How we rate claims
Every rating answers two separate questions — because mixing them up is how this subject usually goes wrong.
1 · Does it break the laws of nature?
If the facts are true, could nature do this? Read assuming every documented fact holds — even for hoaxes. Real fairy photographs would sit high here; whether the photographs are genuine is the next dial’s job. For timing stories the question becomes: was this more than coincidence?
2 · Is there evidence it’s true?
Did it happen as reported? Records, adversarial scrutiny, independent sources, named witnesses, contemporaneity — and direction matters. A confession or exposure drives this dial to the floor no matter how thick the file is. And positive proof of falsity outranks mere silence: a refuted claim always sits below one that is merely undocumented. Each grade names its kernel — the minimal disputed facts this dial actually scores.
How the two come together
We don’t blend the two dials into a single score. A claim only rises when both are high — the event would have to break nature andthe record has to say it really happened. Where it lands on the two dials sorts it into one of the six tiers below, with one plain sentence reconciling them. No bonus points, no benefit of the doubt, and never “certain” in either direction.
What a 99 means — and why nothing is a perfect 100
Each dial is scored the way an auditor or a court would: we define the strongest a case could possibly be — a 99 — and then subtract for every specific thing that is missing. No score is a vibe; every score is 99 minus a list of named gaps you can inspect.
A 99 on “breaks the laws of nature”
A directly-observed, categorical impossibility with zero natural precedent, ever — a severed limb regrowing, a body verifiably dead for days returning, matter from nothing. Our anchor is Calanda. A claim with no known mechanismbut that isn’t a flat impossibility (bilocation, an image on cloth) is docked from there.
A 99 on “is there evidence”
Proven to the ceiling a fact can be — objective before-and-after instrumentation, cleared by review that could have said no. The standard is a court’s beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond all conceivable doubt; we don’t demand the impossible (that every doctor was polygraphed). Our anchor is Vittorio Micheli’s serial X-rays. Older claims are docked only for what their era truly couldn’t record — not penalized for being old.
No case in the jar scores 99 on both dials — a fully-instrumented record of a flat impossibility would be the story of the century, and pretending we have one is exactly the trap this site exists to avoid. So the case we call the Most Convincing in the Jar is the one with the highest lowerdial — the best combination of “extraordinary if true” and “hard to dismiss.” That is the honest number to beat.
The deduction ladders — what each gap costs
Here is the price list. Every score starts at the 99 defined above and loses points for each named gap. These are the standard deductions, published so you can re-derive any rating yourself.
Miraculous meter · starts at 99
The ceiling: a directly-observed categorical impossibility with zero natural precedent — a severed, buried limb regrowing. What pulls a claim down from there:
An attested power or state, not a directly-observed violation of nature
Bilocation, clairvoyance.
The category has rare partial natural precedent
Spontaneous remission: an inexplicable cancer clearance is astonishing, but not categorically impossible.
A known mechanism partially reproduces it
Capillary-action “weeping” statues; the “spinning sun” produced by sun-gazing.
An ordinary event where only the timing is extraordinary
Rescues and improbable survivals.
Fully natural — nothing left to explain
Evidence meter · starts at 99
The ceiling: contemporaneous before-and-after instrumented records, cleared by an adversarial panel that could have said no. The bar is a court’s beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond all conceivable doubt. What pulls the record down from there:
No before-baseline — only the after-state is documented
Evidence claimed but withheld from independent check
No instruments, but adversarial inquiry and multiple witnesses — lands in the 70s
A 17th-century canonical process.
A specific unresolved factual question — identity, custody
Single-tradition custody and a late record
Most medieval relics.
Uncorroborated testimony from interested parties only
A supported competing explanation exists
Confessed or positively refuted
Confessed hoaxes.
One doubt, one dial
The Evidence meter scores whether the raw physical facts are documented. Whether nature can explain those facts lives on the Miraculous meter only. Counting the same doubt on both dials is double-counting — and we police it.
Old is not a gap
Old claims are docked only for what their era couldn’t record — never for being old.
Nobody currently holds a 99/99
No case reaches 99 on both meters. The “Most Convincing Case” crown marks the highest lower dial, not a perfect score — a genuine 99/99 would be the story of the century, and the ladders above define exactly what it would take.
The six tiers
A quick read of the two meters at each tier — the top bar is how miraculous (brown → gold), the bottom is how strong the evidence (red → green). Thresholds are published so you can check our work — and argue with it.
See the Gold-standard cases and both Top-10 boards →
Meter ≥ 70 and Evidence ≥ 80
Clearly miraculous if true, and strongly evidenced that it happened. The whole mission is making this list longer — honestly.
Meter ≥ 60 and Evidence ≥ 40
Clearly miraculous if true, but the record is thinner. Better documentation could promote it — these are our research priorities.
Meter 41–69 and Evidence ≥ 40
A decent record and a genuinely contested mechanism — the honest middle where serious people can disagree.
Meter ≤ 40 and Evidence ≥ 40
It happened — and nature accounts for it. These are not failures; many are the best good-news stories in the catalog.
Evidence 10–39
The record simply can't carry the claim in either direction. Most old legends live here, honestly labeled.
Positively refuted — not merely undocumented
An override, not just a low score — shown on the claim as “Proven False.” This is a different state from Unproven: there the record is simply silent; here it actively says the claim is false. The label names which: confessed means those responsible admitted it; refuted means positive evidence shows the claimed facts are false. Publishing these is what makes the rest credible.
Worked example: a Gold-standard case
Antonietta Raco — primary lateral sclerosis resolved after a 2009 Lourdes pilgrimage, recognized as the 72nd Lourdes miracle in 2025. The first dial sits high — hard to explain (PLS has no documented spontaneous-remission mechanism, though rare PLS-mimicking conditions keep it short of certainty) — and so does the second: strongly attested (a 16-year inquiry, a 17-of-21 vote by an international medical committee, the strongest documentation in the modern record). Both dials high is rare — only four claims in the catalog manage it — and that is what earns the Gold standard.
Worked example: the Cottingley fairies
The 1917 fairy photographs sit very high on the first dial — genuine photographs of fairies would be extraordinary by any standard. But the second dial is on the floor: the photographers confessed, the fairies were paper cutouts — so the verdict is Proven False. A high first dial on a disproven claim isn’t a contradiction — it’s the system refusing to pretend fairies would be boring.
Taking the natural explanation seriously
Before the dials, there is one question: could nature already account for this? Almost every claim has one of six ordinary rivals doing the heavy lifting — spontaneous remission, coincidence, expectation, misdiagnosis, deception, or misperception. We treat each one on its own terms, and we say where it stops being enough. The standing Natural Explanation library sets out each mechanism and lists the cases it best accounts for.
The full working rubric — sub-signals, anchors, version history — is maintained openly and revised as we calibrate. Spot an error in a rating? The evidence ledger on every claim shows exactly what the number rests on. See how the rubric audits itself on the calibration page, or take the whole corpus home from data & badges. More about the project →