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I’m reading Randall Sullivan’s “The Miracle Detective”. Just had to share this passage. Fascinating book, btw.
"The physician who spoke to me most personally, however, was Dr. Marco Margnelli, a neurophysiologist who came to Yugoslavia during the summer of 1988 convinced that previous charts of the seers’ brain functions during their visions had been faulty. A specialist in altered states of consciousness and an avowed atheist, Dr. Margnelli arrived in Medjugorje, he admitted, looking for “any evidence that would contradict it or expose it as a fake.” The doctor conducted an array of medical tests on the visionaries, but seemed almost uninterested in the results by the time he returned home and granted an interview in which he described the seers’ visions as “a genuine state of ecstasy.”
“As a scientist, I can only declare that the children really pass into another state of consciousness - a condition that one can also reach through meditation techniques, such as auto-training, though not as profoundly,” Dr. Margnelli explained. He would not presume to describe this state the seers entered, “but we were certainly in the presence of extraordinary phenomenon. Whether we are dealing with an authentic apparition or something else we cannot explain and I cannot say. It is a question I prefer not to put to myself.
Only a moment later, though, Margnelli added a statement that would startle his colleagues: “Since returning from Yugoslavia, I have been thinking about it continually and I confess, I also ask myself nonscientific questions, such as what the meaning of the whole thing can be.” Dr. Margnelli then described a series of events to which he had been witness, from the “synchronous movements” of the visionaries to the apparently miraculous healing of a woman with leukemia. What had affected him most deeply were the birds: During the late afternoon, they would gather in the trees outside the rectory where the seers shared their apparitions, chirping and cooing and calling by the hundreds, at times deafeningly loud, until “they suddenly and simultaneously all go silent as soon as the apparition begins.” This “absolute silence fo the birds” haunted him, doctor admitted.
A few months after returning to Milan, Dr. Margnelli became a practicing Catholic.”
"The physician who spoke to me most personally, however, was Dr. Marco Margnelli, a neurophysiologist who came to Yugoslavia during the summer of 1988 convinced that previous charts of the seers’ brain functions during their visions had been faulty. A specialist in altered states of consciousness and an avowed atheist, Dr. Margnelli arrived in Medjugorje, he admitted, looking for “any evidence that would contradict it or expose it as a fake.” The doctor conducted an array of medical tests on the visionaries, but seemed almost uninterested in the results by the time he returned home and granted an interview in which he described the seers’ visions as “a genuine state of ecstasy.”
“As a scientist, I can only declare that the children really pass into another state of consciousness - a condition that one can also reach through meditation techniques, such as auto-training, though not as profoundly,” Dr. Margnelli explained. He would not presume to describe this state the seers entered, “but we were certainly in the presence of extraordinary phenomenon. Whether we are dealing with an authentic apparition or something else we cannot explain and I cannot say. It is a question I prefer not to put to myself.
Only a moment later, though, Margnelli added a statement that would startle his colleagues: “Since returning from Yugoslavia, I have been thinking about it continually and I confess, I also ask myself nonscientific questions, such as what the meaning of the whole thing can be.” Dr. Margnelli then described a series of events to which he had been witness, from the “synchronous movements” of the visionaries to the apparently miraculous healing of a woman with leukemia. What had affected him most deeply were the birds: During the late afternoon, they would gather in the trees outside the rectory where the seers shared their apparitions, chirping and cooing and calling by the hundreds, at times deafeningly loud, until “they suddenly and simultaneously all go silent as soon as the apparition begins.” This “absolute silence fo the birds” haunted him, doctor admitted.
A few months after returning to Milan, Dr. Margnelli became a practicing Catholic.”