Science Tests Faith: Fox News Proves God

Build-up to the coming millennium was a wild time, with round-number enthusiasts stockpiling for the end of everything. Who knew what awaited us, chugging alcopops in our JNCO jeans as the clock struck midnight? Perhaps a plane falling through the conservatory from Y2K; perhaps the fires, floods, and asteroids as foretold by multitude Doomsday cults; or maybe even that long awaited return from the big man himself, swanning through the clouds to commence Judgement Day and have us trampled in the great winepress of God's almighty anger. On top of all this, Big Break was into its ninth series.

Like an excited family watching the odometer roll into a pleasing row of zeroes, 1999 was heavy with a collective sense it was all building to something; humanity's season finale. But would we get renewed? Into this paranoid landscape of doomy front pages came a most expected voice, in Fox News. Signs from God – Science Tests Faith was a live special from July of '99, 'investigating' (in the loosest possible terms) warnings that the end was indeed nigh, or as host Giselle Fernandez puts it, the “unprecedented wave of reports of supernatural happenings.” We're not talking Bigfoot, UFOs or talking mongooses, but rather, divine messages from God. Voiceover to an opening montage of flash floods, tornados, earthquakes, and weeping statues informs us it's a demonstration how “mystical events seize every continent.” Fernandez then asks “is this a warning for the new millennia, or predictable hysteria at century's end?” Dunno, mate.

Fox had trod this path before, with 1995's infamous Alien Autopsy hosted by Riker off Star Trek, and again the following year with Miracles and Visions: Fact or Fiction, an hour-long special of stigmatics and blokes who saw Christ's fizzog in the knots of a tree stump. Signs from God is essentially a two-hour thematic retread of the latter, but with extra apocalyptic vibes, and despite opening text telling viewers “the theories, opinions and beliefs expressed are only the possible interpretation,” the show functions as a warning shot for non-believers to stop ignoring the obvious and repent – “are these and other phenomena a massive organised fraud, or the most important story of our time?”

Fernandez's co-host is Michael Willesee, an Australian journalist whose career is riddled with controversies, including hosting the news while visibly drunk, and interviewing, via telephone, a pair of children held hostage by a trio of armed spree killers. But in the course of making this show, the notorious hard-line sceptic has rediscovered his Catholic faith, renewed and transformed into a bullish hammer of God by the things he's seen. It feels like Christmas Morning with Noel, broadcasting from a studio in LA, from where we cut between globe-trotting live links to Bolivia, Mexico, Pennsylvania, and two different laboratories in California. Most Haunted style livecams point hopefully at statues of Christ, to catch them in the act should they start sobbing blood.

Main focus of the show is 54-year-old Katya Rivas, “the chosen one” who sees and hears Jesus and his mum. According to Katya, when she asked Jesus why her, he replied “if there were in the world a more needy person, a poor and more wretched person than you, I would've chosen that person.” Classic negging! Fox take their cameras to her house in Bolivia, where a statue of Mary immediately begins weeping oil, before a painting of the Lady of Guadalupe takes on an “inexplicable” gathering of thousands of tiny crystals. Rivas points at Mary's shimmering belly; the womb, “where He became man,” though as the camera pans up, it just looks like someone's chucked glitter over it.

In a potted biography, Rivas was a thrice-married “sometimes troubled” woman who strayed from religion before getting back into praying, wherein Jesus assigned her the task of personal messenger, to get his word out. Although one wonders if he actually meant it, or if it was like “oh, tell so-and-so I said hi” when bumping into a mutual friend. But convey his word she did, filling up notebook after notebook with Christ's patter (“theologically sound; poetic”), often in languages she can't speak, basically functioning as Jesus's unpaid ghostwriter.

Rivas' brainwaves are tested with an EEG hairnet like Egon puts on Rick Moranis, to see if she's reaching the Delta State while awake – impossible! We're told Delta State only happens when you're asleep or comatose. When Jesus shows up and she begins drowsily passing on his messages, Rivas does indeed reach Delta, brainwaves slowing; which a doctor suggests could be epilepsy, a claim she pre-emptively denies. It's unclear why this is proof Jesus is actually speaking to her, and not the exact opposite; that she's imagining things like people do when they're asleep or hypnotised. It's the old ghost hunter problem, having to set arbitrary parameters on tests, and this proves Jesus is there the same way an EMF reader confirms there's a spirit in the room.

