Among the most spectacular anomalies in modern history are the “Miracle” at Fatima, Portugal in 1917,
and the preceding series of apparitional experiences.
The Catholic Church declared the apparitions
- which culminated in 70,000 spectators seeing the sun dance in the sky -
genuine miracles, and established a cult around the visitations of the “lady of the rosary.”
But the events at Fatima also show that under all the religious overtones,
stories of “miracles” are not that different from other, surprisingly similar, anomalous phenomena.
In 1915, an eight-year-old shepherd girl named Lucia Santos
was reciting the rosary with three friends when they saw a white, translucent human form above the trees.
The children returned twice more to the same location to pray, and saw the same figure again.
The next year, Lucia and two of her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto,
were playing at the mouth of a cave when they heard the sound of a strong wind shaking the trees,
followed by the appearance of the same white figure over the treetops.
As it drew closer, the children could see that it was a beautiful young boy,
whom Lucia described was as transparent as lighted crystal.
The boy approached the children and declared himself the “Angel of Peace,”
then taught them a simple prayer for non-believers, which he made them repeat.
The children did as he asked, as they did in all proceeding cases,
as if moved by some involuntary impulse.
When the boy left, the children were left in a dissociative state, repeating the prayer on loop.
The odd feeling lasted into the next day, and only gradually dissipated.
The children had two more encounters with the being,
once by a well where he called himself the guardian angel of Portugal,
and encouraged the children to offer sacrifices to save themselves from God’s punishment.
The being returned in the Fall to give the children communion and remind them to pray for non-believers.
After each of these events, and all following ones, the children were left physically and mentally exhausted,
and were sometimes hardly able to speak or walk.
They also suffered headaches and parched lips.
At the same time, they felt great peace and joy, and described the feeling as being immersed in God.
Lucia claimed that the effect of this “supernatural” presence diminished with each visit.
On May 13, 1917, Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta were watching their sheep
when they were startled by a bright flash of light and what sounded like a clap of thunder.
They looked to the nearby Cave of St. Irene, a local sacred place,
and were nearly blinded by a light emanating from its direction.
The children saw in the centre of the light what they described as a beautiful “little lady,”
clothed in a pure white mantle edged in gold.
The lady claimed to be from “Heaven,” and she spoke to them in Portuguese,
asking them to return to the same place on the same day of every month.
She then opened her arms and released a beam of light
that shone through the children and infused them with a deep sense of love and Joy
that they attributed to the presence of God himself.
Strangely, Fransisco was never able to hear the lady speak, although he saw her.
At the end of the brief exchange, the lady rose up and to the east and drifted out of sight.
The children returned in June, this time with a group of 50 interested spectators, and again in July with 4500.
The lady appeared in the same manner as before and projected another beam of light through the children.
She also informed Jacinta and Fransisco that they would both die young and go to heaven.
The spectators, meanwhile, could see nothing but a thin little cloud where the children saw the lady,
and a faint voice or buzzing noise during their interaction with her.
Some of those in July felt a cooling of the atmosphere.
But at the end of the exchange, everyone present heard a loud explosion
and watched a small cloud rise from the highest branches of a nearby oak tree,
where the children saw the lady, and where all proceeding apparitions would take place.
During the lady’s third appearance in July, she asked the children to pray for peace,
and promised to work a miracle in October to prove her reality.
She then showed them terrifying visions of great fires, tormented souls, and shadowy demonic figures.
The lady announced the coming end of the First World War,
but warned of a second, much bloodier war if people didn't stop offending God,
one that would begin during the reign of Pope Pius XI and be preceded by an unknown light in the sky.
To prevent this war, the woman asked for the consecration of Russia to her “Immaculate Heart.”
If Russia continued its current path, it would spread its mistakes across the world.
The woman once again departed with a loud explosion.
Word of the visitations got out,
and the three children became celebrities amongst their rural, Catholic compatriots.
However, Lucia’s own family, and much of her community
who resented the visitations from priests and ailing pilgrims, saw her story as a lie.
The republican government too, a staunchly atheistic institution, thought that the story was a hoax,
cooked up by Jesuits in order to reignite religious fervour.
The local mayor, embarrassed by the situation, brought the children to his hall in Ourem for interrogation.
When he failed to get them to confess to fraud, he had the children imprisoned,
and sought a confession under threat of execution.
The children were still imprisoned on the 13th of August, so a crowd of 18,000 stood by the tree alone.
Those present heard a clap of thunder, saw a bright flash,
and once again saw the cloud form around the tree, rise into the air, and fade away.
People claimed that the clouds turned from crimson, to pink, to yellow and blue,
and reflected these colours on the crowd.
The trees’ leaves became flowers, and objects turned gold in colour.
The mayor released the children on the 15th of August.
They were back tending to their flock on August 19 when Lucia, Jacinta and Fransisco
felt the familiar atmospheric disturbances that preceded all their prior communications.
They also noticed a drop in temperature, and saw the clouds once again reflecting the colours of the rainbow.
The woman returned only to ask the children to pray for peace and make sacrifices for sinners.
But her next visits, unimpeded by authorities, would be the most spectacular yet.
The spectacular monthly appearances of the mysterious lady of Fatima continued into September.
There were 30,000 visitors this time, including thousands of poor folk begging for healing,
and at least two skeptical priests.
However, the priests too confessed to sensing changes in the atmosphere
and seeing a ball of light appear in the sky and settle on the tree.
