Count it: “Incredible” Lightning Bolt Strikes the Same Place 11 Times in 8 Seconds

Stock image of lightning. Free-Photos/Pixabay

The saying “lightning never strikes the same place twice” doesn’t seem to be correct anymore.

Southeast Texas experienced a strong storm and heavy rain on May 9 but what really shocked people was a lightning bolt that hit the same place 11 times in 8 seconds.

The lightning was captured in a video by KHOU 11 reporter, Brett Buffington and since then it has gone viral with over 350,000 views on Facebook.

The “incredible lightning over Wallert and Fort Bend County in Texas divided the sky exactly in half appearing like a high-tension electrical wire connecting the sky to Earth.

“SAME LIGHTNING BOLT STRIKES 11 TIMES! A stormy night in Houston. Watch as this lightning bolt hits over and over again in the same spot for several seconds. This was part of the storms passing through Fort Bend and Waller Counties,” said the Facebook post.

The unbelievable bolt struck a chord with people’s imagination. “Imagine the bad luck you would have of being struck by lightning once ... then imagine if you happened to be getting hit by that bolt 11 times,” Jonothan Carroll commented on the post.

“This is the power of Thor,” wrote another user, Daniel Medina.

“How do y’all catch these photos? I never see anything cool in my backyard except Stray cats,” said Erica Avila.

Some users linked the phenomenon to aliens. “Has anyone else seen War of the Worlds? That’s no lightning. It’s aliens teleporting to earth,” said Erick Edwardo Segura.

“It’s an alien ship charging up,” said David Brown.

There were no reports or injuries resulting from the bad weather on Thursday, according to KHOU 11.

Other Incredible Lightning Phenomenon

NASA said that lightning happens more on land than over oceans and happens more near the equator than elsewhere.

The agency said the lightning phenomenon varies from place and place. “As the map shows, the highest amounts of lightning flashes occur in the far eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and Lake Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela,” it said.

The incredible lightning over Lake Maracaibo lights up the sky for 160 nights every year, sometimes as long as 10 hours at a time. It appears in multiple colours—red, orange, blue, and purple due to a presence of a varying amount of dust particles and water vapor in the sky.

Every year the place experiences 1.2 million lightning strikes reported IFL Science.

The lightning is so intense that it is visible from 250 miles away and was a navigation pointer for Caribbean navigators in colonial times.

The exact cause of the lightning phenomenon over the lake is unknown but scientists believe it is a result of the region’s unique topography.

DR Congo in Central Africa is one of the most electric places in the world—its mountain village of Kifuka receives 158 lightning flashes in a little less than half a square mile each year.

Global lightning activity map by NASA that tracked lightning globally between May 4, 1995, to Dec. 31, 2013. Pic Courtesy NASA's Earth Observatory.

The Brahmaputra Valley in Eastern India has the highest monthly lightning flash rate when NASA calculated it between April and May in 2014.

“The heating and weather patterns are unstable and changeable at that time—just before the onset of the monsoon, which brings plenty of rain but much less lightning,” NASA said.