The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

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0: Here Comes The Sun

In 1917, three Portuguese children reported a vision of the Virgin Mary. She promised to return to them on the 13th of each month. On the sixth month - October 13th - she would perform a great miracle.

Rumors spread, and on the 13th of each month, crowds gathered to watch the children speak to an apparition that only they could see. Increasingly many of these pilgrims started reporting minor visions or miracles themselves. Anticipation for the great October miracle consumed the region, then the country.

On October 13, a crowd of about 70,000 people descended on the children’s home village of Fatima. At solar noon, the children made contact with the Virgin and said the great miracle was still on track. Then someone - accounts differ as to whether it was the children or a member of the crowd - pointed to the sky.

According to the ~150 eyewitness accounts that have come down to us, the clouds parted, and the pilgrims saw a strange pale sun (or sun-like object), painless to gaze upon. As they watched in wonder, it began to spin around and flash all the colors of the rainbow, drenching the trees and buildings and crowd with yellow, green, and purple light in sequence. Then it seemed to loom, or grow, or fall to earth - accounts differ, but everyone agrees there was mass panic, as the people expected to be crushed or burned or consumed. It lurched downward three times, as the crowd screamed in terror or confessed their sins - then returned to its usual place in the sky. The whole affair had lasted ten minutes.

Since then, the Sun Miracle of Fatima has gained a reputation as the final boss of paranormal experiences, the ultimate challenge for would-be skeptics and debunkers. It’s not hard to see why. The witnesses included journalists, atheists, prominent scientists, and people who freely admitted that they had only attended in order to laugh at everyone else when nothing happened. There are far too many of them to dismiss, and their reports are surprisingly close to unanimous. People in nearby towns who knew nothing about the miracle claimed to have seen the same thing, seemingly ruling out mass hallucination. There are photographs - too low-tech to clearly visualize the sun, but clear enough to show a crowd pointing at the sky in astonishment. For one hundred eight years, believers and skeptics have written magazine articles, scientific papers, and at least a dozen books on the topic, mostly without progress.

Now its fame has reached Substack. Ethan Muse presents the case in favor, and Evan Harkness-Murphy the case against, with additional commentary from Dylan and Bentham’s Bulldog. I don’t think any of them have risen to the occasion. Ethan observes the formalities of good debate, but presents such a neatly-packaged story that readers are liable to miss the thousand little threads that trail off the bottom and lead places that are, if anything, even stranger than the original miracle. Evan puts admirable effort into arguing that child-seers could have non-veridical visions, but by the time he gets to the sun miracle itself, he has only a few potshots about crowd psychology and “optical phenomena”. Other skeptics are even worse, barely gesturing at Evan’s piece before redirecting their attention to boasts about how they have totally demolished the credulous fundies, or laments about how cosmically unfair it is that they must take time out of their busy schedules to respond to such idiocy. The final boss of the paranormal deserves more respect!

We will at try to at least do better than the other Substackers. But as a stretch goal, I would like to actually advance this 108-year-long conversation.

This post won’t investigate the history of the child-seers or the veracity of their prophecies; we will focus entirely on the spinning sun. We’ll start by laying out the case the way Ethan and other advocates typically present it. Then we’ll go into the usual skeptical responses, finding them to be potentially promising IOUs for a plausible case, but not really the case itself. Finally, we’ll (hopefully) go beyond this well-trodden territory; while we may not reach a certain final answer, we’ll (hopefully) give some compelling circumstantial evidence for why such an answer might exist.

The cost of thoroughness is length; don’t continue unless you want to be nerd-sniped by 30,000 words about the weather in Portugal 108 years ago.

Finally, at many points in this discussion, you will feel tempted to stare at the sun. Do not stare at the sun. By the end of this discussion, I hope you will not only have re-derived the usual reasons not to stare at the sun, but maybe even discovered some new ones you didn’t know about.

1: The Testimonies

There’s a joke about three mathematicians who spot a black cow on a train ride through Scotland. One of them says “I see the cows in Scotland are black”.

The second objects “Technically, we only know that there is one black cow in Scotland.”

The third objects “Technically, we only know that there is one cow in Scotland, at least one side of which is black.”

This is the level of paranoia we should deploy against claims of “over a hundred and fifty eyewitnesses”. Technically, we only know that there’s a book containing the sentence “there were over a hundred and fifty eyewitnesses”!

(technically, you just know that Astral Codex Ten says there’s a book containing the sentence “there were over a hundred fifty eyewitnesses”.)

To address this concern, I tried to follow as many citation trails as I could to the primary sources, seeing how many completely unimpeachable chains-of-transmission I could find. I gave up after finding sixty, with the source material far from exhausted. I believe the claim of 150 recorded witness testimonies is true. If anything, it’s an underestimate. You can find the full citation chains in the spreadsheet at the bottom of this post.

In mid-October 1917 - that is, only a week after the miracle - the parish launched an investigation. Sixteen of our testimonies come from this process - conducted by a priest, related under oath, and witnessed by a clerk. A few weeks later, Church officials worried that local peasants might be too easily influenced, and started a search for educated or sophisticated witnesses; another seven testimonies come from this process. The diocese apparently didn’t trust the parish, and launched their own investigation five years later, including a call from the bishop specifically asking for people who had seen something different from the parish investigation’s story or even nothing at all; six reports are testimonies to this Canonical Commission (there are far more in Portugese documents I can’t access, and some of the secondary sources draw from this stock). The caretakers of the Fatima shrine gathered documents from all three of these investigations - parish, auxillary parish, and diocesan - into a six-volume Portuguese collection called the Documentação Crítica de Fátima (DCF). Of these, they made a 633 page selection available for free download as a PDF, which I was able to machine translate into English. Enough of these documents match other publicly available sources that the shrine caretakers would have to have perpetrated an implausibly complicated fraud to have made them up.

Several Portuguese newspapers published articles about the event. The most thorough coverage was in O Seculo; there is a grainy mostly-unreadable scan of the original October 15th article here, and a high-quality version of an October 29th magazine-style reprint here. An eyewitness account was also published in A Ordem; you can find a scan of the original here. An editorial in Correio da Beira is not available as an original scan, but was reprinted in DCF.

In the 1950s, an American Catholic named John Haffert became obsessed with cataloguing Fatima witnesses before they died off; he says he interviewed two hundred of them, of whom twenty-seven make it into his book Meet The Witnesses. Most of Haffert’s subjects are attested in other sources; in one case, that of American witness Dominic Reis, the interview was recorded and is available on YouTube.

These are too numerous for it to be worth quoting each of them in full; we’ll have to pick and choose. I’ll start by quoting the classic ones that most successfully establish the consensus story, then move on to the rare outliers that say it happened differently or not at all. Finally, I’ll discuss the accounts from surrounding areas, which are usually used to establish that the miracle could not have been simple power of suggestion.

1.1: The Classic Testimonies

Here are the most famous accounts, cited by almost all Catholic sources and most of the skeptical ones. To set the scene - it’s been raining all day, the crowd is wet and restless, and it’s a few minutes after the predicted time of the miracle. Then:

Avelino de Almedia¹, correspondent for the anti-Catholic newspaper O Seculo:

From the height of the road where the people parked their carriages and where many hundreds stood, afraid to brave the muddy soil, we saw the immense multitude turn towards the sun at its highest, free of all clouds. The sun resembled a plate of dull silver. It could be stared at without the least effort. It did not burn or blind. It seemed that an eclipse was taking place. All of a sudden a tremendous shout burst forth, “Miracle, miracle! Marvel, marvel!”

Before the astonished eyes of the people, whose attitude carried us back to biblical times, and who, white with terror, heads uncovered, gazed at the blue sky, the sun trembled and made some abrupt unheard-of movements beyond all cosmic laws; the sun danced, according to the typical expression of the peasants.

On the running board of the bus from Torres Novas, an old man whose stature and gentle, manly features recall those of Paul Deroulede, turned toward the sun and recited the Credo in a loud voice ... I saw him later addressing those about him who still kept their hats on, begging them vehemently to take their hats off before this overwhelming demonstration of the existence of God. Similar scenes were repeated at other places. A lady, bathed in tears and almost choking with grief, sobbed, “How pitiful! There are men who still do not bare their heads before such a stupendous miracle!”

Immediately afterwards the people asked each other if they saw anything and what they had seen. The greatest number avowed that they saw the sun trembling and dancing; others declared that they saw the smiling face of the Blessed Virgin Herself; they swore that the sun turned around on itself as if it were a wheel of fireworks and had fallen almost to the point of burning the earth with its rays. Some said they saw it change colors successively.

Jose Garrett, lawyer:

As I waited with cool and serene expectation, looking upon the place of the apparitions and with a curiosity that was fading because the hour was passing away so slowly without anything to arouse my attention, I heard the rustle of thousands of voices. I saw the people stretched out over the large field turn about from the point upon which their desires and anxieties had converged so far to the opposite side, and they looked up at the sky. It was almost two o’clock war-time or about noon, sun-time.

The sun had broken jubilantly through the thick layer of clouds just a few moments before. It was shining clearly and intensely. I turned to this magnet that was drawing all eyes. It looked to me as a luminous and brilliant disc, with a bright well-defined rim. It did not hurt the eyes. The comparison (which I heard while still at Fatima) with a disc of dull silver, did not seem right to me. The color was brighter, far more active and richer than dull silver, with the tinted luster of the orient of a pearl. Nor did it resemble the moon on a clear night. Everyone saw and felt that it was a body with life. It was not spheric like the moon, neither did it have an equal tonality of color. It looked like a small, brightly polished wheel of iridescent mother-of-pearl. It could not be taken for the sun as though seen through fog. There was no fog at that time. (The rain and the fog had stopped.)

