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Natasha Demkina claims a special ability: She can supposedly peer inside people's bodies, observe their organs, and diagnose malfunctions and disease ("The Girl" 2004; Baty 2004). For a Discovery Channel documentary, The Girl with X-ray Eyes, CSI-COP was asked to test the Russian 17-year-old's alleged visionary abilities. (Results of the test, conducted in New York City on May 1, 2004, are presented elsewhere in this issue.) This column provides background and perspective on such claims.
Natasha's alleged ability falls under the heading of clairvoyance ("clear seeing"), also long known as "second sight." This is the purported perception of objects, people, or events-other than by the normal senses. It is thus a supposed form of extrasensory perception (ESP).
Mystics claim there are various states of clairvoyance, including two that are relevant to Natasha's claims. The first is X-ray clairvoyance, supposedly "the ability to see through opaque objects such as envelopes, containers, and walls to perceive what lies within or beyond." The other is medical clairvoyance, "the ability to see disease and illness in the human body, either by reading the aura or seeing the body as transparent" (Guiley 1991, 111-113). Needless to say, perhaps, as with other forms of ESP, neither of these alleged abilities has been scientifically verified. Let's look at each in turn.
X-Ray Clairvoyance
Demonstrations of X-ray clairvoyance date back many centuries, as do revelations that they could be accomplished by deception.
For example, in the sixteenth century, Reginald Scot explained how a trickster could use a confederate, or accomplice, to receive secret information. "By this means," he wrote in his classic treatise, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1564), "If you have aine invention [that is, any inventiveness] you may seem to doo a hundreth miracles, and to discover the secrets of a mans thoughts or words spoken a far off."
Just such feats were being performed in 1831 by the "Double-sighted Phenomenon," an eight-year-old Scottish lad named Louis Gordon M'Kean. Blindfolded and facing away from the audience, the kilted youth readily identified watches, coins, snuffboxes, and the like. He could also repeat what others had spoken, even though they whispered the words at a distance of a hundred yards (Nickell 1992, 70).
In the following decade came similar performances by an English woman...