Exposed Frauds

During the British retreat from Mons in August 1914, soldiers were said to have been shielded by angelic or phantom bowmen who held off the advancing Germans. The tale is widely traced to Arthur Machen's short story "The Bowmen," published in the London Evening News on 29 September 1914, which many readers mistook for a true report. Within months the fictional medieval archers had mutated into protecting angels, retold in sermons and parish magazines as eyewitness fact. It is a classic instance of a legend growing from a published fiction.

At least four relics — in Vienna's Hofburg, the Vatican, Echmiadzin in Armenia, and the lance "found" at Antioch in 1098 — each claim to be the spear that pierced Jesus' side. None has a credible 1st-century provenance. The famous Vienna lance was metallurgically dated to the 7th century at the earliest (Robert Feather, 2003), and later Vienna research placed it in the 8th–early 9th century and explicitly ruled out a 1st-century origin. The Antioch find is widely regarded by historians as a fabrication. The Catholic Church has never declared any of them authentic.

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.

For eight years, crowds gathered on a hillside above Lake Bracciano where Gisella Cardia said a statuette of the Virgin wept blood and delivered monthly messages; court-commissioned genetic testing found the traces on the statue matched Cardia's own DNA, the bishop ruled constat de non supernaturalitate in March 2024 with Vatican confirmation in June, and the Cardias were ordered to stand trial for fraud — while Cardia, through her lawyer, maintains her innocence.

The mysterious oil reported to exude from religious objects in the Worcester, Massachusetts, room of comatose Audrey Santo was chemically analyzed in 1998 and identified as approximately 80% corn and soybean oil combined with animal fat — commercial cooking oil components, not an unknown substance.

In 1762, a supposed haunting at a lodging house on Cock Lane, London -- attributed to the spirit of a murdered woman -- was investigated by a committee including Samuel Johnson and exposed as a fraud perpetrated by a young girl and her father.

In the summer of 1917, two Yorkshire cousins — sixteen and nine — borrowed a camera and came back from the stream at the foot of the garden with a photograph of fairies. Arthur Conan Doyle put his name behind the pictures; for sixty-six years, only the girls knew how they were made.

In the hot May of 2001, with the power failing and East Delhi sleeping on its rooftops, word spread of a creature — part monkey, part machine — attacking people in the dark; within two weeks, 397 accounts had reached the police. The eyewitnesses could not agree on what they had seen — four feet tall or eight, metal claws, glowing red eyes — and the police found no fur, no tracks, and no bite marks anywhere.

Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier (1506-1552) had modest miracle claims in his lifetime, but a posthumous hagiographic tradition amplified them dramatically -- including a fabricated gift of tongues first attributed to him nearly eighty years after his death.

A hollow bronze Virgin Mary statue at Our Lady of Guadalupe parish in Hobbs, New Mexico, appeared to weep an olive-oil-like substance in 2018, prompting a formal Diocese investigation that confirmed the liquid was rose-scented olive oil.

In 1867 a glass jar appeared at a French pharmacy, labelled in a careful hand: remains found under the pyre of Joan of Arc. Inside lay a blackened rib and charred fragments, venerated for a hundred and forty years — until a forensic team laid them out under the lights.

A woman declared healed of spinal cancer at a Kuhlman service discarded her brace on stage, suffered spinal collapse the next day, and died four months later — the most-cited case in William Nolen MD's 1974 skeptical investigation.

A subset of Guadalupan claims holds that magnified examination of the tilma image's eyes reveals a reflected scene of thirteen or more identifiable people — evidence of a supernaturally accurate image that would have required a living eye to produce.

In mid-1980s arenas, Peter Popoff would pick a stranger out of a crowd of thousands, call them by name, recite their home address and the ailment that had brought them, and say the Holy Spirit had revealed it. In the crowd sat a man with a radio scanner — tuned to a frequency where a woman's voice was reading out the same names, first.

A Belgian farm laborer with a compound leg fracture unhealed for eight years claimed instant healing at a replica Lourdes shrine in Oostakker, Belgium — but post-mortem bone examination introduced serious doubts.

Rita of Cascia, patron of impossible causes, died in 1457; her body has been on display for nearly 600 years, with documented medical examinations in 1743 and 1892 noting repairs to the face using wax and string — indicating partial deterioration.

Silvan, claimed to be the oldest incorrupt body in the Catholic Church, is on display at a Croatian church; skeptical examination reveals the 'body' is a wax sculpture with painted features, glued-on eyebrows and wig, and artificially shallow nostrils and ear canals.

To millions of devotees Sathya Sai Baba was a living god, and the proof was in his hands — sacred ash streaming from an empty palm, gold rings and watches conjured out of the air. Then a cameraman from India's state broadcaster caught something at a public function in 1992: a gold necklace pressed quietly into the guru's hand, a moment before he produced it out of the air.

Self-described psychic Uri Geller was unable to demonstrate any paranormal ability when James Randi advised The Tonight Show to use props Geller had no prior access to, producing an on-air failure that established his method required advance access to objects.

In March 2020, self-styled Bishop Climate Wiseman sold a 'Divine Cleansing Oil' and a £91 'Divine Plague Protection Kit' — oil, a card, and scarlet yarn — marketed with Passover and hyssop scripture as conferring supernatural protection from and cure of COVID-19. A jury convicted him of fraud in 2022; the Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in 2023, and the Charity Commission found no scientific basis for the claims.

Faith healer W.V. Grant was exposed by James Randi for faking leg-lengthening healings and using prayer-card cold reading, then convicted by the IRS in 1996 for failing to report $375,000 in taxable income.