What do you think about this?
In December 1531, near what is now Mexico City, a peasant named Juan Diego said a woman of light appeared to him and asked that a church be built. As proof, roses bloomed in the frozen winter, and when he opened his cloak to show them, an image of her was somehow imprinted on the rough cactus fiber cloth.
That cloak, the tilma, still hangs today, nearly five hundred years later. Believers point out that cloth like that should have rotted away centuries ago. Investigators over the years have claimed stranger things still, that the coloring matches no known paint, and that magnified images in the figure’s eyes seem to hold tiny reflected human faces, as if catching a scene from that first moment.
Skeptics have answers for all of it. A 1982 examination reported ordinary tempera paint, an underdrawing, layers of later touch ups, and a primer coating that would explain how the cloth survived. The Church still treats it as a miracle.
Is it possible an image could be fixed onto ordinary cloth in a way that still resists explanation five centuries on?
Faith made visible, a lost artistic technique, or something science has not cracked? What do you think is really on the tilma of Guadalupe?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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