The sun was not opaque, veiled or diffused. It gave light and heat and was brightly outlined by a beveled rim. The sky was banked with light clouds, patched with blue here and there. Sometimes the sun stood out alone in rifts of clear sky. The clouds scuttled along from west to east without dimming the sun. They gave the impression of passing behind it, while the white puffs gliding sometimes in front of the sun seemed to take on the color of rose or a delicate blue.

It was a wonder that all this time it was possible for us to look at the sun, a blaze of light and burning heat, without any pain to the eyes or blinding of the retina. This phenomenon must have lasted about ten minutes, except for two interruptions when the sun darted forth its more refulgent, lightning-like rays, that forced us to look away.

The sun had an eccentricity of movement. It was not the scintillation of a celestial body at its highest power. It was rotating upon itself with exceedingly great speed. Suddenly, the people broke out with a cry of extreme anguish. The sun, still rotating, had unloosened itself from the skies and came hurtling towards the earth. This huge, fiery millstone threatened to crush us with its weight. It was a dreadful sensation.

During this solar occurrence, the air took on successively different colors. While looking at the sun, I noticed that everything around me darkened. I looked at what was nearby and cast my eyes away towards the horizon. Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground. Fearing impairment of the retina, which was improbable, because then I would not have seen everything in purple, I turned about, closed my eyes, cupping my hands over them, to cut off all light. With my back turned, I opened my eyes and realized that the landscape and the air retained the purple hue.

Manuel Perreiro da Silva, local priest:

We made our arrangements, and went in three motor cars on the early morning of the 13th. There was a thick mist, and the car which went in front mistook the way so that we were all lost for a time and only arrived at the Cova da Iria at midday by the sun. It was absolutely full of people, but for my part I felt devoid of any religious feeling. When Lúcia called out: "Look at the sun!" the whole multitude repeated: "Attention to the sun!" It was a day of incessant drizzle but a few moments before the miracle it stopped raining. I can hardly find words to describe what followed. The sun began to move, and at a certain moment appeared to be detached from the sky and about to hurtle upon us like a wheel of flame.

My wife - we had been married only a short time - fainted, and I was too upset to attend to her, and my brother-in- law, Joao Vassalo, supported her on his arm. I fell on my knees, oblivious of everything, and when I got up I don't know what I said. I think I began to cry out like the others. An old man with a white beard began to attack the atheists aloud and challenged them to say whether or not something supernatural had occurred.

Maria Jose de Leimos Quieros, editorial writer:

As I said, at 1 o'clock, the sky, where the cloud had strayed, cleared; and what was our surprise when a silvery globe appeared, making a small turn and appearing to be crossed here and there by the clouds! This happened three times, with an interval of perhaps three to four minutes.

At this point, behind us, the scene of the little shepherds was taking place near the holm oak; we stayed 7 or 10 meters away to escape the mob. The oldest of the shepherdesses imposed silence at this point, and the rest of the scene was for the three of us!

After this charming rehearsal or prelude to the Sun, as if eclipsed by clouds, but not entirely obscured, suddenly burst forth in all its splendor, very different from usual, a brilliant red cloud or flame that obscured it. Moments later, that globe or sphere shook nervously as if driven by electricity. It seemed to swell and want to rush or speak to the earth, announcing a moment of joy and terror!

A yellow, golden cloud changed this scene; and thus this reality, which to mortals had seemed like a dream, disappeared. I wish I could describe this unique, marvelous event in a polished sentence; I limit myself to narrating it with the simple expression of the truth, which we witnessed.

Goncalo de Almedia Garrett, mathematician:

[The facts] were as follows:

First, the phenomena lasted about 8 to 10 minutes;

Second, the sun lost its dazzling brightness, taking on the appearance of the moon and being easily seen;

Third, the sun, three times during this period, manifested a rotational movement on its periphery, flashing sparks of light on its edges, similar to what happens with the well-known firework wheels.

Fourth, this rotational movement of the sun's edges, manifested 3 times and 3 times interrupted, was rapid and lasted 8 or 10 minutes, more or less;

Fifth, the sun took on a violet color and then an orange, spreading these colors over the earth, finally regaining its brightness and splendor, impossible to be seen with the eyes;

Sixth, it was shortly after noon and near the zenith (which is very important) that these facts occurred.

Jacinto de Almedia Lopes, local resident:

The hour approaches, and behold, as if by magic, the rain stops, the sun breaks through the dense, black clouds and reveals itself with its luminous rays, which quickly take on the colors of yellow, red, and green, turning the objects that were under its influence the same colors; and soon loses its brightness and colors—able to be seen with the naked eye without hurting the eyes—and takes on a dizzying rotation, seeming to fall toward the earth. And while observing these wonders, all the people are in loud exclamations. This lasted, at most, about five minutes, then returned to its normal state.

1.2 Negative Testimonies

A natural next question is whether these were a handful of cherry-picked susceptible individuals, or whether everyone present saw the same thing. Of the 60 statements I was able to conclusively establish as real, plus a few dozen more I came across but couldn’t conclusively establish, 2 were explicitly negative, and other ~3 were sort of vague but suggested some people might not have seen it.

The two clearly negative statements are:

Izabel Brandao de Mela:

This is what was said by those around me, and what thousands of people affirm that they saw. As for myself, I saw nothing ! I could indeed look at the sun and I was terribly agitated to hear everybody shouting that there were extraordinary signs in the sky. I believe that I was not found worthy by Our Lord to see these phenomena, but in my soul I had no need to see them to believe in the apparition of the Holy Virgin to the children.

Leonor das Dores Salema Manoel:

At that solemn moment that I saw nothing of what the others saw! I saw nothing in the sun, nothing there that justified everything I saw around me. But that spectacle and everything I had been seeing since 10 o'clock in the morning were enough for me to continue believing.

We’ll later come across an extremely surprising coda to Manoel’s negative report. For now, we move on to the ambiguously-kind-of-negative statements.

Jose Joaquim da Silva (interview with John Haffert):

JJDS: We could look at the sun without difficulty, the sky became clear . . . I was not afraid but I thought that there was something extraordinary. Persons around me who were seeing something extraordinary, cried with fear. They were saying that the world was going to end.”

JH: What was your personal reaction?

JJDS: I had the conviction that the children were not mistaken, and that we were not mistaken either. I thought that God had, on that day, caused many people to see something extraordinary.

This person only says they “thought there was something extraordinary”. The interviewer, John Haffert, a believer, describes the interview as “Jose da Silva did not see the sun fall from the sky, as is evident from the fact that he was not afraid…in the rather thorough investigations made for this book, he was one of only two persons we found who thought they had not seen the miracle”. Although the quoted section itself is ambiguous, I will accept Mr. Haffert’s opinion that this counts as a negative.

Maria Jose de Lemos Quiera:

We are also not surprised that among thousands of people, some appear like our coachman, to whom, having stood next to the car, at the top of the valley, I asked: – So, Mr. Manuel, did you like it and did you see the sun? It seems that at that time he was feeding the horses! A great materialist (and a very good person, in fact). No wonder.

Although Quiera herself saw the miracle, she says her coachman didn’t (because he was feeding the horses). Although she plays this for laughs, other witnesses say that the whole world was changing colors and the sun was falling to earth and people were screaming that they were about to die. How hard was he concentrating on these horses?!

Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constancio:

Arriving in Fátima, I try to see people I know, to exchange impressions. They all tell me the same thing, they all saw... But what did they see? I ask them: "We saw the sun, covered as if by a silver plate, in a constant rotation, sending out red, yellow, and purple rays, and seeming to detach itself from the sky and approach the earth.

I spoke to the people, they told me the same thing, although, in other words. They told me they had seen Our Lady, St. Joseph, the Baby Jesus, and that I know...The entire celestial court, at the same time, had seen the dancing sun. I didn't believe in so much vision.

It’s true, it’s possible they thought they saw; perhaps a suggestion. Our people, generally very ignorant, are very credulous, and it would be easy for them to convince themselves that they really saw what they wanted to see. It's precisely thanks to this ease of conviction that demagogic doctrines have sometimes been heard and believed by them!

No one in the more educated classes told me they had seen the celestial apparition, but it is certain that everyone, educated and not, expressed their faith...I did not return from Fátima with the complete conviction that Our Lady had appeared to the children, although nothing prevented me from believing it. Nothing is impossible for God

Ms. Constancio’s car got stuck in the mud outside Fatima, and she missed the miracle by half an hour. When she arrived, she asked everyone what they had seen. She says that they “all tell me the same thing”, but later said that “no one in the more educated classes told me they had seen the celestial apparition”

As written, it sounds like she talked to many people, and the ignorant people said they had seen the miracle, but the educated people said they hadn’t. We know from other testimonies that some educated people (including professors, doctors, and lawyers) saw the miracle, but maybe other educated people didn’t, and those were the ones Ms. Constancio talked to. But as written, her exact claim is unclear, as is the number of educated people she talked to.

Against these, we have several claims that “everyone” saw the miracle. These are all from Haffert’s interviews:

Maria Celeste da Camara e Vasconcelos, local baroness:

JH: Did you think it a miracle?

MCdCeV: Yes, there was something supernatural.

JH: Did you know of anyone there who did not see the miracle?

MCdCeV: No.

Augusto Pereiro dos Reis, local resident:

JH: Did you know of anyone who did not see it?

APdR: No.

Joaquim da Silva Jorge, local resident:

JH: Do you know of anyone who did not see it?

JdSJ: I don’t. Everyone has seen.

We might naively say that of our ~60 testimonials, charitably 5 are negative; therefore, perhaps ~10% didn’t see the miracle. But I think that would be an overestimate. These statements are doubly cherry-picked, in the sense that the original investigators looked extra-hard for negative statements to record, and I also looked extra-hard for negative statements in my review of the records.

