Lightning, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t move at the speed of light. The invisible “leader strike” travels from the cloud to the ground at around two hundred thousand miles per hour; a far cry from the speed of light, which travels at upwards of 670 MILLION miles per hour. But what people think of when they look at lightning isn’t the invisible leader strike, but what’s called the “return stroke”, which heats the air in the ionized pathways left behind by the leader strike, turning it to plasma. That travels significantly faster, at around a third of light speed or 60,000 miles per second.