Wet Clothes May Have Helped Save Man Struck by Lightning

July 1, 2008 — -- Kent Lilyerd defied nature and logic by getting struck on the top of the head by a bolt of lightning -- and living to talk about it.

What, ironically, saved the 47-year-old was that he was wearing three layers of sopping wet clothes.

Lilyerd was struggling to prevent his gazebo tent from getting lifted off the ground by high winds when the unexpected thunderstorm blew through Mora, Minn., last Friday. That's when Lilyerd got zapped.

"It's just something that came out of the blue," Lilyerd told "Good Morning America" today. "Right in the middle of that first big roll [of wind], bam! The first bolt of lightning hit, and it hit me right on the top of the head."

A small circular wound atop Lilyerd's head is the only evidence of his miracle escape.

"It was so loud. My ears were ringing, and then I smelled the burned skin and burned hair," Lilyerd said. "It was a big shock. It was an electrical shock. I could feel the electricity shock me."

But even more remarkable was the fact that he woke up.

Lilyerd was wearing three layers of clothing when the bolt hit the metal facet atop his red baseball cap. It then charged through his drenched clothing instead of through his vital organs and exited through his boot's steel toe.

Along the way, the electricity singed his socks, shredded his hat, caused a hunting bullet in his pocket to explode, and blackened a nickel in his pocket.

Lilyerd displayed how each of his layers of clothing was singed and how the lightning melted the plastic on his most inner layer.

Joseph Dwyer, a Florida Institute of Technology lightning specialist and physics professor, said the wet clothing could have aided the body's natural resistance to electricity, which causes the charge to usually travel in a spider web pattern over the skin's surface.

That didn't lessen the jolt from the electrical charge that encased Lilyerd and knocked him out for an hour.

"The first thing I heard when I woke up — the mosquitoes where all over me buzzing in my ear," he said.

He also realized the strike had immobilized him.

"I wasn't able to move at all," Lilyerd said. "[I could] only move my toes."

Slowly, Lilyerd began to regain some feeling in his body, and he headed downhill toward his home by slowly crawling and wiggling for 50 feet on his stomach to make his way to the door. For 30 to 45 minutes Lilyerd pounded on the door to wake up his sleeping wife.

As Lilyerd struggled outside, his wife, Jana Lilyerd, woke up because she noticed strange sounds.

"I heard some tapping that sounded like hammering," she told "GMA."

Initially, Jana said she thought her handy husband was working on something.

"I then heard a moan, then it got irregular," she said.

Jana, who is a nurse, rushed out to find her spouse unable to tell her what happened to him. She suspected he had fallen off his motorcycle because of his dilated pupils and bloody head injury. Lilyerd also had a mouth full of fluid.

She called 911 and rolled Lilyerd like a log onto his side, making sure not to twist his spine because she thought it could be damaged.

He said when emergency personnel arrived they couldn't determine what happened and it wasn't until Lilyerd got to the hospital that he was able to tell them lightning struck him.

Lilyerd said his doctor told him last night the rare occurrence had changed him forever.

The doctor said last night "this man's brain will never be the same,'" Lilyerd said.

Although Lilyerd was well enough to appear on a national television show, he agreed that it would be months before he is back to normal.

Lilyerd survived an event that kills an average of 62 people in the United States annually, and lightning already has claimed eight lives this year.

"I'm probably lucky to be alive. I think that's safe to say," Lilyerd said.