I wonder how many people saw the article about a girl who was born with a sort of X-ray vision? Things like this always catch my eye. Anyway Natasha Demkina is said to be able to see right through people that she is looking at. I don't know whether this is a blessing or a curse? This reminds me about the camera lens that was installed a couple of years ago on Sony camcorders. It turned out that it was able to see through people's clothing and they had to recall the cameras and fix the problem. I bet not everyone turned their camera back in. I mentioned this about the camera because it proves that under certain conditions a lens can make things become transparent and what is an eye after all, it is a lens.

One of the benefits of this X-ray vision is that Natasha can see into people's bodies and diagnose their medical conditions. I am not saying that she has any medical training, what I am saying is that she can see things and then explain them to medical personnel. No one knows how the girl got this ability, what they do know is that she was a very advanced child and was able to talk at only 6 months old. Even at the tender age of 3 years old, she knew how to drive a snowmobile. Hey I don't know how to do that myself. As you gathered by her name, Natasha is Russian. While it is not known how this girl got her powers, it is known when she did. She had been sent into the hospital to correct an operation that she had, where cotton swabs had been left inside of her. About a month after that, her powers appeared.

In the beginning doctors were very skeptical that Natasha actually had these powers and decided to test her. When she looked at one doctor she was able to pinpoint his ulcer. She also disproved a diagnosis of cancer by looking into a patient and pinpointing a cyst. When the patient received more advanced exams it turned out that she was correct. She had proved to the Russian medical world that she could indeed see through skin. This was a little different than the abilities of the Sony lens that I talked about above, since that could only see through material. In England Natasha was put to the test again and was able to pinpoint all the metal pins in someone that had been in a traffic accident.

When talking about the first time she realized that she had this power she said, "I was at home with my mother and suddenly I had a vision. I could see inside my mother's body and I started telling her about the organs I could see. Now, I have to switch from my regular vision to what I call medical vision. For a fraction of a second, I see a colorful picture inside the person and then I start to analyze it." The reason that she was brought to England was that the newspaper the Sun, wanted her to give a demonstration of her powers. This was not the end of her globe hopping. She was brought to New York City in 2004 and appeared in a documentary on the Discovery Channel called, The Girl With X-ray Eyes. She was tested by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry or CSI. She diagnosed people who had previously described their conditions and most of the people were impressed, but not so CSI. One member stated "When I saw her do her usual readings, I couldn't believe the discrepancy between what I was hearing and how impressed the individuals were... I thought they were going to walk away saying it was embarrassing, but time and again, they said it was amazing. Before each reading, I asked the people what was the main medical problem and Natasha never got one of those right."

Wow a strange statement indeed, from someone who was witnessing those with illnesses say that Natasha was correct. In further testing she matched 4 existing conditions out of six. This was not good enough for the CSI which had stipulated that she had to be correct on 5 out of 6 before they would test further. It seems that they were so intent on being correct that they were not willing to admit that she had some kind of ability and completely disregarded the fact that she had a rate of correctness of 66.6% in the tests. While this is not 100%, it does show that she had some hidden ability and who knows how proper the tests were? I hate to say this, but some skeptical organizations are never willing to admit they are wrong and will do anything to avoid this no matter how ridiculous sounding their explanations might be, or how tilted their tests might be administrated. I am not saying that this was the case here, just that it has been shown to be many times before.

As far as her tests went, Natasha stated that the tests in New York were more or less unfair. She stated that for one example, she needed more time to see a metal plate in someone's skull and that scars interfered with her viewing a resected esophagus in another person. She even complained about how her diagnoses were treated and she may have been right from what we have observed. In another case she stated that she didn't know that an appendix was removed because it grew back. She also complained that she was not allowed to compare her diagnoses with independent medical diagnoses. This was certainly unfair. The team replied that an appendix doesn't grow back, that the metal plate was so visible you could see the impression of it and that the scar tissue should have alerted her that there was some condition in the esophagus.

A Nobel Prize winning physicist, Brian Josephson criticized the way the tests were administered. He went on to say that the chance of even getting 4 correct matches out of 7 by accident were 1 in 50. Because of this he stated that her success rate was a statistically significant result. He also said that the testers used a factor that was statistically unjustifiable. After her experience in New York Natasha required all patients to bring a medical certificate showing their health status and also required her diagnosis to be restricted to a single part of the body.