15 Years of the Ganesha Milk Miracle Paranormal Phenomenon of the Last Millennium BySubhamoy Das,About.com Guide See More About: * hindu gods & goddesses * ganesha stories * ganesh chaturthi * ganesha books * ganesha photo gallery 'The Sun' was among the many newspapers that witnessed the 'miracle'Photo courtesy: 'The Sun' Sep 21 2010September 21, 1995. The bewildering news that Lord Ganesha is drinking milk spread across the world like wild fire - faster than ever! I was a college student living in a hostel in a sleepy university town in northeastern India, and soon found myself among friends and classmates marching to the nearest temple to feed milk to the idol of Ganesha, even before my rational mind could question the fact or dismiss it as a rumor. It Happened in Homes & Temples Alike What was so special about the unprecedented incident was that even curious non-believers rubbed shoulders with believers and even fanatics standing in long queues outside the temples. Most of them returned with a sense of awe and reverence - a firm belief that, after all, there may be something called God up there! People returning home from work would switch on their television sets to learn about the miracle and try it out at home. What was happening in temples was true even at home. Soon every temple and Hindu household around the world was trying to feed milk to Ganesha - spoon by spoon. And Ganesha scooped them up - drop after drop. How It All Began To give you a background, Hinduism Today magazine published from the United States reported: "It all began on September 21st when an otherwise ordinary man in New Delhi dreamt that Lord Ganesha, the elephant-headed God of Wisdom, craved a little milk. Upon awakening, he rushed in the dark before dawn to the nearest temple, where a skeptical priest allowed him to proffer a spoonful of milk to the small stone image. Both watched in astonishment as it disappeared, magically consumed by the God. What followed is unprecedented in modern Hindu history." Scientists Had No Convincing Explanation Scientists were quick to attribute the vanishing of millions of spoonfuls of milk from under Ganesha's inanimate trunk to such natural scientific phenomenon as surface tension or physical laws as capillary action, adhesion or cohesion. But they could not explain why such a thing never happened ever before and why it stopped abruptly within 24 hours. They soon realized that this was in fact something beyond the realm of science as they knew it. It was indeed the paranormal phenomenon of the past millennium, the "best documented paranormal phenomenon of modern times," and "unprecedented in modern Hindu history," as people now call it. A Mammoth Revival of Faith Various such small incidents were reported from different corners of the world at different times (November 2003, Botswana; August 2006, Bareilly, and so on), but it was never such a wide-spread phenomenon