A Day the Milk Ran Out

The report is generally traced to a temple in New Delhi in the early morning of 21 September 1995, where a worshipper offering a spoonful of milk to a statue of Ganesha found the liquid appeared to disappear as it touched the trunk. Word spread through phone calls, word of mouth and same-day television coverage with unusual speed for a pre-internet news environment, and by the afternoon queues had formed at temples across northern India and, within hours more, in Hindu communities in Britain, North America and elsewhere, as people arrived to test the phenomenon themselves. Dairies in several Indian cities reported milk selling out within hours, an economic footprint unusual for a religious event of any kind.

The scale and the speed of the spread are themselves part of why the episode is well documented: it was covered live and in depth by Indian television and international wire services on the day it happened, giving historians and scientists an unusually rich, dated record of both the claim and the public reaction to it, rather than a story reconstructed later from memory. Some commentators at the time linked the episode to a wider climate of religious and nationalist sentiment in India in the mid-1990s, though the physical explanation that followed within days applied equally regardless of the surrounding political mood, and did not depend on any account of why the rumor spread as fast as it did.