In the laboratory

According to some reports in that article, Nikola Tesla was able to make ball lightning in his lab in Colorado Springs in 1899/1900, but if he did create it, he did not describe his methods in a way that has allowed anyone since to reproduce his work. RMetS

The article says Russian scientists successfully made plasma balls in the lab in 2002. RMetS A Colorado team led by Dr Mike Lindsay, the article says, made brilliant clouds of plasma emerge from a specially prepared solution and maintained them for nearly half a second. RMetS

Labs have made short-lived glowing plasmas. Researchers themselves have said these are not necessarily the same thing as lightning. This is a generic bench, not a picture of any one experiment.Drawing: our own, simplified and not to scale

Dr Lindsay said, in the article’s wording, “I don’t think what we’ve created is lightning,” and that ball lightning is used almost generically for phenomena not described by normal lightning, bead lightning, St Elmo’s fire or aurora. RMetS He also said, “And likely it’s not one thing but several things that have similar observables.” RMetS

He quotes them further: “There may be more than one type of ball lightning and more than one mechanism by which ball lightning is generated”; “There have been many theories devised to explain ball lightning. None is completely satisfactory”; and “many luminous phenomena created in the laboratory are claimed by their creators to be ball lightning.” Keul 2021

They investigated this basic process by exposing soil samples to a lightning-like discharge, which produced chain aggregates of nanoparticles: these particles oxidize at a rate appropriate for explaining the lifetime of ball lightning. Nature 2000

The same article says that before this can be confirmed as the cause, the process must be replicated in a laboratory. RMetS

Laboratory glows are interesting, and some were made to test ideas about ball lightning. They are not, by themselves, proof that a given natural report has been reproduced. The researchers quoted on this page say as much.