pinball1970 said:
The smell will be related to whatever has been exited burned or vaporised. Soil according to the paper but it could be some something Sulphur rich. If this is an actual thing that is.
I think the links posted by
@PAllen were very interesting. The third reference in
this article was to this paper which described one model:
John Abrahamson & James Dinniss,
Ball lightning caused by oxidation of nanoparticle networks from normal lightning strikes on soil
Nature volume 403, pages 519–521 (2000)
http://www.nature.com/articles/35000525
and the associated article
Fluff balls of fire contained a photograph from 1978 claimed to be of a ball lightning.
Concerning the anecdote I posted, I also remembered that my father said nothing more dramatic happened, like any explosion or collision with other objects. If I remember correctly he said it just vanished after a while. But he told me that he got quite scared by the event, since he had not seen anything like it at all before.
As I said, I'm pretty open-minded with regards to ball lightning. There are other weird phenomena like
St. Elmo's fire, and someone posted a link to a very cool video of it in
this thread.
The thunderstorms are over for now here. I did not see any ball lightning.
EDIT: I read the abstract of the paper I posted a link to above, quote:
Abstract of paper said:
Observations of ball lightning have been reported for centuries, but the origin of this phenomenon remains an enigma. The ‘average’ ball lightning appears as a sphere with a diameter of 300 mm, a lifetime of about 10 s, and a luminosity similar to a 100-W lamp. It floats freely in the air, and ends either in an explosion, or by simply fading from view. It almost invariably occurs during stormy weather. Several energy sources have been proposed to explain the light, but none of these models has succeeded in explaining all of the observed characteristics.
...which made me remember that I also asked my father how bright it was, and he said it was bright, but not blindingly bright. Which at least to me seems to fit the description "luminosity similar to a 100-W lamp" in the abstract.