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

Anita Moorjani, a Hong Kong businesswoman who had refused conventional treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma for nearly four years, was admitted to Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital in early February 2006 in organ failure, weighing about 36 kilograms, and fell into a 30-hour coma during which she reports a near-death experience; her physicians drained her fluid-filled chest and began chemotherapy while she was comatose, her tumors shrank by well over half within days, and she left the hospital cancer-free in five weeks — a recovery her treating oncologist attributed to the chemotherapy and the emergency drainage, and her bestselling memoir attributes to the experience.

Annabel Beam, a Texas nine-year-old who had spent most of her childhood under specialist care for two incurable digestive motility disorders, fell about 30 feet headfirst into the hollow trunk of a cottonwood tree in December 2011 and was lifted out essentially uninjured five hours later. In the months that followed her symptoms were gone; Boston Children's Hospital eventually released her from gastroenterology care, her treating specialist confirmed the resolution on the record, and the story became the book and 2016 film Miracles from Heaven.

Bahia Bakari, a 12-year-old from Évry, France, who could barely swim, was the only survivor among 153 people aboard Yemenia Flight 626 when it crashed into the Indian Ocean on night approach to Moroni, Comoros, on June 30, 2009; she clung to floating wreckage for at least nine hours in heavy seas until a sailor from the ferry Sima Com 2 jumped in to reach her, and thirteen years later she testified at the Paris trial that convicted the airline of involuntary manslaughter.

Bella Montoya, a 76-year-old retired nurse in Babahoyo, Ecuador, was declared dead at Martín Icaza Hospital on June 9, 2023, after arriving unconscious with a suspected stroke and failing to respond to resuscitation; about five hours into her wake, some twenty mourners heard knocking from inside the coffin and opened it to find her breathing. She spent a week in intensive care at the same hospital and died on June 16, 2023, of an ischemic stroke, while Ecuador's health ministry opened an audit of how the country certifies death.

A two-year-old who wandered from his home near Seligman, Arizona, on the evening of April 14, 2025, spent about 16 hours alone in high-desert country where searchers later noted two mountain lions, then turned up nearly seven miles away at a rancher's gate with the family's livestock-guardian dog, Buford, standing beside him; the boy was found with minor cuts and mild dehydration, and the dog's behavior fits exactly what its breed is raised to do.

Four stone stelae erected at the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus in the fourth century BCE record roughly seventy cures — blindness, paralysis, muteness, a five-year pregnancy — reported by pilgrims who slept in the sanctuary's dormitory and dreamed of the god. The inscriptions are the largest surviving body of healing claims from the ancient world, and they were composed and displayed by the sanctuary whose reputation they served.