Gurus and Miracle Claims

"Science must confine its inquiry only to things belonging to the human senses, while spiritualism transcends the senses." — Sathya Sai Baba, refusing a scientific committee's request to test him, interview with R. K. Karanjia, Blitz, 1976¹

"In our research on Sai Baba this approach was closed to us. By that criterion there is no evidence of genuine paranormal phenomena having been produced by Sathya Sai Baba." — Erlendur Haraldsson, the parapsychologist who studied him longest, Modern Miracles, 1997²

Summary

Sathya Sai Baba (1926–2011) was the most famous miracle-worker of modern India.  His followers say he drew sacred ash, rings, watches and sweets out of the air, healed the sick, raised a dead man and appeared in two places at once.  He called these wonders his "visiting card."³  This article states those claims in his and his followers' own words, then reports every investigation of them that could be found, then surveys other Indian guru wonders that were tested.  Last, it applies the same tests to Christian miracle claims, modern and ancient, and says where the Christian evidence is stronger and where it is not.

Conclusions, stated first.

1. He never allowed a controlled test. The parapsychologists Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson asked him on two visits in the 1970s and were refused.² A Bangalore University committee led by the vice-chancellor H. Narasimhaiah wrote him three letters in June and July 1976, got no reply, and was turned away at his gate in May 1977.⁴⁴ His stated reason was that science cannot judge spiritual power.¹
2. The most careful sympathetic investigator found no proof either way, though he came to believe. Haraldsson spent years interviewing witnesses. He and Osis saw objects appear in Sai Baba's hand "about 20 times," and none of those events "occurred under controlled conditions."² He "found no direct evidence of fraud."² He also wrote that by the test of experiment "there is no evidence of genuine paranormal phenomena."² By his 2013 edition, a sympathetic reviewer reports, he judged most of the materializations "probably genuine."⁵ A few events on his account have no ordinary explanation that has been shown, such as a picture-stone vanishing from a ring on Osis's finger and a light on a hill that ten witnesses described to him separately.²⁶
3. Where a specific claim could be checked, it failed. The "resurrection" of the American devotee Walter Cowan in 1971 rests on his wife's account; all four members of the hospital staff told Haraldsson he was alive when admitted and did not die in their care.² A story that he conjured a Japanese manufacturer's new Seiko watch out of the man's own safe was denied in writing by Seiko's president in 1973.⁷ A car said to have run on water turned out, by the account of the young man who filled it, to have had water poured into an empty tank.⁶
4. The filmed evidence of trickery is suggestive, not proof. In 1992 a Hyderabad newspaper said television footage showed him taking a gold chain from an assistant. Haraldsson and the psychologist and conjurer Richard Wiseman examined the tape and found the hand movements suspicious but the picture too poor to show what happened.⁸ Former insiders David and Faye Bailey said in 2000 that he faked his materializations,⁹ which contradicts Haraldsson's later statement that no ex-devotee had ever accused him of trickery.⁶
5. His printed prediction of his own lifespan failed. In 1960 he said, "I will be in this mortal human form for 59 years more," and added, "My Word will never fail."³ That pointed to 2019. He died in April 2011, aged 84.¹⁰ His followers also expected him to live to 96. After his death some said he had reached 96 in lunar years. The only worked arithmetic found for this uses a 27-day month that no calendar uses.¹¹ In a true lunar year he died at 87. And the 27-day unit that rescues 96 makes the 1960 promise fall two "years" short.¹²
6. The abuse allegations are serious and were never tried. Several named men said on the record that he touched them sexually in private interviews, some as teenagers.¹³⁹¹⁴ No court ever ruled on any of these charges. In December 2000 India Today reported that "No case has been filed in India."¹³ Six men died at his residence on the night of 6 June 1993: two of his attendants, killed by four intruders, whom the police then shot dead.¹⁵ No published inquiry has explained the night. He answered his critics by comparing them to Judas, bribed by foreigners.¹⁶
7. Other guru wonders failed when tested. Swami Premananda produced nothing when his hand was sealed in a plastic bag in 1993, though he produced ash when it was not, and he was later convicted of rape and murder.⁸¹⁷ A boy materializer was found with ash hidden in his clothes in 1976.⁴ The fasting yogi Prahlad Jani was watched in hospital in 2003 and 2010. His own doctors' blood tests show a man losing body water and then a reversal they never explained, and neither study was published in a scientific journal.¹⁸¹⁹ The Ganesha statues that "drank milk" in 1995 were explained as milk running down the stone in a thin film, though no one published a measurement.²⁰ Where an investigator set the conditions, nothing happened or a trick was found.
8. The same tests sink most modern Christian claims. The faith healer Peter Popoff was caught in 1986 receiving his revelations about strangers by radio from his wife.²¹ Of 82 people who claimed healing at a Kathryn Kuhlman service, the 23 a surgeon could interview had not been miraculously cured.²² Lourdes has accepted 72 cures out of more than 7,000 claims, prayer trials find no effect, and no "Eucharistic miracle" has ever yielded a human DNA profile.²³ A Christian who uses these tests on Sai Baba has to accept their verdict on these claims too.
9. The same tests also bear on the Gospels, and the Gospels do not pass all of them. Jesus too refused to perform signs on demand.²⁴²⁴ The Gospel writers were his followers, writing, on Bart Ehrman's account, forty to sixty-five years after his death.²⁵ Around AD 177 the pagan critic Celsus already compared Jesus' miracles to the tricks of market-place conjurors.²⁶ By count of living, named witnesses interviewed by a scientist, Sai Baba's wonders are better documented than those of Jesus.
10. The Christian case has to rest on what is different about it. The central Christian claim is not a repeated performance that could be filmed. It is a single past event, the resurrection, reported by people who said they saw it, including a former persecutor, Paul, and a brother who had not believed, James.²⁷ Jesus' ancient opponents, in the writings of theirs that survive, granted that he did wonders and argued about their source.²⁸ Those arguments are tested in the site's articles on the resurrection. What decides the case against Sai Baba is positive evidence: a failed dated prophecy and specific stories that collapsed when checked. The Gospels face a charge of the same kind, the delayed return of Jesus, and that charge and its answers are set out in Part 6.

Verdict.  Sai Baba's miracles are unproven, and the evidence that can be checked counts against them.  The large body of devotee testimony, much of it sincere and some of it unexplained, does not establish a single wonder, because the one test that could have settled it was refused for fifty years.  The same rule binds Christians.  Testimony from believers, a refusal to perform on demand, and a prophecy reread after the fact weaken any religion's claim.  Christianity's claim stands or falls on the resurrection evidence, not on modern wonders, and that evidence has to meet the standard used here.

