- When one person sees a supernatural event,
their story can be dismissed as lies
or ravings delivered by a mad person.
But what happens when something strange
is actually seen by a large number of people?
Well, then it becomes much more difficult to dismiss.
(ominous music)
Here are 10 supernatural events witnessed by masses.
Number 10 is the Miracle of the Sun.
On October 13th, 1917, tens of thousands of people
from the city of Fatima, Portugal witnessed
a phenomenon later referred to as the Miracle of the Sun.
Residents and visitors gathered at the field
of Cova de Iria expecting to see the apparition
of the Virgin Mary.
The event had been prophesied by three children
who were visited by Mary herself on six separate occasions.
Around noon of the 13th, the massive crowd
watched as the sun began moving and changing colors.
The sun's brightness was dulled significantly
and shone rays of multicolored light.
Some witnesses claimed to see it dance around
in zig-zag patterns throughout the sky.
In 1937 after a lengthy investigation,
the Roman Catholic Church canonized it
as an actual Biblical miracle.
Number nine are the Phoenix Lights.
Nevada and Arizona are no strangers to eerie
and unexplainable sightings,
but on the night of March 13th, 1997,
something undeniably supernatural was seen
by thousands of residents.
Between the hours of 7:30 pm and 11:30 pm,
a series of lights in a V-like formation
appeared in the sky over Nevada.
According to witnesses, the lights traveled around
480 kilometers to Phoenix and then continued
to just outside Tucson.
Descriptions of the lights vary slightly
from witness to witness, but the few who saw them
from a closer vantage point say that the lights
were part of a solid V-shaped object
that flew low and made no sound at all.
Possible explanations for the lights range
from military fighter jet flares,
lights attached to a floating helium balloon,
secretive government technology testing,
or even aliens making a close flyby.
Number eight is the Jatinga Bird Suicide.
Every year between September and November,
locals in the village of Jatinga, India
experience an event that sends much of their aviation
wildlife plummeting towards the ground.
On dark and foggy autumn nights between 6:00 pm
and 9:30 pm, usually when the moon is covered by clouds,
birds of various species will dive towards
the small town of 2500 people.
The birds become extremely disoriented
and choose to fly toward any source of light they can find.
In many instances, the birds will actually make contact
with the light, a wall, or the ground
and die upon impact.
But more commonly, the villagers, who believe
the birds to be demons or agitated spirits,
will fight back and kill the birds
with bamboo sticks or traps.
By the end of the night, the ground will be littered
with hundreds, if not thousands, of bird carcasses.
Number seven is the Jodhpur Boom.
The Jodhpur Boom refers to an extremely loud sound
that alarmed the residents of the city of Jodhupur, India
on December 18th, 2012.
It happened at exactly 11:25 am.
It was described as having emanated from the sky
above the city and had the qualities of a sonic boom,
like from a speeding jet plane breaking the sound barrier.
Even stranger is the fact that the sound was so loud
it was nearly deafening to anyone unlucky enough
to be outside and near its origin.
It caused mass hysteria among the population
due to the popular Mayan calender theory
that the apocalypse would occur that year.
Possible explanations involving aircraft
or explosions were ruled out by city officials,
leaving investigators nearly clueless
as to how such a sound could suddenly explode from thin air.
Number six is the Dancing Plague.
In July of 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea
started dancing in the street
of Strasbourg, France alone without music.
At first, the locals cheered her on,
but their attitudes turned more serious
when she continued nonstop for six entire days.
Over the course of a week, Troffea had been joined
in her dance by 34 others, all of whom refused to stop.
After a month, there were 400 manic dancing
citizens crowding the streets.
Dancers began to perish from the extreme physical exertion,
collapsing from exhaustion, stroke, and heart attacks.
The city tried to help them dance the disease
out of their system by building a stage
and encouraging bands to play music.
But the dancing continued long after the bands left.
The cause of the event and how it spread
still remains a mystery to this day.
Number five is New England's Dark Day.
May 19th, 1780 was a strange day for people
in New England and eastern Canada.
The sun rose at dawn as it always did
and continued to rise until around 10 am,
when it turned red and became obscured by darkness.
The sky turned a yellow hue and by 12:45,
everything was so dark that candles were needed to see.
The darkness became slightly less intense soon after,
but the extremely dim lighting conditions
continued until nighttime the next day.
Many people took the darkness as a sign
of the end of the world and the sight
of a deeply red sun and moon rising in the sky
did not help to convince them otherwise.
The cause of the darkness is still unknown,
as theories such as solar eclipses
or thick cloud cover were ruled out.
Exactly what brought the eerie darkness and why?
Number four is the Nuremberg Celestial Phenomenon.
A Nuremberg, Germany broadsheet newspaper article
from the year 1561 describes the scene
of an epic space battle which occurred above the city
between 4:00 am and 5:00 am on April 14th of that year.
According to witnesses, several dark orbs
shooting across the sky at each other,
blood-red striped shapes started thick
and became thin at the end
and blood-red crosses could be seen.
Two large rod shapes were seen at either end
of the battlefield panorama,
both of which flew towards the sun at one point.
The orbs flying around in the sky eventually came
to rest and fell to the Earth in great clouds of smoke.
After this alleged battle had ceased,
a large black spear apparition was sighted pointing west.
It's believed the event was a warning from God.
No evidence of the crashed orbs has ever been recovered.
Number three is the Hollinwell Incident.
On July 13th, 1980, an estimated 500 children
from different marching bands around
the east midlands in England gathered
at the Hollinwell Showground in Kirkby-in-Ashfield
for a charity competition show.
Many of the kids had come from quite far
to reach the event grounds for the 9:00 am start time
and they were feeling travel weary
and nervous with performance anxiety.
Their symptoms were to be expected under the circumstances,
and normally they would've pulled through,
but an hour and a half into their performances,
something unexpected happened.
The children started dropping like flies,
fainting mid-performance while others became
terribly ill with nausea, vomiting, soreness,
headaches, and dizziness.
A total of 300 people, including some adults
and babies, were affected by the mysterious illness.
Number two is the Cosford Incident.
A strange set of triangular-shaped light patterns
appeared over the skies of Somerset, England
on March 30th, 1993 and surprised the hundreds
of locals that witnessed them.
The lights were seen by several people
who stated that they flew very low to the ground
and were part of a UFO that was
around 200 meters in diameter.
The object also flew over two Air Force bases,
the RAF Cosford and then the RAF Shawbury,
and were seen by multiple personnel
who described it in an official report
as having traveled at a high velocity.
But the strangest report came
from the meteorological officer stationed
at the RAF Shawbury, who claimed he saw
a narrow light beam sweep across a field
as if it were looking around for something.
He also claimed that the UFO made a low humming sound
that gave off bass-like vibrations as it flew.
And number one is the Tunguska Event.
On June 30th, 1908 at 7:17 am,
a massive explosion occurred
by the Stony Tunguska River located in Russia.
The event was witnessed by people
at a trading post 64 kilometers away.
It was described as a beam of blue light in the sky
followed 10 minutes later by a massive boom
and then a shock wave that sent people and debris flying.
It flattened a forested area of 2000 square kilometers,
which is the equivalent of blowing up 15
to 30 megatons of dynamite.
The explosion has been studied by many,
and the prevailing theory points towards
a very large meteor.
That would make it one of the largest impacts
in Earth's recorded history,
but possibly the strangest part of the story
is that upon investigating the site,
there was absolutely no crater to be found at ground zero.