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? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
What do you think about this? Pacifica’s Devil’s Slide has swallowed sections of Highway 1 since 1937, and a WWII watch bunker still perched on its cliff edge has sat abandoned there since 1949. Geology, or a stretch of coast that keeps trying to shrug people off?
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