The captain of the British steamer Siberia recently observed, not far from Newfoundland, at 10 sea miles of Cape Race, a strange phenomenon. He saw, against midnight, and with heavy weather, a fireball ascending from the sea which floated for a few seconds 4 meters above the sea, and subsequently disappeared. The captain had seen such a phenomenon before in these parts and thought of it as an omen of storm.
The Hydrographic Bureau in Washington names it "one of the most rare and most difficult to explain electrical phenomena." "The fireball", it further states, "usually ascends slowly in the air and explodes with a thunderous sound. People have also seen such fireballs on the mainland, where they usually fall to the ground where they create a hole of ten meters in diameter, to surface again at another place."