Part 1: What his devotees claim

The man and the movement

Sathya Sai Baba was born Sathyanarayana Raju in the village of Puttaparthi, in what is now Andhra Pradesh.  His official birth date is 23 November 1926, though, as the BBC's obituary noted, "like many born at this time, there is no proof of his date of birth."²⁹  The movement's official biography says that on 8 March 1940, aged thirteen, he collapsed after what looked like the sting of a black scorpion.  It then adds:  "As revealed by Baba Himself in later years, no scorpion had stung Him."³⁰  On 23 May 1940 he declared, "I am Sai Baba!"³⁰  He meant that he was the rebirth of Sai Baba of Shirdi, a holy man revered by Hindus and Muslims who had died in 1918.¹⁰³¹

He later taught that there would be three Sais.  In a discourse of 6 July 1963 he said the god Shiva had promised to be born three times in one family line:  "Shiva alone as Shirdi Sai Baaba, Shiva and Shakthi together at Puttaparthy as Sathya Sai Baaba and Shakthi alone as Prema Sai, later."³²  A later volume of the official biography reports him saying on the same occasion that the third Sai would be born "in Mysore state," the old name of Karnataka.³⁰

His followers built a worldwide organisation with hospitals, schools and a university.  It describes itself as interfaith.  Its history page quotes him:  "I have not come on behalf of any exclusive religion."³³  He died at his own hospital in Puttaparthi on 24 April 2011;  the Times of India reported that his heart "stopped beating at 7.28 am."³⁴

The wonders, in their own words

Sai Baba said he had produced objects from his earliest years.  Asked in 1968 when he began to show divine power, he answered, "From childhood itself! At school, I used to create chocolates, marbles and other articles for the children around Me."³⁰  He explained what the wonders were for in a discourse of 1959:  "You will understand Me only through My work. That is why sometimes in order to reveal who I am, I myself show you my 'visiting card,' something that you call a miracle."³  He insisted they were not his purpose.  "My task is not merely to cure and console, remove individual misery," he said in 1964.  "It is something far more important."³⁵  And he denied any trickery.  "I do not transfer things by a sleight-of-hand," he told an interviewer in 1976.  "I create them to be talismans."¹

The scale was large.  Haraldsson reported that Sai Baba saw about fifty to sixty people a day in small private interviews, "of whom as many as two-thirds might receive a materialized gift."⁶  He estimated "about twenty to forty pieces a day."²  The anthropologist Lawrence Babb, who studied the movement in the 1970s, wrote:  "On one point let there be no mistake: miracles are crucial and central to the cult of Sathya Sai Baba."³⁶  The commonest gift was vibhuti, the sacred ash of Hindu worship.  Babb cites the official biography for the claim that he produced "an average of over one pound per day."³⁶

Devotees also report healings, a raising of the dead and appearances in two places at once.  Three examples show the kind of testimony offered.

1. A healing. C. T. K. Chari, a professor of philosophy at Madras Christian College, wrote in a parapsychology journal in 1978 that a Delhi cardiologist had diagnosed his infant daughter with patent ductus arteriosus, a heart defect then curable only by surgery. Sai Baba "advised against surgery and 'apported' two white tablets for the child to swallow. Since then her lung infections and fevers have subsided, and her growth has been perfectly normal."⁶
2. A resurrection. In 1971 an American devotee, Walter Cowan, fell ill in Madras. His wife Elsie told a California audience the next year, "Walter died at Madras; Sai Baba resurrected him!"³⁷ Walter himself wrote: "As I gasped for breath, suddenly, all the body struggle was over. I died."³⁷
3. Bilocation. Osis and Haraldsson investigated a report from Kerala in which Sai Baba appeared at a sick girl's house and led a ceremony, while, it was found later, he was on the other side of India at the palace of the raja of Venkatagiri. "Osis observed Sai Baba's signature in the guestbook of the Venkatagiri family on the day he appeared in Kerala."⁶

These are not anonymous rumours.  They come from named people, some of them educated professionals, and several were recorded by an investigator who interviewed the witnesses more than once.  That is why they deserve a fair hearing.

Babb found that the wonders mean something different to devotees than to investigators.  Devotees call them his lilas, his divine "sports."  "For his devotees Sathya Sai Baba's miracles are not 'just magic'; they are his lilas, his sports as God."³⁶  Many strong devotees told Babb that they had once suspected trickery themselves:  "many of the strongest devotees among my informants said that this is precisely what they thought Sathya Sai Baba's magic must be before they actually saw it."³⁶  Seeing convinced them.  For the factual question this matters in two ways.  It shows that the devotees were not all credulous from the start.  It also shows that for many of them the relationship came to matter more than any test, so their testimony cannot settle whether a trick was used.

Part 2: The tests he refused and the investigations that were made

Osis and Haraldsson ask for an experiment

Karlis Osis, of the American Society for Psychical Research, and Erlendur Haraldsson, a psychologist at the University of Iceland, went to Sai Baba in the 1970s hoping to study him under controlled conditions.  They were parapsychologists who took psychic claims seriously, not hostile debunkers.  Haraldsson wrote:  "We wanted to have him participate in controlled experiments. We were, needless to say, well aware of what trained magicians may do by sleight of hand; hence, controlled experiments were essential."²  Sai Baba received them kindly, produced a gold ring for Osis on the spot, and declined.  On Haraldsson's account, "He stated that he only used miracles for the good of those who believed in him, and never for show."⁶

After their second trip "the American Society for Psychical Research withdrew its support."²  Haraldsson carried on alone for years, mostly by interviewing witnesses, because "With Baba's refusal to participate in experiments, the only way open was to embark upon extensive enquiries by interviewing a number of witnesses."²  He kept asking.  Of his later interviews he wrote, "when the discussion turned to experiments there was a silent refusal."²

The Bangalore University committee

In February 1976 H. Narasimhaiah, a physicist and the vice-chancellor of Bangalore University, set up "The Committee to Investigate Miracles and other Verifiable Superstitions" with a budget of 25,000 rupees.⁴  Its eleven members included a chemist, a physicist and an aeronautical engineer from the Indian Institute of Science, two psychologists, two physicians, a lawyer and an engineer.⁴  On 2 June 1976 Narasimhaiah wrote asking Sai Baba to "conduct the investigation of these phenomena according to well established methods of science under controlled conditions."⁴  He wrote again on 16 June:  "I am sorry to mention that no reply is received from you."  On 5 July he set a deadline of 19 July and warned that the letters would then go to the press.⁴  Haraldsson, no enemy of Sai Baba, confirms that "Sai Baba did not reply to this letter, nor did he respond to two further letters from the committee, which were widely publicized."²  When the committee announced that it would call at his Whitefield residence on 29 May 1977, its members were told "he was inside the premises and we would not be allowed to enter."⁴

Sai Baba gave his answer to the journalist R. K. Karanjia of Blitz in September 1976.  Asked why he had rejected the committee, he said:

"How can science which is bound to a physical and materialist outlook investigate transcendental phenomena beyond its scope, reach or comprehension? This is a fallacy on the face of it. One belongs to the material and the other to a spiritual plane. Science must confine its inquiry only to things belonging to the human senses, while spiritualism transcends the senses. If you want to understand the nature of spiritual power you can do so only through the path of spirituality and not science."¹

In the same interview Karanjia asked for a ring and, by his own account, was given one "on the spot":  "Baba waved his hand in the air to produce a silver ring bearing the inscription OM in the centre with Sai Ram marks on the sides."¹  That is the pattern of the whole record.  Wonders were given freely to friendly visitors, under his conditions, and never under anyone else's.

The answer has a flaw.  A ring that appears from nowhere is an event in the world of the senses.  Whether it came from a sleeve or from nothing is exactly the kind of question science can answer, with a search before and a camera during.  Sai Baba's reason would apply to a claim about the soul.  It does not apply to a claim about a ring.

What a test looks like when a swami agrees

The same investigators show what was lost.  In the early 1990s Haraldsson and the Dutch psychologist Joop Houtkooper studied a lesser materializer, Gyatri Swami, who did cooperate.  They planned to have him produce objects inside a sealed glass tube, filmed with a fixed video camera, and they used a metal detector.  Their verdict:  "We have good evidence that he cheated on some occasions with the pulling of statues from fruits, both from our own observation on one occasion, corroborated by the videotape, and from the outspoken reaction from the Jagannathan family, who had nothing to gain by a scandal."³⁸  They were careful not to carry the result over:  "Our conclusion on the claims by Gyatri Swami is negative, but, in our view, there is insufficient ground for generalizing this conclusion to Sai Baba."³⁸  That is fair.  But it also shows that the investigators could catch cheating when they were allowed to look, and that Sai Baba never allowed them to look.