Is there some competing form of cherry-picking, where only the positive ones survived and made it to authorities? I’m not sure. There were many unbelievers in the crowd who would have been happy to mock the miracle, and the Portuguese press of the time was quite liberal and would have been happy to publish debunkings. Indeed, several newspapers published articles of the form “This is probably a natural phenomenon, even if we’re not quite sure which one, and people should stop freaking out about it”. I find it hard to believe that the incentives that generated those articles would not have also encouraged negative witnesses to come forward, if they existed. But we have only the examples above.

There are many statements in the diocesan inquiry which I was unable to get, because they were in Portuguese (and on paper, and therefore not machine-translatable). The diocesan inquiry was the investigation that put the most effort into digging up negative witnesses, so more might be buried in there. But several of the Fatima writers whose work I have been most impressed with, including Fr. Stanley Jaki, have read the full diocesan inquiry, and none report some crazy disproportion of negative witnesses that completely contradicts all of the other sources.

I think it would be hard to defend a claim that any less than 80% of the crowd at Fatima saw the miracle. If I had to guess a number, it would be 90 - 95%.

1.3 Discordant Testimonies

Some Fatimologists say the corpus of testimonies is remarkably consistent; others argue it is completely self-contradictory.

Having read many of them, I can see arguments for both positions. If we grant that the “consensus” story is the following:

1. At the hour predicted by the child-seers, the rain stopped and a “window” of clear sky opened in the clouds, revealing the sun. It looked surprisingly pale, cool, and painless to gaze at, like the full moon.

2. It began to dance in a zig-zag pattern.

3. It spun and shot off sparks like a firework wheel.

4. It changed colors, and everyone in the area was bathed in different-colored light, as if it were shining through stained glass.

5. It seemed to fall down to Earth three times, terrifying the onlookers and making them think the world was about to end.

6. Then it returned to its normal position, and the previously drenched crowd noticed they were miraculously dry.

…then almost every testimonial contains some elements of the consensus story, in approximately the correct order.

The case for self-contradiction is that very few testimonials contain all six elements: most are a random subset of those claims. Also, nobody can agree on which colors were involved in (4), or in which order.

A believer might argue that if you encounter six different miracles in close succession, they all sort of blend together and you might forget one or two in your accounting. Or you might turn to your friend and ask what they think, and while you’re not looking you miss part of what’s going on.

A skeptic might argue that if the sun falls to earth and appears seconds away from crushing you and everyone around you is screaming because they think it’s the end of the world, approximately 100% of people should mention that in their account of what happened that day, and if it’s more like 50%, then you have a problem.

Here are some interestingly discordant testimonies that I came across during my search:

Antonio dos Ramos Mira, local resident:

A quarter of an hour after the rain stopped, he saw that huge crowd of people, in great clamor and almost all kneeling, facing the sun, which had unusual signs, turning around, trembling, observing at the same time that a yellow-reddish color had appeared around him, which was reflected throughout the crowd and on the horizon, with at the same time a weakening of light and an increase in temperature. The crowd, even the unbelievers, said that it was a known miracle.

This is in the third person because the priest and clerk conducting the investigation are summarizing an account being given by an illiterate peasant. The witness names one color - yellow-reddish - and doesn’t mention the sun falling to earth.

Antonio Maria Menitra, local property owner:

It had rained heavily in the morning, and a little after noon, the rain stopped, and he observed a large crowd of people kneeling down and looking at the sun. He also looked and saw different colors in the sun and in the people.

No mention of the sun dancing, spinning, shooting off sparks, or approaching the earth.

Joao Martia Lucio Serra, lawyer:

Already in some candid souls arose the fear that the foretold event might not occur, when suddenly the entire immense crowd stirred at the seer's voice in a significant brouhaha of astonishment and wonder, raising their heads to the sky, where thousands of eyes gazed in amazement at the sun in full blue, visible to all, without the intensity of its rays harming the retina and hindering vision, crowned with various colors, in a rapid rotation, at times seeming to detach itself from the celestial vault, approaching the earth. The spectators, looking at each other, represented themselves to each other as yellow, and on the horizon, reddish-orange, wherever their eyes looked, they saw beams of dim light, affecting an oval shape, seemingly placed at equal distances, and reflecting on the earth.

Nobody else mentions the “beams of dim light, affecting an oval shape, seemingly placed at equal distances”.

Maria Augusta Saraiva Vieira de Campos, local resident:

Our sense of discouragement was profound, when suddenly we heard from all sides: Miracle! Look at the sun! The rain had stopped as if by magic; hats were closed; a warmth was felt as if we had entered a heated greenhouse, and the disk of the sun began to be seen, clearly discernible in the brownish layer that covered the entire sky. The heat increased, and the sun seemed to sink lower and lower, presenting new and varied changes. We saw a silvery veil, rounded in shape, as if it were a full moon; shortly after, it turned to vivid purple, then red, then emerald green, and finally took on its original color.

Cries were heard from all sides as it emerged from the sun like a white, shining snow-like shape, without harming the retina, coming toward us, returning to the sun again, and finally hiding for the third time among the clouds. Everyone wept, and prayers, supplications, and acts of faith were heard from many mouths.

Now something is coming down off the sun, instead of the sun itself coming down. Also, the colors are purple → red → green.

Goncalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett, mathematics professor:

1st: The phenomena lasted about 8 to 10 minutes;

2nd: The sun lost its dazzling brightness, taking on the appearance of the moon and being easily seen;

3rd: The sun, three times during this period, manifested a rotational movement on its periphery, flashing sparks of light on its edges, similar to what happens with the well-known firework wheels;

4th: This rotational movement of the sun's edges, manifested 3 times and 3 times interrupted, was rapid and lasted 8 or 10 minutes, more or less;

5th: Next, the sun took on a violet color and then an orange, spreading these colors over the earth, finally regaining its brightness and splendor, impossible to be seen with the eyes;

6th: It was shortly after noon and near the zenith (which is very important) that these facts occurred.

Do mathematicians really number everything they say like this? We saw this account earlier, and in most ways it matches the consensus story. But even though he’s trying to be methodical, he totally fails to mention the sun descending to crush the world. Instead, it’s the rotational movement that happens three times. Also, the colors are violet → orange

Luis Antonio Vieira de Magalhaes e Vasconcelos, nobleman:

I was absolutely convinced that I would see nothing. I then remembered, as I had remembered many times before, that principle of Gustave Le Bon, which boils down to the hypnotic current that dominates it. I had to be cautious, not to be influenced.

This friend of mine, taking out his watch, said to me: there are five minutes left, at one o'clock look at the sun, that was the time announced by the shepherdesses, then you will tell me.

My friends shout to me: look, look, but at first I only saw clouds drifting by, leaving the sun uncovered. Suddenly, I see an intensely pink rim, surrounding the sun, which resembled a disc of dull silver, as someone once said, while giving me the impression that it was moving from its original position. Diaphanous, vaporous clouds, somewhat purple, somewhat orange, permeated the air. At various points along the horizon, contrasting with the leaden hue of the sky, I also saw pink and yellow spots. The clamor grew louder and louder.

This didn't last seconds: perhaps minutes. As I observed these manifestations, which I never doubted for a moment were due to the Infinite Omnipotence of God, an indescribable impression came over me.

Here are the silver disc and the unusual colors (here “pink, purple, and orange”). But the colors are now merely “clouds” and “spots”, and there is nothing about spinning, dancing, or falling to earth.

Antonio de Paula, pilgrim from Lisbon:

Suddenly the priest looks at the sun and says that the sun in eclipse was not like that. The deponent also looked and saw that the sun gave no light; a white mist hung over it, it was a dull moon. The sun was to the left, with the rest of the sky obscured. Taking his eyes off the sun, he saw the people a very bright red color; and he exclaimed: "Oh, gentlemen, how the people are all red!" And the priest replied: "Are they red scarves?" To which he remarked: "How can that be? So they had all agreed to have red scarves on their backs?!" Then the people appeared the color of gold. The sun's rotational movements were not visible to them. The people on that occasion cried out loudly, kneeling with their hands raised, shouting for Our Lady, not caring about the thick mud, repeatedly invoking Our Lady. The people's impression was extraordinary.

This person saw the silver moon-like sun and the color changes (here “red” and “gold”), but nothing else. He explicitly mentions not seeing the rotation.

Luis de Andrade de Silva:

The globe of the sun, similar to a disc of dull silver, rotated around an imaginary axis, and at that moment, it seemed to descend through the atmosphere, towards the earth, accompanied at times by an extraordinary brightness, and by an intense heat. The sun's rays were said to have yellow, green, blue and purple colors, but I only noticed the yellow color.

After a few minutes, during which these phenomena occurred, no one could look at the sun anymore, because its rays hurt the retina. Only those who witnessed these phenomena can evaluate what happened then, but cannot describe them exactly.

He says that although he heard other people mention yellow, green, blue, and purple colors, he only saw yellow.

Dominic Reis, American traveler:

The sun started to roll from one place to another place, and changed blue, yellow, all colors! Then we see the sun come toward the children, toward the tree. Everybody was hollering out. Some start to confess their sins, ‘cause there were no Priests around there . . . even my mother grabbed me to her and started to cry, saying, ‘It is the end of the world! And we see the sun come right into the trees. And then the little children get up and turn around to the people and told the people, ‘Pray and pray hard because everything is going to be all right.’

