April 11, 2013 • 20 mins
Human Lightning Rods: Some folk claim to attract undue attention from electrical storms. Some even insist it's hereditary. But what does science have to say about individuals who incur the wrath of Thor upwards of six or seven times? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie explore the world of human lightning strikes.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stop to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. And
in our last episode that we recorded, we talked about
watch stoppers, this idea that some people can magically stop
(00:24):
watches just by wearing them, that they can walk under
a street lamp and they'll set it off with their
electromagnetic field. Well, in this episode, we're exploring a similar misnomer,
this idea that some unique individuals are natural lightning rods.
Although I'm going to guess there are probably less people
who think they are human lightning rods than watch stoppers. Yeah,
(00:47):
because it's one of those things like strike me once
with lightning, shame on you strike me seven times. Well,
maybe maybe there's something weird going on with me. It's true,
and we'll get into that. There's a idea that you
know that has been kicked around, like could it be genetic?
Could could lightning strikes be attracted a certain people. I'm
(01:07):
guessing you guys know the answer to that, But we'll
discuss it in a bit more. Um, But let's talk
about the anatomy of a bolt of lightning because this
is really, in and of itself a very cool thing. Yes,
lightning is very cool. Has anyone who's ever seen it
can can certainly test ouh and uh and I would
also want to call back to our episode from Stuff
(01:28):
to blow your kid's mind when we talked about lightning.
But essentially, you have this, uh, this generated electrical charge
and it needs to get to the earth. It does,
and think think about what's going on weatherwise. You have
down drafts and up drafts and they're all colliding and
uh dogs everything. Now you're just putting yoga in it. Uh.
(01:50):
They're colliding with unstable air and these particles collide and
you know it might be particles of ice or rain,
and they cause electrical charges to separate. So if you're
thinking about this in terms of the cloud, um, if
you've got the cloud in mind, think about this positive
charges shooting high and then the negative charges hanging low
within the cloud, and then the electrical imbalance kind of
(02:12):
hangs in the air and intensiflies within the cloud and
then between the cloud and the ground. So most of
the lightning that you see is cloud. The clouds just
kind of playing with each other. But then sometimes it
makes that jump to the ground again because this is
this this upper portion of the storm cloud being that
this is positive in the lower portion is negative. Now,
the exact mechanics of this are are sort of poorly understood.
(02:35):
That we do know that much, and we know that
um as that charge increases, the field becomes more and
more intense, so intense. This is really interesting that the
electrons at the Earth's surface are repelled deeper into the
Earth by the strong negative charge at the lower portion
of the cloud. So that's when you get to this
(02:56):
cloud to ground lightning because you've got the repletion of
electrons causing their surface to acquire a strong positive charge.
This is quite a dance going on here in the atmosphere, uh.
And this is when you see the cloud to the
ground electricity happen in that strong electrical charge really serving
as a conductive path and serving and then in the
(03:18):
air serving as an insulator. Right now, when when lightning
is traveling to the Earth, it's it's it tends to
be very sensible about things. It tends to be very economic,
and we can see that reflected in our basic understanding
of what not to do during a lightning storm. Like,
what do they tell you not to do? Don't stand
under a tall tree why because the tall tree is
more likely to be hit by lightning. Don't play golf
(03:40):
during a lightning storm. In other words, don't stand up
in a in a in a wide open area while
raising a piece of metal over your head because you're
susceptible to lightning strike. Right. Why because this flash of
light it heats the air around it to nearly fifty
thousand degrees fahrenheit about twenty almost twenty eight thousand degrees celsius,
and that is hotter than surface of the sun, and
(04:02):
the scorching heat really forces the air to expand in
an explosion of thunder. That is why you don't want
to wave around a golf club. So yeah, as you
said that, as a charge near the ground, something like
a tall tree will send positive charges surging up it.
And that's why it connects so well with something really
tall like a tree or house, a telephone poll and
(04:24):
then of course people, right, this is where it all
comes down to. You frequently struck by lightning, but with
with humans, Yes, humans do get struck by lightning, and
in many cases, uh, there's not a lot of opportunity
to test the theory that this individual is more susceptible
to lightning, because one good boat can and will kill
(04:45):
you in many cases. Yeah, although a lot of people
do survive it, but one one will do its um.
In case you're wondering what's going on in the United States,
in terms of statistics, lightning researchers estimate that twenty two
million lightning flashes strike the ground each year, and of
course the majority of that is in Florida, which is
(05:06):
at Central Florida has been called a lightning alley and
they have on average twelve flashes of lightning pursh square
kilometer the year. This is a lot. And so why
is the most common month to get struck between the
hours of noon to six pm? So what's going on here?