What Haraldsson could not explain

Haraldsson's conclusions in 1997 cut both ways, and both halves should be reported.  On one side:  "in spite of a longlasting and painstaking effort, we found no direct evidence of fraud."²  On the other:  "In science, experimentation is traditionally the ideal way to certainty about the nature of any phenomena. In our research on Sai Baba this approach was closed to us. By that criterion there is no evidence of genuine paranormal phenomena having been produced by Sathya Sai Baba."²  He did not leave it there.  He argued that courts "rely primarily on quantity of testimony or on the consensus of witnesses," that "This has been our approach," and that followers and critics alike "arrive at a general consensus about the paranormality of the frequent appearance of objects in his presence."²  By 2013, as noted above, he judged most of the materializations "probably genuine."⁵

Four episodes on his account have not been given a shown ordinary explanation.

1. The vanished picture. In 1974 Sai Baba told Osis, "Look at your ring." The enamel picture had gone from the gold ring Sai Baba had given him the year before, though the frame and the notches that held it were undamaged. The two men sat five or six feet away and had not touched him. "Sai Baba teasingly remarked, 'This was my experiment'."⁶
2. The double rudraksha. When Haraldsson pressed him on the meaning of a word, Sai Baba produced a pair of joined seed-pods, handed it round, took it back, blew on it, and returned it set in gold with a small cross and a red stone. A London jeweller later found "the gold was found to be at least 22 carat and the stone was a genuine ruby."⁶
3. The light on the hill. "I have found ten witnesses to this phenomenon of light, each of whom I have interviewed separately. They all agreed that these phenomena happened only in the late 1940s and only a few times."²
4. Hot food on a riverbank. Witnesses from the 1940s and 1950s described steaming food produced from the sand. "If a trick was involved, a heater must have been placed with the foods in the sand before Sai Baba and his group arrived. That would have been difficult in the 1940s and 1950s, and have involved considerable preparation."²

A skeptic should grant that these accounts are sincere and have not been explained case by case.  But they have the weaknesses Haraldsson himself named.  The vanished picture and the rudraksha are the only two of the four that an investigator saw for himself.  Both took place on Sai Baba's ground, and both involved an object that had passed through his hands:  the ring was his gift of the year before, and the rudraksha was handed back to him before it changed.  An object that changes after it has been in the performer's hands is the classic structure of a conjuring effect, however skilful.  The light and the food were recalled to Haraldsson decades after the late 1940s, and he states that "None of these events occurred under controlled conditions" even for the twenty productions he and Osis saw themselves.²

What collapsed when it was checked

Where a claim could be checked against someone outside the circle of devotees, the record looks different.

1. Walter Cowan. Haraldsson traced the hospital staff. The attending physician, Dr. Vaz, told him "Walter Cowan had been seriously ill ... but it was not true that he had died."² "All four members of the medical staff report that Walter Cowan had been alive when he was admitted to the hospital and had not died while under their treatment."² The dispute is about the hours before admission: "It is on this last point that Mrs Cowan and Dr Vaz radically disagree."² The journalist Mick Brown reproduced letters from the two doctors. Vaz wrote that when Sai Baba prayed at the bedside, "Mr Cowan was conscious then and also right through." The cardiologist, Dr. Rajagopalan, wrote that Cowan had a cardiac arrest in hospital and was revived by "standard cardio-respiratory resuscitative procedures."³⁹ On either doctor's account the man was treated and revived by medicine, not raised from the dead. Haraldsson also recorded that a devotee named Eswar told Osis that Sai Baba had asked him "to play the case down."²
2. The Seiko watch. A devotee scientist, S. Bhagavantham, published a story that Sai Baba had handed a visiting Japanese watch manufacturer a parcel containing the new Seiko model the man had locked in his own safe in Japan, and that the watch was later found missing from the safe. The Sri Lankan rationalist Abraham Kovoor wrote to Bhagavantham in September 1973 for the man's name and got no answer. He then wrote to the Seiko company, whose president replied on 8 November 1973: "Neither I nor any members of my staff have ever made the acquaintance of this individual. I am sure that these reports are completely unfounded."⁷
3. Petrol from water. Osis and Haraldsson were told that Sai Baba had a car's empty tank filled with water and sent it on its way. "Talking later with the investigators, Amarendra Kumar said he had simply poured buckets of water into the empty tank."⁶ The miracle, if any, would be that the car ran. Nobody recorded measuring the tank.
4. Ash on photographs. Haraldsson visited about twenty homes where ash was said to form on pictures of Sai Baba but never saw it appear. He judged that "Since it can be easily faked, the reports of it must be considered inconclusive until vibhuti has appeared on objects under the direct control and observation of investigators."² When a University of London researcher analysed ash from a picture in North London, it proved "virtually identical" in its chemistry to ash from a Hindu temple in Archway.³⁹

The film and the insiders

In 1992 the Hyderabad newspaper Deccan Chronicle printed a front-page story on state television footage of a public function in the city and claimed they showed Sai Baba taking a gold chain from an assistant before "producing" it.  Haraldsson and Richard Wiseman, a psychologist and amateur conjurer, obtained the tape and had it enhanced.  They described the stakes:  "This claim, if valid, would represent the first time that strong evidence of such trickery had surfaced."⁸  Their result was that "The quality and resolution of the tape leave much to be desired."⁸  The movement "looks suspect to some (to a greater or lesser degree) and not to others," and "Though it looks suspicious, it offers no unequivocal evidence of fraud."⁶  That is a fair verdict on one blurred piece of film.  It is not an acquittal.

Abraham Kovoor showed that the effect itself is easy.  After public lectures in Colombo and Kalutara, he wrote, "I produced 'holy ash', Sai Baba-wise, by waving my out-stretched hands in air, just to convince the audience that the socalled materialisation of things from 'nowhere' by Bhagawans are only similar jugglery".⁷  This shows that a trick can produce what audiences saw.  It does not show that Sai Baba used one.

Haraldsson's strongest argument against fraud was that a lifetime of tricks would need helpers, and insiders who left would have talked.  In 2017 he wrote, "it is striking that no ex-devotee has ever come forward with accusations of trickery."⁶  That was not so.  In late 2000 two long-time devotees, David and Faye Bailey, whose marriage Sai Baba had arranged, circulated a document called The Findings.  The journalist Michelle Goldberg, who read it, reported that "Part of the nearly 20,000-word piece is given over to evidence that Sai Baba fakes his materializations and doesn't magically heal the sick".⁹  The Findings itself was not obtained for this article, so its evidence has not been weighed here.  But the claim that no insider ever alleged trickery is wrong.

By the 1990s the more spectacular wonders had faded.  Mick Brown, who visited in that decade, was told that Sai Baba "no longer produced lingams," the emblems of the god Shiva, and that "The age of miracles, I was told, had passed."³⁹

Weighing the record

Three facts carry the most weight.

First, the refusal.  For half a century a man who said he created objects from nothing would not let anyone check whether he did, though he was asked by sympathetic scientists and hostile ones, and though a single clean demonstration would have settled the matter in his favour.  A refusal does not prove fraud.  But it removes the one kind of evidence that could have proved the claim.

Second, the asymmetry of the checks.  The episodes Haraldsson could not explain all rest on testimony, much of it recalled long after.  The episodes that could be checked against outside records, the hospital, the watch company, the man who filled the tank, all came out against the miracle.

