12 Year Old Girl Cries Crystals! - Facts Analysis

Story:

Subject: FW: Crystal girl!!!

A 12 year-old Lebanese girl has baffled medical experts by producing crystals from her eyes. Coming at a rate of seven a day, the crystals are razor sharp, but do not harm her eyes. Hasnah Mohamed Meselmani’s condition is yet to be explained.

Analysis:

This video showing a 12 year old Lebanese girl crying hard crystals from her eyes started circulating ever since the video was made in 1996. It became popular on YouTube and spread rapidly through email forwards and sharing on social networks. The video shows a Lebanese girl named Hasnah Mohamed Meselmani who started producing hard crystals from her eyes while crying. The girl was believed to have told their parents that a heavenly figure in white, calling himself as a messenger of God used to visit her. The family of the girl explained the incident quoting,

“It all began in March 1996. She was at school when she felt something strange in her left eye – her first piece of crystal, which, understandably, troubled her. Back home, she told her family what had happened and, while she was doing so, a second piece of crystal appeared in her eye. Her father took her to the city of Chtaura to see Dr Araji, an ophthalmologist. The girl stayed in his clinic for two weeks, and the crystals kept flowing out of her eye as she cries. Dr Araji certified that the pieces from the girl’s eyes were real crystals and said he had no scientific explanation of the phenomenon. It could only be understood, he thought, as an act of God.”

This story was quoted in an article of Share International website under signs and miracles section. The article claims that Saudi Arabian officials tested those crystals from the girl’s eyes as she cries and found them to be real. The sources further claim that the officials tried to keep the girls father quiet, as this was creating lot of fuss, and also offered him $50,000.

The article and the story however look skeptical and fanciful. The girl stopped producing crystals few months after the story started circulating, and it never recommenced over the years. Joe Nickell, a former magician and researcher studied this particular case and proved that the phenomenon can be easily duplicated with a simple trick. He gathered some similar crystals, pulled out his lower eyelid to form a pouch and dropped in few crystals so that they rested comfortably. Then in front of a camera, he tugged on the lower eye lid, similar to the sensation of girl crying, when the crystals came into view and came out of the eye slowly, just like it happend in the case of the girl.

All these factors imply that the story is mostly a hoax, a prank started for unknown reasons.