When a lightning strike hit Georgia man Sean O’Connor he was literally blown out of his boots by the electrical shock. While the man did not gain any super hero powers like something out of the Hulu original Misfits , he does have photos to back up his claim to fame.
In a related report by The Inquisitr , a young boy struck by lightning is struggling for his life, and one incredible video shows a lightning strike turning a pickup truck into a rolling death trap.
Mr. O’Connor was working in his front yard during a mostly sunny day when it began to sprinkle. When he reached for a rake, he heard a loud crashing noise:
“I thought it was a tree limb falling, but moments later I found myself across the driveway on the ground. A few moments later I was picking myself up off the ground. I had the taste of blood in my mouth. I noticed my leg was burning a little bit.”
When he had recovered his wits he looked around and realized his steel-toed work boats were still on the driveway… and they were still smoldering:
“They were no longer on my feet, and one of them was smoking. At that point I realized I had just been hit by lightning…. That’s where the doctors believe the lightning bolt actually entered my body. They believe it was a direct strike.”
The lightning even charred the leather, and his right shoe has a hole where the material completely disintegrated.
Before his wife rushed him off to the hospital, O’Conner took a photo of his boots as proof that he literally had been blown out of his boots by a lightning strike. Although the hospital treated him for an irregular heartbeat and kept him overnight, doctors were apparently skeptical at first about his story:
“At first they didn’t believe me, but when I showed them the singed hair on my legs and the boots they all wanted to shake my hand. They said they’d never met someone who lived after being struck by lightning…. With your body running off its own electrical system, any time you’ve got a jolt like that that runs through you, you run the chance of basically short circuiting your mind out and rewiring some stuff.”
The odds of being struck by lightning in any given is around one in 1.9 million, so his family joked that he should enter the state lottery. Of course, they also hope he’ll transform into a superhero:
“I wish, but my sister did bring me a Flash Gordon t-shirt with a lightning bolt on it.”
Sean O’Connor knows that being blown out of his boots by a lightning strike has odds worse than one in 360 billion, but even so he plans on checking the weather forecast next time he does yard work.