Third, the residue is real but small.  Haraldsson was careful and honest, and some of what he recorded has no shown explanation.  This article does not claim that every report was a trick.  It claims that none was shown to be anything else, and that the one test which could have shown it was refused.

Part 3: The prophecies

A wonder done in a private room is hard to check.  A dated prediction is easy.  This is where Sai Baba's claims can be tested most cleanly, and the test should be stated in the devotees' own terms first.

What he said, and what his followers said he said

The one dated prediction of his lifespan in his own published discourses was given at Prasanthi Nilayam on 29 September 1960:

"I will be in this mortal human form for 59 years more and I shall certainly achieve the purpose of this avathaar; do not doubt it. I will take My own time to carry out My Plan so far as you are concerned. I cannot hurry because you are hurrying."³

The passage ends:  "But My Word will never fail; it must happen as I will."³

The better-known figure, 96, does not appear in that volume.  It comes from devotees' reports of his conversation.  The movement's own website collects them and admits that "Some of the sources are contradictory with regard to Prema Sai and when he will come on Earth."⁴⁰  It reports the belief this way:  "We have heard often that Prema Sai will be born eight years after the passing of Sathya Sai Baba, which will take place when Sathya Sai Baba is 96."⁴⁰  A devotee's diary from the late 1940s, quoted on the same page, has him saying, "The present Avatar will last for 96 years, and, after a gap of one year, Prema Sai Avatar will assume human body."⁴⁰  Another early writer, Howard Murphet, also gives one year.⁴⁰  So the sources disagree on whether the successor would come one year or eight years later, and on where.

The belief was held firmly.  On 22 April 2011, as he lay in intensive care, the Press Trust of India reported that "some of his devotees are confident he will recover and live for 96 years as he had once predicted."⁴¹  The Deccan Herald wrote that devotees, "including former judges, police officers and even doctors kept faith that he will recover and live for 96 years as he had predicted on several occasions."³¹

What happened

He died on 24 April 2011.  By his official birth date he was 84 years and five months old.¹⁰  Indian newspapers, counting the year of life then running, gave his age as 85 or 86.³¹¹¹

Within a day some devotees said the prophecy had been fulfilled after all.  The Deccan Herald reported:  "Baba died at the age of 85 but some devotees still believe that he will return to prove himself right while others claim he lived for 96 years as per the lunar calendar."³¹  A year later the same paper recorded the argument in full from a devotee outside the ashram:

"He did not specify according to which calendar he would live for 96 years. According to the regional lunar calendar he had lived his tenure." He went on to explain that since a lunar calendar has 27 stars, it implies a lunar month has 27 days. Hence a lunar year comprises 324 days only. "Going by this, Baba spent 30,834 days or 96 years with us," he concluded.¹¹

The arithmetic

This claim can be priced exactly.  From 23 November 1926 to 24 April 2011 is 30,833 days.  The devotee's 30,834 counts both the first and last day, which makes no difference here.

The 27 "stars" are the nakshatras, the 27 equal divisions of the sky, 13 degrees 20 minutes each, that the moon passes through.⁴²  They are not days.  A lunar month, from new moon to new moon, lasts 29.53 days, and twelve of them make 354.37 days, as the Indian government's Calendar Reform Committee put it in 1955:  "twelve such lunations amount to 354.36706 days."⁴²  The moon takes 27.32 days to pass through all 27 nakshatras and return to the same star, so even a "star year" of twelve such circuits is 327.86 days.  No Indian calendar uses a 27-day month or a 324-day year.  The Telugu calendar is lunisolar:  it adds an extra adhika month when needed to keep its years in step with the sun.⁴²

The table gives his age at death in each kind of year, and the dates on which he would have reached 96.

On a real lunar year he died at 87, nine years short.  Only the invented 324-day year brings him into his 96th year, and only by seven weeks:  on that unit his 96th year began on 2 March 2011.¹²  The unit was chosen after the death to fit it.

The 1960 promise gives a second, independent check, because it fixes the end from a known date.  Fifty-nine years after 29 September 1960 is 29 September 2019 in solar years, 26 December 2017 in lunar years, and 30 January 2013 even in the devotee's 324-day years.  He died before all of them.  On the devotee's own unit he lived 57.0 more "years" after that discourse, not 59.  Any year-length short enough to make him 96 at death, between about 321 and 325 days, makes the 1960 interval come out between 56.9 and 57.5 years.¹²  No single calendar makes both statements true.  The website's editors suggest that "Swami meant lunar years" in 1960 as well,⁴⁰ but 59 lunar years from 1960 ran to December 2017, more than six years after his death.

The fair conclusion is plain.  His one dated prediction of his own lifespan, made in his own published words with the assurance that "My Word will never fail," did not come true on any reckoning.  The rescue offered for the 96-year figure depends on a unit no calendar uses, and the same unit sinks the 1960 prediction.

The prediction of a successor cannot be checked yet.  On the one-year version Prema Sai would have been born in Karnataka around 2012, and on the eight-year version around 2019.  This article found no statement by the Sathya Sai organisation recognizing any claimant.

Part 4: The allegations and the deaths of 1993

These matters do not test the miracles directly.  They are reported here because they test the character of a man who claimed to be God, and because a skeptic will ask about them.  Only what named people said on the record, and what courts did or did not do, is reported.  Nothing here has been proved in court.

The night of 6 June 1993

Late on 6 June 1993 four young men, all long-time devotees, entered Sai Baba's living quarters at Prasanthi Nilayam with knives.  India Today reported three weeks later:  "Two of his assistants were killed in the attack close to midnight on June 6, before the police shot dead all the four assailants."¹⁵  The police inspector who led the team said of the shooting:  "Absolutely, there was no other way."  The ashram "declined to comment on the incident."¹⁵  A fortnight later the magazine named the four dead men, "Suresh Shantharam Prabhu, 42, E.K. Suresh, 32, N. Jagannath, 29 and K. Sairam, 22," and noted that the inspector "cannot explain why there was a big time gap between the four assailants locking themselves up in the living room and their deaths at the hands of the police."⁴³  One family said Jagannath's body "was disposed of without even informing his family in Bangalore."⁴³  Sai Baba's brother, Janakiram, told the magazine:  "If we allowed them (the assailants) to live, some Ram Jethmalani-like lawyer would have come and rescued them."⁴³

The motive was never established.  The anthropologist Tulasi Srinivas, writing in 2010, found that "all published accounts are unanimous that four young men were found dead in Sai Baba's personal quarters," and that the newsweekly The Week had "concluded that all was conjecture, since the ashram was known to be tightlipped."⁴⁴⁴⁴  The rationalist Basava Premanand wrote that he filed a petition in the Andhra Pradesh High Court on 27 September 1993 asking for an impartial inquiry.⁴⁵  No court order on that petition was found for this article, and no published official inquiry explains the night.

The sexual-abuse allegations

From about 2000 on, a series of former devotees, most of them Western, said that Sai Baba had sexually touched young men and teenage boys in his private interview room, often while rubbing oil on their genitals.  The accounts come from named people in several countries.

