They have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men or women. But unlike the characters of the comic book, these extraordinary people were quite real. The movie version of X-Men was the hottest film in the theaters when it was released. Based on the enormously popular comic book, X-Men features a collection of human mutants - both good and evil - who were born with extraordinary and sometimes bizarre powers. With such names as Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Magneto and Mystique, they bound around making blades spring from their knuckles, conjuring hurricanes from the sky or manipulating their environment through telekinesis. These characters, creations of legendary comic book author and illustrator Stan Lee, live only in the imagination, on paper and now on film.Would you believe there are real X-Men? They may not be genetic mutants, in the strictest sense, and they may not be able to threaten or save the world with their strange and fantastic powers of the body and mind, but they are extraordinary... not at all like you and me. Here's our own gallery of real-life super-powered characters.

Lightning Man: When storm clouds gather, courageous Lightning Man stands in defiance of nature to draw deadly bolts of electricity from the heavens. Roy Cleveland Sullivan was a Forest Ranger in Virginia who had an incredible attraction to lightning... or rather it had an attraction to him. Over his 36-year career as a ranger, Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times - and survived each jolt, but not unscathed. When struck for the first time in 1942, he suffered the loss of a nail on his big toe. Twenty-seven years passed before he was struck again, this time by a bolt that singed his eyebrows off. The next year, in 1970, another strike burned Sullivan's left shoulder. Now it looked as though lightning had it out for poor Roy, and people were starting to call him The Human Lightning Rod. He didn't disappoint them. Lightning zapped him again in 1972, setting his hair on fire and convincing him to keep a container of water in his car, just in case.

Spontaneous human combustion is the mysterious phenomenon of a person bursting into flame for no apparent reason. The flames burn very hot and are very localized. They destroy most of the body but leave objects in close proximity to the person relatively unburned. These are the remains of Dr. John Bentley (See below)who died of spontaneous combustion in Pennsylvania in 1966. The spot where the body lay is burnt, but the rest of the room, including the toilet, was not even scorched. This shows a quick, hot flame that devoured the body in seconds. Only the bottom of one leg remained to identify this as a person. On the right is a picture of workers cleaning up the remains of Mrs. M H Reeser of Florida who apparently died of spontaneous combustion in July of 1951. The only remains found was her skull, shrunken to the size of an orange.

There are theories on this occurance but no one is sure how or why it happens. It does happen even without scientific explanation. One theory is ball lightning which would produce similar results, but many of these instances seem to rule out this possibility just by the location of the death. A majority of these deaths have the opposite characteristics that one would see if a person was burned to death, such as the shrinking of the skull.

Crematorium Specialist have viewed photos of combustion victims and say they cannot duplicate the complete destruction of bones in such a short period of time. They find it even harder to believe that this could happen so completely in ordinary rooms such as living rooms, bathrooms, etc. There are over 100 unexplained fire deaths a year just in England. If just ten of these deaths are spontaneous combustion, then the number world could be well over 100. Does the body have chemical reactions that science has yet to discover ? It seems that an internal reaction of some kind is the most likely explanation for these deaths, but what triggers it ? Can it be detected ? Avoided ? ...

The stigmata is the spontaneous appearance of the wound marks of our crucified Lord on a person's body. These marks include the nail wounds at the feet and the hands, the lance wound at the side, the head wounds from the crown of thorns, and the scourge marks over the entire body, particularly the back. A stigmatic (i.e. the person suffering from the stigmata) may have one, several, or all of these wound marks. Moreover, they may be visible or invisible, and they may be permanent, periodic, or temporary in appearance.

Some skeptics would attribute such wound marks on a person to some pathology or even to a psychological condition without considering any notion of the supernatural. Of course, the Church too strives first to ascertain that the origin is not of natural causes, and looks for supernatural evidence to prove that the stigmata is truly a sign from God. Moreover, the Church would also want to insure that the stigmata is not a sign from Satan to cause some spiritual frenzy and lead people astray. Accordingly, since the stigmata is a sign of union with our crucified Lord, the genuine stigmatic must have lived a life of heroic virtue, have endured physical and moral suffering, and have almost always achieved the level of ecstatic union with Him in prayer.