Is Florida just cursed by God? Well that's one interpretation. No, Now,
(05:29):
it's all about weather, right, They have tons of it,
and they have tons of moisture and warmth and there
you know, we've got the ocean there and lo and
behold you have sort of the perfect storm, as you
would say, and you have a lot of people out golfing, voting, etcetera.
So you have a lot of lightning, a lot of
people putting themselves in a position to be hit high lightning.
Put those two together, it's natural what's going to occur.
(05:50):
And now, so obviously we've talked about the tall objects.
We've talked about power lines, reckon. We haven't talked about
power lines, but power lines metal, All of these things
you would want to stay away from. Um, most people
think that includes cars, but that is in fact the opposite.
A car can actually protect you. And I wanted to
mention this just because we're kind of going through and
(06:10):
debunking a couple of things. Um, Yes, cars metal, but
what it does is it acts as a sort of
Faraday cage for you. And when I talked about a
fair Day cage, I'm talking about something that is conducting
the electrons over the surface but keeping the inside neutral.
So that's what a car is basically doing. It has
nothing to do with rubber tires or you wearing rubber soles. Um.
(06:32):
It's just basically crux. Yes, it's just basically that you
are protected because of these electrons moving along the surface
of the car and not on you. And it's also
worth pointing out when we talk about human lightning rods.
Of course, the lightning rod in essence is a is
a rod that is erected on, say a building, with
the understanding that, hey, we have a tall building in
(06:52):
the middle of nowhere, lightning is going to strike it.
So I'm going to have this, uh, this rod here
in place so that the lightning will strike this rod,
and that's grounded in such a way that it doesn't
impact the rest of the building. Right, And that's really
important when I when I talk about Faraday or um,
the Faraday cage or the car, you're talking about the
path of it going into the ground and away from it.
(07:14):
So the car, obviously the path of lightning electricity is
running along the wall, water or down the tires and
into the ground. Yeah, bolt of lightning sensible, dude. It
wants to get where it's going if you if you
offer an alternate route that's a little more sensible, it
will take that instead. So what have we learn so
far right here in terms of being at the wrong
(07:35):
place at the wrong time, trying not to visit Florida
in the month of July and then decide to picnic
on a golf course under a cypress tree while entertaining
your picnic guests by twirling a baton. Let's say, no
golfing on a boat in there in the middle of
a storm either, that's always a no note. Yeah, And
and try to stay away from a phone booth too,
(07:56):
because we're talking about lightning hitting the ground and traveling
you that telephone booth and up the wires, and if
you're happy to be in there holding the telephone, that
is not a good situation. Yeah, definitely worth thinking about.
The more and more that we end up of burying
our power lines and whatnot. It's easy to maybe see
that booth and think, oh, well that's a place of safety,
but not so another thing for for mighty Thor's sake,
(08:20):
try not to be of the male persuasion. Yeah, now
this is uh, this is pretty interesting as well, and
I believe it's making the rounds very recently. Uh. The
idea here is that of individuals hit by lightning our ment.
So then that's a pretty high percentage when you know,
essentially we're talking I mean, we're talking about half of
(08:40):
the the species. If we were all getting hit equally,
to be about fifty, but I don't know, it's eighty.
So what are we to make of that the lightning
hates men? Lightning hates men? Well, yeah, so you could say,
all right, well this is the act of of of
wrathful God and knows that that the men are worse
and therefore are deserving of more lightning. Uh. There are
(09:00):
some other crazier theories. The one you ran across was
a head to do with the proteins. Uh, no, minerals
something I did not go into much iron too much,
but it was something like the accumulation of minerals would
make men more conductive. I abandoned this article, by the way,
But yeah, there are a lot of different ideas. You know.
Some people will say, oh, we'll men tend to be taller,
so maybe they're more likely to be hit by lightning.
(09:22):
But well, actually there's some information out there that says
try to make yourself as small as possible if you
are out in a thunderstorm and you are the tallest
thing out there. I thought that was more like you
want to be submissive to an angry guy, so you
just sort of a little bit because if you're proud
and like you know, you're doing like chest out, you're
just asking for the word is going to take you on.
(09:43):
But no, I mean if you have an umbrella above
your head, which is an entirely different can of worms
there with an umbrella, but really anything that makes yourself taller.
There's this idea to you that men participate more in
outdoor sports like fishing and golfing, and therefore there increasing
their exposure times to storms. And then there's an idea
(10:04):
that men are taking more risks in these sorts of situations.
