What really happened — and how likely is it that there's no natural explanation?

An Alabama woman lived 130 days off dialysis with a gene-edited pig kidney — the longest any pig organ has functioned in a living human — before acute rejection forced its removal. The headlines reached for the word "miracle." The honest description is something rarer: a fully explained triumph of engineering, with limits as documented as the success.

On September 6, 1998, a crowd the temple put at roughly 20,000 gathered at Wat Phra Dhammakaya, a large Buddhist temple north of Bangkok, and reported seeing the sun spin, dim, and change colour, with the image of the movement's revered founder-monk appearing in the sky. The phenomenology closely matches the famous 1917 'miracle of the sun' at Fatima, and has the same proposed natural explanation — the optical after-images of staring at a bright sun, amplified by an expectant, meditation-primed crowd. The documentation is thin, drawn mainly from the movement's own media.

In 2008 the academic neurosurgeon Eben Alexander spent a week in a coma from a rare bacterial meningitis, recovered fully, and in the 2012 bestseller 'Proof of Heaven' described a vivid journey to an afterlife. What set his account apart was the argument he built on his own expertise: that the experience occurred while his cortex was entirely shut down, making it, in his view, evidence of consciousness beyond the brain. A 2013 Esquire investigation placed the experience in the sedated and recovery window rather than true brain death and disputed parts of his account; defenders, including a published rebuttal, argue the investigation distorted the medical facts.

Every year at the end of Buddhist Lent (Wan Ok Phansa, in late October), crowds along a long stretch of the Mekong River near Phon Phisai in northeastern Thailand report seeing reddish glowing orbs rise silently from the water and climb into the night sky. Devotees attribute them to the Phaya Naga, a revered serpent deity, honoring the Buddha's return from the heavens. The lights are real and recurring; what causes them is disputed, with two natural accounts on the table — igniting riverbed gas, and human-fired tracer rounds, the latter captured in a 2002 Thai television documentary.

A 24-year-old woman in Japan with idiopathic severe aplastic anemia — a dangerous bone-marrow failure usually treated urgently with immunosuppression or a transplant — saw her blood counts start to recover on their own 11 days after diagnosis, with no treatment or transfusions, and stayed in complete remission 30 months later. Genetic analysis of her surviving blood cells showed they had escaped the autoimmune attack, giving the recovery a documented natural explanation. Reported in Frontiers in Immunology (2025).

A 32-year-old man with lupus collapsed in cardiac arrest while jogging. After two weeks in a coma with a grim neurological prognosis, his family agreed to terminal extubation and organ donation. He survived the extubation, recovered, and a year later walked, talked, and consented to the peer-reviewed case report that documents how close the call came. His brain MRI had been normal all along.