It's not enough to convince a priest on satellite link from Mount Pocono, reckoning Katya's powers are “possibly from the God; possibly from the Devil... from a sick mind, or even worse, someone who's engaged in fraud.” Willesee's visibly pissed off by this, before Fernandez practically answers her own question of why such events are confined to poor people in small Catholic countries. Next, a whistle-stop tour of Mary's miracles over the decades; levitating peasant girls in 1960's Spain, weeping statues in Japan, Korean stigmatics, warnings of catastrophe and rivers-of-blood visions in Rwanden teens; and of course the Miracle of Fatima – the latter weirdly not when Fatima Whitbread got mentioned on telly in the 80s without someone joking she was a man. Yet, there's a pattern; a pattern which rings dire warning – “stop offending God. You have yet to see the forces of nature, if you choose to live apart from God, then you will fall.” You're hard, Mary, mate.

Ad breaks are the most 1999 imaginable, for bigger fridges, The Blair Witch Project, 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin at the Teen Choice Awards, and forgotten Farrelly Brothers movies, with a trail for upcoming regional news teasing “killed by a Pepsi can – a local boy dies trying to puncture a can with a pin!” But we must return to the divine, and a satellite interviewee who tellingly notes all cases are from “simple” people (monetarily; not that they're Benny from Crossroads) who spend their lives praying. Then a lady's blood-crying statue has a CAT scan to prove there's no hidden trickery, though it's impossible not to read BLEEDING STATUE OF CHRIST in a Steptoe voice – “what'd you bring home that bleedin' statue of Christ for?” Also, the formation of blood makes it resemble a bust of Matthew Kelly going through a Norwegian black metal phase.

A sample's dropped into a biohazard specimen bag, then tested for DNA, which a forensic scientist in a white coat confirms to be human blood; female human blood. Oh dear. But this is proof enough for Willsee, believing that Christ, who had a mother but not a father, would have female blood – “Could Jesus be of the blood of his mother?” It's definitely that, and not the owner pricking her thumb and wiping it under its eyes. Then another home; another South American woman in deep poverty; this time with an image of Mary appearing in the concrete of a freshly mopped floor. It's no Faces of Bélmez, with all its Beadles and Sutcliffes, and the tiny home's got a massive shrine of Our Lady taking up one room, so given a different cultural frame of reference, she might've pegged 'Mary' as the sun-baby off the Tellytubbies.

But Mary's been going hogwild, making her presence felt with crying pictures and rose petals – left on the altar by visitors – forming into “mystical images” when flattened inside a bible. Honestly, while some are the 'vague smear of a possibly-bearded shape' style, others are far more detailed, with the eerie quality of the Turin Shroud. Wonder what would happen if you slipped the petals into other books, say Little Goes a Long Way by Syd Little? They're investigated by an art expert, who suspects something was intentionally pressed into the leaves, a process he uses to exactly replicate the images, for which the presenters patronisingly thank him for “his attempt.” But Willesee is clearly seething, lost for words when trying to address it. “It doesn't completely, uh... answer it. Let's get a botanist to look at it. Let's try again.”

The botanist too, reproduces the miracle in seconds, by pushing a religious medallion into the petals, and further rubs it in by describing “my bible, the botanical book,” but Willesee's not having it. “We now see that man can make them, we don't know that God isn't also making them.” Plus, he adds, if they're frauds, how come the perpetrators aren't selling them? Perhaps ask the woman who's now a local celebrity believed to have been chosen by Jesus for a direct line to God, and currently has a TV crew in her home, which is constantly packed with visitors. And certainly nobody ever lied to perpetuate the spread of their religion.

Their big knockout blow to doubters, saved for last because of its gruesome nature, is stigmata; those who exhibit the wounds Jesus suffered on the cross; and there's footage of a million people gathered in Rome to witness the beatification of Padre Pio by Pope JP2. Pio was canonised as a Saint for bleeding sweet-smelling blood out of his palms and feet, and if you Google him, one of the first suggested questions is 'What did Padre Pio smell like?' What's not mentioned are accusations by a local pharmacist of Pio purchasing large quantities of carbolic acid (with which to burn the holes) and a pain-relieving neurotoxin; though Pio said he only bought it for a practical joke, to get revenge on the priests who'd previously mixed the neurotoxin with his snuff, which made him sneeze like mad.

