Death Rays and Ball Lightning

There is a big void surrounding the purpose of the mission that called for Townsend to parchute behind the lines in 1945. Something to do with ball lightning we have been told.

A poster named Sy.Gunson (who previously presented convincing evidence that the Nazi Bell was an isotope separation device) has recently posted a related thread about German development of Particle Beam weapons. He claims that these were developed out of the linear accelerator work of Rolf Wideroe.

From Wideroe's online autobiography, The Infancy of Particle Accelerators

I eventually found out why the German Air Force was so interested in the betatron. Physicist Dr. Schiebold from Leipzig, a specialist on non-destructive testing of materials using X-rays among other methods (after the War he became professor in Magdeburg) had had the idea that it would be possible to build an X-ray tube....[that] would cause the X-rays to be emitted in a narrow bundle. With sufficiently high voltage it would then be possible to achieve high radiation intensities at long distances. Thus it may even be possible to kill the pilots....

In order to conduct some test experiments for this ‘death ray’, a still unused and unpacked X-ray apparatus with a high voltage supply of a little over one million volts (made by means of a sort of cascade circuit), was taken from a hospital in Hamburg to a small military airport called Groß-Ostheim (today ‘Großostheim’) in the region of Hanau.

Gunson states that "ball lightning" was an artifact of the ray when it was used to disable aircraft in flight. I have heard this claim before, though I can't remember where. However, mention of ball lightning always rings a resounding "ding! ding! we have a winna!" in my head.