It is Thursday the 7th of May, 2026, and you're listening to Skeptics with a K,

the podcast for Science, Reason, and Critical Thinking.

Skeptics with a K is produced by skeptic media in association with the Merseyside

Skeptic Society, a non-profit organization for the

promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseyside around the UK and internationally. I'm your

host, Mike Hall. With me today is Marsh. Hello. And Alice. Hello. So a few episodes ago,

we did a story on ball lightning and how I think ball lightning is bollocks. You think it's absolute horseshit.

We got quite the response. We got a lot of feedback on that. Most of it was positive feedback. There's a lot of people saying, actually, I normally agree with everything you say, but I've definitely seen Ball Lightning. And there was someone else I saw... You said a lot of people. That was one single person. Well, there was also a couple people on Reddit, I think, but that was related to an article we put up about online.

Reddit is not right. It didn't, though, did it? Because if it passed through a wall, as we said, that isn't the thing. That's not what lightning does. No, exactly. Your mum maybe saw some glowing sphere of something, which could have been a million different things. And there's no reason to assume it is all the same phenomenon or even some lightning-related thing. It's like your placebo stuff, Mike, in that, yes, placebo effect doesn't exist in the way that people think, use the term, but that doesn't mean that you don't feel better from some cognitive stuff, sometimes, in some conditions. Indeed. It's not saying there is nothing, it's saying it isn't that, it's something else being misattributed. But yeah, completely by coincidence, the articles we put up on the Skeic, we often digitise the back catalogue.

And completely by coincidence, we had, Mark, who does the back catalog editing, had already

found an article on Ball Lightning that he was in the middle of sending me for that.

So he put out an article about how Ball Lightning is probably Bullocks from 1992 in the same week

that you did the same story.

Just calling Mike out through the magazine of,

this is old news, right?

Exactly, yeah.

But interesting, like literally 30 years later,

there are still people believing that about lightnings.

And still skeptics believing it as well,

because it is the explanation for UFO phenomena

that is scientific, so it's okay to believe.

Same with the placebo effect, it's the explanation for alternative medicine, so it's okay to believe. Same with the placebo effect, it's the explanation for alternative medicine, that it's

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