The Science of Miracles

by Joe Nickell

  Inside, the church was swelteringly hot. Nevertheless, people milled about for a time after viewing the controversial icon of the Madonna and Child, while new pilgrims passed before it. A table filled with candles and a crude sign that read “PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE ICON OF VIRGIN MARY” kept the curious at bay. An attendant refused my request for a sample of the tears and pretended to ignore me when I asked again, in a louder voice.

  OILY TEARS

  A hanging oil lamp partially obscured the face of the Madonna, but by moving my head from side to side and thus catching the light on the surface of the picture, I made several important discoveries. First, the icon itself was a fake—not an original wood-panel painting at all but merely a color photographic print. In addition, the “tears” did not emanate from the eyes but from somewhere near the top of the Virgin's head, and so, by definition, the image was not “weeping.” Moreover, one of the four tear rivulets was smeared and looked “suspiciously oily” (as I told the Sun).

  The latter point was quite significant, since real tears, or even mere water, would quickly dry in the hot atmosphere of the church. But a nondrying oil (such as olive oil) would remain fresh and glistening for hours or days—just the trick for “weeping” icons and one apparently more commonly used than the hidden tubes and special chemicals so often proposed by theorists. During the quarter of an hour or so that I observed the image, there was no fresh flow of “tears”—just the same unchanging rivulets I saw at the beginning. (There were also fine droplets between the streaks, as if the painting had been spattered on, possibly from the oil lamp that almost touched the print.)

  After lengthy appeal, I persuaded the priest, Reverend Ieronimos Katseas, to provide a better view—at least for the photographer. Katseas pulled the lamp away with one hand while holding a candle close to the Madonna's face with the other. Photographer Robertson clicked away.

  In the subsequent article by Magnish and two colleagues, I was quoted as saying that the phenomenon was “more carnival sideshow than miracle” and that I was troubled by the withdrawal of the promise to allow the icon to be examined. “It would seem to me a miracle could withstand a little skepticism,” I stated, complaining further about being kept at a distance and being refused a sample of the “tears” (Magnish et al. 1996).

  REVELATIONS

  In the meantime, reporters learned that Katseas had been embroiled in considerable earlier controversy. It turns out that he had also preached at a Greek Orthodox cathedral in Queens, New York, when an icon there—that of a mid-nineteenth-century nun, St. Irene—began crying and drawing hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, some from as far away as India and Japan. More than a year later, after I had investigated that icon with the New York Area Skeptics and concluded that the phenomenon was bogus (Nickell 1993), the icon was stolen at gunpoint. Supposedly, Katseas refused to cooperate in producing the key to the case that housed it and was pistol-whipped, after which the bandits broke the lock and made off with the “miraculous” icon. It was subsequently returned—minus $800,000 in gems and golden jewelry that decorated it—under conditions that remain controversial (Christopoulos 1996).

  Katseas was also defrocked in 1993 when it was learned he had previously worked in a brothel in Athens. A church document on the priest's excommunication states that a New York ecclesiastical court found him guilty of slander, perjury, and defamation, as well as being “in the employ of a house of prostitution” (Goldhar 1996). In fact, in 1987, in sworn testimony before a Greek judge, Katseas admitted he had been so employed (Magnish et al. 1996).

  A rumor I heard from neighborhood residents was soon confirmed by a newspaper report, namely that the Toronto icon began weeping after the East York church found itself financially strapped with an accumulated debt from mortgages of almost $271,000. In June, in response to the debt situation, the church dispatched Father Archimandrite Gregory from Colorado with instructions to evict Katseas from the church, but the matter became mired in the courts. After the icon began “weeping,” Gregory cast doubt on the phenomenon, stating in a letter, “It would not be surprising if this were a hoax, in order to attract people to spend money” (Goldhar 1996). Such revelations and opinions, however, had no effect on some pilgrims. Said one woman: “I don't care if there's a pipe and a hose behind that picture. I don't care if the Virgin Mary jumps right out of the painting. You either believe in miracles or you don't. I believe” (DiManno 1996). On the other hand, a woman living in the neighborhood stated, “We all need something to believe in, but this is preying on those who really need a miracle” (Goldhar 1996).

