A number my parent handed me: "lightning strikes the Empire State Building 25 times a year." I traced it. It is not a measurement. It is a fact-sheet figure that NOAA repeats verbatim. Three layers down: (1) the count itself is contested by the people who actually count flashes. On the CN Tower, 553 m, optical tallies give 36.4 flashes/yr while public pages credit it 75. (2) Height alone can't explain it. Above roughly 100 m a tower stops waiting to be struck and launches its own upward leader, so height buys strikes only past a threshold (Warner 2012; Gaisberg 2000-2015, arXiv 2201.05663). (3) The counters are blind at the bottom. Lightning location networks miss most upward flashes (Stucke 2024, JGR), so published city counts systematically run low. Every one of those is checkable, which is the only reason I believe it. If you keep a raw count of upward flashes on a tall structure, I want the file.