They're out there hunting down the food while the woman
is back cooking it in the kitchen. Well maybe if
you're in the mafia. Yeah, no, I don't know what
I mean. I see that. I see that there's a
logic here that you know, men are going to get
struck more than women because you know, let's say that
(10:25):
you work on power lines. Um, you know, most likely
with the data we have available, you're probably a man. Yeah.
And then also you get into the I two that
you know, again the men are more more of a
risk taker but also a little stupider, and that they
don't want to be seen as a whim. So it's like, well,
I guess it's there's a lightning storm moving in. Maybe
we should go home. And stop playing golf. Do you
want to be that guy? You want to be the
(10:46):
guy who says, ah, well heck with that, that's not
God's not going to stop this golf game, and then
you keep going. So the idea too, is that men
are more likely to be that fool hardy regarding their
their risk of likning strike. Well. I think a good
example of work related injuries and just a good example
of someone being struck repeatedly and actually thinking that thor
(11:08):
might be after him is a guy by the name
of Roy Cleveland Sullivan, and I think we've actually mentioned
him before. He was a force ranger at the Shenandoah
National Park in Virginia, and he was struck seven times,
once while in the lookout tower, in once while driving
while walking across his front yard. This was in nineteen seventy.
(11:31):
Like that one was just you know, it's different if
you're the top of the tower, but dude was just
like getting his mail or something exactly, standing in a
ranger station on patrol in the park, check at camp ground,
and then fishing. So after the fourth one, he has
to have said that to have gotten very paranoid and
begin to think that some force was after him, and
I cannot blame him. Yeah, because again, we tend to see, uh,
(11:54):
you know, we tend to apply meaning to patterns, and
the crazier the pattern than well, the crazier at the meaning,
we end up coming up with Ford. And you know,
once you're own lightning hit five or six, I can
certainly understand it. Also, there's a there's a biological toll
to be taken here, So I mean it can. Lightning
strikes can cause a host of of physical ailments, and
(12:17):
some of them are neurological in nature. Yeah. Actually, let's
take a quick break and when we get back, we're
gonna talk a little bit more about that. All right,
we're back, and we're gonna talk about a little something
cooled coronopathy. And this is a pathology of lightning, and
a handful of specialists actually study the effects of lightning
on living things. Again, there's probably not a lot of
(12:39):
subjects that these specialists can look at, because thankfully, lightning
strikes are fairly rare. Yeah, like, I don't I don't
know that we have a there's a coronapathy clinic in
my neighborhood. No, no, no, Well, you know, if you
live in a super fancy neighborhood. Maybe that's when you
get your own or right, maybe in Florida it's more
(13:00):
more likely. But you know, I was looking at the
map of showing where lightning strikes are are likely to occur,
and George's actually it was in the black on the
on the map. Blogger and science journalist Kyle Hill says
that people being bags of electrolytes, are better transmitters of
electrical current than most ground is, and many are injured
by ground current. Each year's lightning surges up one leg
(13:22):
that is closer to the strike, and then down the
one that's further away. Yeah, and that's just something to
keep in mind because again we're talking about lightning striking
people and the reason it does what it does, and
the sort of effects that we have afterward. Dr Elizabeth
Glurbier of the Electricity de France, so please don't write
(13:44):
in I know it's an awful pronunciation in France, says
that lightning survivors experience residual effects, most commonly affecting the
brain and the neuropsychiatric, vision and hearing sections, and that
these effects can actually develop slowly and become apparent only
much later. Yeah, and plus you're throwing and stuff like
just you know, post traumatic stress syndrome as well. I mean,
(14:04):
just the the the experience of being struck by lightning
is is pretty intense. Well, it is forever changing, and
it's not something that we think about all the time
because again it's rare. But you tend to think of
people being struck by lightning and having these incredible abilities afterward,
because we have a couple examples of this. Oh, yes,
we've we've talked about before. The individual who's suddenly had
(14:26):
a profound interest in piano music, right and and and
someone who had never played the piano before became a
composer and actually a wonderful pianist. M He was actually
in a phone booth when he was struck by lightning,
by the way, But really the most common symptoms that
happen physically, you will suffer some burns, but not a
lot um. You can get burned through the sweat that's
(14:49):
vaporized by the lightning um. Mentally, the person may suffer
from short term memory loss, have difficult difficulty mentally storing
new information and accessing old information, get tired very easily
because their mental processes are being taxed. Um, they're not
really used to sort of running at the same speed
that they were before. The personality can change, become very irritable,
(15:11):
and they often suffer irreparable nerve damage. Um. And this
is something that again it's not we don't think of
with lightning strikes, but this is stuff that will affect
them in various ways depending on how they were struck,
and they often have chronic headaches, some of which are
really debilitating and SUPERINTENSEE. We're looking at some photos of
(15:33):
what we call Lichtenberg figures, and you see these, uh
you see these on for instance, cattle sometimes that have
been struck by lightning into in this one particular instance,
on a human being who had been struck, and it's
this crazy kind of like tree like pattern, like if
you didn't know any better, you'd look at it and
I think it was some sort of a body art
like like, yeah, I was gonna say it looks tribal
(15:53):
kind of a thing, yeah, because that's sort of like
a tree branching out and there is a beauty to it.
