Miracles Jar

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.

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202
Claims reviewed
650
Sources cited
7
Categories
94
High-confidence assessments
% authentic

From the catalog

The most interesting cases to start with — well-documented and genuinely contested — followed by the newest.

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62% authentic

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.

Resists a natural explanation
63% authentic

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.

Resists a natural explanation
37% authentic

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.

Likely a natural explanation
26% authentic

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.

Likely a natural explanation
14% authentic

relics · Turin, Italy

The Shroud of Turin

A linen cloth bearing the faint image of a crucified man — revered as Christ's burial shroud, radiocarbon-dated to the medieval period, and disputed ever since.

Strong natural explanation
8% authentic

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.

Strong natural explanation
9% authentic
Strong 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.

Explainedhealing·Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital, Happy Valley, Hong Kong

Anita Moorjani — The Coma, the Chemotherapy, and the Recovery (2006)

8% authentic
Strong natural explanation

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.

Explainedprovidence·Indian Ocean off Grande Comore, Comoros

Bahia Bakari — Sole Survivor of Yemenia Flight 626 (2009)

3% authentic
Strong natural explanation

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.

Explainedbaselines·Babahoyo, Los Ríos Province, Ecuador

Bella Montoya — The Knock from the Coffin at Babahoyo (2023)

4% authentic
Strong natural explanation

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.

Explainedprovidence·Seligman, Yavapai County, Arizona, USA

Boden Allen and Buford — A Ranch Dog Walks a Toddler Home (2025)

6% authentic
Strong natural explanation

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.

Disprovenhealing·Sanctuary of Asclepius, Epidaurus, Greece

The Epidaurus Cure Inscriptions — The Iamata of Asclepius (4th Century BCE)

4% authentic
Strong natural explanation

When Jeju Air Flight 2216 belly-landed at Muan International Airport on December 29, 2024, overran the runway, and struck a concrete-reinforced mound supporting the localizer antenna, 179 of the 181 people aboard died; the two survivors were flight attendants strapped into the aft jump seats of a tail section that broke away on impact. In January 2026, a government-commissioned simulation concluded that without the mound the aircraft would have slid to a stop and everyone aboard would likely have survived, and the Transport Ministry admitted the structure failed safety standards.

Explainedbaselines·Muan International Airport, South Jeolla Province, South Korea

Jeju Air Flight 2216 — The Jump Seats and the Concrete Mound (2024)

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