1. In December 2000 India Today named Jeff Young, a former regional president of the movement in the United States, who said his son Sam had been molested from the age of 16, and reported that "When contacted by INDIA TODAY, Young confirmed the charges." It named Hans de Kraker of Sydney, who sent a signed affidavit, Jens Sethi of Munich, who "recently filed a complaint with the public prosecutor in Munich," and the Swedish actor Conny Larsson.¹³
2. In July 2001 Salon quoted Said Khorramshahgol, an Iranian-American former follower: "Sai Baba was my God — who dares to refuse God? He was free to do whatever he wanted to do with me; he had my trust, my faith, my love and my friendship; he had me in totality." It quoted Jed Geyerhahn, who said he was 16 when it began: "Each time I saw Baba, his hand would gradually make more prominent connections to my groin."⁹
3. In June 2004 the BBC film The Secret Swami featured Alaya Rahm and Mark Roche, whose accounts were alike though about thirty years apart. Rahm said: "He took me aside, put the oil on his hands, told me to drop my pants and rubbed my genitals with the oil. I was really taken aback."¹⁴

The movement denied the charges.  A director at the ashram told Salon they were "completely false."⁹  Michael Goldstein, the chairman of the international organisation, told the BBC:  "My heart and my conscience tell me that it is not possible."¹⁴  Sai Baba himself answered in his Christmas discourse of 2000.  In the movement's own published text he said:  "Some foreigners are trying to bribe them, asking them to fabricate stories against Sathya Sai Baba," and "there are some traitors like Judas, who are being bribed to level false charges against Sai Baba."¹⁶  In September 2000 UNESCO withdrew from an education conference at Puttaparthi, saying, as Salon quoted it, that it was "deeply concerned about widely reported allegations of sexual abuse involving youths and children."⁹  The former Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, by contrast, called the attacks "wild, reckless and concocted" in a letter on his official notepaper.¹⁴

What was never proven

No court ever ruled on any of these charges.  In December 2000 India Today reported that "No case has been filed in India," and that "Even among the western cases, except for one person, no one has moved court against Baba yet."¹³  A US State Department official told the magazine the matter "appears to be an issue for the Indian courts."¹³  Srinivas wrote in 2010 that "Sai Baba has never been accused (much less convicted) of wrongdoing in an Indian court of law."⁴⁴  Alaya Rahm sued the movement's American society in California in 2005.  A devotee-side writer, the only source found for the dates, says the trial was set for 28 April 2006 and that "on 7 April 2006, the plaintiff self-dismissed his own lawsuit."⁴⁶  No court record was obtained to confirm this.

So the allegations stand where they stood:  consistent accounts from named, unrelated men in several countries, reported by mainstream outlets that checked what they could, and never tested in a court.  A reader may give them the weight such testimony usually gets.  The same reader should notice that this is the same kind of evidence, named testimony never tested in court, that supports the miracle stories, and should not believe the one kind and dismiss the other without a reason.  One reason does exist.  The miracle reports come almost entirely from people who believed he was God, and the abuse reports come from people who had believed it and then stopped, at great cost to themselves.  Testimony against one's own former faith is not proof, but it is not the testimony of a party with something to gain.

Part 5: Other guru wonders under test

Sathya Sai Baba was the most famous Indian wonder-worker of his time, but not the only one.  The cases below were chosen because someone tested or measured something, and because the record says who did it.

A swami with his hand in a bag: Premananda, 1993

Swami Premananda, a Sri Lankan who set up an ashram near Tiruchirappalli in 1983, was known for bringing up small egg-shaped stones, lingams, from his mouth and for producing sacred ash.  He was one of the few who agreed to a controlled test.  In July 1993 Richard Wiseman and Erlendur Haraldsson spent several days at his ashram.  Their method was simple:  after his hand was checked, a clear plastic bag was sealed over it at the wrist, and he was asked to produce ash or an object inside it.  Premananda was cooperative.  He told them, "I never say no, I want to try."  He also complained that "the bag felt 'unnatural' and the build up of moisture inside the bag impeded his ability."⁸

The result:  "During formal testing Premananda didn't produce any phenomena."  "During informal sessions, Premananda didn't produce any materializations within the plastic bag, but did produce some vibuti when the bag was not on his hand."⁸  They added that his "hand was never shown to be empty before an apparent materialization occurred," which is "consistent with Premananda secretly taking various objects from his lap," but "it should be clearly noted that no direct evidence of fraud was uncovered during this investigation."⁸

Premananda was later tried on other charges.  On 20 August 1997 a sessions court "found Premananda/A-1 guilty of rape of 13 girls as well as the murder of Ravi and sentenced him for life imprisonment on both charges."¹⁷  The Supreme Court of India dismissed his appeal on 5 April 2005.  Its judgment recorded, as part of the facts, that he "used to produce "lingams" and viboothi during the nights of Mahasivarathri," and remarked:  "It is rare that A-1, supposed to be incarnation of God and allegedly having divine powers has been alleged of raping 13 of Ashram girls systematically and murder of Ravi."⁴⁷⁴⁷  The conviction does not show that his wonders were tricks.  It shows that a man whose followers took him for divine on the strength of such wonders was found guilty of grave crimes by three levels of courts.

The same investigators studied two other materializers in India.  One, Minu Bhowmick, "completely rejected the use of the transparent plastic bag" and "refused to work under more rigorous conditions."⁸  The third, Gyatri Swami, did accept filming and was caught cheating, as Part 2 described.³⁸  Their verdict on the set was that "two of the three investigations failed to provide any evidence in support of genuine macro-PK."⁸

A boy with ash in his clothes: Sai Krishna, 1976

The Bangalore University committee that Sai Baba refused did test one claimant.  Sai Krishna, a boy in the village of Pandavapura near Mysore, was said to produce ash during Thursday prayer meetings.  His family did not answer the committee's letters.  So three members, the psychologists Vinoda N. Murthy and B. Kuppa Swamy and the physician Anupama Niranjana, attended as ordinary devotees.  On 8 July 1976 there was no miracle.  On 15 July Murthy noticed the boy "repeatedly putting his hands on his waist," saw "a dangling string," and "pulled the string and 'Lo and Behold!' the hidden ash poured out from the underwear."⁴  The account is the committee chairman's own, and no recording is cited.  The mother, he reports, said the family were devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, "who was the main switch and Sai Krishna was only like a small bulb."⁴  That is her claim, and it says nothing about how Sai Baba himself worked.

The statues that drank milk, 1995

On 21 September 1995 word spread across India, and then to Hindu temples in Britain and the United States, that statues of Ganesha were drinking milk offered on spoons.  A priest in New Delhi told the Associated Press, "It is a miracle."  The same report said scientists answered "that the offered milk trickled down the granite or marble idols in a thin film that was not easily visible."⁴⁸  The physicist T. Jayaraman of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Madras explained it by surface tension and capillary flow:  "while one sees the milk slowly disappearing from the spoon, the milk does not vanish into the idol. The milk remains on the surface of the idol or appears at the base of the idol."  He proposed the test:  feed a measured spoonful, collect what drains onto a plate, and compare.  "The amount will be the same, except maybe with a very minor difference due to a little milk remaining on the surface on the idol."²⁰  In Calcutta the rationalist Prabir Ghosh demonstrated the effect in public, setting out "to show that any liquid, including milk, can be made to rise from a spoon through the porous ceramics used for the idols through capillary attraction."⁴⁹

The devotees' side should be heard.  Hinduism Today printed a letter from a senior scientist at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute who asked, "How can the scientists explain the copper snake absorbing the milk I offered with a spoon kept at a good distance away from it?"⁵⁰  No answer to her case was found, because no one measured it.  That is the honest summary of the whole episode.  The physical explanation is simple and was demonstrated in public, but no published source read for this article reports anyone running Jayaraman's measured test.  The miracle claim was never shown, and the explanation was never measured either.  London's Independent called it a "24-hour wonder."⁵¹

