I personally agree that ball lightning probably exists. However, there is another interesting phenomenon where a brilliant blue/white "spark" of electricity can travel along a wire. I don't have a name for it but power companies are certainly familiar with it. I've seen footage of it happening repeatedly along the same stretch of wire after a storm as an automated system tried to restore power a few times before keeping the power shut off.
That describes Bigfoot. I’d hope your epidemic standard is beyond anecdotes + videos that report to show what they report they’re showing. Else you can be made to believe anything.
I don’t know enough about ball lightning to care one way or another.
No one has dressed up and walked in front of a camera as ball lightning
> An optical spectrum of what appears to have been a ball lightning event was published in January 2014 and included a video at high frame rate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bBNeyrMOJE
I think what that sentence is saying is that we don't know how to reproduce it in a lab. We don't know what exactly is happening in the real world that is causing us to perceive this. It could be an illusion I guess, but I think it's undisputed it's a real phenomenon.