Only 12 stigmatics had been verified by the Catholic church, and Willesee's hanging his hopes on Katya Rivas being lucky thirteen. There with a crew on Good Friday, they're hoping for some bleeding, only to be told by Jesus (through Rivas), not on your Nelly. Willesee, arms folded as he listens to the translator, sadly narrates “there would no stigmata. We had come all the way to Bolivia, it seems, for nothing.” But hold on, Jesus ain't finished, and through rather savage eye contact from Rivas, he warns the crew “learn to trust me more. This is not the right time.” Jesus H. then gives “an incredible prophecy,” on when the next stigmata will occur – June 4th, the day after Corpus Christi. If Rivas was faking it, how could she possibly know when it would happen?!

The entire stigmatic process plays out in front of camera, Rivas hangdog and moping like a sulky teen the night before, undergoing the mental anguish of Christ in Gethsemane, riddled with profound sadness. Next day, the prophecy is fulfilled, groaning and writhing in bed, forehead starting to bleed like Abdullah the Butcher, Willesee bedside in the cuck chair, and a priest praying as marks begin to appear on her hands and feet. Like men who get a tummy ache when their wife's giving birth, Rivas feels the sensation of her lungs filling with liquid, in sympathy for the dying Christ, and we reach crucifixion end game, gasping and bucking in an extended death scene. It should be noted that while she does bleed from multiple wounds, Rivas clutches a chain of prayer beads and crucifix, and the parts of her body which bleed will constantly disappear beneath the sheets. Regardless, Willesee's beside himself with the possibility they may have some of Christ's actual blood, though once again, it's confirmed as female; its DNA matching exactly with that of Katya Rivas.

But cynics beware, as we reach the fear-mongering montage it's all been building to, with Fernandez warning “if man does not turn back to God, there will be a steady increase in natural disasters,” and even a quote from the Pope telling us darkness will fall on human souls at the end of the second millennium. He wasn't wrong. Over ominous news footage of burning buildings, tornados, volcanos, tsunamis, earthquakes, and bodies carried out of rubble on stretchers, it's clear God wants us dead. Representees from insurance firms confirm the 90s saw an increase in natural disasters, i.e. Acts of God, and a priest cautions us to sit up and take notice; floods and earthquakes are a “call to repentance,” to return to God. He's gonna keep fucking us up until we love him. Also, the priest uses the brilliant phrase “church-approved apparitions,” which is how I now wish to identify.

Rivas leaves viewers with one final message from Jesus, but this time; for the very first time; he appears to her in full. “How did he look?” asks Willesee. “Beautiful... he was in a white tunic, smiling.” Gotta give it to Jesus, 2000 years on, he really stuck with a look. No haircut, never went clean shaven, still rocking that 33AD fit. Even Superman had a mullet in the 90s. But knowing Jesus is stood right behind him, Willesee goes doe-eyed and star-stuck, all “tell me what you see when you're looking over my shoulder,” like someone who's been told 'don't look now, but Adam Woodyatt's at the next table!' Rivas says Jesus is smiling, and what a scoop for Willesee, one-on-one with the son of God (albeit through a completely honest middle-aged woman). Asked if anything offends him, Jesus replies “all sins are an offence to God.” At least he didn't single out wanking.

Cut to the edit suite. “While we were editing this footage, one of our editors noticed a strange reflection in katya's left eye.” 1999 standard-def tech enhancements reveal yet another blob of light, but could it be – is it possible?! – that they've captured a reflection of Jesus Christ? “That,” says Willesee, with his entire 52-inch chest, “is one question in this investigation that science can't answer.” Up your arse, Neil deGrasse Tyson; all the way up it! In a final thought, Willesee notes he's been changed considerably through production, and hopes the show gives viewers a lot to think about. Whether it did or not, there were plenty of them, with 28 million tuning in, although the following day's reviews were damning.

As for God's chosen one, Katya Rivas, she was since accused of plagiarising a book titled (in English) Training Preachers; the content of which coincidentally comprised her messages from God, word for word, sixteen years before she begun dictating the almighty, explaining how she was writing in languages she didn't speak. And as for the prophecies, the millennium was, what, a hundred years ago? And we're still here, making memes and hoping nobody saw when we tripped in the street. That said, if you did a show like this now, with crying Funko Pops and countless hours of recent natural disaster footage to choose from, I might not think God had a hand in it, but I'd certainly have no trouble believing the end was coming.