I actually did this as my high school chemistry project. I used 70% rubbing alcohol, 90% rubbing alcohol, and pure ether (don't try that at home, kids). You can get a number of different effects, only some of which were seen here.

As I recall, there were 5 distinct effects I noticed.
First, and most exciting, the jet. This was just a 2-6 foot jet of flame out the top, I surmised it was caused by low oxygen inside the glass making for a poor partial burn inside until the pressure pushes out enough unburnt vapor to burn outside. Depending on the fuel (both vapor level and fuel type), this could last up to 10 seconds.
There's a 'neck burn', where the flame hovers just inside the neck and just burns there, apparently in equilibrium, like an oil lamp.
There's the fire ball, which is just as it sounds, a round ball of fire, usually hovering in the top 1/3 of the bottle, sometimes bouncing up and down, but always centered.
There's the flash, where the entire interior flashes repeatedly, as seen in this video. This can end much more violently than it did here, 'pinging' the bottle loudly as the flashes get more powerful. When this happened with ether, we stopped, afraid we were making a glass bomb surrounded by high school kids.
Finally was the fire plane, also seen in this video, which can ascend, descend, or hover in place. This was my favorite effect, especially when it hovered and lasted up to 30 seconds long.

Good times, good times....FIRE GOOD.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'ponka city, ok, oklahoma, power plant, explosion, fire ball, electrical, substation' to 'ponca city, ok, oklahoma, power plant, explosion, fire ball, electrical, substation' - edited by bareboards2

Tags for this video have been changed from 'ponka city, ok, oklahoma, power plant, explosion, fire ball' to 'ponka city, ok, oklahoma, power plant, explosion, fire ball, electrical, substation' - edited by calvados

Instead of saying "Fire balls", they should say "Balls of Fire". That's a festival I would go to.

Yes! I hate it when they use up memory on AI when it's supposed to be used for animating EVERY SINGLE BOARD IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF MY NAVAL BASE.

At least now I know that when my tanks abandon their mission to hunt that rouge ore truck, my destruction will be rendered in spectacular, high-definition fire balls.

Looked familiar so I did a quick search. It's definitely a dupe.

http://www.videosift.com/video/How-to-Make-Fire-Balls

I never meant that it was indeed gasoline, but I've seen water thrown onto a grease fire, and it didn't make a huge fire ball, but just spread the fire around.

I was once a ranch hand at a large central Oregon llama ranch and have experienced "green rain" so may times I think I'd rather have the fire balls.

Is this thread dead now?