Russian Girl Said She Saw Inside the Human Body; Laboratory Was Unconvinced

SARANSK, RUSSIA — A Reddit user posting to r/HighStrangeness has revived the story of Natasha Demkina, a teenager from Saransk who in 2004 claimed she could look at living people and see their internal organs as distinct, colored images.

According to the post, Miss Demkina said the ability appeared after a routine medical procedure at the age of ten. The author writes that her claim baffled both journalists and local physicians.

The post says the British tabloid The Sun sent a reporter to Russia unannounced to test her. Without knowing his medical history, the post states, she took his left wrist and identified an old, healed fracture from a childhood accident. The author adds that doctors in her hometown declared she had correctly diagnosed patients at their clinic when X-ray machines were unavailable. These accounts are the post's own and are not independently verified here.

Attention grew, and she was reportedly flown to London and New York for televised demonstrations. A testing committee that included psychologist Richard Wiseman then subjected her to double-blind trials, in which she was to identify documented medical anomalies in test subjects. By the post's own account, her accuracy fell short of scientific validation, and the media labeled the outcome a failure.

The author is not satisfied with that verdict. Dismissing the matter as a magic trick or hoax, the post argues, leaves too many loose ends, and the diagnoses she gave outside the laboratory remain what it calls an unsettling anomaly. The laboratory, for its part, found nothing to confirm them.