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

KJ Muldoon was a day old when doctors found ammonia flooding his blood — a one-in-a-million genetic disorder, the deadliest of its kind, kept his liver from clearing the toxin. In about six months, a Philadelphia team designed and built a gene-editing medicine for him alone — the first person ever treated with a therapy written for a single patient.

David Bennett was dying of heart failure, too sick to qualify for a human heart, when a Maryland team offered him one from a pig — the first ever placed in a living human. "I know it's a shot in the dark," he said the day before the operation, "but it's my last choice."

Towana Looney had spent about eight years tethered to a dialysis machine, no matching human kidney in sight, when surgeons gave her one that had never belonged to a person. It came from a pig, its genome edited ten times over — and the open question was how long her body would keep it.

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 Thailand's northeastern Nong Khai Province on the Thai–Lao border, 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.