But I think that one of the things that the
lictomrid figures, as it shows you it is evidence of
how life altering being struck by lightning would be, or
having that sort of current run through your body. That's
the sort of imprint that it can make. Sometimes. Yeah,
it's like you are you are marked by it, very
(16:15):
deep and profound sense. And of course you have individuals
who claim, and this is even less likely, but you
have individuals who claim that they have a genetic susceptibility
to lightning strikes, that it runs in the family. For
there was recently um an episode of on Being an
interview with the author Kevin Kling, and uh Kling argued
that or not they didn't really seriously argue, but he
(16:38):
he claimed that there that lightning strikes run in his family. Again,
all the factors that go into it. We you can
ask questions like, well, does your family tend to live
in Florida? Does your family tend to climb things a lot?
Are you a very outdoorsy family? Are you fisherman? You know,
there are all these other factors that go into it.
That really has nothing to do with a cursed family
(16:59):
lineage or something in your genes that makes you especially
susceptible to a lightning strike. But you know, always thinking
about the ancestral Memories episode. Then we talked about sometimes
that you take on your family's history and you repeat it,
and if this becomes part of your family's mythology, then
you begin to especially if if you have an uncle
(17:20):
or and or someone in the family that is marked
like this, with this Lichtenburg figure, you can easily see
how someone might begin to think this is, you know,
something that is a curse on their family and not
necessarily looking at it like, well, you know, we we
work out in the outdoors quite a bit, and we
live in Florida, or you know, various other factors that
(17:43):
would make the likelihood even greater for this family to
be struck. Yeah, there's a great character in Corte McCarthy's
All the Pretty Horses, a character in Blevins, and I
think this is reflected in the film version as well.
But um he he claims to have this history of
lightning strikes, and there's this this great bit where he's
explaining it. He says, it runs in my family. My
granddaddy was killed in a mind bucket in West Virginia.
(18:03):
It run down in the whole hundred and eighty feet
to get him. Couldn't even wait for him to get
up to the top. They had to wet down the
bucket to cool it for they could get him out
of it. Him and two other men. It fried him
like bacon. My daddy's older brother was blowed out of
a derek in the Baston field in the year nineteen
and four, cable rig with a wood derek. But the
lightning got him anyways, and him not nineteen years old.
(18:24):
Great uncle on my mother's side, mother's side, I said,
got killed on a horse and it never singed a
hair on that horse, and it killed him graveyard dead.
They had to cut cut his belt off of him
where it welded the buckle shut. And I got a
cousin ain't but four years older than me, and was
struck down in his own yard coming from the barn,
and it paralyzed him all down one side and melted
the fillings in his teeth and soldered his jaws shut.
(18:45):
So as persuasive persuasive? Um, alright, so you think that's persuasive,
But then all you have to do, as we ever
have to do when we try to get outside of ourselves,
is to look to space, of course, because there's something
about space and lightning going on that explored to look
like weak sauce. Okay, scientists have actually observed lightning on
Mars and Saturn before. Right, we know this, um, But
(19:07):
what is nuts is that it can occur in the
middle of space and it has done so to a
force equaling a trillion lightning bolts. Okay, we're talking about
electrical surge, trillion lightning bolts. This current was discovered near
Galaxy three C three zero three, and it's thought to
be the byproduct of a nearby massive black hole that
(19:30):
is emitting huge amounts of magnetic energy. Two. It's the
biggest burst of electric current ever detected in the universe.
That is just crazy because you have not only do
you have a black hole in this scenario, you have
the most enormous lightning bolt ever imagined occurring as well.
I mean just amazing. Like, I mean, what can you
(19:51):
even say about that? That's drama. Yeah, that is that
is some drama. All right, Well there you go. All right, well, um,
what's called the about over and do some quick listener mail?