  LABORATORY TESTS

  Subsequently, on August 27, 1997, I returned to the church, invited by attorneys for the parent Orthodox Church authority. Attended by a police guard stationed outside, a detective from the police fraud squad, and members of the Canadian news media (figure 10.1), I examined the icon carefully. (For the purpose, a carpenter assigned to assist me dismantled the frame the icon had acquired.)

  This time putting my “weeping icon kit” to good use, I took samples of the oil and signed them over to the detective for testing by the police crime laboratory (Kudrez 1997). Later, at a forensic conference in Nova Scotia (where I was a lecturer), I learned that the oil had indeed proved to be of a nondrying variety. However, since obviously there was no one to say who put it on the icon, the case went nowhere.

  For a new television series on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) called Miracle Detectives, I was invited to a home in Northern California where myriad icons, statues, and other religious effigies were “miraculously streaming oil”—“healing” oil, some claim. There I joined cohosts Randall Sullivan (whose book The Miracle Detective [2004] prompted the series) and Indre Vískontas (a neuroscientist and skeptic) (figure 11.1). Indre introduced me on the show by announcing: “Joe Nickell is one of the most prominent debunkers of purported miraculous or supernatural events in the country—maybe even the world.” As it happened, I had long ago suggested the case was one of pious fraud (Fernandez 2001). What would an on-site investigation reveal?

  BACKGROUND

  The home I visited in Union City, California, belonged to a diminutive Philippine American woman named Cora Lorenzo. There, in 1991, she hung by the front door in her living room a holy-water font she had bought on a trip to Lourdes, the French healing shrine. One November evening in 1995, Lorenzo noticed that the water had dried up. The next morning, however, which happened to be the Catholic feast of the Pentecost, the font had mysteriously been refilled with scented oil. Both her husband and twenty-four-year-old son denied that they had placed it there.

  Soon, word of the “miracle” spread, and visitors—mostly the Catholic faithful—began to come in swarms. Some left their own icons and holy figurines overnight, only to retrieve them the next day drizzled with oil. Claims of healings—from headaches to rashes to arthritis—began to be reported. More visitors came from as far away as Indonesia, Australia, Holland, and Nigeria.

  In 2001, the San Jose Mercury News featured the oil story but included more than a trickle of skepticism. A spokesperson for the Diocese of San Jose urged that such claims should be given “great caution.” Described as “a professional debunker,” I was quoted in observing that nondrying oils like olive oil could remain fresh looking for long periods of time. (Since they do not evaporate like water, such oils have become favored for weeping-icon trickery.) I mentioned other cases of “miraculous” oily or bloody effigies that ranged from those that remain unproven to those that have been determined to be fraudulent. Moreover, although there were unverified claims of the oil samples miraculously increasing in quantity (rather like the self-replenishing jar of oil in the Old Testament [2 Kings 4:1–7]), the Mercury News reported that this did not happen to the vial of oil the newspaper received from Cora Lorenzo (Fernandez 2001).

  INVESTIGATING ON SITE

  When I met Lorenzo at her home on May 24, 2010, she hugged me and said she had wanted to meet me ever since I appeared on a Discovery C
hannel special on miracles some ten years before (figure 11.2). The home was filled with effigies, including statues of the Virgin and the children of Fatima, multiple copies of the Image of Guadalupe and the Shroud of Turin, and other such reproductions.

  Initially puzzled by the proliferation of oil, Vískontas nodded understandingly as we toured the display and I pointed out, using a magnifier, how the oil was often suspiciously placed (figure 11.3): it was spattered onto a mirror, placed above or outside the eyes of statuary for an unconvincing “weeping” look, separately placed (not dripped from the eyes) onto hands, and indeed was indistinguishable from careless human placement. In addition, Vískontas wondered aloud why the oil would appear not only on religious items but also on walls, door jambs, and the like.

