The Miracle Baby of Aceh

 

Sometimes evil doesn’t come crawling on eight legs or floating through the air like a sentient mist. Sometimes it comes wearing a woman’s face, with a belly swollen not with life but with deceit.

In a dusty corner of Aceh in the late 1970s, a young woman named Cut Zahara Fona appeared like a character who’d wandered off the pages of one of those old EC horror comics—the kind where the twist ending always left you feeling like someone had just walked over your grave. She was twenty-three, pretty in that way that makes men stupid and women cautious, and she’d cooked up a tale so wild you’d think it came straight from the midnight movie double-feature.

(Folks would believe anything back then. Still do, if I’m being honest. Ain’t that the truth, Constant Reader?)

Cut Zahara claimed—and I shit you not—that the baby growing in her womb could talk. Not just babble like infants do, but full-on conversation. It could recite the call to prayer—the adhan, they call it—and read verses from the Quran while still swimming around in amniotic fluid. According to some fella named Tamar Djaja who wrote about it in ‘81, the fetus could even pray and was fully aware of what was happening outside its mama’s belly.

Jesus Christ on a bicycle.

The crazy thing? People believed her. Not just a few backwoods yokels who’d never seen a television set, but doctors, politicians, and men who ran entire goddamn countries.

Word spread through Sigli, her hometown, like a virus—person to person, house to house. You know how these things go. First it’s just whispers between neighbors hanging laundry, then it’s the talk of the local coffee shop, and before you know it, the whole town’s caught the fever. Cut Zahara and her husband Sjarifuddin, a businessman with a shark’s smile and the moral compass of a weathervane, packed up and moved to Jakarta.

They rented a little house in the suburbs. Nothing fancy, mind you, just the kind of place where you’d expect to find a young couple starting out. Not the kind of place where you’d expect to find a miracle. But that didn’t stop the crowds from coming.

They lined up around the block, these people. Standing in the hot Indonesian sun, sweat rolling down their backs and soaking through their clothes, just to get a chance to press their ears against this woman’s belly and hear the voice of what they were calling “the miraculous baby.” Some days, if you wanted to hear the show, you had to pay for a ticket.

(If there’s one truth I’ve learned in my years spinning yarns, it’s that nothing opens wallets faster than the promise of a miracle. Nothing except fear, maybe, but that’s another story for another time.)

Radio stations picked up the tale. Newspapers ran with it. Before long, Cut Zahara’s face was plastered across every magazine in Indonesia, her swollen belly becoming an object of national fascination. Mochtar Lubis—a respected journalist, mind you, not some tabloid hack—wrote that Foreign Minister Adam Malik himself had invited Cut Zahara for a private audience. She’d even met President Soeharto. Not once. Not twice. Three times.

When reporters asked Bardosono, the Secretary of Operational Control for Development (try saying that five times fast), why the president needed three separate meetings with a woman whose claim to fame was a talking fetus, he shrugged it off. Said the president could meet with citizens however many times he wanted, whether in rice fields, villages, or living rooms with miracle babies.

Even a Canadian newspaper, the Victoria Daily Times, ran an article about it on November 3, 1970. “Soeharto, Aides Taken in by ‘Tape Recorded’ Baby,” the headline screamed, giving away the game before we even got to the juicy part. The Religious Affairs Minister, K.H. Mohamad Dachlan, had joined the parade of officials making pilgrimages to Cut Zahara’s rented house to hear the baby recite and pray.

When a religious figure like Dachlan bought into it, well, that was all the validation the true believers needed. He even drew comparisons to Al-Shafi’i, who supposedly spent three years in his mother’s womb. Some folks went so far as to predict that this unborn child was the Mahdi—a messianic figure in Islamic eschatology.

(People sure do love their end-times prophets, don’t they? Seems like every generation’s got at least one or two candidates for the job.)

Even the renowned Islamic scholar Hamka weighed in, quoting the Quranic verse kun fa-yakūnu—“be, and it is”—though he did express some skepticism about a fetus having the ability to recite scripture. Smart man, that Hamka. The kind who knows that when something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

And that’s where the cracks started to show. On October 13, 1970, a team of doctors from the Indonesian Medical Association and RSPAD Gatot Soebroto Hospital scheduled an examination of Cut Zahara. But wouldn’t you know it? She refused. Said the fetus didn’t want to be examined.

(That’s always a red flag, isn’t it? When the miracle doesn’t want to be subjected to scrutiny?)

A week later, Kompas newspaper reported that an examination at Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital found no fetus at all. Cut Zahara vanished like smoke, leaving behind nothing but questions and a whole lot of red faces.