All right, this is this one comes from a slightly
older episode, but listener of Brenton Wrightson and says, get
a Robert and Julie. Perhaps that means this is an
(20:12):
Australian listener. We shall find out. I love your podcast
I'm slowly working my way through them, and to have
just listened to the Firewalking podcast you Your mentioned of
your sister putting your tongue on the car cigarette ladder
made me smile, as did a similar thing when I
was a kid. Just use my finger and
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stop to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. And
in our last episode that we recorded, we talked about
watch stoppers, this idea that some people can magically stop
(00:24):
watches just by wearing them, that they can walk under
a street lamp and they'll set it off with their
electromagnetic field. Well, in this episode, we're exploring a similar misnomer,
this idea that some unique individuals are natural lightning rods.
Although I'm going to guess there are probably less people
who think they are human lightning rods than watch stoppers. Yeah,
(00:47):
because it's one of those things like strike me once
with lightning, shame on you strike me seven times. Well,
maybe maybe there's something weird going on with me. It's true,
and we'll get into that. There's a idea that you
know that has been kicked around, like could it be genetic?
Could could lightning strikes be attracted a certain people. I'm
(01:07):
guessing you guys know the answer to that, But we'll
discuss it in a bit more. Um, But let's talk
about the anatomy of a bolt of lightning because this
is really, in and of itself a very cool thing. Yes,
lightning is very cool. Has anyone who's ever seen it
can can certainly test ouh and uh and I would
also want to call back to our episode from Stuff
(01:28):
to blow your kid's mind when we talked about lightning.
But essentially, you have this, uh, this generated electrical charge
and it needs to get to the earth. It does,
and think think about what's going on weatherwise. You have
down drafts and up drafts and they're all colliding and
uh dogs everything. Now you're just putting yoga in it. Uh.
(01:50):
They're colliding with unstable air and these particles collide and
you know it might be particles of ice or rain,
and they cause electrical charges to separate. So if you're
thinking about this in terms of the cloud, um, if
you've got the cloud in mind, think about this positive
charges shooting high and then the negative charges hanging low
within the cloud, and then the electrical imbalance kind of
(02:12):
hangs in the air and intensiflies within the cloud and
then between the cloud and the ground. So most of
the lightning that you see is cloud. The clouds just
kind of playing with each other. But then sometimes it
makes that jump to the ground again because this is
this this upper portion of the storm cloud being that
this is positive in the lower portion is negative. Now,
the exact mechanics of this are are sort of poorly understood.
(02:35):
That we do know that much, and we know that
um as that charge increases, the field becomes more and
more intense, so intense. This is really interesting that the
electrons at the Earth's surface are repelled deeper into the
Earth by the strong negative charge at the lower portion
of the cloud. So that's when you get to this
(02:56):
cloud to ground lightning because you've got the repletion of
electrons causing their surface to acquire a strong positive charge.
This is quite a dance going on here in the atmosphere, uh.
And this is when you see the cloud to the
ground electricity happen in that strong electrical charge really serving
as a conductive path and serving and then in the
(03:18):
air serving as an insulator. Right now, when when lightning
is traveling to the Earth, it's it's it tends to
be very sensible about things. It tends to be very economic,
and we can see that reflected in our basic understanding
of what not to do during a lightning storm. Like,
what do they tell you not to do? Don't stand
under a tall tree why because the tall tree is
more likely to be hit by lightning. Don't play golf
(03:40):
during a lightning storm. In other words, don't stand up
in a in a in a wide open area while
raising a piece of metal over your head because you're
susceptible to lightning strike. Right. Why because this flash of
light it heats the air around it to nearly fifty
thousand degrees fahrenheit about twenty almost twenty eight thousand degrees celsius,
and that is hotter than surface of the sun, and
(04:02):
the scorching heat really forces the air to expand in
an explosion of thunder. That is why you don't want
to wave around a golf club. So yeah, as you
said that, as a charge near the ground, something like
a tall tree will send positive charges surging up it.
And that's why it connects so well with something really
tall like a tree or house, a telephone poll and
(04:24):
then of course people, right, this is where it all
comes down to. You frequently struck by lightning, but with
with humans, Yes, humans do get struck by lightning, and
in many cases, uh, there's not a lot of opportunity
to test the theory that this individual is more susceptible
to lightning, because one good boat can and will kill
(04:45):
you in many cases. Yeah, although a lot of people
do survive it, but one one will do its um.
In case you're wondering what's going on in the United States,
in terms of statistics, lightning researchers estimate that twenty two
million lightning flashes strike the ground each year, and of
course the majority of that is in Florida, which is
(05:06):
at Central Florida has been called a lightning alley and
they have on average twelve flashes of lightning pursh square
kilometer the year. This is a lot. And so why
is the most common month to get struck between the
hours of noon to six pm? So what's going on here?