This person says the sun didn’t merely fall to earth, but went to the children (ie the child-seers) and the tree (the oak where the Virgin was appearing) in particular. At one point, it is specifically located “right [in] the trees”. But in this account, I am getting the impression that the “sun” is some sort of UFO-like object, maybe the size of a large helicopter, which is in a particular place. I can’t tell if other witnesses also thought this and just didn’t describe it clearly, or whether this testimony is discordant. The interviewer (Haffert again) notices this, and asks whether Reis really thinks it was the sun; Reis gives a weird non-answer (“Well, for my part it was the sun . . . but whether just a light or not, there was something there. I know for sure.”)

Dominic Reis, continued from elsewhere in his account:

As soon as the sun went back in the right place the wind started to blow real hard, but the trees didn’t move at all. The wind was blow, blow and in few minutes the ground was as dry as this floor here. Even our clothes had dried. We were walking here and there, and our clothes... we don’t feel at all. The clothes were dry and looked as though they had just come from the laundry. I believed. I thought: Either I’m out of my mind or this was a miracle, a real miracle.

Although many people said their clothes were miraculously dry, Reis is the only one who mentions a miraculous wind. Everyone else says their clothes were dried by a miraculous heat. Reis does not mention heat.

Maria dos Santos

On October 13th, when Lucia said: "Our Lady is coming!", one of the deponent's daughters, named Maria, was standing on a rock, a meter from the holm oak tree, on the east side, to guard the bow so the people wouldn't damage it. The girl felt a blow to her face, saw a beautiful light near her, and cried out: "Oh! Our Lady!" The deponent looked and saw a star, a ball, not entirely round, like an egg, very beautiful, with the colors of the celestial rainbow, but much more vivid, with a tail of one and a half meters of brilliant colors. It passed very quickly and close to the holm oak tree, and disappeared a hand's breadth from the ground. She saw the sun sinking low.

This is maybe the same UFO-like object that Dominic is reporting. In some of the other Fatima apparitions, the Virgin appears to those who cannot see her true form as a ball of light that comes to the tree where the child-seers are waiting. So maybe there were two things going on - the sun in the sky, and a ball of light (the apparition itself) heading back and forth to the tree. Still, if these are really two different phenomena, only these two accounts mention the second one.

I don’t really have much that is non-obvious to say about these discordant testimonies. Aside from the ones with the UFO-like object, they seem about as discordant as you would expect from panicked people seeing a real inexplicable phenomenon - with the exception of some people who are absolutely terrified by the falling sun, and other people who don’t mention it at all.

1.4 Dalleur And The Distant Testimonies

Maybe the only interesting advance in Fatimology in the last fifty years is Dalleur (2001), the focus of Muse’s Substack post.

Dalleur is a philosophy professor at the Pontifical University in Rome, but clearly a multi-talented individual. He seems to lean toward the “miracle” explanation, but asks a fruitful question that nobody else seems to be considering: if it was a miracle, how was it implemented?

That is, the real sun obviously didn’t change color or move - this would have been visible around the world, and would probably have fried the Earth. So what did God or the Virgin do, exactly, to produce the appearance of a moving sun?

We can imagine two possibilities. First, they could have implemented the miracle through a “prophetic vision”, where they inspire a sort of mass hallucination in the onlookers. Second, they could have created some kind of objectively-real fiery wheel object in the skies above Portugal, and arranged for people to mistake it for the sun. If they did the second, we should be able to pin down where exactly they created it by triangulating distant testimonies

Dalleur and I both found four of these:

Joaquim Lourenco, schoolboy, 9 miles from Fatima:

I feel incapable of describing what I saw. I looked fixedly at the sun which seemed pale and did not hurt my eyes. Looking like a ball of snow, revolving on itself, it suddenly seemed to come down in a zigzag, menacing the earth. Terrified, I ran and hid myself among the people, who were weeping and expecting the end of the world at any moment.

It was a crowd which had gathered outside our local village school and we had all left classes and run into the streets because of the cries and surprised shouts of men and women who were in the street in front of the school when the miracle began.

There was an unbeliever there who had spent the morning mocking the ‘simpletons’ who had gone off to Fatima just to see an ordinary girl. He now seemed paralyzed, his eyes fixed on the sun. He began to tremble from head to foot, and lifting up his arms, fell on his knees in the mud, crying out to God.

But meanwhile the people continued to cry out and to weep, asking God to pardon their sins. We all ran to the two chapels in the village, which were soon filled to overflowing. During those long moments of the solar prodigy, objects around us turned all colors of the rainbow... When the people realized that the danger was over, there was an explosion of joy.

Albano Barros, young boy, 12 miles away:

I was watching sheep, as was my daily task, and suddenly there, in the direction of Fatima, I saw the sun fall from the sky. I thought it was the end of the world.

I was so distracted that I remember nothing but the falling sun. I cannot even remember whether I took the sheep home, whether I ran, or what I did.

Guilhermina Lopes da Silva, local resident, 16 miles away:

I could not go [to Fatima] because my husband was an unbeliever. I was looking toward the mountain at noon when suddenly I saw a great red flash in the sky. I called two men who were working for us. They, of course, saw it, too.

Afonso Vieria, famous writer, 30 miles away

On that day of October 13, 1917, without remembering the predictions of the children, I was enchanted by a remarkable spectacle in the sky of a kind I had never seen before. I saw it from this veranda…

Dalleur pins these on a map, which I’ve edited slightly for clearer labeling:

The furthest report is 34 km (21 miles) away from Fatima, so Dalleur concludes the phenomenon was visible from about this distance. Further, all witnesses outside Fatima said the phenomenon was coming from the direction of Fatima, not from the direction of the sun (which in some cases was directly opposite Fatima)! By triangulating the accounts, Dalleur estimates that the miraculous light source which appeared to be the sun:

was probably located above the hills a few km south of the Cova da Iria [in Fatima].

…ie at the spot indicated by the black sun sign in the purple circle on the map.

Dalleur moves on to analyzing photographs of the event:

He tries to estimate the angle of the shadows, and, from there, the angle of the light source. I cannot entirely follow his calculations, but he finds that there are two light sources - a diffuse source at about 42° elevation, and a point source at about 30°.

The 42° source corresponds to the elevation we would expect the sun to be at in southern Portugal on October 13 around solar noon. It’s diffuse because it’s hidden behind clouds, just as it was all morning.

So what is the 30° light source? Dalleur suggests it’s whatever object the witnesses are describing as spinning, moving, and changing color. They’re mistaking it for the sun because the real sun is hidden behind clouds. For a bright round sun-sized object in the sky during the day not to be the sun, isn’t really in most people’s hypothesis space.

The paper stops here, but I’m not sure why. Given a distance, an angle, an apparent size (the size of the sun disc), and basic trigonometry, you should be able to calculate the object’s elevation and true size. Do this, and you find that the light source is two miles high and about 200 feet in diameter. That’s about the size of a 747, at about half the 747’s usual cruising altitude.

What, who did you think God drafted to play “terrifying spinning fiery disc”?

1.5: Making Sense Of The Testimonies

The multitude of testimonies of Fatima may trick us into thinking we understand what the miracle looked like. This complacency deserves to be challenged:

“The sun looked pale, like the moon, and was painless to gaze upon”: Most sources treat this as the first aspect of the miracle. Several talk about how unbelievers are going to think it was just fog, but this can’t be true, because the edge of the solar disc was clearly defined, or there was no fog halo, or some other reason like that - and therefore even this first step was clearly miraculous.

I feel like I’m going crazy here - I see this regularly! Not often, but a few times a year. When the sun is sort of halfway behind certain types of thin cloud, it looks pale like the moon (I remember, as a child, being uncertain about whether the full moon was somehow out during the day and visible through clouds), is painless to gaze upon, and has a clearly defined edge.

Am I crazy? I decided to resolve this the same way the new government of Nepal chose its prime minister - via Discord poll:

Here’s one of the hits for “sun behind clouds” on Google Images:

I don’t know if this is a real picture or used lenses or something, but it’s pretty true to my experience.

So why does every previous commentator act as if this is some cosmic mystery to be explained? A few people argue that (although it was a generally cloudy day), the mystery is that the clouds were nowhere near the sun at this point, so they couldn’t have been causing the unusual pallor. But the majority of witnesses say the clouds were absolutely near, or veiling, or even covering the sun. Stanley Jaki makes this a central point of his book, saying that “The great majority of eyewitness accounts, and certainly the most important ones, contain emphatic references to the continued presence of clouds.”

I’m going kind of crazy here. I notice that the holdouts on my Discord poll disproportionately come from my non-Californian friends - is this rarer in other locales? I’m not sure.

In any case, I will not count this as being one of the mysterious aspects of the miracle requiring explanation.

“The sun was spinning”: How can a featureless disc be seen to spin?

Despite this being one the most commonly-reported aspects of the miracle, almost nobody explains this point. Some say that only the rim was spinning, but this has the same problem. However, several people compared the sun to a “firework wheel”, also called a “Catherine wheel”. Here is a video of this object, which apparently was well-known in the Portugal of the time:

Stanley Jaki relates a story about a priest having this same question and grilling a witness; the witness finally claimed that the sun traced a circle (like a basket in a Ferris wheel) rather than merely rotating. But this contradicts several claims that it “rotated around its own axis”, and I wonder if the witness was intimidated by the seeming contradiction in her story and was trying to weasel out of her own confusion.

If we treat the miracle as the result of some kind of illusion, this becomes slightly easier to explain; there are plenty of visual distortions that look like a spinning motion, and since it is the visual field itself that is spinning, rather than any particular object, it can be seen whether the object is a disc or not.

“The sun seemed to fall to earth”: In what sense did it seem like this?

If the sun had simply gone down in the sky, people would have said it was setting, the same way it does every evening. One witness does say this. Most other witnesses say it was terrifying, and they felt like they (as opposed to other people living near the horizon) were about to be crushed.

