"I've waited out storms in my tent wearing fleece clothes while lightning struck all around me. I'm still alive. Not scientific, but not bad."

Lightning does incredible and strange things.

It will hit the ground just a few feet from
a 300' radio tower. It will enter one window,
pass through a living room, and exit out
another window. It will hit wood, plastic, or
anything else considered non conductive.
It will cause electronic musical bears to start
playing their pre-recorded ditties. It will
fuse a giant construction crane into one big
useless mass of metal, and make the insides of
an electrical box just disappear, leaving
nothing but soot behind,
but leave the wires on the outside mostly
unscathed.

Lightning does not always 'follow the rules'.

It also does not care if your clothes are woll,
polyester, cotton, or tinfoil. If it strikes,
it's going to strike regardless. Of course,
if it does 'choose you', you don't want to
be wearing anything that can make the situation
worse (polyester melted to your skin for example).

Same with cars. Even if the tires are 100% non conductive
(they're not), a bolt which managed to turn
miles of insulating air into a conductor would
have no problem jumping from the underside
of your car to ground. A metal bodied and roofed
car is safER than being out in the open because
it directs most of the current around you to
ground, but this is no 100% guarantee either.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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"In the few seconds while I was doing all this, I noticed a strange
whistling sound, and the wind blew my parka up around my neck. Then I
noticed it wasn't the wind. When I tried to brush the billowing parka
back, it sparked at me, little noisy points of light that stung my
neck."

This reminds me of the "Balloon and
static electricity" experiments we did
during our elementary school years.

" Then the phone screamed a chattering high whistle and went dead."

Likely induced currents within the phone.
Stuff like this make electronics and microprocessors go haywire

"I stared at it, looked up, and the BIGGEST, BLACKEST, NEAREST CLOUD I
ever saw was right over my head. For just a moment I felt like a
character in a cartoon, rooted to this knob of crumbling rock. The
thought that went through my head was: "What a stupid way to die." Then
I DOVE off that rock, grabbed my pack, and RAN very low back to the
start of the trail down, a distance of maybe 75 yards. The cloud passed harmlessly overhead. The sparking stopped. I got the hell out of
there"

It seels like you were inside or very close
to a ground streamer, one of many in the area,
that was growing and getting ready to
connect with the growing downward streamer
from the cloud. Had they met-BOOM-lightning.

You didn't hear any thunder or lightning
after you "dove off that rock", simply because
the connection wasn't completed for some
reason. Could've been wind preventing any connections,
maybe the cloud started to discharge into the air around it,
slow enough to not produce a bolt, who knows?

But what I do know is that you lucked
out big time, because you came very close to being
in the path of a sucessful lightning strike

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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