The man who said he never ate or drank: Prahlad Jani

Prahlad Jani, a yogi from Gujarat known as Mataji, said he had taken no food or water since the 1940s.  Unlike Sai Baba, he agreed to be watched.  The neurologist Sudhir Shah observed him at Sterling Hospital in Ahmedabad "from 13/11/03 (10:00 AM) to 22/11/03 (10:00 AM)," in a room with the toilet sealed and a camera running.¹⁸⁵²  The team reported that "Mr. Jani has not passed or dribbled urine during these 10 days."¹⁸  Its own conclusion was careful:  "we have confirmed the claim over 10 days only."¹⁸  In 2010 the Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences, a government defence laboratory, watched him for "15 days wef 22 Apr 2010 to 06 May 2010."  Its update admitted that "The only contact with any form of fluid was during gargling and bathing periodically during the study beginning from 5th day of study," and that "He was taken out for MRI, Ultrasound, X-Ray and exposure to sun under continuous video recordings."⁵³⁵³  The rationalist Sanal Edamaruku had complained of exactly this:  that "Jani would sometimes move out of the CCTV camera's field of view; he was allowed to receive devotees and could even leave the sealed test room for a sun bath."⁵⁴  No results of either study were found published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The 2003 team's own blood tests are the most telling evidence, and they were printed in Shah's summary without comment.  His serum sodium rose from 139.8 mmol/L on 12 November to 154.3 on 18 November and 155.9 on 20 November.¹⁸  The normal adult range is 135 to 145, and a high level can come from "Inadequate fluid intake."⁵⁵  His blood urea more than doubled, from 33.0 to 77.¹⁸  If no salt is lost, a rise in sodium from 139.8 to 154.3 means the water in the body fell by about 9 percent in six days.¹⁹  That is what happens to a man who is not drinking.  It is evidence that, for those six days, Jani really did go without water.  It is also evidence that he could not have kept it up:  he was losing body water steadily, as anyone would.

Then the numbers turn.  On 21 November, the day before the observation ended, his sodium was 143.5.¹⁸  With no urine passed, the only way for sodium to fall from about 154 to 143.5 in three days is for the body to take in water, about 7 or 8 percent more than it held.¹⁹  The team's protocol says "100 ml water was given to him daily under supervision for mouth wash and was collected back after measurement," but the volume recovered was never reported.⁵⁶  Either he took in water, or the laboratory values are unreliable.  The summary says only that "There was mild alteration in renal parameters" and that "Otherwise all reports were in normal range."¹⁸

A breatharian on television: Jasmuheen, 1999

The Australian teacher Jasmuheen, who claimed to live on "light" alone, is not a Hindu guru, but her claim was the same as Jani's and her test was the one stopped by a doctor.  In October 1999 the television programme 60 Minutes kept her under watch in a hotel and then a mountain retreat.  At about 48 hours the physician Berris Wink told her, "You are now over 5 per cent dehydrated. If we let this go much longer, that's going to damage your kidney."  By about the fourth day:  "You are now quite dehydrated, probably over 10 per cent, getting up to 11 per cent."  "Her pulse is about double what it was when she started."⁵⁷  "After four days, on the advice of Wenck, 60 Minutes abandoned the trial."⁵⁸  The figures are a doctor's bedside estimates, not laboratory values, and the reports spell her name two ways.  But they show what an honestly watched breatharian looks like after four days.

A tantric's curse on live television, 2008

On 3 March 2008 the Indian rationalist Sanal Edamaruku appeared on India TV with a tantric, Pandit Surinder Sharma, who "claimed that he was able to kill any person he wanted within three minutes by using black magic."  Edamaruku invited him to try on him, on air.⁵⁹  Sharma chanted, and later pressed his thumbs against Edamaruku's temples until the anchor cautioned him.⁶⁰  "Finally, after 90 minutes, it was over," Edamaruku wrote;  his organisation's account says "nearly two hours."⁶¹⁵⁹  Both accounts are the challenger's own.  Nothing was measured, because nothing happened.

The rationalists' standing offers

In 1963 Abraham Kovoor offered "an award of one lakh Sri Lanka rupees to any one from any part of the world who can demonstrate supernatural or miraculous powers under fraudproof conditions."  His list of acceptable feats included materializing an object, walking on water and levitating "by yogic power."⁷  His book records, twelve years on, that "nobody was able to win one cent from, him," and that during his 1975 lecture tours of India "Only one doctor in Bangalore was foolhardy to take up the challenge and made the earnest deposit," which he lost.⁷  Of the gurus he wrote to, he said, "these socalled Bhagawans have not yet responded," and he named Sathya Sai Baba first among the godmen whose "Conjuring tricks and the fictitious claims" he dismissed.⁷  An unclaimed prize is not proof, since a believer may refuse on principle to perform for an unbeliever.  But it means that no Indian wonder-worker chose to settle the question when money, fame and a willing judge were on offer.

What the cases show

The pattern is the same in every case.  Where the claimant set the conditions, the wonders happened.  Where an investigator set them, as with Premananda's bag, Gyatri Swami's camera, Sai Krishna's string and Jasmuheen's guarded room, they did not, or a trick was found.  The one claimant who agreed to long observation, Prahlad Jani, produced numbers that show an old man going without water for about a week, and then numbers that cannot be squared with the claim.

Part 6: The same tests applied to Christian miracle claims

This article has weighed Sai Baba's wonders by five tests.

1. Did the wonder-worker allow a controlled test when one was possible?
2. Is there positive evidence of trickery, on film or from insiders?
3. Were the witnesses believers with a stake in the claim, and how long after the event was the record made?
4. When a specific claim was checked against people outside the movement, did it hold?
5. When a dated prophecy failed, was it reread afterward to fit?

A Christian who uses these tests on Sai Baba has to use them on Christian claims.  A skeptic who uses them on the Gospels has to use them on Sai Baba.  This part does both.

Modern Christian wonders

Modern Christian miracle claims, put to the same tests, mostly fail them.

1. Faith healers. The planned article Faith Healers and Religious Fraud will cover them in full. Two cases show the same pattern as the gurus. The American evangelist Peter Popoff called out the names and illnesses of strangers in his audience as if God had revealed them. In 1986 the magician James Randi played a recording on NBC's Tonight Show and told the audience that "Popoff had a tiny hearing aid in his left ear, connected to a high-frequency receiver," through which his wife read him the details from backstage.²¹ In the early 1970s the Minnesota surgeon William Nolen took the names of people who claimed to be healed at a Kathryn Kuhlman service in Minneapolis: "We got eighty-two names." He invited them back. "Twenty-three people showed up and I interviewed them all," and "none of the patients who had returned to Minneapolis to reaffirm the cures they had claimed at the miracle service had, in fact, been miraculously cured of anything."²²²² Nolen's follow-up was not a controlled study, and the 23 who returned were a self-selected part of the 82. But it is the same kind of outside check that Haraldsson made on the Cowan story, with the same result.
2. Lourdes. The shrine does what Sai Baba refused to do. It submits cures to an independent medical committee. Of more than 7,000 claimed cures since 1858, the Church has accepted 72. The site's article Healings at Lourdes finds the process honest and a small residue unexplained, but no cure that breaks a law of nature and no count that beats what chance and spontaneous remission predict.
3. Prayer trials. Does Prayer Heal? finds that the large blinded trials show no effect. In the STEP trial, complications came to 52% among patients who were prayed for and 51% among those who were not.
4. Eucharistic miracles. Eucharistic Miracles finds that no bleeding host has ever yielded a human DNA profile, the one result that real human tissue cannot fail to give.

