Top Ten Real World Miracles

Maybe miracles are the mind’s way to exert extraordinary control over the body. Whatever you may believe, this list will certainly have you questioning the fabric of our existence.

10. Man’s Wedding Ring Deflects Bullet

It is becoming a common debate whether the institution of marriage is growing outdated. For Donnie Register, his marriage literally saved his life. Mr. Register was at the register when two armed men stuck him up. Confusion happened and Donnie lifted his left arm towards his assailants. A gun was leveled at his head and went off. The bullet hit his wedding band and was redirected away from his vital area. Pieces of the bullet remain lodged in nonthreatening locations of his finger and neck tissue. Donnie’s experience proves that the life-saving capabilities of cherished valuables are not simply a tv show cliché. This experience might not be as miraculous as the rest of the list, but it serves as an example of where luck meets the astounding in everyday life.

9. Mary Appears on a Florida Finance Building

It seems that the Virgin Mary is always getting her jollies through this miracle thing. Sometimes she shows up in the most random of places. This is exactly what happened in 1996, when she decided to pop her image on an office building in Clearwater, Florida. Her image started dull and grew in distinction over a series of months. The image stuck in the glass windows and the building was soon purchased by Shepherds of Christ Ministries. A statue was erected outside and visitors poured in by the truckload. Sadly, all good miracles come to an end and someone eventually knocked out the glass panes bearing Mary’s head with slingshot. Whether religious or not, most people believe that this manifestation was a curiosity that should have been preserved. Our world is so much more interesting with effigies on office buildings.

8. Boy Comes Back Alive For a Short Time

Imagine you are at a wake for a loved one while a eulogy is being read. Suddenly, the same lifeless body that had been laid out all day suddenly rises, asks for water, and lays back down dead as ever. This roller coaster of emotion is precisely what happened to the family of Kelvin Santos, in Brazil, 2012. Kelvin miraculously sat upright looking to his father for something to drink. The resurrection was miraculous, but it ranks low on our list because of what happened next. Before his father could fathom seeing his son alive again the moment was robbed from him. What followed is a dramatic protest of the hospital that had initially pronounced him deceased. The truth behind the events that transpired in this episode are so far unexplained, and so remain a bittersweet, modern miracle.

7. Nature is Miraculous: The Kiwi Gives Birth

Let us not overlook the inconceivability of nature’s design. Natural systems, unseen energies and a huge collection of evolutionary curiosities have scientists searching for answers and then more questions that those answers beg. From creatures that glow in the dark to frogs that can be frozen only to unfreeze and hop away alive as happy as can be. There are many bizarre things that nature throws our way, but I have chosen the kiwi’s process of birth. The kiwi lays the largest egg (and probably the largest anything) per body mass on earth. This egg is almost the size of an emu’s, the largest bird in Australia. The egg weighs 16 oz! The above image speaks for itself. Nature provides us with some truly phenomenal stuff.

6. Incorruptible Corpses: Rita of Cascia

The incorruptible corpse is a truly phenomenal, if not painstakingly long to decipher, event. Basically, someone dies, and for whatever reason their corpse is either unburied, uncovered, or otherwise observed. The catch is that when these bodies are viewed they look as if they had literally just died. Even more surprising is that there are a number of these corpses, many of them even being over a thousand years old. The competition to make this list was stiff, but ultimately Rita of Cascia took the prize due to the lore surrounding her. It has been reported and verified that her body actually moves from time to time. The extent of this spectacle is skeptically debated, but there are indisputably times where her face needs to be readjusted, usually her eyebrows and eyes that have a habit of opening.

5. Stigmata: Padre Pio of Pietrelcina

Ever since St. Francis of Assisi first made it cool for Christians to exhibit unexplained wounds similar to those suffered by Jesus Christ, many other people have hopped on the trend train. The person selected for our list is Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, a priest who would later become a saint and who was the first stigmatic to undergo the scrutiny of (relatively) modern medical science. His stigmata appeared after the turn of the 20^th century. Wounds opened in the middle of his two hands and medical practitioners failed to diagnose the cause. Infection never entered the wounds even though they were present for most of his life (they healed once only to reappear shortly thereafter). In fact, his wounds were inexplicably smooth and his hands were never puffy. This irregularity has been accepted as proof that his body did not see the wounds as invasive and so found no reason to try fighting them. Stigmata isn’t just relegated to Christianity, it is found in many mystical cultures, including Buddhism.

4. Unexplained Healing: Therese Neumann

Therese Neumann has a bucket list of miraculous events that could have made this list, including stigmata. So many in fact that not only has she found herself sanctified, she has also made this list as a case of unexplained healing. She was declared blind in 1919. Therese was also partially paralyzed and suffered nasty bedsores. On May 17, 1925 she claims that Saint Therese of Lisieux came to her in spirit and cured her of her illnesses. Whatever happened, her bedsores were healed and eyesight physically restored. She was then (and this could be treated more skeptically, due to the nature of medical diagnosis at the time) diagnosed with appendicitis only to later announce herself free of the ailment.

3. Our Lady of Akita

Our Lady of Akita is the name for a miracle regarding the Virgin Mary that happened near Akita, Japan. Since this list is about what has tangibly been experienced and seen we can pass briefly over the supposed apparition of Mary seen by Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa. Sure, Mary had a lot to say to the good nun, but it is what happened next on live national television that makes our list here. A statue of Mary was filmed crying for the world to see. In the long history of the Vatican, Our Lady of Akita is the only apparition accompanied weeping statue that has been confirmed as being truly unexplained and supernatural in origin. The vast majority of weeping statues are hoaxes. The Vatican may be religious, but they are very scientific when it comes to miracle-proving. They run tests (including DNA) on all liquids that are expulsed by weeping statues.

2. Miracle of the Sun

The Miracle of the Sun was an event witnessed on a mass scale (up to 100,000 people) in Portugal, 1917. There was such a large amount of people present because the miracle had been preordained by three farm children. They had promised the crowd a vision of the Virgin Mary, but what followed was a dazzling array of bizarre solar displays. The sun moved erratically towards Earth, inverted into a spinning disk, and shed a multitude of different colors and shadows across the landscape. Onlookers momentarily feared the end of the world. Apparently, the Sun was only saying hello and also kindly dried the wet clothes of bystanders. Skeptics point to the fact that it isn’t generally healthy for the eyes or the mind to stare at the Sun. In sum, the size of the event alone lends credence that something miraculous did occur that day.

1. Falling out of the Sky and Living: Vesna Vulović

As a 22 year old flight stewardess who had boarded the wrong flight because of a scheduling mishap, Vesna Vulović must have cursed her luck when a bomb exploded in the small aircraft where she was working. What followed was a 33,000 ft. drop that resulted in the deaths of 27 out of 28 people in the plane at the time. Vesna was pulled from the debris by Bruno Henke, a former medic during World War II who treated her extensive trauma. She awoke from a coma after 27 days (an ironic number if you see above) with a new lease on life and the claim to the highest fall survived in history. Vesna has since taken advantage of the notoriety granted her to become politically active in former Yugoslavia and Serbia.