Is Florida just cursed by God? Well that's one interpretation. No, Now,
(05:29):
it's all about weather, right, They have tons of it,
and they have tons of moisture and warmth and there
you know, we've got the ocean there and lo and
behold you have sort of the perfect storm, as you
would say, and you have a lot of people out golfing, voting, etcetera.
So you have a lot of lightning, a lot of
people putting themselves in a position to be hit high lightning.
Put those two together, it's natural what's going to occur.
(05:50):
And now, so obviously we've talked about the tall objects.
We've talked about power lines, reckon. We haven't talked about
power lines, but power lines metal, All of these things
you would want to stay away from. Um, most people
think that includes cars, but that is in fact the opposite.
A car can actually protect you. And I wanted to
mention this just because we're kind of going through and
(06:10):
debunking a couple of things. Um, Yes, cars metal, but
what it does is it acts as a sort of
Faraday cage for you. And when I talked about a
fair Day cage, I'm talking about something that is conducting
the electrons over the surface but keeping the inside neutral.
So that's what a car is basically doing. It has
nothing to do with rubber tires or you wearing rubber soles. Um.
(06:32):
It's just basically crux. Yes, it's just basically that you
are protected because of these electrons moving along the surface
of the car and not on you. And it's also
worth pointing out when we talk about human lightning rods.
Of course, the lightning rod in essence is a is
a rod that is erected on, say a building, with
the understanding that, hey, we have a tall building in
(06:52):
the middle of nowhere, lightning is going to strike it.
So I'm going to have this, uh, this rod here
in place so that the lightning will strike this rod,
and that's grounded in such a way that it doesn't
impact the rest of the building. Right, And that's really
important when I when I talk about Faraday or um,
the Faraday cage or the car, you're talking about the
path of it going into the ground and away from it.
(07:14):
So the car, obviously the path of lightning electricity is
running along the wall, water or down the tires and
into the ground. Yeah, bolt of lightning sensible, dude. It
wants to get where it's going if you if you
offer an alternate route that's a little more sensible, it
will take that instead. So what have we learn so
far right here in terms of being at the wrong
(07:35):
place at the wrong time, trying not to visit Florida
in the month of July and then decide to picnic
on a golf course under a cypress tree while entertaining
your picnic guests by twirling a baton. Let's say, no
golfing on a boat in there in the middle of
a storm either, that's always a no note. Yeah, And
and try to stay away from a phone booth too,
(07:56):
because we're talking about lightning hitting the ground and traveling
you that telephone booth and up the wires, and if
you're happy to be in there holding the telephone, that
is not a good situation. Yeah, definitely worth thinking about.
The more and more that we end up of burying
our power lines and whatnot. It's easy to maybe see
that booth and think, oh, well that's a place of safety,
but not so another thing for for mighty Thor's sake,
(08:20):
try not to be of the male persuasion. Yeah, now
this is uh, this is pretty interesting as well, and
I believe it's making the rounds very recently. Uh. The
idea here is that of individuals hit by lightning our ment.
So then that's a pretty high percentage when you know,
essentially we're talking I mean, we're talking about half of
(08:40):
the the species. If we were all getting hit equally,
to be about fifty, but I don't know, it's eighty.
So what are we to make of that the lightning
hates men? Lightning hates men? Well, yeah, so you could say,
all right, well this is the act of of of
wrathful God and knows that that the men are worse
and therefore are deserving of more lightning. Uh. There are
(09:00):
some other crazier theories. The one you ran across was
a head to do with the proteins. Uh, no, minerals
something I did not go into much iron too much,
but it was something like the accumulation of minerals would
make men more conductive. I abandoned this article, by the way,
But yeah, there are a lot of different ideas. You know.
Some people will say, oh, we'll men tend to be taller,
so maybe they're more likely to be hit by lightning.
(09:22):
But well, actually there's some information out there that says
try to make yourself as small as possible if you
are out in a thunderstorm and you are the tallest
thing out there. I thought that was more like you
want to be submissive to an angry guy, so you
just sort of a little bit because if you're proud
and like you know, you're doing like chest out, you're
just asking for the word is going to take you on.
(09:43):
But no, I mean if you have an umbrella above
your head, which is an entirely different can of worms
there with an umbrella, but really anything that makes yourself taller.
There's this idea to you that men participate more in
outdoor sports like fishing and golfing, and therefore there increasing
their exposure times to storms. And then there's an idea
(10:04):
that men are taking more risks in these sorts of situations.
They're out there hunting down the food while the woman
is back cooking it in the kitchen. Well maybe if
you're in the mafia. Yeah, no, I don't know what
I mean. I see that. I see that there's a
logic here that you know, men are going to get
struck more than women because you know, let's say that
(10:25):
you work on power lines. Um, you know, most likely
with the data we have available, you're probably a man. Yeah.
