Natasha Demkina - Girl With X-Ray Eyes

Image Credit : Discovery Channel documentary 'The Girl with X-Ray Eyes"

It all started in 1997 and in a rather East-European way. Natasha Demkina was only 10 when she underwent a surgery to have her appendix removed. When it was time to go home she could hardly move. Ultrasound revealed that surgeon forgot the medical cotton inside her. She was operated again to have it removed. About a month later her x-ray vision appeared for the first time. One day she looked at her mother and said "I see a crimped tube similar to our vacuum cleaner inside of you. I also see two beans and a tomato that resembles a bulls' heart". At that time she did not know the words for intestines, kidneys and other organs so she just compared them to things she knew - vegetables and things she saw in and around the house.

Her abilities were first tested in Children's Hospital No 1 in her home town of Saransk, Russia. Natasha was able to draw a picture of a doctor's stomach and marked where she saw an ulcer. She was correct. Several other experiments were also successful and the word soon got out. People with medical problems were lining up at her door. It wasn't until early 2003 that local newspaper wrote about her and later in November of the same year local TV also made a report about her.

Then things started to roll. Next chapter of the story occured in In January of 2004 when British newspaper "The Sun" brought Natasha to England where she performed a number of successful demonstrations, but also a few inaccurate ones. In May of the same year, Discovery Channel invided her to New York to make a documentary about her - 'The Girl with X-Ray Eyes" and to be tested by Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

This test ended up in a great contoversy. She was presented with 7 people and was asked to match 6 medical conditions to each one of them (the seventh test person was completely healthy). She managed to match 4 conditions correctly, but said committee concluded that the test was a failure. A number of people, most prominent of which was a Nobel Prize winner Dr. Brian Josephson, argued that the test was deeply flawed and did not give Natasha a fair chance. He pointed out that mathematical chance of successfuly matching 4 out of 6 conditions to 7 patients are less than 2% and that "failure" is not a fitting conclusion for such performance. Not only that - two test persons have been previously operated in abdominal area but the list of matches given to her showed only one. This left then 17 year old girl confused as to which one of the two people is she supposed to match.

Regardless of this, Demkina accepted the invitation to Tokyo Electrical University in Japan by Professor Yoshio Machi to test her abilities there as well. The only reports about those tests come from Demkina's own site http://demkina.ru/ and according to it she was able to recognize artificial implants and conditions on a number of humans and one dog.

Edit February 02 2008:
After making a post about a video found on YouTube (thanks Tom) Amusing Video - Is Psychiatry "Supernatural" ? I have to chuckle at the comparison. When a girl matches 4 out of 7 patients it is called a "failure" but when psychiatrists with years of experience admit curing zero, one or "few" patients over years - it is called a "science".