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Notes -
But never video footage.
You're talking about literal transubstantiation? hang on, how do they know it's human heart tissue if they can't sequence the DNA? what does it even mean to not be able to sequence the DNA? Like, the machine broke?
Hoaxes are a known source of Christian relics. Apparently there are over 30 holy nails in various european curches and cathederals today! there were probably enough holy nails and pieces of the true cross floating around 15th century europe to fill a warehouse.
Realized I didn’t address your first question: video does exist, but suffers the same problem that it can be dismissed out of hand as a hoax.
Here’s video of a spontaneously bleeding and pulsing host contained in a monstrance: https://aleteia.org/2019/06/17/this-eucharistic-host-was-filmed-bleeding-and-pulsating-like-a-heart-on-fire
And video of an apparently beating host: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/251891/a-new-eucharistic-miracle-in-mexico
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There are human specific proteins that can be identified independent of DNA sequencing.
Grok suggests that it’s likely a failure to replicate the DNA via PCR that is at fault, with the report on the Buenos Aires miracle citing this explicitly, with other reports being more vague about failures to sequence.
My conversation with Grok also reminded me that the Eucharistic miracle blood type of AB is also the same observed in the Shroud of Turin.
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In my humble opinion, video footage alone is actually not super good evidence. If it was, you (and everyone else) would believe in Bigfoot and UFOs, which you can see by the dozens on YouTube.
Well, yes, it often isn't super good evidence. They are few in number and invariably low quality. This is strange; as the number of cameras on the planet increased exponentially, you would expect the number of video captures of any given real phenomenon to increase exponentially, and statistically you would expect some of those captures to be high quality, but this does not happen. The fact that this does not happen is strong evidence against such phenomenon being real. Bigfoot is an excellent example of this.
On the subject of UFOs, both here and in your other comments you are fudging definitions pretty hard in order to conflate unlike things.
UFOs - meaning flying objects that are unidentified - certainly exist.
UFOs - meaning specifically tic-tac shaped objects which hang out in the middle of nowhere and appear to perform incredible maneuvers - plausibly exist.
UFOs - meaning specifically tic-tac shaped objects which hang out in the middle of nowhere and actually do perform incredible maneuvers - probably do not exist, but I would place low probability on some weak versions of this being true. The fact that these tic-tacs apparently like to hang out in the middle of nowhere where the only thing likely to stumble across them are fighter jets provides a convenient out to the 'why so little footage from 2010 onward?' question.
Flying Saucers - meaning alien spaceships that abduct folk from Arkansas and anally probe them and/or take them on whistle stop tours of the solar system - certainly do not exist, for the same reason that Bigfoot does not exist. The XKCD comic uses the term 'Flying Saucer' not 'UFO'. I expect this is deliberate.
Finally, neither Bigfoot nor UFOs nor Flying Saucers are 'miraculous' things in the sense that the OP used the term - meaning divine or diabolical phenomenon.
There are some pretty decent videos of Bigfoot, but I have no strong opinion on their veracity. I think it would be fairly easy to fake something like that. Which goes to my point: video evidence by itself is not great evidence.
First off, I think we should all just acknowledge that cell phone cameras are not good at taking nighttime photographs at any real distance. I don't own the latest and greatest, so maybe they stole a march on me. But if hypothetically I had an encounter with a real Bigfoot (or an ape or, heck, a deer) at night and took a photo of it I would expect it would look low quality.
But secondly, by this argument, there are no weird (but perfectly mundane) things flying out of Dreamland, but there are. They just don't want to be seen, so they hang out in the middle of nowhere where the only thing likely to stumble across them are fighter jets. In fact, to use just one recent example, the US constructed and flew multiple prototypes of the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter jet for years, yet to my knowledge not a single photograph of them went public. (There are always one or two photos of "weird stuff in the sky" that circulate, so maybe one of them was a NGAD demonstrator).
If the position of XKCD is that an intelligence [including potentially our own] that can engineer a craft superior in performance (as reported by US defense officials) to conventional aircraft cannot keep a low profile in a way similar to that of our own bloated inefficient corrupt government bureaucracy can then, well, that position is very silly! Particularly when you realize that there are a couple of ways, such as lens detection or emissions detection, that would allow you to steer clear of would-be photographers, so if the 2024 iPhone - which is not an ideal platform for aviation photography - is really the threat vector you want to defend against you probably have options there, especially if you have advanced technology at your fingertips.
And indeed it turns out that if you read the actual US government reports on UFOs you'll note the term "signature management" is used. In fact one might certainly wonder why hypothetical UFOnauts would get caught on camera (or radar) at all, and if UFOs were real and preferred not to get caught on camera, one might expect that high-powered military sensors would be disproportionately likely to capture compelling evidence. And interestingly from what I recall the F/A-18s started picking up UAP on their radar regularly after receiving an upgraded AESA, which could be indica of a mundane sensor issue but also could be a sign that that a hypothetical UFO designer's signature management model was not up to the task of deceiving latest-gen hardware.
That's certainly begging the question.
The US didn't want its test flights to be seen by the public, and so tried to conceal them. Religious believers don't claim that God is deliberately concealing miracles from scientists.
I actually suspect there's a diversity of thought on this among religious believers.
But again, my understanding is that Catholics do apply something like the scientific method to miracles, so they would probably say that you are correct, and that scientists can in fact find evidence of them.
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Of course. If Bigfoot and UFOs were both real and capturable on camera, I'd hear about it from CNN and the like, not no-name Youtube channels.
This still leaves the "it's faked from one level above them" out, as you've noted.
No offense, but I'm not sure you would, since UFOs have been captured on camera (military targeting systems no less!) and it's been covered many many times in outlets like the New York Times and, yes, CNN.
Here's a video of the then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe (merely on Fox News, but still) pointedly telling the audience that US spy satellites and other sensors catch UFOs from time to time. (And although I don't think this made the news, here's relevant documents from the NRO about a possible UAP image capture and discussion of a "UAP model" as part of their SENTIENT AI image intelligence program.)
Yes, there's been definition fuzziness/creep between "a UFO is, literally, a Flying Thing we, the general public, are Not Sure What It Is" and "a UFO is an alien encounter".
Sure. I am not convinced they are aliens (but the cutting-edge UFO Believers/Enthusiasts/Fanatics often don't think this either). But (imho) that doesn't make them mundane and certainly not a good example of something that's obviously not real.
They are a pretty good example of something "science" has a hard time dealing with since you can't snap your fingers and reproduce them in a test tube. In that sense at least they are miraculous.
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