The New York Times eventually got in on the action too, reporting on October 31, 1970, that Cut Zahara had convinced masses of people that she was carrying a special being destined to be born in Mecca. From May to July that year, she and her husband had traveled the world—Japan, Malaysia, Germany, Pakistan—showcasing the “miraculous baby” like a carnival sideshow.

She even had photos—snapshots of herself surrounded by officials and crowds, including one that showed her lying on a carpet in Soeharto’s residence, belly exposed like some kind of holy relic.

Tien Soeharto, the president’s wife, was among the first of the high and mighty to smell a rat. When she invited Cut Zahara to the State Palace, something didn’t sit right. Meanwhile, doctors from the Indonesian Medical Association and hospitals like RSPAD Gatot Soebroto and RSCM were raising hell about the biological impossibility of a fetus speaking or reciting verses.

A Dutch newspaper, Limburg Dagblad, reported on October 23, 1970, that obstetrician Prof. Sarwono had examined Cut Zahara at RSCM, where she claimed the “miraculous baby” had been in her womb for nineteen months. The newspaper quoted this claim twice, as if they couldn’t believe anyone would have the brass balls to make such an outlandish statement.

(Nineteen months. Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. Even elephants don’t carry their young that long.)

It was the police in South Kalimantan, led by Brigadier General Abdul Hamid Swasono, who finally put an end to the charade. They tracked Cut Zahara to Kampung Gambut, about fourteen kilometers from Banjarmasin. When they caught up with her, they did what any sensible law enforcement officers would do—they searched her.

And what did they find? A mini tape recorder, no bigger than 2 cm × 7 cm × 13 cm, hidden under her belly. Imam Semar wrote about it later in his book, Penipu, Penipu Ulung, Politikus dan Cut Zahara Fonna. The device was identified as an EL 3302/OOG model, according to Kompas on November 18, 1970. She’d been wrapping it in a sash around her belly to create the illusion of pregnancy.

The cops confiscated the tape recorder and cassettes containing recordings of a baby crying and recitations of Quranic verses. The jig was up. The miracle baby was nothing more than a cheap parlor trick performed by a woman with brass in her veins and a talent for sensing what people desperately wanted to believe.

The public was outraged, of course. Shocked. Disappointed. Angry. You name it. The societal and religious figures who had supported her—or at least given her claims the benefit of the doubt—were left feeling like the biggest chumps in Jakarta.

(That’s how these things always end, isn’t it? With the believers feeling like fools and the skeptics feeling vindicated but somehow still unsatisfied.)

In the Indonesia of the 1970s, media literacy was as rare as a moderate winter in Maine. Information was tightly controlled, and critical thinking wasn’t exactly encouraged. A simple device—a tape recorder that would look primitive to today’s children—was all it took to craft a narrative that captivated an entire nation.

People want miracles. They want to believe in something beyond the mundane reality of their everyday lives. And Cut Zahara Fona knew exactly how to exploit that yearning. She wasn’t the first, and she sure as hell wouldn’t be the last.

Abu Jihan, writing in Panji Masyarakat magazine on February 28, 1989, compared Cut Zahara to other notorious hoaxers like Raja Idrus and Ratu Markonah. These weren’t just simple con artists; they were skilled manipulators who understood the socio-psychological conditions of their time. They knew which buttons to push, which strings to pull.

“Education is not always the ‘key’ antidote to deception,” Abu Jihan wrote. “The rise in public belief stemmed from the legitimacy lent by mass media and community figures.”

The newspapers and radio stations that initially helped spread the hoax eventually played a role in exposing it, but not before they’d made a pretty penny from the sensation. Pos Kota, a newspaper that never met a scandal it didn’t like, saw its circulation jump from 3,500 to 21,000 copies on the back of serialized stories about the “miraculous baby.”

(The almighty dollar—or rupiah, in this case—has a way of clouding editorial judgment.)

S. Wirosadjono, writing about Pos Kota years later, suggested that even when doubts about the veracity of Cut Zahara’s claims began to surface, the newspaper continued to milk the story for all it was worth. Other papers, like Indonesia Raya and Kompas, also covered the phenomenon, though with varying degrees of skepticism.

After her deception was exposed, Cut Zahara and her husband were briefly arrested and imprisoned. But with no one pressing charges—perhaps because no one wanted to admit they’d been duped—they were eventually released. They vanished from public view, their names fading from the headlines and eventually from memory.

Until now, that is. Because that’s the thing about stories like this—they may go underground for a while, but they never really die. They wait, dormant, until someone comes along to dig them up again.

And sometimes, Constant Reader, the things we dig up are better left buried. But I’ve never been one to leave well enough alone. Have you?