And then also you get into the I two that
you know, again the men are more more of a
risk taker but also a little stupider, and that they
don't want to be seen as a whim. So it's like, well,
I guess it's there's a lightning storm moving in. Maybe
we should go home. And stop playing golf. Do you
want to be that guy? You want to be the
(10:46):
guy who says, ah, well heck with that, that's not
God's not going to stop this golf game, and then
you keep going. So the idea too, is that men
are more likely to be that fool hardy regarding their
their risk of likning strike. Well. I think a good
example of work related injuries and just a good example
of someone being struck repeatedly and actually thinking that thor
(11:08):
might be after him is a guy by the name
of Roy Cleveland Sullivan, and I think we've actually mentioned
him before. He was a force ranger at the Shenandoah
National Park in Virginia, and he was struck seven times,
once while in the lookout tower, in once while driving
while walking across his front yard. This was in nineteen seventy.
(11:31):
Like that one was just you know, it's different if
you're the top of the tower, but dude was just
like getting his mail or something exactly, standing in a
ranger station on patrol in the park, check at camp ground,
and then fishing. So after the fourth one, he has
to have said that to have gotten very paranoid and
begin to think that some force was after him, and
I cannot blame him. Yeah, because again, we tend to see, uh,
(11:54):
you know, we tend to apply meaning to patterns, and
the crazier the pattern than well, the crazier at the meaning,
we end up coming up with Ford. And you know,
once you're own lightning hit five or six, I can
certainly understand it. Also, there's a there's a biological toll
to be taken here, So I mean it can. Lightning
strikes can cause a host of of physical ailments, and
(12:17):
some of them are neurological in nature. Yeah. Actually, let's
take a quick break and when we get back, we're
gonna talk a little bit more about that. All right,
we're back, and we're gonna talk about a little something
cooled coronopathy. And this is a pathology of lightning, and
a handful of specialists actually study the effects of lightning
on living things. Again, there's probably not a lot of
(12:39):
subjects that these specialists can look at, because thankfully, lightning
strikes are fairly rare. Yeah, like, I don't I don't
know that we have a there's a coronapathy clinic in
my neighborhood. No, no, no, Well, you know, if you
live in a super fancy neighborhood. Maybe that's when you
get your own or right, maybe in Florida it's more
(13:00):
more likely. But you know, I was looking at the
map of showing where lightning strikes are are likely to occur,
and George's actually it was in the black on the
on the map. Blogger and science journalist Kyle Hill says
that people being bags of electrolytes, are better transmitters of
electrical current than most ground is, and many are injured
by ground current. Each year's lightning surges up one leg
(13:22):
that is closer to the strike, and then down the
one that's further away. Yeah, and that's just something to
keep in mind because again we're talking about lightning striking
people and the reason it does what it does, and
the sort of effects that we have afterward. Dr Elizabeth
Glurbier of the Electricity de France, so please don't write
(13:44):
in I know it's an awful pronunciation in France, says
that lightning survivors experience residual effects, most commonly affecting the
brain and the neuropsychiatric, vision and hearing sections, and that
these effects can actually develop slowly and become apparent only
much later. Yeah, and plus you're throwing and stuff like
just you know, post traumatic stress syndrome as well. I mean,
(14:04):
just the the the experience of being struck by lightning
is is pretty intense. Well, it is forever changing, and
it's not something that we think about all the time
because again it's rare. But you tend to think of
people being struck by lightning and having these incredible abilities afterward,
because we have a couple examples of this. Oh, yes,
we've we've talked about before. The individual who's suddenly had
(14:26):
a profound interest in piano music, right and and and
someone who had never played the piano before became a
composer and actually a wonderful pianist. M He was actually
in a phone booth when he was struck by lightning,
by the way, But really the most common symptoms that
happen physically, you will suffer some burns, but not a
lot um. You can get burned through the sweat that's
(14:49):
vaporized by the lightning um. Mentally, the person may suffer
from short term memory loss, have difficult difficulty mentally storing
new information and accessing old information, get tired very easily
because their mental processes are being taxed. Um, they're not
really used to sort of running at the same speed
that they were before. The personality can change, become very irritable,
(15:11):
and they often suffer irreparable nerve damage. Um. And this
is something that again it's not we don't think of
with lightning strikes, but this is stuff that will affect
them in various ways depending on how they were struck,
and they often have chronic headaches, some of which are
really debilitating and SUPERINTENSEE. We're looking at some photos of
(15:33):
what we call Lichtenberg figures, and you see these, uh
you see these on for instance, cattle sometimes that have
been struck by lightning into in this one particular instance,
on a human being who had been struck, and it's
this crazy kind of like tree like pattern, like if
you didn't know any better, you'd look at it and
I think it was some sort of a body art
like like, yeah, I was gonna say it looks tribal
(15:53):
kind of a thing, yeah, because that's sort of like
a tree branching out and there is a beauty to it.
