Joe Nickell, PhD, is CSI’s senior research fellow and author of some forty books, including The Science of Miracles.
On August 27, 1963, two Pennsylvania coal miners were rescued after two weeks of trapped underground. The pair would soon relate how, confined in the pitch black, they had witnessed humanoid figures, bathed in strange light, and saw a door that opened onto marble steps leading to a great celestial city with angels playing harps. Pope John XXIII, who had died just ten weeks before, smiled down upon the two.
Skeptics of these supposedly miraculous “visions” branded them “delusions” and “hallucinations,” but defenders of the claims observed that “both men had independently corroborated the other’s story” (Furek 2015, 128). As one of the two stated, “They now tell me these were hallucinations but the crazy thing is that Davey [the other miner] would see the same things I did” (Throne quoted in Furek 2015, 129). Even when both were interviewed separately, they still related in detail the very same story (Budd 2013). How could this be? Were the visions indeed proof of heaven, evidence of life after death, or at least substantiation of near-death experiences? If not, then how do we explain these reported claims of the inexplicable?