On tests 1, 2 and 4, then, modern Christian wonders do no better than Sai Baba's.  Where a Christian institution has allowed testing, as at Lourdes, the honesty of the process is to its credit, and a small residue survives.  But that residue is the same kind of residue Haraldsson found:  unexplained events, not demonstrated miracles.  A Christian who calls Sai Baba's residue unproven must call Lourdes' residue unproven too.

The Gospel miracles, test by test

Test 1:  refusing to perform on demand.  Jesus refused too.  When scribes and Pharisees said, "Teacher, we want to see a sign from you," he answered, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, but no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet."²⁴  Herod "hoped to see some miracle done by him. He questioned him with many words, but he gave no answers."²⁴  In his home town "He could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people, and healed them. He marveled because of their unbelief."²⁴  A skeptic will see in that last verse the same excuse faith healers give when a cure fails.  The parallel with Sai Baba's refusals is real.  There is one difference.  Sai Baba performed wonders for friendly visitors every day and refused only the conditions that would have shown how.  The Gospels show Jesus refusing displays to demanding audiences.  But a skeptic is entitled to say that both patterns keep the wonder away from the people best placed to check it.

Test 2:  evidence of trickery.  There is no film from the first century, so there is neither film evidence of trickery nor film evidence against it.  The charge itself is ancient.  Around AD 177 the pagan philosopher Celsus, as quoted by Origen, granted the reported deeds for the sake of argument, "Well, let us believe that these were actually wrought by you," and then "immediately compares them to the tricks of jugglers," who "in the middle of the market-place, in return for a few obols," would "expel demons from men, and dispel diseases."²⁶  Origen's reply was that no juggler "invites his spectators to reform their manners."²⁶  That reply does not separate Jesus from Sai Baba, who also called his followers to love, service and moral reform.  On this test the Gospels are neither cleared nor convicted.  The evidence that would decide it does not exist.

Test 3:  believing witnesses and late records.  This is where the Gospels are weaker than the Sai Baba record.  The Gospel writers were followers, and John says plainly that his signs "are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ."²⁴  On Bart Ehrman's account the Gospels were written "between forty and sixty-five years after the death of Jesus."²⁵  Haraldsson interviewed living, named witnesses, many of them more than once, within years or decades of the events, and he sought out critics and ex-devotees.  By count of witnesses and nearness of the record, Sai Baba's wonders are better documented than those of Jesus.  A Christian cannot dismiss Haraldsson's witnesses merely because they were devotees without dismissing the evangelists on the same ground.

Test 4:  checks against outsiders.  Here the two records part.  For Sai Baba, the claims that could be checked against outsiders, the hospital staff and the watch company, came out against the miracle.  For Jesus, the outsiders who mention his wonders did not deny them.  They attributed them to a different power.  The Gospels themselves record the charge that "This man does not cast out demons, except by Beelzebul."²⁴  A Talmudic tradition says Jesus was hanged "for sorcery and leading Israel astray."²⁸  The New Testament scholar David Instone-Brewer notes that the charge of sorcery "implies that Jesus' miracles were genuine because illusions were not punishable by death."²⁸  Celsus too granted the deeds and called them magic.²⁶  This evidence has limits.  The Talmudic text was compiled centuries later, and both it and Celsus may be answering Christian preaching rather than remembering independently.  But it is a different pattern from Sai Baba's, where the outsiders who could check said no.

Test 5:  prophecy reread after failure.  The Bible states this test itself:  "When a prophet speaks in Yahweh's name, if the thing doesn't follow, nor happen, that is the thing which Yahweh has not spoken."²⁴  Critics apply it to two sayings of Jesus.  "There are some standing here who will in no way taste death until they see God's Kingdom come with power."²⁴  And:  "this generation will not pass away until all these things happen."²⁴  The world did not end in that generation.  A later New Testament letter shows Christians already facing the mockers' question, "Where is the promise of his coming?", and answering that "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."²⁴²⁴  A skeptic will see the same move as the lunar-year rescue:  when the expected time passed, the measure of time was changed.  That should be admitted.  Christian interpreters answer that Mark 9:1 is fulfilled in the next scene, where "After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John ... and he was changed into another form in front of them,"²⁴ and that "all these things" in Mark 13 begins from his prediction that of the temple "There will not be left here one stone on another,"²⁴ which the Romans fulfilled in AD 70, within forty years.  The difference a Christian can point to is that these readings rest on events the text itself places beside the sayings, while the 324-day year was invented after the death to fit it.  That difference is real.  Whether it is enough is a judgment the reader has to make, and the site treats it in its articles on prophecy.

What the Christian framework allows

The Bible does not require a Christian to call every non-Christian wonder a trick.  It warns that a prophet who leads people to other gods may give "a sign or a wonder" that "comes to pass," and that the people must still not follow him.²⁴  Jesus warned that "false christs, and false prophets ... will show great signs and wonders."²⁴  So a Christian could grant that some of Sai Baba's wonders were genuine and deny that they came from God.  This should be stated with its weakness.  As a claim about evidence it is untestable:  no observation could show a wonder to be from a deceiving spirit rather than from God or from a trick.  It is a theological premise, not a finding, and this article's verdict does not rest on it.  The verdict rests on the refusals, the failed checks and the failed prophecy.

Where the Christian evidence is stronger, and where it is not

Not stronger:  in the number of named witnesses, in the closeness of the record to the events, in independence from devotion, and in the refusal of signs on demand, Sai Baba's record is as good as the Gospels' or better.  Both face a charge of rereading a prophecy after the time passed.

Stronger:  the central Christian claim is of a different kind.  It is not a stream of small wonders produced in private for visitors.  It is one public claim, that a man executed by the Romans was seen alive afterward, set out in a list of witnesses that Paul wrote down about AD 53 to 57, within about 25 years.²⁷  The critic Gerd Lüdemann, who rejects the resurrection, grants that Paul gave the list so "that those who were still skeptical about what they have heard could ask the witnesses directly, since most of them were still alive."⁶²  The list includes two men who were not followers beforehand:  "The church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed," and "The skeptic James, brother of Jesus, was suddenly changed," as Gary Habermas and Michael Licona put it.²⁷  Lüdemann's answer is that Peter and Paul "became victims of self-deception."⁶²  That is a serious answer, and it is weighed in Hallucination Theories of the Resurrection and The Historical Case for the Resurrection.  Nothing in Sai Baba's record corresponds to a hostile witness turned into a witness for the claim.

The fair conclusion runs both ways.  The arguments that sink Sai Baba are not "his witnesses were devotees" or "he would not perform on demand," because those arguments would sink the Gospels too.  What sinks Sai Baba is positive evidence:  refusal of tests that were possible and easy, specific stories that failed when checked against outsiders, and a dated prophecy in his own words that failed on every calendar.  The case for Jesus has to be made on positive evidence of its own, chiefly the resurrection witnesses, and it has to meet the same standard used here.

Objections and responses

"Haraldsson was a trained scientist who studied Sai Baba for years and found no fraud."  That is true, and this article reports it in his words.²  He also wrote that by the standard of experiment there was "no evidence of genuine paranormal phenomena," because the experiment was refused.²  He and Osis were psychologists, not conjurors, as a sympathetic reviewer of his book notes.⁵  When the same kind of investigator was allowed to film and control a lesser swami, he caught him cheating.³⁸  And his later claim that no former insider ever alleged trickery is wrong.⁹

"Thousands of witnesses over fifty years cannot all be wrong."  Haraldsson made this argument, comparing his method to a court that weighs the "quantity of testimony."²  But courts also cross-examine, and they weigh physical evidence above the number of witnesses.  The witnesses here were mostly devotees, many of whom saw the same kind of event under the same conditions, so their number does not make them independent.  The argument also proves too much.  Craig Keener has estimated that about 200 million Pentecostal and charismatic Christians in ten countries say they have witnessed divine healing,⁶³  and every major religion has its own witnesses.  If the count of witnesses settled the matter, it would confirm the rival claims of every religion at once.