But I think that one of the things that the
lictomrid figures, as it shows you it is evidence of
how life altering being struck by lightning would be, or
having that sort of current run through your body. That's
the sort of imprint that it can make. Sometimes. Yeah,
it's like you are you are marked by it, very
(16:15):
deep and profound sense. And of course you have individuals
who claim, and this is even less likely, but you
have individuals who claim that they have a genetic susceptibility
to lightning strikes, that it runs in the family. For
there was recently um an episode of on Being an
interview with the author Kevin Kling, and uh Kling argued
that or not they didn't really seriously argue, but he
(16:38):
he claimed that there that lightning strikes run in his family. Again,
all the factors that go into it. We you can
ask questions like, well, does your family tend to live
in Florida? Does your family tend to climb things a lot?
Are you a very outdoorsy family? Are you fisherman? You know,
there are all these other factors that go into it.
That really has nothing to do with a cursed family
(16:59):
lineage or something in your genes that makes you especially
susceptible to a lightning strike. But you know, always thinking
about the ancestral Memories episode. Then we talked about sometimes
that you take on your family's history and you repeat it,
and if this becomes part of your family's mythology, then
you begin to especially if if you have an uncle
(17:20):
or and or someone in the family that is marked
like this, with this Lichtenburg figure, you can easily see
how someone might begin to think this is, you know,
something that is a curse on their family and not
necessarily looking at it like, well, you know, we we
work out in the outdoors quite a bit, and we
live in Florida, or you know, various other factors that
(17:43):
would make the likelihood even greater for this family to
be struck. Yeah, there's a great character in Corte McCarthy's
All the Pretty Horses, a character in Blevins, and I
think this is reflected in the film version as well.
But um he he claims to have this history of
lightning strikes, and there's this this great bit where he's
explaining it. He says, it runs in my family. My
granddaddy was killed in a mind bucket in West Virginia.
(18:03):
It run down in the whole hundred and eighty feet
to get him. Couldn't even wait for him to get
up to the top. They had to wet down the
bucket to cool it for they could get him out
of it. Him and two other men. It fried him
like bacon. My daddy's older brother was blowed out of
a derek in the Baston field in the year nineteen
and four, cable rig with a wood derek. But the
lightning got him anyways, and him not nineteen years old.
(18:24):
Great uncle on my mother's side, mother's side, I said,
got killed on a horse and it never singed a
hair on that horse, and it killed him graveyard dead.
They had to cut cut his belt off of him
where it welded the buckle shut. And I got a
cousin ain't but four years older than me, and was
struck down in his own yard coming from the barn,
and it paralyzed him all down one side and melted
the fillings in his teeth and soldered his jaws shut.
(18:45):
So as persuasive persuasive? Um, alright, so you think that's persuasive,
But then all you have to do, as we ever
have to do when we try to get outside of ourselves,
is to look to space, of course, because there's something
about space and lightning going on that explored to look
like weak sauce. Okay, scientists have actually observed lightning on
Mars and Saturn before. Right, we know this, um, But
(19:07):
what is nuts is that it can occur in the
middle of space and it has done so to a
force equaling a trillion lightning bolts. Okay, we're talking about
electrical surge, trillion lightning bolts. This current was discovered near
Galaxy three C three zero three, and it's thought to
be the byproduct of a nearby massive black hole that
(19:30):
is emitting huge amounts of magnetic energy. Two. It's the
biggest burst of electric current ever detected in the universe.
That is just crazy because you have not only do
you have a black hole in this scenario, you have
the most enormous lightning bolt ever imagined occurring as well.
I mean just amazing. Like, I mean, what can you
(19:51):
even say about that? That's drama. Yeah, that is that
is some drama. All right, Well there you go. All right, well, um,
what's called the about over and do some quick listener mail?
All right, this is this one comes from a slightly
older episode, but listener of Brenton Wrightson and says, get
a Robert and Julie. Perhaps that means this is an
(20:12):
Australian listener. We shall find out. I love your podcast
I'm slowly working my way through them, and to have
just listened to the Firewalking podcast you Your mentioned of
your sister putting your tongue on the car cigarette ladder
made me smile, as did a similar thing when I
was a kid. Just use my finger and
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