If the sun had simply gotten bigger - wouldn’t people have just said it looked bigger? Isn’t this a more natural way to record that the sun’s disc seemed to expand? Fr. Jaki combs his selection of witness accounts (larger than mine), but is only able to find one person who says “it got bigger” in so many words, compared to the dozens who talk about it looming, or falling to earth.

Some people say that the sun “left the sky” or “left its place in the sky” at this point. In what sense? If the object that appeared to be the sun at Fatima had been visible as an object of a particular size (let’s imagine it as a flying saucer), then not only would this have been remarked upon, but it would have appeared to threaten some parts of the crowd in particular (that is, a descending saucer would look like it was about to land on some specific area). But this is not the consensus description, and several people say they thought the sun might crush the entire world.

Several witnesses say it approached Earth with a jerky or zig-zag motion. If I imagine something else approaching Earth - let’s say a jumbo jet or asteroid - I can tell that it’s approaching rather than getting bigger because there’s multiple components to its trajectory that let me separate size change from forward movement.

When I think of this aspect, I imagine the sun very suddenly growing in size and brightness to take up a substantial fraction of the sky (maybe >50%?!), maybe with some jerky motion on the side.

Although it’s hardly scientific, I was charmed by John Touhey’s project of trying to visualize the miracle by using witness descriptions as prompts for ChatGPT. His work is a year old, and so several GPT iterations out of date. When I repeat his work with the current version, I get these:

Interlude: The Anti-Clerical Union

As mentioned briefly before, 1910s Portugal was in a period of transition. In 1910, a group of proto-socialist revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy. The monarchy and church had been in cahoots, so the revolutionaries cracked down on Catholicism, closing the monasteries and persecuting the churches. This was a bold move - only an upper crust of educated urbanites were proto-socialist, and 99%+ of the country identified as Catholic, albeit at various levels of religiosity. In the 1920s, conservatives would regain the upper hand, overthrow the proto-socialists and restore a pro-church dictatorship.

Still, the small urban educated ruling class of 1910s Portugal was a hotbed of atheistic anti-church sentiment. Probably the child-seers of Fatima were only dimly aware of this, but their prophecies were a spark entering a powder keg, and many of the more worldly witnesses were aware of this context.

While reading through Fatima-related documents, I came across some pamphlets by Grupo Anticlerical, one of the era’s leading atheist organizations. They are totally irrelevant to our primary goal of trying to figure out what’s up with the miracle. But I love them so much that I can’t resist adding one as an interlude. I have slightly edited the machine translation for clarity and readability:

To defend the sacred freedom of conscience—guaranteed by the original Law of Separation of Church and State—from the furious attacks of implacable Jesuitism—the greatest enemy of all human happiness!—the Anticlerical Group was organized in this town, similar to what is being done in many parts of the country!

This was necessary. They call us to fight. We present ourselves courageously! The great, formidable battle of progress against Ultramontane Reaction, of Freedom against Tyranny, of Truth against Lies is waged again with enthusiasm and ardor!

The redemptive dawn that the Portuguese people saw emerge on October 5, 1910, is about to be eclipsed, intercepted by the immense flood of black cassocks!... But in the dark night that seeks to envelop Reason; where moral suffering takes on tragic proportions in a frightening asphyxiation, the Light will once again break through!... the consoling light of elevated spirits... and like a sinister scarecrow, the grim reaction will flee in terror!

Liberal people! Hear us! This fight is terrible! Many of our people will perhaps be crushed and tortured on the battlefield, but what does it matter?! Every war against reaction is a holy war because it frees consciences from the clutches of their enemies!... It is the fight of Justice against Iniquity, of Love against Hate, of Good against Evil!... To the fight, then, for the Progress that makes life beautiful; for the Freedom that redeems the people; and for the science that guides us all as an eternal beacon to the Light of Truth!

Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral [two Portuguese aviators who had recently flown across the Atlantic] are prodigious spirits before whom our souls kneel religiously – boldly breaking through the air with the mathematical certainty of someone who knows the path to be taken to get from one point to another determined point; flying through the immense blue as sure of their route as any of us walking on earth, they showed us that Science is not an empty word! The power of their prodigious sextant, the fruit of immense scientific lucubrations, is more real and positive than the cross of Christ painted on their device, which could not even have saved them from falling due to lack of gasoline in the middle of the sea at the mercy of the waves.

Their extraordinary journey, an adventure which moved us to tears, was the most resounding scientific victory of recent times! It was, above all, a powerful affirmation of science! Let us therefore make science our religion, for scientific religion is Freedom of Thought!

To be a Free Thinker is to love immortal science, eagerly waiting for it to reveal to us the truth of the great enigmas of the Universe! And only it can reveal them!

People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured.

The victory of reaction, of clericalism, of black, cruel and ferocious Jesuitism will result in: the gallows, the acts of faith with their human destruction, persecution, exile, robbery, arson, the deflowering of women, the killing of children, the monstrous torture of all free spirits!

The history of so many crimes committed in the name of God horrifies us! The Inquisition, relentlessly slaughtering, tearing, and burning the flesh of so many victims, is still today, in the twentieth century, a sinister specter haunting us!... O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children!

Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs: Love Freedom! Love Liberty, O loving mothers, immaculate saints of our altar! We pray for them... for your children, who are the light of your candid eyes, the life of your life... for little children... for all children, tender rosebuds that retrogression furiously lashes, – love Liberty!.

And you, O parents! Heads of families who so tremble at your loved ones, snatch them from the merciless clutches of the reactionaries who twist their brains and kill their reason!

Hear us all, men, women, and children; listen: Freedom writhes in horrible convulsions... it vibrates in space, echoing from mountain to mountain, an anguished cry for help!... It is Freedom that falls, annihilated! It is Freedom that dies in the bloody clutches of Jesuitism!

The Miracle of Fatima, people, is a ridiculous lie, it is a comedy, it is not religion!

Come on, liberals! Let us all rise up from this criminal apathy and, without delay, fight not the religious sentiment of the Portuguese people, such a good people, a race of heroes, but rather the exploitation that clericalism is inflicting on the people, foisting upon them, at a good price, images of the saint —trademarked to avoid competition from other vampires! —the shamelessness!—and leading them, through suggestion, to wallow and drink madly, the miraculous water, foul, filthy water, full of rot, pus, and pestilent microbes that the sore flesh of the sick leaves deposited there in the washings!

We, all as one man, will fight the reaction, forcing it to retreat and thus, with our efforts, we will save the Republic and the Portuguese Land from its fatal annihilation!

…

…anyway, Interlude over, let’s get back to the miracle.

2: The Skeptical Explanations

Re-invigorated by the rousing prose of Grupo Anticlerical, can we come up with a materialist explanation for the sun miracle?

2.1: Pilgrim, Avert Thine Eyes

Starting in October 1917, doubters have focused on one obvious possibility: staring at the sun is harmful to your health. If you stare too long, you go blind. If you stare just slightly less long than that . . . maybe something strange happens?

Just to get a particular theory out there: everyone knows that if you stare at a bright light source for a few seconds, you get a temporary afterimage - often pink or bluish-green - on your retina. Suppose the pilgrims stared at the sun. Their eyes would inevitably make microsaccades - small natural jerking motions - and the afterimage would appear somewhere slightly different than the true sun. This might look like the sun turning pink or blue and moving in a zig-zag pattern.

Believers in the miracle counter this proposal in several ways.

First, although it might explain the sun changing colors and dancing, it doesn’t give an explanation for spinning, sparkling, or falling to earth and threatening to crush everybody (exactly three times in a ten minute interval, no less).

Second, although witnesses describe the sun changing color, they also describe everything around them changing color to match the sunlight, which doesn’t match localized afterimages. And one scientifically-minded witness specifically describes closing his eyes to see if there was a persistent afterimage; he says there was not.

Third, there are no reports of eye injuries or blindness from a crowd that was, supposedly, staring straight at the sun for ten minutes. This is a good match to witness reports (that the sun was unusually pale and didn’t hurt to look at) and with Dalleur’s theory (that it wasn’t the sun). But it’s a bad match to any theory depending on eye injuries.

Fourth, this would require Portuguese people to be total idiots. Everyone already knows bright lights cause afterimages. Surely if you stare at the sun for ten minutes and get some afterimages, you’re not going to freak out and start screaming about miracles and the end of the world. Even if the peasants had somehow remained ignorant of afterimages their whole lives, the scientists and doctors in attendance wouldn’t be fooled.

If we are to keep this theory, maybe we should posit some retinal phenomenon much stronger than the ones we know. Everyone thinks they know how much an illusion can fool you - “yeah, okay, obviously the cookie that looks very slightly bigger will actually be the same size” - which is exactly why the really good ones, like the Checker Shadow Illusion, come as such a shock.

Squares A and B are the same color. Source: Checker shadow illusion.

There’s no way around it: we need to hear from someone who has stared directly into the sun.

August Meessen was a physics professor at a Catholic university, which sounds like exactly the job profile we want for this sort of thing. He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened. From his paper:

In November 2002, I looked directly into the sun, at about 4 p.m. The sun was relatively low above the horizon and its light intensity was attenuated, although the sky was clear. I was able to look right into the sun and was amazed to see that the sun was immediately converted into a grey disc, surrounded by a brilliant ring. The grey disc was practically uniform, while the surrounding ring was somewhat irregular and flamboyant, but did not extend beyond the solar disk. It coincided with its rim. I stopped the experiment, since I wanted to be prudent, but I had experienced myself the initial phase of a typical “miracle of the sun” and I could explain it. The sun became grey, since my eyes immediately responded to its great luminosity by an automatic reduction of their sensitivity. This adaptation is not simply due to the bleaching of pigments in the colour-sensitive cones of the fovea, where the image of the sun is projected, but to secondary processes.

