An effort to build a catalogue of alleged ball lightning reports in Italy has recently been launched by a small group of BL researchers stimulated by the Italian Centre for UFO Studies, which offered to open its files to interested scientists to look for pertinent data.

A first survey of more than 12,000 Italian reports of unusual aerial phenomena brought a sample of 40 possible ball lightning phenomena in the last 50 years. A more thorough search is presently being conducted, that will yield an expected total of 100 reports.

A second important source is the impressive collection of ball lightning cases published by Ignazio Galli in the early years of this century.

All such reports are presently being filed into an "Italian Ball Lightning Archive" and a computer database is also being implemented, containing space-time coordinates (date, time, latitude, longitude, altitude) as well as descriptive (colour, size, shape, behaviour) and environment (meteorological, topographical) data.

Similar projects have already been attempted in Austria and Hungary, and some more national catalogue have also been produced for countries (Russia, Japan) with very different ecology/geography/climate. A second planned step will thus be a comparison between the Italian database and those other ones.