  The Miracle Detectives segment on the case, “Mysterious Oils” (the second part of the January 5, 2011, episode), featured a forensic construction expert, Robert G. Cox, who has fifty years’ experience in building inspection. Cox's findings matched my own. Demolishing the idea that the oil was somehow seeping into the room from outside—as by Lorenzo possibly having “leaky oil tanks in her attic” (Fernandez 2001)—Cox pointed out that the gypsum drywall was covered with enamel paint, which he observed “is a fairly dense material.” Using a pocket microscope he observed “dots” of oil, indicating it had been splattered onto the wall—similar to the spatter patterns I had noted here and there. Cox concluded the oil was therefore appearing from inside the room.

  But was the oil freshly flowing, as some people believed? It was never doing so, apparently, when the scene was properly observed. As the Mercury News reported nearly a decade earlier (Fernandez 2001), “During a reporter's two visits to Lorenzo's house, oil was present on the walls and statues, but did not flow on either occasion.” I showed Vískontas how a trickle that is already on a statue or icon could go unnoticed from one low-light vantage point, then, as the viewer moved, catch light and glint as if it had suddenly appeared. (I have been at sites where flickering candles placed before an oil-streaming icon could cause the trickles to seem to be moving—flowing—although they were actually static.) There were no unambiguous fresh flows during the two days I was on site.

  Still, we agreed to test the issue using video surveillance, although Sullivan was somewhat uneasy, feeling it amounted to “testing God.” However, he said to me, “That's what you're here to do is test God, so, yeah.” Lorenzo gave her permission to do whatever we wanted, so we wiped down a large oil-exhibiting statue of the Virgin, emptied the Lourdes font, and then trained a surveillance camera on each. We also placed a small statue in a plastic bag, which Vískontas and I heat sealed to prevent tampering, and (although not shown on the program) I took custody of another that I monitored overnight in my hotel room. The next day the three of us reconvened at the Lorenzo home to check the results of our tests. Not a single trace of fresh oil had appeared anywhere, as far as we could tell—certainly not on the effigies and font we had under observation. Things were not looking very miraculous.

  HEALING OIL?

  Nevertheless, how do we explain the reported healings? First of all, they are just that: reported. Besides, claims of “miraculous” healing are invariably predicated on being medically inexplicable, so claimants are simply engaging in a logical fallacy, argumentum ad ignorantiam (an “argument from ignorance”)—that is, drawing a conclusion based on a lack of knowledge.

  In fact, there are many potential explanations. For example, some illnesses, such as multiple sclerosis, are known to exhibit spontaneous remission. Other reputed cures may be attributable to such factors as misdiagnosis, prior medical treatment, psychosomatic conditions, the body's own natural healing mechanisms, and other factors. For such reasons, the international panel of physicians appointed by the Catholic Church to identify “miracles” at Lourdes, the French “healing” shrine, announced in 2008 that it would end the practice. Now the panel will only indicate that some cases are “remarkable.” And remarkable healings may happen to anyone—independent of supposedly magical oil (Nickell 2008).

  Miracle Detectives examined the claim of Marlene Alberto, a woman who reported having been miraculously healed of an eye ailment. Her “symptoms suggested” that she had a macular hole in her left eye. Reportedly, doctors recommended she have surgery; she preferred not to accept the risk, instead anointing her eye with oil from the Lorenzo home, whereupon the hole surprisingly closed. The show consulted Ronald P. Gallemore, MD, PhD, who pointed out that “spontaneous closure” sometimes occurs in such cases, with the opening filling in with scar tissue as a result of the body's own healing processes. Although such spontaneous closures are rare, they are not medically inexplicable and do not warrant the term miracle.

  A CASE OF DECEPTION

  When we emptied the Lourdes font using a syringe, we filled some flint-glass vials with the oil—one of which I kept while two others were sent to Flora Research Laboratories for testing. Meanwhile, the show consulted David Stewart, author of Healing Oils of the Bible (2002)—which is published by an aromatherapy company and touts the inclusion of God and his creations (such as oil-producing plants) in healthcare. Stewart sniffed a sample of the Lorenzo oil and found it to have a “spiritual” quality. However, he did suggest that analysis of the oil could be significant, since, as he told Miracle Detectives, “God's oils are not synthetic by definition.”

