Lightning Strikes Seven Times?

Tom Dunkel reports on the legendary park ranger who claimed to be struck by lightning SEVEN times:

I’ve come to talk with Dickey Baker about the legacy of Lightning Man. When Baker was a teenage employee, he crossed paths with Roy Sullivan, who died 30 years ago and undoubtedly is the most famous ranger in the history of Shenandoah National Park, if not every national park.
Baker saw the tan ranger hat that Sullivan kept in his truck as a souvenir. It had two scorched holes where a lightning bolt supposedly entered and exited. “He used to haul it around with him,” recalls Baker, who also saw Sullivan’s wristwatch that got toasted black by another bolt.
Forty-one years after his debut in the “Guinness Book of World Records,” Ranger Roy Sullivan continues to hold the dubious distinction of being struck by lightning more than any known person. Not twice. Not three times.
Seven times.
That’ll attract attention. In the early 1970s, Sullivan did an interview with expat British broadcaster David Frost and appeared on the quiz show “To Tell the Truth.” In 1980, Sullivan was featured in an episode of the TV series “That’s Incredible.” More recently, Discover magazine (2008) included him on its list of memorable survivors, along with the Soviet World War II pilot who bailed out of his plane at 22,000 feet without a parachute and the hapless sailor who endured being adrift at sea for 76 days in a five-foot raft. The Web site Cracked.com (2009) selected Sullivan as one of the seven “Most Bizarrely Unlucky People Who Ever Lived.” (Tsutomu Yamaguchi was named most unlucky, having been at ground zero when atomic bombs fell on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) In 2010 Sullivan’s misadventures were the basis of a humorous South African TV commercial for, of all things, energy-saving milk cartons. His birth-chart reading is posted on AstrologyWeekly .com in the heady company of Elvis Presley, Bill Clinton and Leonardo da Vinci.

The whole story is fascinating.  I had a close enough brush with lightning for my taste, and while this guy might have exaggerated a bit, I bet he got struck by lightning at least once or twice.  I'll pass.