WHEN a globe of fire tore up a 100m trench on a peat bog in Donegal in 1868, it created a mystery that has defied scientific explanation ever since. But now one of America’s leading physicists thinks he may have the answer: the fireball was powered by a “mini black hole”.

Pace VanDevender, the former chief technical officer at Sandia laboratories in America, has visited the Glendowan mountains six times to examine the damage caused by the fireball. The trench, a six-metre-square hole, and extensive damage to the bank of a stream are still visible, having been preserved in the peat.

At the time of the incident, Michael Fitzgerald, a local engineer, witnessed the “globe of fire in the air floating leisurely along” the Donegal bog. In a report to the Royal Society, Fitzgerald said he found a hole “about 20ft square where it first touched the land with the peat turned . . . as if it had been cut out with a huge knife”.

The ball had floated along for “more than 20 minutes” and covered over a mile.

“It appeared at first to be a bright red globular ball of fire, about 2ft in diameter, but its bulk became rapidly less, particularly after each dip in the soil, so that it appeared not more than three inches in diameter when it finally disappeared”.

Scientists are mystified as to what Fitzgerald saw. Although ball lightning is relatively common, damage on this scale is unprecedented.

VanDevender says a possible explanation is that a mini black hole drove the lightning. Black holes, created in the Big Bang, are gravitational fields so powerful that nothing can escape their pull.

“The event in Donegal is unique in a number of ways: it created a massive amount of damage, lasted a long time, was observed carefully and reported with good measurements, and the evidence has been conserved in the peat bog,” VanDevender said.

“The only explanation that is not invalidated is that this was a massive condensed object, which can only be a black hole. Of course, I am sceptical about this myself until more facts are known.”

VanDevender’s theory is that a huge number of mini black holes were created by the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, and about 10,000 still hit the Earth each year. “Most go into the ocean, and on dry land they are absorbed. But bogs are different,” he said.

“I am planning to set up monitoring stations to track these coming through. It will be located in the US, but if I don’t find anything there I may well move it to Ireland.

“If this theory turns out to be true — and for the moment most of it is inference — that Donegal site could turn out to be very important.”

Peter Van Doorn, a British meteorologist, was the first to discover Fitzgerald’s eyewitness account in the archives a decade ago. “What he saw defies conventional physics. The appearance of the object and the fact that it lasted 20 minutes rules out lightning,” he said.

“Not many people are studying this subject, because it appears to be insoluble. It tends to offend the ego of scientists when they are not able to explain something.”

Van Doorn has chronicled several episodes of apparent extreme ball lightning, including several in Ireland. In Athlone in 1697 a “great round body of fire” was seen to fall from a “fiery cloud” over the citadel in the town. It caused a huge explosion, which destroyed the building and part of Athlone, killing seven.

In 1895 in the Inishowen peninsula, a boy saw a large bright globular object approach his house. Part of it broke away and struck him, causing serious injuries that led to the amputation of two of his fingers and part of a thumb.

Other scientists are not convinced. Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio told New Scientist magazine that a mini black hole on the Donegal bog would have gobbled up everything in its path relatively quickly.

“I think speculative ideas are good, and I encourage him to keep thinking about it,” he said. “But I just think certain things smell right or wrong, and this just doesn’t seem to hang together to me.”

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