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

An infant born with a lethal metabolic disorder became the first person ever treated with a gene-editing therapy designed and built for him alone — a bespoke CRISPR medicine created in about six months. The headlines reached for the words "miracle baby." The honest description is something rarer than a miracle: a designed medicine, engineered for one child by a team that knew exactly what it was doing, with its limits stated as plainly as its success.

A 57-year-old man dying of heart failure, and ineligible for a human transplant, received the first genetically modified pig heart in January 2022 and lived about two months before he died. The headlines reached for the word "miracle." The honest description is something rarer: a fully explained frontier procedure — a medical first with its limits, including a pig virus later found in the graft, documented as carefully as its success.

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.