LIGHTNING TRIVIA:

Lightning can strike up to 20 Miles away from a thunderstorm.
When you see Lightning in the distance on a hot day, but, you don't hear thunder, that's because, there is a storm a long ways away. Too far for you to see the rain clouds or hear the thunder. This makes it look like the lighting is being caused by the heat. People often think it is the heat that is causing the lighting. It's often referred to as "Heat Lightning". But, Heat Lightning does not exist. It is regular lightning from a storm that's too far away for you to see the rain or hear the thunder.
Lightning strikes the Earth between 50 and 100 times per second! Astronauts have confirmed that as fact, because they can see the clouds light up in several different places around the world, all at the same time. They can see it from the space station.
Lightning can travel in all directions, most Lightning is cloud to cloud lightning and it doesn't hit the ground. On the ground it can travel straight down, up, or sideways. According to the Discovery Channel and some high speed video footage of lightning strikes, which you can see on YouTube, most Lightning travels from the ground up, NOT down from the clouds!
Lightning has between 1 Million and 1 Billion Volts.
In the movie: Back To The Future, they use the the word: "Jigowatt". There is no such thing as a Jigowatt. The actors mispronounced the word: "Gigawatt". Just like the computer term, Gigabyte- 1 Billion bytes, a Gigawatt is 1 Billion Watts.
When people get struck by lightning, they usually don't get hit directly by the bolt, usually, the lighting hits something else, if someone is touching the object that got hit, they get zapped. It can also "splash", or bounce off something it hits and hit someone. Sometimes, it hits the wet ground several feet away and if a person is standing on the ground near the strikes, electricity travels across the wet ground and hits them.
The record for the most times being struck by lightning lightning is 7 times! It was a park ranger. He lived to tell about it! However, he had Psychological and physical health problems after being struck that many times.
The lighting capital of the word as of 2016, according to NASA.gov, is: Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. They get an avg of 233 lightning strikes per square Km every year.
Before NASA researched this, The Congo Basin in Africa held the record for the most Lightning activity each year.
NASA conducted their research with: "The Lighting Image Sensor" (LIS) on the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission.
The lighting capital of the US is Tampa, FL. They have more Lightning than any US city. The word Tampa comes from the Clausa Tribe in the 16th century. The word Tampa means: "Sticks of Fire".
The Lighting Belt is an area of FL that extends from Tampa to Orlando and from Orlando down to Ft Myers and Lake Okeechobee. That  area of FL gets the most Lightning each year.
Lightning can generate heat up to 60,000 degrees F. That's 6 times hotter than the surface of the Sun!
Lightning kills more people than Hurricanes and Tornadoes combined every year.
NASA is not supposed to launch rockets through clouds, because, that could trigger lightning. However, I have seen them do it and the rockets did not cause lightning. Not the ones I saw.
Most commercial airplanes get struck by lightning at least once or more every year. Because of all the safety features on airplanes  to protect the plane and passengers from lightning, most people don't even know that the airplane was struck by lightning. In fact, planes can even trigger lightning.
Experts say that if lightning hits your car while you're in it, you should be safe. The force of the lighting will be absorbed by the outer frame of the car and you, theoretically, should not be affected by it. Unless you stick your arm out the window and touch something else that is touching the ground, then you'll get fried.
Lightning can be produced by other things besides rain, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, rockets and sometimes even a huge fire, which can also cause a fire tornado. That is a whirlwind caused by a fire. It sucks up the flame. Now the tornado is spinning around and it is actually spinning a flame around with it! Making it even more dangerous.l
Some other planets have storms on them and some of them also produce lightning. Jupiter has some of the most violent storms  in the Solar system. According to NASA, Lightning on Jupiter is much more powerful than what we experience on Earth.
(Most of this information comes from: Discovery Channel, NASA.gov, Orlandosentinel.com and Scientificamerican.com.)

Things you learned in school (and other places) that are wrong.

Ben Franklin:

He never flew a kite in a thunder storm. His kite was not struck by lightning. He did not discover electricity.

Yes, he did fly a kite in clouds that were electrically charged, but they were not storm clouds.

He did not get struck by lightning. If he had been, he would have either died or been seriously injured.

Electricity had been discovered Thousands of years before Franklin was ever born.

He worked a lot with electricity. Someone asked him which direction electrons flowed out of a battery, he told them: “I think it flows from Positive to Negative”. For years everybody believed that. It wasn’t until the mid 1900’s when they invented the electron microscope that they were able to see electrons under the microscope and prove Franklin’s guess wrong. Electrons flow out of the NEGATIVE TERMINAL AND BACK TO THE POSITIVE TERMINAL!

 Einstein:

He did not do very well in school. Although he was a genius with an IQ of 160, he did not show it in school. Some of his teachers in school thought he would never amount to anything.

He had Aspergers, this caused him problems. He couldn’t walk until he was about 4. He had problems communicating. He couldn’t speak full sentences until he was 7.

He actually was good at Math. If he hadn’t been good at Math, he would never been successful as a Physicist.

Bill Clinton:

Yes, Congress did officially impeach him. The reason that he was still able to finish out his term as President is because Congress did not vote to “Remove him from office”.

Washington:

He never really chopped down a Cherry Tree, like you probably learned in school. Over 200 years ago, somebody wrote a fictional novel about Washington. In the book, he chops the bark off his dad’s Cherry Tree and the tree dies. Even in the book, he did not chop down the tree!

