Deception: Hoaxes, Cold Reading & Stagecraft

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.

A faint face-image on cloth, venerated as the veil Veronica used to wipe Jesus on the road to Calvary. The "Veronica" legend is late and likely grew from the phrase vera icon ("true image"); several rival cloths claim the title (the Vatican veil at St. Peter's Basilica; the Holy Face at Manoppello's Sanctuary of the Holy Face; others at Jaen, Spain, and the Hofburg, Vienna). None has provenance reaching the first century, and the much-publicized "sea-silk" (byssus) claims about Manoppello remain disputed.

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 1st-century CE Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana was credited with healings, exorcisms, prophecy, and a resurrection in a biography by Philostratus written c. 220-235 CE.

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.

The Venerable Bede, in his Prose Life of St. Cuthbert (c. 721 CE) and Ecclesiastical History (731 CE), catalogues dozens of miracles by the Northumbrian bishop including post-mortem healings from his incorrupt body.

Two major broadcast investigations — an HBO documentary in 2001 and repeated NBC Dateline reports — followed up on Benny Hinn's claimed miracle healings and found no medically verified cases among those tracked.

A German priest celebrating Mass in Bolsena reportedly experienced a bleeding host that stained the corporal linen; the event allegedly prompted Pope Urban IV to institute the Feast of Corpus Christi.

In 1996, a Buenos Aires priest found a discarded communion host at the back of his church and, following the rule for such things, dropped it into water to dissolve. Weeks later someone looked in the glass: it had not dissolved — it had turned into something reddish and fleshy that a cardiologist would later say looked like living heart tissue.

On a March night in 1640, Miguel Juan Pellicer's parents drew back the blanket from their sleeping son and found two legs where, for two years, there had been one. Surgeons in Zaragoza had amputated the right leg and buried it, he had begged at the basilica doors on one leg ever since — and witnesses later swore to all of it under oath.

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.

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.

Each Orthodox Holy Saturday, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch emerges from Christ's Tomb bearing candles said to have been lit by spontaneous blue flame — claimed as the longest-attested annual Christian miracle.

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 relic said to date from the 8th century — when a host and wine reportedly became flesh and blood — was analyzed in 1971 and reported to be human heart muscle and blood.

A dropped host placed in water on Christmas Day 2013 reportedly developed red tissue identified by forensic departments at two Polish universities as human cardiac muscle showing signs of agony, with human DNA confirmed.

In 1995, some sixty people said they watched a sixteen-inch souvenir Madonna in a Civitavecchia family's home weep blood. The tests found the blood human — and male; asked for samples to compare it against, the family declined, and the question of whose blood it was has never been answered.

In the early 1980s, a cardiac arrest patient named Maria described seeing a worn blue tennis shoe on a specific third-floor window ledge of Harborview Hospital — a detail her social worker said she subsequently verified.

French mystic Marthe Robin (1902–1981) reportedly lived without food or water for over fifty years, sustained only by the Eucharist, but declined all controlled medical testing and remains contested by Church investigators and historians.

Spanish Franciscan abbess Mary of Ágreda (1602–1665) reportedly bilocated to the Jumano tribe in Texas and New Mexico over 500 times in the 1620s while remaining in her convent in Spain, evidenced by Franciscan missionary accounts and Jumano testimony in 1629.

Since June 1981, six youths (now adults) in the village of Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, have claimed ongoing daily Marian apparitions, making it one of the longest-running and most controversial alleged apparition cases in Catholic history.

A reproduction of the Iveron icon, entrusted to Chilean-Canadian Orthodox layman Jose Munoz-Cortes in Montreal in 1982, reportedly streamed fragrant myrrh almost continuously for 15 years until its guardian was murdered and the icon vanished.

A wooden statue of the Virgin Mary at the Institute of the Handmaids of the Eucharist in Akita, Japan wept on 101 documented occasions between 1973 and 1981, with tears and blood analyzed as human biological fluids; Bishop Ito approved veneration in 1984.

In 1918, a young friar in the mountains of southern Italy said that as he prayed after Mass, wounds opened in his hands, his feet, and his side. He carried them for the next fifty years while the Church sent one doctor after another to press on them — and the doctors came away contradicting each other.

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.

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.

One night in 1898, a lawyer developing his photograph of the faint image on an old linen cloth watched a detailed, lifelike face resolve in the negative — a face the cloth itself does not show. A 1988 radiocarbon test dated a corner of the linen to the Middle Ages; that date is now genuinely contested, and no one has reproduced how the image was made.

Bavarian mystic Therese Neumann (1898–1962) claimed to have lived without food or water from 1922 until her death, sustained only by the Eucharist, and bore visible stigmata from 1926; a 1927 medical observation produced ambiguous results she later refused to repeat.

During a Eucharistic retreat, a host reportedly emitted a reddish substance that was subsequently identified by laboratory analysis as human blood of type AB, appearing to originate from within the host rather than from an external source.

The 2008 Florida Healing Outpouring drew massive crowds and claimed dozens of healings and twenty resurrections from the dead, but ABC Nightline found not a single claim independently verifiable, and World magazine reported several 'healed' individuals had since died of their conditions.

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.

Roman Emperor Vespasian reportedly healed a blind man and a man with a withered limb in Alexandria c. 69 CE, as recorded by Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio.

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.