This week, Morning Brief reader Phillip in Suffolk, England, writes in with an elaborate and strange story of surviving a lightning strike.

"On Tuesday 21st May 2024, around 12.30pm I was struck by lightning while in my garden in Suffolk.

The weather forecast for the day was dry in the morning, a bit overcast and then some rain later – but no mention of a storm. I had just finished mowing the lawn and as it was just starting to spit with rain I covered up some dry logs with a tarpaulin. As I stepped back it sounded as if large hailstones were hitting the tall trees to the northeast. As it moved towards me the sound got louder. I ducked – as if that would have done me any good!

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The pattering sound changed to crackling. Surrounding me at arm’s length were what I would describe as orange sparklers shaped like car wheel wrench spiders. There was then a big bang and thunder rolled away into the distance.

All this must have taken only seconds. I stood for many minutes wondering what had just happened. I was unhurt and there were no signs of scorch marks on the drive. To my knowledge, trees in the garden have been struck by lightning twice in the past 50+ years. In each case an elm and then a willow had been blown to smithereens.

Later, I telephoned some friends who live some five miles to the north-east who said they had a hailstorm followed by a large bang. One suggestion as to what happened is that the electrical charge was dissipated by the hailstones which vaporized. But what was this strange fire around me? Can you explain?"

Digital Meteorologist Jonathan Belles: People often bring me strange stories about the weather: “I saw this, that, or the other thing. Explain it to me.”

As we're seeing in the Southeast this week, we've had several people struck this week that we know of. So, being struck by lightning isn’t necessarily rare. But the details of this story do make for an unusual one.

When I try to explain a story like this, where something happened to a person, I try to go back to things that we've looked at before. Rare, super rare events: those are unexplainable because we haven't seen them before. Oftentimes though, we can take some scenario that we've seen before and place it into this new scenario. In the case of lightning, we have plenty of documentation of the different ways that lightning impacts the human body.

I started looking into your story by pulling up the weather for that day. There was a weak and dying low pressure system moving through the mainland part of Europe. And on the northern side of that, where you find England, there was a band of rainfall. That backside tends to be colder, which is where you would see hail like this in May. So, all of that is validating the story here.

Lightning is created by friction up in the clouds. That could be really big raindrops or, because this is 20 or 40 thousand feet up, it could be the collision of objects: hail. These create sparks. They're building up a charge slowly but surely with all of these bouncing objects up there.

In this specific case, it sounds like you were working up a sweat and it was also beginning to rain. So, there was probably a layer of water on your skin.

Lightning is trying to figure out the path of least resistance, from wherever it started to wherever it's going. A lot of times that is water or metal. It can be light poles or a skyscraper, if that’s the tallest object around, or it could be a golfer with a club, that’s the tallest thing on the fairway. In many cases, lightning comes down and hits the human, goes straight through their head, and out one of the soles on their shoes.

Less often, lightning will take that charge through water molecules, instead of the path through the body. This is called a flashover event or flashover strike, where the flash is going over the human body instead of through the body.

That’s probably what happened to you. The lightning likely passed through the layer of water on your skin. The "strange fire" you saw could have been the lightning heat passing in front of your eyes or it could have been your brain trying to process all of that heat, which is five times hotter than the sun, by the way.

This isn’t a lucky story, being struck by lightning never is, though I'd probably go buy a lottery ticket afterward if I was struck by lightning and survived unharmed.

Do you have a question to ask the meteorologists at Weather.com? Write to us at [email protected] and we’ll pick a new question each week from readers to answer.