Edison:

He did not invent the Light Bulb by himself. He owned a company and some of his employees actually discovered how to make the light bulb work. But, since Edison owned the company, he took full credit for it! This still happens in companies all the time today. If you invent something, your boss will steal all the credit for your invention. He gets on TV and tells the world: “I invented this. I had a hard time making it work, but, I finally figured it out……………” Then he puts the paten in his name, any awards that your invention earns go to the boss. He gets all the money, etc. Your name is never going to be mentioned.

Tesla:

Edison and other people created so many myths about him that I could almost write a book about them all.

He had an idea that would have given the world FREE energy.

He used to work for Edison. But, they didn’t get along very well, so he quit and opened his own company.

He came up with the idea of using Alternating Current (AC) electricity instead of Direct Current (DC). He told everyone that it would be so much better than using batteries. Edison was much more powerful and had a lot more money. Edison went out of his way to prove Tesla wrong and convince the public that Tesla was wrong and he was an idiot. The people believed Edison for a long time. He was able to convince people that his idea of sticking with the old way of using batteries was the best way to go.

Tesla’s idea of AC electricity being better took years before it caught on. But, when people figured out it was better, they put up power lines and that is what comes out of the electric outlets in almost everybody’s homes and other buildings today.

Tesla was found mysteriously dead in a hotel room one day. He was murdered. Most of his research documents were stolen. Nobody knows for sure if Edison was involved in his murder or not. (I think he probably was involved.)

The federal government doesn’t want us to have free energy, because, they’d get less money. So They were very likely involved in his murder to!

 Voting:

When you cast your vote for President, YOU are not voting actually for President, you are voting for Electoral College (EC) votes. Each state has a certain number of Electoral College votes. It depends on the population of the state as to how many Electoral College points they have.

If your state has 30 EC points, If the state votes mostly Republican, most of the people the state sends out to vote for the EC will be expected to Republican supporters. They will be expected to vote Republican. However, when they go cast their own votes, you don’t know who they are going to vote for, they can still vote for whoever they want.

Lightning:

You’ve probably heard the term: “JIGAWATT” in the movie Back To The Future. There is no such thing as a Jiggowatt. It was a mispronunciation of the word: “GIGAWATT”. The word “Giga” means Billion. Just like with a computer, as in Gigabyte (One Billion Bytes). A Gigawatt is One Billion Watts of electricity.

Lightning strikes the Earth between 50 and 100 times every second. NASA can see it from space.

Lightning does not usually come down from the clouds to the Earth, it usually goes from the ground up! Lightning can go in all directions: Up, down, Horizontally, diagonally, etc.

Most lightning never hits the ground, it is cloud to cloud lightning.

The Lightning Belt is an area in FL that gets more lightning strikes than anywhere else in the US. It goes from Tampa, crosses over Orlando and ends in Daytona Beach.

More people get struck by lightning in FL almost every year than any other state.

READ THIS ONE CAREFULLY! Don’t get confused by the facts here! Each year,  there’s not normally a lot of people in the state of Michigan that get struck by lightning. However, (READ THIS PART SLOWLY! TAKE A MINUTE AND LET YOUR BRAIN PROCESS THIS!) However, there have been more people in the state of MI who have been reported as having been struck by lightning ON THE GOLF COURSE, WHILE PLAYING GOLF than in any other state. (OK, go back and read the last part of this again if you have to, before you say it doesn’t make sense or it contradicts or any other stupid comments. It makes perfect sense!)

(I’m sorry, I’ve had problems with that one before. I tried to explain it to some stupid idiots before and all they did was argue with me and say: “That don’t make sense. First you said, “There’s not a lot of people in MI that get hit by lightning, then you said there’s more people who get struck there.”

Then I have to explain: More people have been struck ON THE GOLF COURSE in MI than anywhere else. Other than that, there’s not a lot of people who get struck in MI.)

When people do get hit by lightning, it’s not usually a direct hit. The lightning either hits another object and bounces off, hitting the person, hits the water they’re standing in or hits something they are touching.

Roswell UFO:

I just had to include this one, because I love Outer Space, Astronomy and especially UFO’s more than anything! I guess I’m a geek.

Since UFO stands for: Unidentified Flying Object, anything you see flying through the air can be considered a UFO. If you don't know for sure what it is, in other words,  you can't identify the object that you see in the air, up to the moment that you can tell what it is, technically, it is a UFO. Most of the time, however, when we hear about a UFO, we think of flying saucers from outer space.

Years ago, something crashed in Roswell, NM. Nobody knows for sure what it was, except the US government! According to witnesses, there were three strange beings on the ground near the object that landed. The material the spacecraft was made out of did not look like any material on Earth. It was not the shape of anything that we have on Earth that can fly. There were other strange things about it to.

The US military sure got there pretty fast. They searched the whole area with a magnifying glass and picked up every single tiny piece of the UFO. So if someone else went out there later to find a piece of it, there was literally nothing left of it. Not even a speck of dust!

When the military finished cleaning up the remains of the UFO, they threatened all the witnesses saying, “If you tell anyone what happened here, we’ll kill you and your family! You are going to get on the news now and say it was just a weather balloon.”

People think they probably took the remains of the UFO and aliens to Area 51. I don’t think they took the UFO there. I think there was another top secret location that is even more top secret than Area 51 where they took it and no one knows where this location is. That would be a more likely place to take it.

The US military declassified some documents 15 or 20 years ago that tell about the US military attempting to make a flying saucers. The reason they never used the military version of the flying saucer is, because they couldn't get it to lift up off the ground more than a few feet and it would only fly a short distance before it fell to the ground. They eventually had to give up the project, because it was costing too much time and money. So it's not they didn't want to build a UFO, they just couldn't get it to work.