Do you believe in the Yeti? How about miracles?

What Would You Do If the Facts Were Just Too Strange to Ignore?

Sir Edmund Hillary is best known as the unassuming beekeeper from New Zealand who, alongside Tenzing Norgay, became the first man to stand atop Mount Everest. But summiting the world’s highest peak was just the beginning of a life lived on the edge of adventure and inquiry. In the years that followed, Hillary did a lot of remarkable things.

He charted untraversed Antarctic routes and built schools in the Himalayas. He also led a 1960 expedition to investigate the mystery of the Yeti, sponsored by World Book Encyclopedia. It was a serious endeavour, combining scientific rigour with a genuine openness to wonder.

As part of that journey, Hillary visited several remote Himalayan monasteries where so-called “Yeti scalps” were venerated by locals. With permission, he brought three of these relics back for scientific testing. Once analysed, two were identified as belonging to Himalayan bears and the third to a type of goat-antelope known as a serow.

Which, of course, you could have guessed from the outset. Hardly anyone actually believes the Yeti exists. Had concrete evidence been found in the 1960s, the world would be a very different place.

But pause for a moment and ask yourself: how would you honestly have reacted if one of those scalps had tested positive for an unknown hominid? Not a bear, not a goat-antelope, but something genuinely unclassified. Something upright and primate in nature.

I say all this by way of introduction to my intention to write at least a few articles on the subject of miracles. Because people who consider themselves intelligent and worldly often assume that miracles don’t happen. Where they appear to, it’s assumed there’s a natural explanation we just haven’t uncovered yet.

When I’ve written on religion in the past, I’ve mostly stayed on shared terrain—cosmology, archaeology, the historical record. You may not have always agreed with me, but plenty of you have read along in good faith on the assumption that I’m not deluded or crazy.

But now we come to one of those lines where you may stop giving me the benefit of the doubt. This is the part where I might lose you. Because I believe miracles do happen.

Not in the abstract sense that “life is a miracle” or that “love is miraculous.” I mean actual interventions in nature, events in time and space that cannot be explained by natural causes, however clever the rationalisation. In short, I do not believe the natural world is a closed loop.

You might roll your eyes. You might think I’m an idiot for believing that. But I do. So here we are.

I’m not asking you to believe in every crying statue or glowing silhouette. I’m simply asking, if the evidence were strong, would you even let yourself believe it?

I’ll probably write about four or five cases before wrapping up with some final thoughts. One category I’ll mostly avoid, though, is medical miracles. Things like sudden healings or unexplained remissions. It’s not that I don’t believe they happen. The Lourdes Medical Bureau, for instance, has rigorously documented around 70 such cases that defy medical explanation.

But I’ve seen enough episodes of House to know how most people respond to these stories. It’s easy, perhaps even fair, to assume that spontaneous recoveries are just statistical outliers or involve factors we don’t yet understand. So while I respect the significance of those claims, I’ll focus instead on cases that are harder to dismiss with a shrug about biology being weird sometimes.

Let’s return to the Yeti for a moment. Imagine if Hillary had come back from that 1960 expedition with something indicating that something strange, something vaguely but not fully human, was out there. It wouldn’t prove every crazy abominable snowman story, of course, but it would be evidence of something.

Think about that while you consider the following situation.

A scientist in the United States was sent a biological sample for analysis using standard lab procedures. No background was given. After running tests, he concluded that it was a fragment of living human heart tissue, taken from the wall of the left ventricle. It showed signs of trauma and inflammation.

Incredibly, the sample showed white blood cells still present and active. That indicated the tissue was alive. Which was, of course, impossible. White blood cells typically survive only minutes to hours outside the body without life support.

All of which would be remarkable enough. Except the sample had been sent by the then-Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio. The scientist was Dr Frederic Zugibe, a respected cardiologist and forensic pathologist, then serving as chief medical examiner of Rockland County, New York. Bergoglio is better known to us as Pope Francis.

The substance hadn’t come from a patient or a cadaver, but from a consecrated communion host that had been sitting in water for about a month and then locked away in a tabernacle for over three years.

In August 1996, after Mass at the parish of Santa María, Father Alejandro Pezet was approached by a parishioner who had found a discarded host at the back of the church. The standard procedure in such cases is to place the host in water and store it in the tabernacle to dissolve naturally over time.

