I can remember as a kid in Texas, riding with my mother in her '79 Pontiac and being scared out of my mind by thunder and lightening. I can remember her trying to reassure me that we were perfectly safe in the Houston traffic. She assured me that the chances of being hit by lightening were less than wining the lottery, that rubber wheels protected the car, that only high places got struck by lightning, and many other comforting facts that I wouldn't learn were completely untrue wives' tales until I was much older.

Lightning can carry 100,000 amps of electricity and get up to five times hotter than the surface of the sun. Forget the wives' tales you were told as a kid. Now, I'm not trying to tell anyone that lightning strikes are liklier than getting hit by a car or anything, but at 60 deaths a year average in the United States, lightning is no joke.

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Statistics
There an average of 14.5 million thunderstorms a year. According to NASA, who made this very cool map of lighting frequency,  lightning flashes about 40 times a second around the world. According to the NOAA, 60 people a year die from lightning In the United States, with 340 reported injuries (which the government thinks is more like 540 including those that are unreported). With a population of approximately 300 million people, that comes out to a one in 500,000 chance of being hit by lighting in a given year, or one in 6250 in an average lifetime.

Obviously those numbers can be skewed. Lightening occurs much more often in the East and South of the country, especially in Central Florida (don't worry, it's still nothing close to Kampala, Uganda, which sees lightning during 75% of it's calender year). If you spend time outdoors, you are much more likely to be struck than someone who is a couch potato, and if you spend time on open water, your chances increase even more.

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Reducing your risk
Mom was unfortunately wrong about the car being invulnerable to lightning. The truth is, no place outdoors is safe from lightning. None!  A fully enclosed car (not a convertible with the top up) is the second best thing to being indoors, but even then you should be careful not to touch anything connected to the outside of the car (radio, ignition, etc).

If you can hear thunder, lightning is in striking range, and you should get to safe shelter. An enclosed building, means a house, a school, a shopping mall, a church or a store, not a baseball dugout, a tent, or a back porch. Furthermore, lightning strikes most often at the beginning and end of a storm, often before and after the rain is actually falling. That means you should get to safety as soon as you hear thunder (even before it actually rains)  and you should stay put 30 minutes until the storm passes.

What to do
If you find yourself dealing with a thunderstorm, bear in mind that 60 people die every year on average from lightning, usually because they remained outside. Mother nature seems especially cruel to people in golf courses, open water, and because of the frequency of storms in that area, central Florida. Don't keep playing golf in a thunderstorm, and get out of the water if you are fishing/swimming/surfing. The lifeguard, as it turns out, WAS right for blowing his whistle and telling everyone to get out of the pool.

Indoors
Avoid touching anything connected to electricity, especially computers and land line telephones (cordless phones and cellular phones are fine). You should also avoid any plumbing, sinks, baths and faucets, which can be a major conductor of electricity. Ideally, you'll want to stay in an interior room. Avoid doors, windows, porches, and don't lie on concrete floors or lean on concrete walls (which also can conduct electricity).

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Outdoors
Chances are, you have access to an all metal car or a building somewhere, and if you do, go there. Don't stay outside. If, however you do find yourself far from cars and buildings, and there's absolutely NO secure shelter, don't lie flat on the ground. Mom believed that was safe, but lightning can often strike low points in a field, even within a stone's throw from a treeline. Ideally, you want to minimize your height AND the amount of contact you have with the ground, so a low crouch on your feet is the best.

Avoid elevated surface, and don't you dare climb a tree. Forest fires were around long before man learned to start fires. Climb a tree and you may very well learn why, as many a tree lit on fire from a lighting strike. Don't use a cliff or rocky overhead for shelter. Don't touch wire fences, windmills, powerlines, wet ropes or any metal or wet objects that can conduct electricity. Get out of and away from any body of water (or watch this video for what to do if you are stuck in a boat).

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If you discover someone has a winning ticket with that 1 in 6250 probability and gets hit with lightning, get help immediately. Humans, except for certain characters in comic books, do not hold an electrical charge, and are safe to touch. They will likely need medical attention, unless they are dead, for which no known medical remedy yet exists. If you know CPR, administer it, or otherwise call 911.