Twelve-year-old Hasnah Mohamed Meselmani produced razor-sharp glass crystals from her eyes, Share International reported at the end of 1996. Nabil Matraji, our correspondent in the Lebanon, contacted the Meselmani family to find out more about the amazing phenomenon, which lasted from March till November 1996. A discussion with Hasnah confirmed that the unseen hand behind the crystal miracle was that of Maitreya. A report about the mysterious "white knight" follows. Commotion stirred the Arab world: a girl was making hard glass crystals, sharp enough to cut paper, appear from her eyes seven times a day without any apparent injury to herself - it had to be some kind of miracle. The 12-year-old Hasnah Mohamed Meselmani became the centre of attention. Religious authorities and scientists sought answers to the riddle.

The answer soon came: it was 'fraud', and the girl had admitted it, at least that is how the story was reported. Many people were upset and disappointed, others, less inclined to believe in inexplicable 'miracles', were relieved. Lebanon and other Arab countries declared the file closed and silence descended on the story of Hasnah Mohamed Meselmani. And yet certain questions remained unanswered. For instance, questions about the nature of the so-called fraud. How did Hasnah manage to pull the whole thing off with crystals coming out of her eyes in full view of television cameras? If the television pictures were authentic and anything to go by, then fraud would seem to be out of the question: the girl's eye was filmed in close-up and showed pieces of glass slowly pushing out of her eyes as if coming from the retina. Could she have first hidden them in her eye herself? Or was it just illusion that the glass fragments were seen coming out through the retina? And had Hasnah mastered the trick of keeping them hidden in the corners of her eyes? And in both cases: how could she do it without sustaining any injuries with crystals shown to be sharp enough to cut paper, as also witnessed by the television cameras?..

There is a very strange dimension to works of science fiction which has never been properly explored. What are we to make of instances where someone writes a work of obvious fiction only to discover that some of the fictional facts therein are later proven to be true? For example, in 1898 Morgan Robertson published a novel called "The Wreck of the Titan, or Futility." It described how a transatlantic luxury liner called the "Titan" sank on its maiden voyage even though it was reputed to be "unsinkable." In the novel the Titan struck an iceberg and sank with a great loss of life. Doesn't that story sound familiar? The similarities between the fictional Titan of 1898 and the Titanic of 1912 are stunning (see table below) How do we explain this?

Perhaps some authors do good research, and make excellent educated guesses while also having a bit of luck to boot? Another possibility may be that some authors, while searching for inspiration, are either consciously or even unconsciously, able to tap into psychic realms and to write about things which will happen in the future. A more subtle question is whether these authors know that they are psychic, but in order to save themselves from being denigrated by others, they hide their psychic abilities in works of "obvious fiction" while privately knowing that there is more realism in their books than anyone (at the time) would care to believe. Consider for example the case of Gulliver's Travels which is clearly a work of complete fiction about the existence of tiny people as well as giants. The places mentioned in Gulliver's travels do not exist - or do they? Mars has two small moons orbiting it. They were officially discovered in August 1877 by the U.S. Naval observatory. In Gulliver's Travels, which was published in 1726, in Chapter III, we find this strange paragraph: "They have likewise discovered two lesser stars or satellites, which revolve about Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet exactly three of its diameters and the outermost, five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half." ...

© 2007 Deutsche Welle

It could be a university prank or a case for Mulder and Scully: Students from the University of Kiel have claimed in their own X-file that the German city of Bielefeld doesn't actually exist. It appears on the German map, the city has a Bundesliga soccer team and regional train services include it as a destination. It is home to 330,000 inhabitants and one of Germany's 20 major cities. But according to a group of students in the northern German city of Kiel, Bielefeld not only doesn't exist but its creation and promotion is a disturbing conspiracy to hide a number of (im)possible secrets.

The students from the university of Kiel started to smell a rat after hearing about Bielefeld for as long as they could remember but had never met anyone who had lived there, come from there or even visited the city in the Westphalia region in northwestern Germany. It soon became a topic of discussion between them that maybe the town didn't actually exist. Historical texts state the official founding of the city of Bielefeld took place in the year 1000. In over a thousand years of existence, Bielefeld looks to have kept itself pretty much to itself, with its main claim to fame coming from Dr. August Oetker, his renowned baking powder and the nationwide food business which developed from it and which still bears his name. But despite this, the Kiel students continued to muse about its existence.

Sudden appearance of city dwellers: After casually voicing concerns, the students began to notice an increase in people claiming to have come from Bielefeld, to have wandered the streets of this mythic location and those who had friends and relatives living there. The students' suspicions were aroused further by the seemingly distant looks and vacant expressions of those making these claims. Had they been manipulated? Had the minds of these people been rewired as some part of a nefarious plan?...

©copyright 2005 Robert Todd Carroll

Intelligent design (ID) is an anti-evolution belief that asserts that naturalistic explanations of some biological entities are not possible and such entities can only be explained by intelligent causes.  Advocates of ID maintain that their belief is scientific and provides empirical proof for the existence of God or superintelligent aliens. They claim that intelligent design should be taught in the science classroom as an alternative to the science of evolution. ID is essentially a hoax, however, since evolution is consistent with a belief in an intelligent designer of the universe. The two are not contradictory and they are not necessarily competitors. ID is proposed mainly by Christian apologists at the Discovery Institute and their allies, who feel science threatens their Biblical-based view of reality.

In December 2005, federal Judge John E. Jones III ruled that ID must meet the same fate that creationism met in 1987 when the Supreme Court ruled religious doctrines can't be promoted in secular institutions under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Judge Jones wrote in his decision regarding a policy of the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district that added ID to the school's biology program:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy. The arguments of the ID advocates may seem like a rehash of the creationist arguments, but the defenders of ID claim that they do not reject evolution simply because it does not fit with their understanding of the Bible. However, they present natural selection as implying the universe could not have been designed or created, which is nonsense. To deny that God has the power to create living things using natural selection is to assert something unknowable. It is also inconsistent with the belief in an omnipotent Creator...