I have experienced something similar in Montana, only seen one time. This was late into the night, during a severe thunderstorm. The storm woke me up. Looking out the window, lightning seemed to be continuous, for at least a couple of minutes. Like a xenon strobe light with the frequency sufficiently high to appear persistent to the human visual system. It looked like an alien abduction scene -- the outside landscape appeared to be illuminated as brightly as daylight.

I had lighting strike a telephone pole about 30 feet from me when I was a kid in Missouri. It was like someone sticking a camera flash close to my eyes and pressing the button. I didn't really feel anything else, just temporary blindness. And honestly, I wasn't really scared; it all happened so fast.

If you don't mind - how long was the temporary blindness roughly? And I assume your eyesight went back to normal eventually, or did you have any lasting effects?

Notably people who have eyesight damage normally don't notice any effects unless the damage is major. You can have a pretty big area of your retina totally nonfunctional and not notice.

Ive been near (<50 feet) to two lighting strikes. The strangest thing i remember is the lack of a thunderclap. It was a pop and fizzle sound but not the big boom i expected. Only afterwards did we really appreciate what had happened.

Interesting. I have been near a lightining strike as well (about 20m), so a similar distance. There was a very loud bang. The lightning struck a tree, so maybe that's different.

I was similarly close to a lightning streak, on the other side of an outside wall of our house. I remember that there was a boom, and I didn't realize it at first, but I lost my hearing. I remember running to the hallway and screaming to my sister at the other end of the hall, "Shut off the power!" I read her lips, "I don't know where it is" or something, and ended up running past her to throw off the main breakers.

I actually don't know if that was necessary or not, because I'm pretty sure all the relevant breakers had already been thrown.

Anyhow, point is that I remember hearing a boom and then nothing. I wonder if I was closer, or not protected by the wall, if noise would have been so loud that I lost my hearing immediately, instead of hearing the boom first?

My hearing came back over the next 5-10 minutes, IIRC.

I think much depends on the shape of the lighting bolt and what it hits. I think I was near very vertical strikes, with the bulk of the noise projecting outwards rather than down towards the impact point. Once time the bolt hit flatish ground, the other a metal post, neither were objects that might explode to make their own noise.

What this has in common with the megaflashes is that both are flashes between the clouds, which don't necessarily hit the ground:

> Megaflashes crawl through the clouds but can produce or induce ground connections at various points.

I have seen a few thunderstorms like you describe (although probably less powerful) at night where I live. Lots of very frequent flashes, but only between the clouds and with almost no thunder.

Yeah, it was all in the clouds, I should have pointed that out. And in my memory it was silent/no thunder, but that seems impossible so I just discounted it as a tainted part of the memory.

That is the second strangest report of lightning phenomena I've ever heard. Sounds almost too fantastic to be true but I guess it's confirmed to be possible now.