By “initial phase”, he means the part where the sun looks pale and well-defined, like a full moon. This isn’t something I think needs explanation (see above), but he sure has explained it. Moving on:

In a second experiment, realized at 3 p.m. in December 2002, I looked straight at the sun during a much longer time. After some minutes, I saw impressive colours, up to 2 or 3 times the diameter of the sun. They changed, but were mainly pink, deep blue, red and green. Further away, the sky became progressively more luminous. I stopped there, since I understood that these colours resulted from the fact that the red, green and blue sensitive pigments are bleached and regenerated at different rates.

This is frustratingly vague. Are the “impressive colors up to 2-3 times the diameter of the sun” just the normal aftereffects of staring at a bright object? Or something surprising even to physics professors?

And the spinning?

What about the motions of the sun? I didn’t see them, because I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time or my brain knew already too much. Once, after I had been looking at a very long passing train, I had (for about 30 seconds) the illusion of an opposite motion. Joseph Plateau discovered that when we look at the centre of a spiral that is rotating at some given velocity about this point, and when we stop this rotation, we see a reversed rotation. It lasts for several minutes, although in reality, there is no motion at all. This is a good example of motional after-effects. The “dance of the sun” is initiated, however, by a spontaneous generation of apparent motion.

This feels suspiciously like a just-so story. His explanation for the sun falling to earth to crush everyone - which he also did not see - is equally ad hoc:

A very interesting study was recently devoted to this “zoom and loom effect”. It tends to appear when the brain is confronted with the two-dimensional retinal image of an object that is situated at some unknown distance. The brain will then consider the possibility that it could come closer, by performing an illusory mental zoom, where the apparent size of the object is progressively increased. This results from the fact that evolution preserved the tendency to take into account the possibility of a dangerous approach: a rapid evasive action could be beneficial for survival.

If true, it sounds like you should be able to generate this effect not just by staring at the sun (ill-advised, causes blindness), but by staring at the moon. I would like to test this, but unfortunately I am writing this on the night of a new moon; I’ll check back in two weeks. Still, I am skeptical that no human being living before 1917 AD ever figured out that staring at a celestial body long enough would make it appear to fall to earth and crush you. Compare to much gentler illusions - like how the moon looks bigger right when it starts to rise - which everybody knows about.

I was able to find a thirdhand report (Fr. Stanley Jaki → G. J. Strangfeld → consultation with bishop) of another sun miracle investigator, one “Professor Dr. Stöckl” in Germany, who made a similar experiment:

After almost a minute (the time varies according to the condition of the atmopshere and the momentary condition of the eyes) one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun (this is already a sign of the highly excited state of the retina). According to my experience … this dark blue disk is somewhat smaller than the solar disk, so that the edge of that disk stands out as a ring beyond that dark blue disk. Then one has right away the impression that the solar disk rotates with great speed in one or the other direction. This I have experienced often enough. All this is a subjective appearance that has nothing to do with the external world.

These reports are suggestive, but weaker than all but the barest Fatima testimonials. Dr. Messeen admits as much, saying that “I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time”. Can we find people even more committed - or reckless, or masochistic - than Professors Messeen and Stöckl?

Absolutely yes: there was a whole subfield of late 18th / early 19th century psychophysicists who experimented with staring at the sun for long periods, many of whom went blind. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883, went blind in 1843²) summarizes their work in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects. He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe what we now recognize as typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin (father of Charles; cf. Secrets of the Great Families). After stating that:

The author has frequently observed that when he gazed at the midday sun for a long time, until its disk appeared pale blue, he saw a bright blue specter on other objects for more than two days.

…he mentions how

When looking at the meridian sun as long as the eyes can well bear its brightness, the disc first becomes pale, with a luminous crescent, which seems to librate from one edge of it to the other owing to the unsteadiness of the eye.

Here is pallor, and at least a hint of motion. But it’s pretty different from spinning, and not really clear how it relates to the sun miracle.

Gustav Fechner (1801 - 1887, went blind in 1839) may have stared for even longer; you can read more of his story - including his ensuing insanity and subsequent attempts to found a new religion - on Adam Mastroianni’s blog. But all that he records about his ill-fated experiment is that:

…after looking at the sun through homogeneously colored lenses, if you close your eyes, the primary impression remains for a long time and the entire afterimage usually disappears without a complementary coloration having clearly emerged.

These people are great, and they all sound like minor Sam Kriss characters. But after whole careers dedicated to staring at the sun much longer than any normal person would ever try, they report only the barest hints of odd phenomena. Indeed, if anything they saw less of interest to the Fatimologist than Profs. Messeen and Stöckl.

Worse, all of these authorities saw their phenomena after seconds to minutes of deliberate staring. Surely if it had taken a minute of staring at the sun before anything happened, some of our eyewitnesses would have mentioned this; after all, several mention that they were starting to doubt after the child-seers’ deadline had passed a few minutes earlier. But by all accounts, the miracle was near-instantaneous.

Although Messeen and Stöckl’s reports of miracle-like phenomena are intriguing, it doesn’t seem like they can be the whole picture. Let’s move on.

2.2: Aurora Borealis? At This Time Of Year? In This Part Of The Country? Localized Entirely Within Your Kitchen?

Could the miracle at Fatima have been some kind of weird weather phenomenon?

The main argument against is that if it were a common weather phenomenon, it would not have awed and terrified tens of thousands of people. But if it were a rare weather phenomenon, then the seers’ successful prophecy that the rare weather phenomenon would happen at solar noon on October 13 1917 becomes almost as impressive as an outright miracle.

The argument in favor is that dozens of people have written books and papers about this possibility, we would feel remiss if we didn’t mention them, and anyway it gives us the opportunity to look at pretty pictures of interesting weather phenomena.

This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported.

(source)

This is a solar corona³; cloud iridescence is a related phenomenon. I don’t know how much work the exposure length is doing in this particular photo, but I’m guessing more than zero. Coronae are also very pretty, and might explain the description of wheels and colors. They seem surprisingly common for something that I can’t ever remember seeing, supposedly happening several times a year in most locations. But they don’t spin, the colors don’t change or stain the surrounding landscape, and they don’t fall to earth and crush people. Let’s keep this one as a backup option and move on.

This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding.

But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance.

At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat!

I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them.

But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”?

Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent)

Don’t they usually break windows?

Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies?

Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak?

Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event⁴?

And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance?

We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, Artur Wiroski argues that Fatima was a three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces. Actually, he offhandedly mentions Fatima in three sentences, with the majority of the paper looking more like the image above - but he eventually makes it into a Guardian article where he emphasizes that yes, he is trying to explain the miracle of the sun.

However, if I’m understanding him correctly, he says that his theoretical ice crystal phenomenon can only happen when the sun is at an altitude below 22 degrees. But during the Fatima miracle, the sun was at 42 degrees (and Dalleur’s mysterious light source was at 30 degrees), so none of this applies.

I’ve tried to include pictures of all the phenomena I mention in this section. I failed for this one, because it’s never been observed to occur in nature. It’s just some incredibly weird thing that one scientist says ice crystals might do if parameters were ever exactly right, with such a precise definition of “exactly right” that it’s never happened in real life.

If it ever did happen, it probably wouldn’t be at exactly the moment predicted by child-seers several months in advance.

2.3: Everyone’s Mad Here Except You And Me

Another common response calls the Sun Miracle a “mass hallucination”. Can 70,000 people really hallucinate the same thing?

“Mass hallucination” on Wikipedia redirects to List Of Mass Panic Cases. The Miracle of the Sun is on there, but listed as “(disputed)” - the only item to earn such a parenthetical. The other fifty items mostly belong to three categories:

1. A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.

2. Somebody claims to have encountered a monster/supercriminal. Over the next few months, several more people claim ambiguous encounters with the monster/supercriminal, or detect evidence of their activities. On more sober reflection later, authorities decide the monster/supercriminal never existed.

3. The Hindu milk miracle of 1995.

Starting from the bottom: In 1995, a man in New Delhi noticed that an idol of the elephant-god Ganesh seemed to be really drinking the glass of milk left as an offering. The story went viral - or as viral as things could go in 1995 - and Hindus around the world noticed the same thing. There was “an increase in overall milk sales in New Delhi by over 30%”. Scientists investigated and determined that a sculpted stone elephant trunk could sometimes absorb milk through capillary action. This was a story about rumor, interpretation, and context, but not really “hallucination”. The drinking effect was real.

The Halifax Slasher was a typical supercriminal story. Two women reported being attacked by a mysterious and oddly-dressed knifeman; others followed. “Vigilante groups were set up on the streets, and several people, mistakenly assumed to have been the attacker, were beaten up; business in the town was all but shut down”. Although there was a Halifax resident with a history of knife crime, “he was quickly ruled out of the 1938 attacks on account of his large nose, which none of the 1938 victims had described”. Eventually several of the victims admitted to having made it up, and the whole thing went away. Supercriminal cases most often result from people making things up. Occasionally, seemingly-honest people report seeing the supercriminal in poor lighting conditions across a dark alley or something. But even if we consider these to be “hallucinations”, it is usually the one or two most vulnerable people in a town at the time. I can’t find any examples of true “mass hallucinations” - entire towns seeing a nonexistent supercriminal or monster at the same time.