"Spiritual power cannot be judged by science."  This was Sai Baba's own answer.¹  It would be a fair answer about a claim concerning the soul.  The claim here was that a gold ring appeared from nothing in a man's hand.  That is a physical event, and whether the ring came from a sleeve can be checked by a search and a camera.

"The 1992 video proves he was a fraud."  It does not.  The two investigators who examined it, one of them a skeptic and conjuror, judged it suspicious but too poor to show what happened.⁸  This article does not rest its verdict on the film.

"He lived 96 years by the lunar calendar."  On a real lunar year of twelve lunations he died at 87.  Only a 324-day year built from a 27-day "month," which no calendar uses, brings him into his 96th year, and the same unit makes his own 1960 prediction fall short by two years.¹²

"The allegations were invented by jealous foreigners."  That was Sai Baba's answer.¹⁶  The accusers were named, came from several countries over several decades, and in some cases filed complaints with prosecutors.¹³  Calling them bribed is not evidence that they were.  But it is also true that no court found against him, and this article does not treat the allegations as proved.

"Jesus also refused to perform on demand, so the refusal argument is a double standard."  In part, yes.  Part 6 grants the parallel.²⁴²⁴  The difference is narrower than Christians often say:  Sai Baba performed for friends daily and refused only controls, and the Gospels show Jesus refusing displays to demanding audiences.  The verdict against Sai Baba does not rest on the refusal alone.  It rests on the refusal together with the checks that failed and the prophecy that failed.

"Christians are special pleading:  the Gospel miracles are worse documented than Sai Baba's."  On the number of witnesses and the distance of the record from the events, that is correct, and Part 6 says so.²⁵  The Christian case cannot rest on the Gospel healings as evidence equal to a modern investigation.  It rests on the resurrection evidence, which is argued and tested in the site's resurrection articles.

"A Christian has to say Sai Baba's powers were demonic."  The Bible allows that false prophets may show real wonders,²⁴²⁴ so a Christian is free to grant that some reports were genuine.  But that is a theological premise that no observation could test, and this article's verdict does not depend on it.

"A refusal to be tested is not evidence of fraud."  Agreed.  It is the absence of the one kind of evidence that could have proved the claim.  The positive evidence against the claims is the set of checks that failed:  the hospital staff, the watch company and the man who filled the petrol tank.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. The insiders' document was not read.  The Findings, by David and Faye Bailey (2000), is described here only through Michelle Goldberg's report.  Its evidence of faked materializations has not been weighed.

2. Haraldsson's later conclusion was not read in his own words.  The 2013 White Crow edition of his book, in which a reviewer says he judged most materializations "probably genuine," was not obtained.  Nor was his first paper with Osis, in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 71 (1977), pp. 33–43.

3. The 1992 footage.  Neither the Deccan Chronicle report nor the original television footage was obtained.  The film is described only through Haraldsson and Wiseman's study.

4. Where does 96 come from?  No passage giving 96 years was found in Sai Baba's own published discourses.  The figure rests on devotees' reports, one of them a diary from the late 1940s known only through the movement's website.  If he never said 96, the 96-year prophecy is a devotee belief, and the 1960 statement, which he did make, is the prophecy that failed.

5. Court records.  No record was obtained of Premanand's 1986 petition under the Gold Control Act, which the BBC says was dismissed, of his 1993 petition about the deaths, or of Alaya Rahm's California lawsuit.  The dates of Rahm's withdrawal rest on one devotee-side writer.

6. The 1993 deaths.  No report of any official inquiry was found.  Accounts differ even on who the two dead attendants were and on the timing.

7. The Cowan doctors disagree.  Dr. Vaz wrote that Cowan was conscious throughout.  Dr. Rajagopalan described a cardiac arrest and resuscitation in hospital.  Both deny that Cowan died before admission, but their accounts do not match each other.

8. Quotations not used.  Several sayings circulate widely without a traceable source and were left out:  the remark attributed to the Hard Rock Cafe founder Isaac Tigrett, "I know he fakes materializations, because I've seen him do that too";  the aphorism "When doubt walks in the front door, faith walks out the back door," which was not found in the 43 volumes of his discourses searched;  the story that jasmine flowers thrown on the floor spelled "Sai Baba";  and a "miraculous conception" by his mother.  The official biography's account of his mother's experience describes a light around him as an infant, not a conception.

9. Dates that conflict.  Haraldsson's own texts date the two visits with Osis to 1973 and 1974 in one place and to a second visit in 1975 in another.  Reports of the time of death differ by twelve minutes.

10. Overlap with a planned article.  The site has a planned article, Sathya Sai Baba's Miracles, under Philosophy, Miracles and Experience, whose description covers Parts 1 to 3 of this one.

11. Burial and levitation feats.  No documented case of a guru's live burial or levitation tested by Indian rationalists was found in the sources read.  Kovoor's book lists levitation among the feats his prize would reward but records no burial or levitation exposure.  The work of Narendra Dabholkar's Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti and of Prabir Ghosh was not reached in primary form.

12. Prahlad Jani's full data.  The 2010 study's blood, urine, weight and hormone values were never published, and the volume of mouthwash water recovered in 2003 was never reported.  A single-subject brain scan paper (Raghuprasad and Manivannan, Annals of Neurosciences, 2018) on an unnamed 82-year-old man with the same claim gives two different gland volumes in its abstract and its tables, and was not used.

13. The milk test.  No published source reports anyone running the measured test Jayaraman proposed in 1995.  A coloured-milk test credited to a government team appears only in secondary sources.

14. Broadcasts.  The 60 Minutes programme on Jasmuheen, the India TV recording of the 2008 challenge and the Popoff segment of the Tonight Show were not obtained.  Randi dates the Popoff broadcast to February 1986;  other sources give May.

15. Dadaji.  No source was found for an investigation of the guru Dadaji by Haraldsson, though Kovoor lists "Poojya Dadaji" among the godmen he challenged.

Verdict

Sathya Sai Baba's wonders are unproven, and the evidence that can be checked counts against them.  For fifty years he refused every controlled test, from sympathetic parapsychologists and from a university committee alike, on the ground that science cannot judge spirit, though the claim was about rings and ash.  The most careful investigator, Erlendur Haraldsson, found no direct evidence of fraud and none of a genuine miracle, and some of what he recorded remains unexplained.  But the specific stories that could be checked against outsiders, the Cowan resurrection, the Seiko watch and the car that ran on water, failed.  His one dated prediction of his own lifespan, made in his own published words with the promise that "My Word will never fail," did not come true on any calendar, and the lunar-year rescue rests on a unit that no calendar uses.  Other Indian wonder-workers did no better when an investigator set the conditions.

The same standard binds Christians.  Modern Christian wonders, from faith healers to bleeding hosts, mostly fail the same tests, and a Christian should say so.  The Gospel miracles are reported by believers, decades after the events, by a teacher who refused signs on demand, and they face their own charge of a reread prophecy.  On those tests they are no better attested than Sai Baba's.  The case for Christianity does not rest on matching Sai Baba wonder for wonder.  It rests on a single claimed event, the resurrection, reported within about twenty-five years by a list of witnesses that included former opponents, in a movement whose ancient enemies called Jesus' wonders sorcery rather than denying them.  That evidence has to meet the standard this article applied to Sai Baba, and the site's resurrection articles put it to that test.

Sources