ball lightning during a stay at a cottage near Lake Pasquaney in New Hampshire, USA. According to Crowley's account, published in his autobiography 'The Confessions of Aleister Crowley,' he was sitting in the cottage during a thunderstorm when a luminous globe approximately six inches in diameter appeared near the window, floated slowly across the room, and disappeared through the opposite wall with a sharp crack. Crowley, who was well-educated in chemistry and physics despite his occult reputation, provided a surprisingly sober and detailed description of the phenomenon, noting its steady luminosity, slow movement, and the sulfurous odor it left behind. While Crowley's credibility as a witness is understandably questioned given his history of self-mythologization, his description is entirely consistent with other ball lightning accounts and contains none of the supernatural embellishment that characterizes his other writings. The account is sometimes cited in ball lightning literature as an example of the phenomenon's ability to surprise even the most unconventional observers.