Duh, it’s obvious: his beard is made of cotton candy, and he munches it when nobody’s looking.
Put him in a plastic box and hang him over London for a year.
Open the box at the end of a year & wait for an answer.
I think this case is a little different. In this case, we have the “alien” (the fakir) in hand. He’s claiming he can “make crop circles” (live indefinitely without food or water) using “mysterious UFO technique” (yogic discipline or whatever). So, we’re asking him to demonstrate, and he says he is.
This is not at all the same as showing that people can make perfect crop circles, never having seen a UFO actually try to.
So, it isn’t enough to show that other humans could duplicate the demonstration he’s making. Instead, we have to be convinced that his demonstration is valid (i.e., that it shows what he claims it shows).
If we have alternative explanations, then we need more evidence that can distinguish betwen our explanations and his. Several good suggestions (IMHO) have been made so far in this thread, such as extending the trial to 30 days and allowing him the freedom to obtain water and food if he needs it.
(Yes, that latter one has the small flaw that he might say “after 30 years I just wanted to see what the new Coke tastes like”, but then the burden of proof shifts entirely to him.)
This is a miracle wrapped in a mystery.
The miracle is the internet, that permits anyone with a computer connection to post whatever they desire as a webpage.
The mystery is why adults seeing the page believe there might be some truth in it simply because the page can be viewed on the internet.
I think the BBC is not just “anyone with a computer connection”.
There was a recent book—I cannot for the life of me remember the tile, or I’d link—about a very famous woman in 19th-century Brooklyn who “went decades without eating or drinking.” It details her and other “hunger artists” through the centuries, and how they cleverly executed their ruses, for various reasons (religious manie, mental illness, fame).
So CSI is using mountainclimbing lore as fact now? The rule of 3’s to a mountain climber are:
3 minutes without oxygen
3 hours (in extreme weather) without shelter
3 days without water
3 weeks without food
It’s also used as a distress signal. Three shots in the air, three whistles, three fires, etc.
In a hospital bed, the rule of 3s doesn’t really take on the same significance. Even in the wild, it’s meant as a guide, and not a cold hard fact.
If I were in the man’s room, I could solve the question in three minutes with a simple thermometer.
Is the man warmer than the surrounding room?
If yes, he’s generating body heat, which means he’s burning calories- a fuel of some sort- which means he’s eating and drinking something.
If no, then he’s dead. And it’s quite easy to go many, many years in that condition without food and water.
There’s no ‘miracle’ here, the only thing that needs to be figured out is where the man is getting his sustenance.
Doc, that depends on what your definition of the word “is” is 
If you mean “is” in the scientific meaning of “backed by so much evidence that it would be foolish not to give preliminary credence to it”, then yes, I would agree. If you mean “is” in the mathematical sense of an absolute proclamation, than no, nothing is absolutely certain in the world.
Except that this is not an esoteric mathematical hypothesis. If the man is alive, his cells must be consuming a fuel, therefore he must be eating and drinking something.
Yes, he can fast for days, but not weeks, certainly not months, and definitely not years. Therefore he is taking in some form of nourishment, therefore his claims are bunk.
From another article that I read, doctors have been trying to get him in for observation for a while. It was only recently that he agreed to participate in a 10-day observation. This suggests to me that the 62-year fast is not true. His weight loss during the observation also suggests the same.
But assume that the 62 years have been filled with fasting. It seems possible that the man discovered that he could survive without water for 10 days, either through constant training or through unique physiology. He could then make his assertion and support it by only submitting himself for 10-day observations. Going without food for 10 days would be a trivial matter for him.
It seems like it would be very difficult for him to secretly drink without being discovered unless he had a confederate - and that seems very unlikely. I doubt a man that lives in a cave would have a close friend on the observation staff. Since he had constant video survellience, I assume the video was recorded and any suspicion could be double-checked.
On the other hand, what about the possibilty of drinking his urine during yoga exercises? Could doing this once break his 10-day fast into two 5-day fasts?
If you have noticed, the word “miracle” in the title is in quotes. Which means, of course, this is not a real miracle.
Now lets see if there’s evidence of this event is miraculous.
lekatt, a question: is there anything you won’t believe?
In hate.
Love,
erl
Well, no, sometimes it’s perfectly reasonable simply to have an alternative explanation even if the alternative is unsupported by definite facts about a specific case. If a shady looking stranger approaches you on the street and offers to sell you Rolex for fifty bucks, you already have strong, even compelling, reasons for assuming he’s trying to cheat you rather than simply accepting his claim that it’s an authentic Rolex. If you took him up on his offer, you would almost certainly find that you had bought a counterfeit, a cheap piece of junk made up to look like a Rolex. This scam has been exposed so many times that you would be perfectly justified in assuming the Rolex was a fake even if you had no specific evidence of fakery about this specific watch. Of course, there’s the possibility that it * might * be real. Maybe the guy’s an eccentric millionaire, and this is his idea of joke. Or maybe he’s a junkie desperate for a fix who’s stolen a real Rolex. But the likelihood is so small that you would be perfectly justified in demanding evidence that the watch is the real McCoy before forking over your fifty beans. You might, for example, insist that the watch be examined by a jeweler. It may be faulty logic in some purely formal sense, but it’s darn good street smarts.
In the case of the fakir, we know that most reports of miracles and wonders are either too poorly documented to be taken seriously or turn out to be hoaxes or honest mistakes when closely investigated. That’s a general fact that justifies demanding a fairly high standard of evidence before taking this fakir’s claim seriously. A more specific fact is that (as someone else has already pointed out) previous cases of people going incredibly long periods without food or water have been shown to be fraudulent after careful investigation, and this necessarily casts strong, reasonable doubt on his claim. What is more, we aren’t required to produce specific facts about this specific case until he has pass some fairly strigent tests. Only after he has passed such test would a skeptic need to produce specific facts about this specific case to debunk it.
Now, this guy claims that he can go entire decades without food and water, not a mere ten days. In that case, a mere ten days proves little, and it doesn’t appear to me that controls were stringent enough to rule out the possibility that he was being supplied with water by a confederate or had a stash of water someplace. We are justified in demanding that he go, say, six months under carefully controlled conditions without ingesting food or drink. If he passes that test, then the buck passes to the skeptic to point out specific facts which support the hypothesis that he cheated on the test. The skeptic would not be justified in merely speculating as to how the test might have been flawed; he would have the burden of demonstrating that the test was definitely flawed and/or that cheating had occurred.
Frankly, it doesn’t seem impossible to me that under ideal conditions someone with an unusual physiology might go ten days without food or water. Of course, I’m no medical expert.
So I’d say the best explanations are: a.) he has an unusual physiology that allows him to go as much as ten days without water without suffering extreme ill effects, or b.) he somehow had access to water during the test.
I wonder if there might be a bit of confusion here? Perhaps he did not mean to claim that he had gone continuously without food or water for thirty years. Perhaps he meant only to claim that he had gone on fasts similar to this one many times over thirty years, someone mistakenly took him to mean that he had had no food or water whatsoever for thirty years, and the distorted version of the claim was the one that made it into the papers. Just a thought.
You have much faith in the world, Doc.