Stories & evidence, weighed honestly
What really happened — and how likely is it that there's no natural explanation?
Miracles Jar collects reported miracles and pairs each one with a Snopes-style review of the documentation. For every claim we lay out the sources, weigh the evidence, and publish an explicit probability assessment: natural explanation vs. authentic miracle.
Have a story to share? You're in the right place.
- Anna Bågenholm: Survival from Extreme Accidental HypothermiaExplained
- Operation Thunderbolt — The Entebbe RescueExplained
- Joan Ginther's Four Texas Lottery JackpotsExplained
- Miracle on the Hudson — US Airways Flight 1549Explained
- Vesna Vulović: Survival of JAT Flight 367Explained
- Anita Moorjani — The Coma, the Chemotherapy, and the Recovery (2006)Explained
- Annabel Beam — The Fall Into the Hollow Tree (2011)Explained
- Bahia Bakari — Sole Survivor of Yemenia Flight 626 (2009)Explained
- Bella Montoya — The Knock from the Coffin at Babahoyo (2023)Explained
- Boden Allen and Buford — A Ranch Dog Walks a Toddler Home (2025)Explained
- Carolina Wilga — Twelve Days Lost in the Western Australian Outback (2025)Explained
- Chris Dempsey and Heather Krueger — The Overheard Conversation and the Liver (2015)Explained
From the catalog
The most interesting cases to start with — well-documented and genuinely contested — followed by the newest.
healing · Peoria, Illinois, USA
James Fulton Engstrom: Stillborn 61 Minutes, Full Recovery — Fulton Sheen's Miracle
An Illinois newborn with no heartbeat for 61 minutes, given up for dead, suddenly revived with no lasting brain damage — proposed as the miracle for Archbishop Fulton Sheen's beatification.
healing · Lourdes, France (patient from Trento, Italy)
Vittorio Micheli: Pelvic Sarcoma Healed — Bone Reconstruction Documented by X-ray
An Italian soldier with an inoperable sarcoma destroying his pelvis and hip socket recovered completely after a 1963 Lourdes pilgrimage; follow-up X-rays showed the destroyed bone had reconstructed — a case published in a peer-reviewed journal.
healing · Calanda, Aragon, Spain
The Calanda Miracle: A Restored Leg
A young man's amputated right leg was, by sworn contemporary testimony, restored overnight in 1640 — two years after it had been cut off and buried.
signs · San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy
Padre Pio's Stigmata
Italian Capuchin friar Francesco Forgione (Padre Pio) bore visible wounds on his hands, feet, and side for approximately fifty years, examined by multiple physicians who reached contradictory conclusions.
relics · Turin, Italy
The Shroud of Turin
A ~14-foot linen cloth in Turin's cathedral bearing the faint front-and-back image of a crucified man. A 1988 radiocarbon test dated a corner to the Middle Ages; that date is now genuinely contested, and nobody has reproduced how the image formed.
apparition · Tepeyac Hill, Mexico City, Mexico
Our Lady of Guadalupe (The Tilma of Juan Diego)
In 1531, a Marian image allegedly appeared miraculously on the cloak of indigenous convert Juan Diego in Mexico City, producing an artifact still venerated nearly 500 years later.
On 20 May 1999, a 29-year-old surgical resident trapped under ice for roughly 80 minutes arrived at a Norwegian hospital with a core temperature of 13.7 °C and no heartbeat — and, after nine hours of rewarming by cardiopulmonary bypass, eventually made a near-full recovery and returned to work as a physician.
Anna Bågenholm: Survival from Extreme Accidental Hypothermia
On 4 July 1976, Israeli commandos flew over 4,000 kilometres to Entebbe Airport, Uganda, stormed the terminal in under an hour, and rescued 102 hostages held at gunpoint by Palestinian and German hijackers — an outcome widely described as a miracle.
Operation Thunderbolt — The Entebbe Rescue
Between 1993 and 2010, Joan R. Ginther — a Stanford-trained mathematician born in Bishop, Texas — won four separate Texas lottery prizes totaling $20.4 million, a run of fortune so statistically extreme it prompted serious investigation into whether luck alone could explain it.
Joan Ginther's Four Texas Lottery Jackpots
On 15 January 2009, Captain Chesley Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles ditched an engineless Airbus A320 onto the Hudson River after a Canada goose strike disabled both engines at 2,818 feet, and all 155 people aboard survived.
Miracle on the Hudson — US Airways Flight 1549
On 26 January 1972, flight attendant Vesna Vulović survived when JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367's DC-9 broke apart over Czechoslovakia — officially at 10,160 m (33,330 ft), earning the Guinness World Record for the highest fall survived without a parachute, though a 2009 journalistic investigation argues the aircraft was near 800 m when it disintegrated.
Vesna Vulović: Survival of JAT Flight 367
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.
Anita Moorjani — The Coma, the Chemotherapy, and the Recovery (2006)
From the community
Submitted stories awaiting review. Upvote what we should research next.
The catalog launched this week — this space is open and yours to start.
No community stories are in yet. A healing you witnessed, a rescue that shouldn’t have worked, timing too perfect to shrug off — share it as good news, or opt in to a full evidence review. Either way it posts here for others to weigh in, and the community decides what we research next.
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