Man Survives Being Hit by Lightning Twice in Remarkable CCTV Footage - Facts

Story:

How unlucky can you get! Man survives being hit by lightning Twice in remarkable CCTV footage and walks away…

Other Versions

1. Incredible. Man struck by Lightning ‘Twice’ and walks away..!

2. A Miracle! Jogger Hit Twice by lightning and still Walks Away!

3. Raw footage: Chinese Man Struck by Lightning Twice in a Row Survives.

Analysis:

This is a popular video that has been circulating since at least April 2011. What is shown as a security camera recording claims to show a jogger hit by lightning twice within couple of minutes, but yet he manages to stand up in both cases and walks away miraculously. Many people thought the video could be real, and that the man was unlucky (or lucky), but that’s not the case.

This video gained so much popularity that mail Online(dailymail.co.uk) published an article on it, and then there were even reports in Chinese media, not concluding whether it was real or hoax. Lightning generally strikes the tallest objects like trees or metal objects, and sometimes it also strikes humans – mostly in the form of ‘side flashes’. This is the reason why some people survive lightning strikes. A U.S. park ranger named Roy Cleveland Sullivan survived lightning strike in seven different occasions, and is even recognized by Guinness World Records. And lightning can hit the same spot or almost the same spot more than once. But as shown in the video, if a person is struck by lightning “directly”, then the chances of his survival are almost zero – because lightning bolts can convey up to a gigajoule of electrostatic energy.

Coming to the authenticity of the video in question, firstly, if the lightning were real, the supposed security camera cannot capture the footage so clearly. If it were real, multiple frames of the camera should have gone completely white, resulting in saturation or blooming of the camera. And then there are certain flaws in the footage. As shown in the pictures below, if we have a closer look at the shadow patterns of lightning strike shots in both cases, we can see very much similarity. In first strike, the shadows of the surrounding vehicle do not seem to be disturbed by the lightning, and more importantly, the shadow of the man shows up clearly. Same is the case in the second strike as well. Also, the surrounding light pattern around vehicles and trees is very similar. In fact when we look at both the screenshots side by side, we can clearly conclude that both the lightning strikes are shown in exactly same way!

So considering the aforementioned factors, it is clearly evident that the video showing a Chinese man surviving lightning strikes twice in a row is not real, but a hoax. Visual effects depicting lightning seem to have been added to an ordinary footage to stage it as an incredible incident. The video is most certainly created as a marketing strategy – to grab viewer interest and generate traffic.