Koro is the psychosomatic disease par excellence; I’ve written about it before here. Victims, always male, believe that their penis has disappeared or retracted into their body; they often blame penis-stealing witches. Koro occurs at some very low background rate in every society (including ours), but occasionally wells up into mass panics in primitive cultures that take witchcraft seriously and have traditions of worrying about this sort of thing. Still, I don’t think any panic ever affects more than half of a village’s males, and usually not at the exact same time; it’s a smoldering panic over days or weeks, not a single instant of horrified realization. Also, although I’m not sure and would love to learn more about this, I don’t think the koro victim is having a visual hallucination of not having a penis at all. I think they think their penis is much smaller or shorter than it should be - which only requires some sort of obsessive worrying and (perhaps motivated) mis-remembering of its normal length.

None of these are “mass hallucinations” in the sense where the sorts of visual hallucinations typical of certain mentally ill people occur en masse in a crowd of thousands with >50% prevalence - that is, the type of mass hallucination that would be required to explain Fatima. As far as I know, there are no confirmed cases of this ever happening.

Still, from the Hindu milk miracle, we can learn that religious people can miss a real phenomenon for a long time, then notice it all at once with great fanfare. And from the koro cases, we can learn that a rare phenomenon can become more common in situations of widespread belief and social pressure.

Interlude: It Seems Like Years Since It’s Been Clear

This is around the stopping point of the previous Substack discussion. I’ve tried to cover most of Ethan and Evan’s arguments, go through the chain of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals, and maybe pull on a few of the more tempting loose threads that they’ve left.

As best I can tell, this level of investigation ends in a decisive victory for the believers. They have a stock of seemingly-unimpeachable testimonies; the skeptics have only a few leads that don’t seem on track to pan out. Eye damage can maybe produce a few odd effects, but - in the entire history of tens of billions of people living daily underneath a sun that they are able to view at any moment - we have not yet found anyone who reports the full constellation of Fatima experiences just from seeing the sun. No exotic weather phenomenon is a perfect match. Mass hallucinations are real but comparatively weak.

At least this is my assessment. Skeptic blogs don’t agree. They propose one of these things (with no consensus as to which one) then act like they’ve debunked the miracle, then skip to the really important part: laughing at how obviously wrong it is. I’ve written before about my disappointment in the skeptical community and why it worries me, and here I feel it as acutely as ever.

Sitting with my disappointment and trying to put it into words, I think my worries come down to a tangling of the Bayesian graph. The straightforward Bayesian way to do this is to start with some prior probability that there is a God who causes miracles (let’s say 1%), notice that the evidence for Fatima being a miracle naively seems very high (let’s say 90%), multiply out, and end up with a higher (8.3%) probability of God’s existence and a lower (8.3%) chance that Fatima in particular was miraculous. This is liberating. It lets you say “This piece of evidence is very strong, but my prior is very low, so even without being able to debunk the evidence, I continue to disbelieve.”

But doing this the straightforward Bayesian way doesn’t work. First of all, what would it mean to naively (even before factoring in that you don’t believe in miracles) say Fatima seems 90% likely to be miraculous. Before factoring in that you don’t believe in miracles, surely the probability is much higher! But also, if you try this, then as soon as you find two similar miracles (I’ve been told the next two are the Eucharistic Miracle of Lancio and the Miracle of Pellicer’s Leg) your probability of God goes up to 88%! But I don’t think there’s any real atheist whose probability would rise in such a straightforward linear way. You need some kind of model where either it’s almost trivially possible to generate an arbitrary number of convincing-yet-false miracles, or it isn’t. But this doesn’t match the “virtuous” approach of addressing each miracle on its own terms - where you try to understand the Sun Miracle by learning things about the sun, or entoptic phenomena, or 1910s Portugal. And it does match the skeptical approach I’m complaining about, where you say “it’s probably swamp gas or something, lol, imagine being so dumb that you believe in miracles.” So I cannot object too strongly.

Still, my greatest fear in this and all other problems of reasoning method is the trapped prior, where people take this too far and become impervious to evidence entirely. I think it’s worth untangling the whole Bayesian graph, trying to keep this whole structure in mind, if it prevents people from accidentally propagating an update down a logical chain, then propagating the same update back up the chain, again and again, ad infinitum, until they become arbitrarily sure of themselves. “We can be sure all miracle claims, even the convincing ones, are false, because there’s no God - and we can be sure there’s no God because all miracle claims are so risibly false.” Even if this is harmless - even if it turns out correct in the case of religion - it teaches such dangerous habits of mind that I’m willing to err in the direction of going way too far taking such claims seriously - at least in the “entertaining an idea without accepting it” sense.

Everyone gets to decide what is and isn’t worth their time. I think deciding that these sorts of miracles aren’t worth your time is fine, as long as you’re propagating all the probabilities correctly and not accidentally treating your own hurriedness as a cause to update the rest of your belief graph. As for me, I don’t know, I just find this fascinating. In Evan’s skeptical take on the conversation, he starts strong, but after the topic switches to Part LXXVII of Dalleur’s discussion of photograph angles, he stops and asks:

What the fuck are we doing? What are we talking about? What have I spent (conservatively) 18 hours of my life on?

We’re addressing what Stanley Jaki called the most important event of the 20th century! We’re debating the existence of God, the most important question possible! If God is real, then nothing could be more important than establishing this: in the best case, we will come to believe; at worst, we will be able to tell St. Peter that our failure was honest and not from lack of trying. If He is not, then we can do whatever we want here on Earth, and surely one of the noblest ways to spend our short existence is expanding the frontiers of the known into the borderlands of mystery!

In particular, if the God of Fatima exists, we are in deep trouble. I said I wouldn’t talk about exactly what the Virgin Mary told the child-seers, but the short version is that the First Secret was a very, very nasty vision of Hell. It looked exactly the way a ten-year-old child might expect: a lake of fire populated by ebon-skinned demons and horrendous tortures; the lead child-seer said that if the Virgin had not begun by promising that she personally would never go there, “she would have died of fright”.

As it was, the consequences of the vision were grim. The child-seers got it into their minds that they could perhaps save sinners from the fire by “doing penance”. They drank only stagnant, scum-encrusted water, in the hopes that this might help some otherwise hell-bound soul; on some especially hot days, they ceased drinking water at all. When they found particularly painful ropes, they tied them around their bodies so hard that they bled (later, the Virgin mercifully told them they didn’t need to wear the ropes at night - they could stick to daytime only). After so many mortifications, they were easy prey for the Spanish Flu; two of the three perished before their tenth birthday. As they lay dying in the hospital, they were recorded as freaking out every time they saw a nurse or visitor with “immodest dress”, saying that they would not act in such a way if they knew how long Eternity was, or what awaited them there⁵.

If all of this is the true opinion of the Lord of the Universe, we had better figure it out quick. If it isn’t, then the words of the Grupo Anticlerical:

People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured . . . O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children! Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs!

…take on new meaning and urgency.

I will admit my bias: I hope the visions of Fatima were untrue, and therefore I must also hope the Miracle of the Sun was a fake. But I’ll also admit this: at times when doing this research, I was genuinely scared and confused. If at this point you’re also scared and confused, then I’ve done my job as a writer and successfully presented the key insight of Rationalism: “It ain’t a true crisis of faith unless it could go either way”.

But now that we’ve let Ethan, Evan, and the rest dig us into as deep a hole as possible, let’s try to dig our way out.

3: Our Lady Of Everywhere Else

One question that Ethan, Evan, and Dalleur fail to ask is: what if people are basically always seeing the sun spin and change colors and and fall from the sky? What if this is the most common experience in the world? What if it’s a minor miracle every time you get more than a handful of people together and they don’t fall down in awe and terror at the manifestations of the sun?

Goncado Xavier de Almeida Garrett is one of the star witnesses of the Fatima miracle, quoted above. His testimony comes from a letter written to Father Formigao, a local priest, about two months after the event. But although pro-Fatima sources quote the testimony at the beginning of the letter, they conveniently leave out what follows:

I ask your excellency to please tell me if you confirm this narrative: the Bishop of Portalegre and Mrs. Maria de Jesus Raposo report that while they were with other people in Torres Novas, on the 20th of October at the end of the day, they saw the sun rotate and change its colors. They said this was different from Fátima and did not have the importance of October 13th. I would like clarification on the differences. It is urgent to know what the differences are, since they attended both […]

Until now, no one saw the sun's sparkling rotations, and now everyone sees them many days and many times.

Many days and many times?

Remember, the Virgin Mary first appeared at Fatima on May 13. She promised to return on the 13th of each successive month until October, when she would perform a great miracle. But she never said she wouldn’t perform any miracles until October. So on the 13th of each month, a medium-sized crowd gathered. They didn’t leave disappointed. I won’t include every claimed supernatural occurrence, but here are the ones relevant to our subject:

Olimpia de Jesus, about July 13:

[On July 13], at her sister-in-law's house, when they heard the people shouting, he asked, "What's going on over there?" [Olimpia] looked at the sun and said, "The sun is different." The people came and reported that they had seen signs in the sun and in the sky.

Joaquim Inacio Vicente, about August 13:

This hour was a moment of terror for all who were there. Some lost their senses, others believed it to be the last day of their lives and their day of Judgment, and for some, afterwards, it was a wonder to see the admirable colors that successively took on the clouds that obscured the sun's rays—colors from bright red to pink and from there to blue—the color of anise, as several people declared to me minutes later in my home.

Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constancio, about August 13:

Everyone looked up at the sky, which was covered by a light cloud, like a very fine white lace, pink in places. The sun, which had been completely hidden for a moment, left us illuminated by a strange light, with yellow spots visible on the ground and above us all, and a great drop in temperature, as happens during a solar eclipse.

Manuel Pedro Marto, about August 13 and September 13:

[On August 13, he] saw a kind of luminous globe rotating in the clouds […] On September 13th, he also went to Cova da Iria. He was a little away from the children. He saw nothing, nor heard anything, but he heard that some people had seen extraordinary things in the atmosphere.

