I visited Bob Papp last Friday afternoon in West Liberty, IA. My main motivation was just to see if the guy seemed sane and of good character. He did.
I say this as someone who has gone through a pretty serious episode of being drawn in by Paul Koloc and his ball lightning system back in the 1990s. He had represented a series of 3 still photographs (taken by CCD camera) as being 3 sequential frames of 30fps video showing a long-lived plasmoid which he had produced in his attempt to produce ball lightning. It took me years of working my way into his trust before I could get access to his laboratory and happened upon the "lost" original video tape from which these images had been drawn. When I went through the process of digitizing the tape, it turned out that these 3 images were separate shots and the apparent movement of the "plasmoid" was simply a result of the "plasmoid" image being captured in 3 different stages of being clocked out of the CCD array. The "plasmoid" itself was a result of a very bright plasma discharge expanding and then contracting as the CCD array was being clocked, resulting in a oblong profile that appeared to be a rounded diamond shaped plasmoid. There were signs that Paul Koloc, whlie obviously very mentally sharp, was suffering from some kind of psychological problem that, as I drew closer to exposing his lie, exhibited as a multiple personality disorder where, apparently, one of his personalities was aware of his deliberate deception and another was not. I don't know how to explain this extreme pathology except for two factors: 1) Kolov had been working with very high power mercury switches for a long time and/or 2) Kolov had been under treatment for narcolepsy for decades and the treatment involved daily treatment with dextroamphetamine sulfate. There were other things going on that I could attribute to paranormal phenomena but these were not so pronounced that I could not explain them away as coincidence. So my judgement is obviously fallible, but on the other hand, I have been through the ringer with one very -- dare I say extremely -- pathological case, and am more cautious as a result.
