The Bleeding Cross of Vile Parle
In March 2012 water began dripping from the feet of a crucifix outside the church of Our Lady of Velankanni in the Mumbai district of Vile Parle; thousands came, collecting the water in bottles and drinking it. The rationalist Sanal Edamaruku arrived with a television crew, followed the damp patch on the wall behind the cross and found a blocked washbasin drain in the room behind it: the water was rising by capillary action through porous concrete and coming out through the figure's foot. He demonstrated it live on air. The Catholic archdiocese of Mumbai filed a complaint against him for outraging religious feelings, and Edamaruku, facing arrest without bail, left for Finland.
The Minnesota Iceman
From 1967 Frank Hansen toured Midwest fairs with a refrigerated case holding a hairy humanoid in a block of ice, twenty-five cents to look. In 1968 the zoologists Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan Sanderson examined it, declared a new species, Homo pongoides, and approached the Smithsonian. While the institution deliberated, Hansen swapped the case: he admitted commissioning a latex model in Hollywood from Howard Ball, who made figures for Disneyland. Nobody ever saw anything but the model, and in 2013 it sold at auction for eleven thousand dollars to a museum in Texas.
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