Other witnesses saw white petals fall from the sky.
However, the petals seemed to shrink and “melt away” as they approached the people on the ground.
The children once again saw the lady in a ball of light.
This time, she promised a miracle when she returned in October,
and promised to heal some of the beggars in the meantime.
There were 70,000 people present on October 13, the last of the lady’s visits.
In the pouring rain, a ball of light left the Cave of St. Irene and approached the children.
The lady announced the coming of the end of the war, and asked all people to stop offending God.
When pressed on her identity, she called herself the “Lady of the Rosary,”
although she had earlier used the “immaculate heart.”
She then opened her hands and shone light on the sun.
At this point, Lucia cried out and pointed upwards, as if moved by an external impulse.
The children saw various holy figures standing by the sun and making the sign of the cross.
The spectators, however, saw something very different.
They watched as the clouds parted and revealed a spinning silver disc
that shone beams of coloured light in all directions.
The light dimmed to the point that witnesses were able to see stars in the sky.
Eventually the disc stopped spinning, and fell towards the earth in a zig-zag motion, like a falling leaf.
The crowd fell to their knees in repentance, thinking it was the end of the world,
before the disk reversed course and rejoined the sun.
Spectators then realized their clothes had completely dried in the duration of the sighting.
Unfortunately, none of the many photos taken of the aerial anomalies
were successfully developed, for reasons unknown.
Lucia became a nun and lived the rest of her life in different convents in Spain and Portugal.
She had several other visitations from the lady in later years,
as did Jacinta before her premature passing in 1920.
Some witnesses reported “miraculous” healings in the wake of the apparitions,
and a well dug at the site in the years after was widely attested to be a source of healing water.
The Church and local community used money from pilgrims’ donations
to build a chapel at the site, as the lady requested.
The lady’s prophecies were vague, and difficult to assess,
but it’s worth noting that both Jacinta and Fransisco died young,
as she said they would, in the flu epidemic that followed the First World War.
That Lucia survived it, even while providing hospice care from her family home,
was taken as a sign of God’s grace.
In the early 1920s, the Bishop of the diocese of Leiria launched a canonical inquiry into the events.
In 1930, he declared that the apparitions of the lady, assumed to be Mother Mary, were worthy of belief,
and that the Church would officially acknowledge the cult of Our Lady of Fatima.
However, the Church has also imposed a more rigid interpretation of the encounters
than the evidence permits,
one that tends to disregard some of the more esoteric elements of the story.
Limiting ourselves to “conventional” explanations,
either the children’s visions were a remarkably consistent string of “collective hallucinations”
shared by tens of thousands of strangers and gradually conflated with successive retellings,
or they were deliberate hoaxes on the part of the children and a few secret accomplices.
But what could the children possibly have done, especially while locked in prison,
to produce the kinds of effects reported by witnesses?
The hallucination theory, too, has its problems.
Although it’s commonly used to dismiss large-scale sightings,
there is really very little support for the existence of “mass” or “collective hallucinations,”
and it is unlikely that upwards of 70,000 individual perceptual errors and psychic projections
could coincide so perfectly as to produce the kind of consistency we find in eyewitness testimony.
Witness reports were poorly documented, however,
and it’s possible that compilers selected for ones that tended to agree with one another.
The apparitions at Fatima were hugely important in the Christian world, and even fuelled a religious revival
in Portugal that helped replace the republican government with a Catholic one.
But when stripped of their religious overtones, the stories show certain features
they share with anomalous experiences not exclusive to the Christian faith.
In particular, some of the children’s sightings sound a lot like sightings of UFOs.
Many UFO witnesses describe flying balls of light, rather than structured craft,
similar to the one that enveloped the lady of Fatima,
and the spinning disk seen during the miracle of the Sun is very close to the archetypal 1950s “flying saucer.”
Even the children’s reactions to the visits - their compulsive submission,
and their exhaustion and dehydration - are similar to the reactions of UFO contactees.
Most abductees report feeling a suppression of their free will in the presence of their alien captors,
and others have intense physiological reactions.
The witnesses to the Cash-Landrum sighting in 1980, for example, experienced symptoms of radiation exposure,
and were sick, weakened, and dehydrated after the encounter, much like the three children at Fatima.
The disappearing petals seen falling from the sky on September 13 are described as being similar
to the “angel hair” and other substances seen falling from UFOs but never remaining on the ground.
It is also common for alien abductors to show scenes of global destruction to their captives,
just as the lady at Fatima showed scenes of the destruction of sinners to the children.
In another light, some of the witnesses’ experiences
suggest an altered state of consciousness during periods of contact.
The fact that only the children saw the woman, and that no astronomical observatories
witnessed the solar anomalies, also leads us to believe that the events were at least partly illusionary.
The bright colours seen reflecting off the clouds, for example, are decidedly psychedelic,
and the euphoric feeling of being one with God,
as the children did in the lady’s beam of light, is also shared by many mystics and psychedelic drug users.
By the same token, however, these kinds of “altered states” are also common in UFO
and other paranormal encounters, even where physical changes have also occurred.
Stories of “miracles” supporting a particular religious tradition tend to divide “skeptics” and “believers”
more sharply than other supernatural anecdotes.
But when we approach them without presupposing a religious interpretation, we see how they are embedded
in wider traditions of “wonders” and entity encounters that are not restricted to any one group.
The string of anomalous events at Fatima are remarkable by any measure, whatever one’s beliefs.
(Sources listed in the video description.)