But eight days later, it hadn’t dissolved. It had transformed into a fragment of fleshy, blood-like material, what would later be sent for testing. Pezet reported the matter to his bishop who, being cautious, had it photographed and ordered the incident kept strictly confidential.

That’s standard operating procedure for the Catholic Church. Understandably so. For every genuinely puzzling case, there are hundreds of mistakes, misunderstandings or outright hoaxes. Bergoglio, a Jesuit, was not easily given to spectacle or credulity.

But after more than three years without decomposition, Bergoglio arranged for scientific testing. In 1999, a sample was taken by Dr Ricardo Castañón Gómez, a Bolivian neuropsychologist known for investigating alleged phenomena with clinical rigour. The host had been stored in water and then in a tabernacle since 1996. Castañón oversaw blind testing protocols to ensure objectivity, sending the sample to laboratories without disclosing its origin.

In 2004, one of those samples was analysed by Dr Frederic Zugibe. He had no idea what he was examining. His conclusion? The sample was real human heart tissue, specifically from the left ventricle, showing signs of acute inflammation and trauma. Most remarkably, it contained living white blood cells, suggesting the tissue had come from a living person at the time of sampling.

Which, of course, made no sense.

The significance of the transformation is profound if genuine. In Catholic theology, the Eucharist becomes the true Body and Blood of Christ at the moment of consecration, even though its appearance remains that of bread and wine.

That’s doctrine. What follows is interpretation. A consecrated host that visibly transforms into human flesh, particularly heart tissue in distress, would appear to be a startling sign of Christ’s real presence. As if, just once in a while, the veil is lifted and the hidden reality made visible.

Why then and there? That’s unknowable.

Could it have been faked? That’s the obvious question. And yes, any physical event can be faked in theory.

But the more you look into the Buenos Aires case, the more complicated that answer becomes.

First, someone would have had to secretly replace or tamper with a consecrated host to make it appear to have become living heart tissue. That would require access, precise timing, and a willingness to commit sacrilege on sacred ground. It’s possible, but highly unlikely in a functioning parish under clerical oversight.

Second, the sample would need to be more than generic flesh. It would need to be real human heart tissue in an inflamed state, with intact white blood cells, indicating it came from a living person. That’s not something you pick up at a butcher’s shop.

Third, the preservation would need to be flawless. The host sat in water and then in a tabernacle for years, yet showed no signs of decomposition and no preservatives. Pulling off that level of deception and foresight, over several years, would require remarkable skill and restraint.

Finally, multiple people would have to keep quiet. Priests, scientists, lab technicians. All either complicit or completely fooled. Across countries and years.

None of this proves it wasn’t faked. It could have been. Just like the moon landing could have been filmed in a studio. But the plausibility seems remote.

Could the sample have been contaminated in a way that produced a false result? It’s possible. Contamination is always a concern in biological testing. Was it just reddish bacteria or fungus?

But in this case, it’s hard to see how contamination alone accounts for the findings. The sample was taken years after the host had been placed in water and stored. Any foreign material introduced in that time would likely have degraded, not yielded fresh, intact tissue with living white blood cells.

Zugibe, with no knowledge of the sample’s origin, identified it as real human heart muscle from the left ventricle, in a state of acute inflammation, with living white blood cells inconsistent with any known method of preservation.

Contamination might explain a smear of DNA or a few degraded cells. It doesn’t explain living tissue with forensic markers of trauma. To buy that explanation, you’d have to believe not only that a human biological sample was introduced undetected into a sealed vessel, but that it also mimicked a living, suffering human heart.

Could that happen? Possibly. But at some point, “contamination” stops being an explanation and becomes a placeholder for “we don’t know.”

I’m not telling you what to think. Honestly, I had a hard time believing it myself. Still do, as much as I’d like to. It’s the kind of thing I would usually assume was exaggerated, misreported or fuelled by devotional imagination.

And, importantly, the Church has never endorsed, approved or encouraged any conclusion about the incident.

But the more you look into it, the stranger it gets. The blind testing. The reputation of the scientists. The nature of the tissue. The discretion of the future Pope. All of it makes it harder to simply wave away.

It’s as if Sir Edmund Hillary had come back from Nepal not with a goat-antelope scalp, but with a massive pelvic bone, not quite human, not quite ape, but clearly from something that walked upright and weighed twice as much as a man.

What would you think? Would you reason from what he discovered? Or would you insist on reasoning through it?