2006-03-30 - Tallahassee, FL - Fireball

Glowing Greenish Firball on Power Lines in Daytime

I am still unsure of what this might have been but I know what I saw! Wow! Today started out normal, I had just returned home from carpooling with babies in tow and sat in the car a little longer than usual listening to this cool song on the radio. The sky was clear, the weather nice, with no breeze. After about a minute I decided to get out and open the house door to enter my house. Just I approched the lock with key in hand, I hear an extremely loud roaring/churning/oscillating sound, I think " What the..." as the sound is directly on the side of my house and getting so loud that I can feel it shake the ground. I run to the side of the house and for about 5 seconds (that's about how long it took for me to turn tail and head back to the car so that me and my babies could hotfoot it away!) the sky just on the side of my house and above my neighbor's yard was a weird cold greenish blue tint. Like looking thru a funky pair of sunglasses. Anyway, at the car door curiosity takes hold so I am standing on the stepbar of my car and I watch, mouth agape as this orb approx. the size of my car tire, leisurely travels down the powerlines. It is the same color as the sky was glowing seconds earlier but now the color is contained just around the orb itself. And I recall thinking it is going to set the trees on fire as it rolled and periodically sparked. Just as I decided to grab my camara phone (cause no one was going to belive this!!!) It reached the end of the wires, turned a funny bright white yellow color, sparked a few more times then just winked out. By this time two of my other neighbors were outside and we were all looking up at the lines. So I called my mom who is only about 2 blocks away and asked if she had experienced anything odd, and she confirmed that she heard the the loud roaring and her lights flickered off and on several times but she never came to the door. After that phone call, I decided to drive the block to see the damage that this fireball had caused. ( still asumming that logically it must have been a blown transformer or something) yet after inspection, it was noted that 1)no damage whatsoever was done to the powerlines in question, you could still see the mold growing on them, 2) there was no buring ozoney smell in the air, that you would normally get from these types of fires ( I have seen powerlines burn before and they smell bad) 3) and the weirdest thing of all is that I do not remember hearing a loud boom like a powerline blowing, the sound just appeared and then got louder! I will never forget this day!