I tried to find this after reading your comment and the amount of nonsense AI tornado videos is a lot to wade through. Wasn't able to find it.

Orrrrrr, there are always tons of cosmic rays of the type that create lightning hitting earth, there just aren't the conditions necessary for those rays to trigger lightning except for when there's a big storm. I imagine the clouds are a different electrical environment than a regular sky and maybe in those conditions a cosmic rays will trigger lightning. Like a gigantic bubble chamber made of our atmosphere.

Well, the primary particles that hit the atmosphere are mostly protons. They cause avalanche of secondaires that are varied but mostly muons,

As others have mentioned you are correct. But Earth's atmosphere has plenty of all forms of matter. A proton can interact with mostly anything and accelerate it. So you can find high energy everything in low earth orbit.