Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/27/tourists-in-arizona-say-they-found-a-magnetic-portal-but-are-actually-flirting-with-death-video.html
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I’m glad they’re ok, but … pay attention in school, kids!
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“We stayed there for over an hour and there was no lightning; there must be another explanation.”
Spoken like a true Xitter user.
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Add this to the video of the person holding the “cute little blue ringed octopus” in Australia.
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I’m not really clear on where these people should have or could have run to, it kind of looks like they’re hiking out in the middle of nowhere in a big flat desert. Unless their car was parked 100 feet away out of frame, I guess. Glad they didn’t get fried, anyway.
I saw a similar video recently filmed on the deck of a cruise ship. The appropriate course of action (get the hell inside) was a little more obvious in that case.
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Drop to the ground. You don’t want to be the tallest object. The difference of a few feet up or a dozen feet to the side can be lethal.
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Oh, interesting - you can see the CCD in the camera being directly affected by the charge, with all the white dots appearing in the video… That seems like something you generally don’t want to see in your videos, because the other cause would be ionizing radiation…
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And if you are hit while lying down there’s at least a chance that the electricity won’t burn through every vital organ in your body from your brain on down in its path to reach the ground.
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It’s so hard to do the math on that, it could be associated with lightning, that effects pretty much every part of the planet, or a magnetic portal, that never occurs on the surface of the earth. I guess flip a coin to figure it out.
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The stupid, it burns… but not nearly as much as being struck by lightning, I would imagine.
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True, and more ground contact should spread out the current density to less harmfull levels in any one area of tissue.
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I guess their DM let them do a charisma saving throw instead of intelligence?
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The weather conditions look like there could be some light misting in the area, which might be getting caught by the camera shutter.
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Doing their own research of course.
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This video makes me wonder if there are some old legends inspired by survivors of similar experiences.
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This happened to my husband and me while we were hiking near Summit Lake, CO. Lightning was everywhere, our hair began to stand up and we could feel tingling in our fingertips. Luckily we were able to quickly seek cover. Very interesting experience that I’d rather not repeat.
Figuring the odds were in our favor, we bought lottery tickets afterwards. Considering I’m writing comments on Boing Boing, instead of destroying the planet with my Gulfstream G650, you know how that went.
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One cloudy afternoon on a 14,000 foot Colorado mountain a friend asked me to go stand by some rock towers for a photo. As I approached I could hear them sizzling. We ducked into a crevice until things quieted down. As it turns out, that might not have been a good place to go, but at least we didn’t get zapped. Neither did a group of older men who walked past us to the nearby summit with metal hiking poles.
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just as a note, the accuweather author seems to have not read the linked article; the boy was not killed, instead a to the family unrelated man by the same strike.
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