  Often, the testing of substances from weeping icons is of little benefit because, presumably, a deity could use any substance it wished and, anyway, it is the question of how the substance got on the effigy in the first place that matters. For example, actual “salty tears” were reported to flow from a plaster bas-relief in Pavia, Italy, but then the owner was secretly observed applying the liquid with a water pistol (Nickell 1997). Nevertheless, in several cases tests have been revelatory. In 1913 a color print that “bled” was exposed when the substance failed tests for human blood; in 1985 a bleeding statue of the Virgin at a home in Quebec was exposed as a hoax when the blood was tested and found to be mixed with animal fat (so that when the room warmed from pilgrims’ body heat the substance would liquefy and flow realistically); and a case in Sardinia in 1995 was solved when DNA tests showed the blood was that of the statue's owner (chapter 9). In yet another instance, involving a home with statues on which oil appeared in the presence of a comatose girl, the substance proved to be 80 percent vegetable oil and 20 percent chicken fat, consistent with the use of kitchen drippings (Nickell 1999).

  With such cases in mind, I was happy that the Lorenzo oil was to be tested. The laboratory report was instructive. While the substance was a vegetable oil, tests also revealed the presence of a glycol ether—a synthetic compound used as a fixative by the perfume industry (“in order,” Vískontas explained, “to keep elements together”). Sullivan agreed with Stewart that it was unlikely that God would need to use a synthetic material.

  With regard to the other evidence (especially the placement of the oil), he said to Vískontas that although he was disappointed, “You and I both agree, I think, that somebody's putting that oil there.” That had always seemed likely to me, but now there was a preponderance of scientific evidence to that effect thanks to the Miracle Detectives investigation.

  Throughout the Hindu world on September 21, 1995, statues of Indian deities, seemingly miraculously, sipped spoonfuls of milk in supposed fulfillment of a devotee's dream.

  As the phenomenon progressed, it spread from the deity Lord Ganesh, the elephant-headed, multihanded, Hindu god, to other idols, including Nandi the Bull and statues of Lord Shiva, who is often depicted in human form with a serpent around his neck. Spreading across India, the milk-sipping phenomenon soon extended to other parts of the Asian continent as well as to Europe and North America, where it was duly noted on television and in newspapers.

  EXPLANATION

  An Indian psychiatrist explained: “All people are vulnerable to such credulousness. Hindus were especially susceptible because this was the season o
f pitr baksh, when the devout offered milk for the souls of their ancestors” (cited in Nickell 1996). So many Hindus were caught up in the mass hysteria that milk supplies were depleted and prices soared—even for canned and powdered milk, although only “Kachcha,” unboiled milk, was supposed to be accepted by the deities.

  Skeptics pointed out that many of the statues were made of baked clay, which absorbs liquids prodigiously by capillary attraction. States Julia Higgins, professor of polymer chemistry at London's Imperial College, “Break a flowerpot, dip it in water, and the water disappears like mad” (Nickell 1996). With glazed statues, only a bit of the glaze need be absent, say from a tooth (as indeed seemed the case in one statue), for capillary attraction to work.

  But what about relatively nonporous materials like marble, or even nonporous ones such as brass and other metals? Some people noticed milk pooling at the bottoms of such statues but could not explain how it was getting there. The secret was discovered by India's Department of Science and Technology in New Delhi. Researchers there offered a statue milk mixed with a red dye and observed that while the milk quickly disappeared from the spoon, it soon coated the statue due to surface tension. Explained the secretary of the Indian Rationalists’ Society, Sanal Edamaruku, when a spoonful of milk is offered to a “wet idol” (many of the idols had been ritually washed) the spoon is naturally tilted a bit and the milk imperceptibly drains over the idol in such a thin layer that is virtually transparent, especially on marble or other white or light-colored surfaces. “The basic principle behind it,” says Edamaruku, “is that when two drops of a liquid are brought together it leads to the formation of one drop” (Nickell 1996).