Years later, an Israeli man named Yaakov Avrahami recalled in the past going to a Tel Aviv bus station and seeing a ball of light: “At that certain moment I noticed a little boy with a white shirt come out from the building to the left.” Avrahami said he saw the ball of light trail the youngster.

The exact cause and composition of ball lightning has yet to be determined. There may be several different varieties. But it usually appears as a grapefruit-sized sphere of light moving slowly through the air, which may end by fizzling out or exploding.

Prominent witnesses have observed ball lightning in previous times. In Acts 2:3, “tongues of fire” seemed to float around on the day of Pentecost. Czar Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, reported seeing a ball of light float into the window of a small church while in the company of his grandfather: “The ball (it was of lightning) whirled around the floor, then passed the chandelier and flew out through the door into the park.”

The Dutch News agency recently reported that on July 19, 2009, at least 100 homes in a district of the town of Soesterberg were hit by ball lightning. The lightning, a rare atmospheric phenomenon, wrecked hundreds of televisions, computers, telephones and central heating systems, the report said. In some households, flames came out of electronic equipment. In others, electric sockets sprang off the wall. “I saw the lightning shoot through the street,” one eyewitness told reporters. “The fireball hit a large fir tree and then went into a house,” he said.

Before Uri Geller finished his ten-week Greek reality show TV series “O diadohos tou Uri Geller” (The Successor of Uri Geller) introduced on October 24, 2009, I had the opportunity to attend his 8th program. I was in the ANT1 TV Athens studio audience on December 12.

In the studio cafeteria I bumped into Uri’s wife, Hanna, encircled by a group of young people with soft drinks and sweets. The senior editor of Focus magazine Christos Tsanakas chatted about statistics and dark matter with iconographer Giannis Tsolakos and his son Dionysus close by. Escorted by production assistant Laura Neri, I briefly greeted Uri Geller in his dressing room. But the situation there was far too rushed and jumping with folks for Uri to manage any of my mind testing.

Antenna TV host Christos Ferendinos and his creative director Kostas Grigorakis carefully reviewed last-minute details before the live broadcast. Countess Vanessa Kosta Pomponi with her husband Paolo and a few friends were also in the audience, keenly waiting for the show to get underway. Guest stars that gathered on the stage included model and presenter Vicky Kaya, and other national television celebrities.

The ANT1 TV studio was well designed and up to date. I walked around a multiplex of rooms specifically constructed for recording live to video. I unconsciously sensed that Zakris would finally win the Greek mentalist talent show. But I was also concerned that some observers were cautious about Uri Geller, accusing him of misleading the public with claims of supernatural powers.

What happens to you when you get struck by lightning? In “Act of God,” the Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal portrayed real-life stories to examine the jarring subject. In his book “Struck by Lightning,” mathematician Jeffrey Rosenthal endeavored to find out how often a result will happen just by chance. Some traditional beliefs suggest that people who miraculously survive lightning strikes can develop extraordinary talents.

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