Joaquim Xavier Tuna, about August 13 and September 13:

On the 13th of August, I saw the sun lower in the sky at the hour of its appearance. It never lowered as much as that time, not even on October 13th. All the objects around me turned yellow.

On September 13th, I saw a large cross emerge from the sun and head east. Its progress was not very hurried. Sometimes it appeared, sometimes it disappeared, until it disappeared from view. I also saw other things that I cannot explain. In the Lapas area, there were people who, at the same time, saw the cross.

Then there was the great miracle on October 13. Remember, I was only able to find a handful of negative testimonies - people who said they didn’t see it. One was from a woman named Leonor das Dores Salema Manoel, who said she saw “nothing of what others saw”, at least at Fatima. But on the drive home from Fatima that evening⁶:

I saw [the sun] pass through different colors that I can't remember and it turned green, very light green, like a green salad with a golden rim around it, and spinning. Very long rays seemed to touch the earth and the sun seemed to be separated from the sky. Then the sky took on pink flashes, changing to a yellowish hue around the sun, and further away, spots here and there. After a few long moments that I can't remember, it returned to normal and I couldn't look at it again.

The next occurence was early the following year. From the parish inquiry’s interview with Jacinto de Almedia Lopes:

He further said that on the day of Our Lady of Purification, that is, on the second of February, 1918, he about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, being in the same place, he noticed signs in the sun identical to those of the thirteenth of October, which he had not noticed on many other days when he had been there.

And next, from a letter by Gilberto Fernandes dos Santos:

I must inform you that I went to Fátima on [June 13, 1920]… at that very moment, the people were kneeling on the ground, shouting, praying loudly, weeping, begging forgiveness with their hands raised, because they were witnessing a solar phenomenon similar to that of October 13, 1917.

And next, from Dr. Henrique Weiss de Oliviera, describing events on May 13, 1923:

I ate my meal in a car on the road near Cova da Iria [in Fatima], from half past noon to one in the afternoon, and when I returned to the Chapel, I heard the groups I passed exclaiming in admiration about a marvelous phenomenon that they claimed was occurring in the sun toward which they were directing their gaze.

Deeply doubting the repetition of the marvelous phenomena that had dazzled thousands of people, according to reliable reports, during the last apparition of Our Lady in 1917, I was about to pass on without even bothering to look. I remembered, however, that when I first went to Fátima on October 13th of last year, and upon hearing similar admiring rumors around me, I had seen nothing during my quick inspection, perhaps because I was filled with that spirit of doubt. I therefore wanted to be certain this time so that I could, with full awareness, give my testimony to whoever and whenever I was asked.

And, having stopped near a group and stared at the sun, carefully shielding my eyes from the direct sunlight, so as not to see anything, they immediately advised me to insist that I would see something.

It took a long insistence to finally see what amazed everyone and caused astonishment that I could not see it. And I saw with precise clarity, and twice, what the common people, in their imaginary language, very accurately likened to: almond blossom petals. They fell from a great height (no longer seeing them detach from the sun as the people around me saw them)

For myself, I finally, and after a considerable time, concluded that there is no such natural phenomenon, neither known nor described, thus leaning toward the supernatural. Today I firmly believe that this was the case, because I have had testimonies that allow me to reconstruct the phenomenon as it appears to have occurred according to these testimonies.

First, one could gaze at the sun for a long time and with impunity, seeing magnificent phenomena of beauty and color; then began an abundant rain of the aforementioned petals; and when I arrived, it was no longer possible to gaze at the sun, and the phenomenon, which had been quite lengthy, was at its end, which explains my difficulty in witnessing it now.

And from Joao Amael, on October 13, 1925:

I do not know why, I suddenly felt a desire to look at the sun. [I would hear] other educated persons admit having seen phenomena in the sun on that day and hour. I looked at the sun. Before that, nothing special could be seen. But now I looked at the sun without hurting my eyes, without any retina resisting. I became more intent. To my astonishment, the sight became even clearer. The sun turned on itself in a very small circle, and in the center it turned into a dark disk in rapid rotation. During some minutes, very impressive and overwhelming, I could clearly verify this strange process. Then, without revealing anything of what I observed, for fear of autosuggestion, I asked my companion to look at the sun and see whether it really appeared. And my companion was describing exactly the phenomenon, the same extraordinary phenomenon. The test was achieved. And I gained further assurance, when various other people later told me that they had seen what I saw clearly, at the same hour, as they kept looking at the sun, without the slightest sensation of pain.

Amael’s report of a miracle in 1925 is the last recorded case I can find at Fatima. I don’t know if this was when the sun miracles stopped happening there, or when people stopped including them in the Critical Documents collection. In either case, there were plenty of other places willing to pick up the torch.

3.1: The Ghiaie Variations

As far as I can tell, Fatima was only the second-largest crowd to have ever witnessed the Miracle of the Sun.

The largest was a group of 200,000 - 300,000 people in Ghiaie, a tiny village near Bonate, Italy. On May 13th, 1944 - the same day of the year that the child-seers of Fatima saw their first apparition - a seven-year old girl went out to pick flowers and had a vision of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin promised to return to her for nine successive evenings; at some point (although I cannot follow this part of the story) she must also have promised to return four times the following week, as large crowds gathered in expectation. According to my source, on the ninth appearance:

Many testimonies from the site of the apparition and from surrounding villages described an impressive solar phenomenon. The sun came out of the clouds, whirled dizzily on itself, and projected beams of yellow, green, red, blue, and violet light in all directions. The beams of light colored the clouds, fields, trees, and the stream of people. After a few minutes the sun stopped its whirling, and those phenomena began soon again. Many noticed that the disc had turned white like a Host. The clouds seemed to be lowering down on the people. Some noticed a Rosary in the sky. Others saw a majestic Our Lady with a trailing cloak. Some people, who were at greater distance, saw Our Lady's face looming in the sun. From nearby Bergamo many witnesses observed the sun become pale and radiate all of the rainbow's colors in all directions. They also noticed a large yellow light beam falling over Ghiaie, perpendicularly.

The blog says there were similar solar phenomena during the tenth and twelfth appearances, as well as on the following June 13th and July 13th⁷.

All of this is from a random Catholic blog; can we find clear testimonies? The miracle of Fatima was heavily promoted by Portuguese, Vatican, and American Catholics, leading to a large body of sources being available in English. The Ghiaie apparition has gotten less attention, and so I can find fewer testimonies, have had to clunkily machine translate some things, and had a harder time tracing the exact chain-of-transmission. Still, here’s what we’ve got, mostly from here:

Don Giuseppe Piccardi:

The people cried out to the miracle; I turned between the intrigued and the distrustful, and I saw the sun that-comes from the clouds - turned on itself and the speed of movement seemed to be skidding. At the same time I saw that he projected light beams, then, for me, almost constantly yellow gold. This color I contemplated it even when the sun was veiled with uncaught clouds.

Slightly hard to figure out from the machine translation, but I think this is Bishop Adriano Bernareggi:

At 6:00 PM I was at the Patronato for the feast of St. John Bosco. Just at that time I finished speaking in front of the church. Then I entered the church for the Benediction with the Blessed Sacrament. But most of the crowd remained outside because they said they had observed for about ten minutes the sun rotating on its axis, also suddenly changing color: yellow, red, blue. The sun could be observed without disturbance. The phenomenon was also observed in other places. I only noticed at the end of the service a yellow color in the houses, as when there is a partial eclipse of the sun at sunset. At 7:45 PM they said the phenomenon was repeated. I watched too. By staring into the dazzling sun, you could end up seeing the sun stand out clearly, giving the impression that it was rotating. Then everything took on a red color. But then it was clearly an optical phenomenon.

Don Luigi Cortesi, a local seminary teacher who was a strong skeptic of the apparitions and even borderline-kidnapped the child-seer to convince her to recant:

A shiver runs through me for a second. I react forcefully, forcing myself not to lose my mind, not to let myself be overwhelmed. I desperately squeeze my pupils and look at the sun: I see a large, clear spot without sharp edges, then, when my eye has adjusted, I see a disk of intense whiteness that seems liquid. Staring at the edges of the disk, I detect a dizzying rotation, like an electric circular motion, like a dizzying pinwheel, except that the direction of motion changes rapidly from left to right and then from right to left. I remember Fatima. Except this time, the sun revolves around a fixed axis, without moving in the sky. I return to the earth, to the crowd: I notice that the faces, the hands, the trees pierce through all the colors of the rainbow. It's natural, I think to myself: when the eye is offended by an intense light or an equivalent stimulus, it projects a stain on objects, which fades from red to violet and tints the objects it encounters with different colors; the stain disappears when the eye, rested, has returned to normal. In fact, a few minutes later, I no longer see those iridescent colors; every object has returned to its natural hue. The phenomenon of rotation leaves me dubious. A neighbor offers me his smoked glasses, and I look: the sun continues to rotate. He offers me a telescope, and I invert it, the screen, and look: the sun is still rotating. Then I can't take it anymore: even today, I'm not convinced that seeing a cosmic prodigy is worth losing my sight. Back then, I wasn't even convinced I was seeing a prodigy, since a plausible natural explanation for the phenomenon quickly emerged in my mind. However, urged by the neighbors to get excited, I remain silent. And I silence them by pinching and slapping the arms of those around me, which are stretched out towards the sky."

From the parish bulletin of Tavernola, the exact author is slightly confusing but it was either written by or signed/confirmed by Piero Bonicelli, local provost:

On the 28th in the evening of Pentecost, something happened that made a profound impression on everyone. At 6:00 PM sharp, a dimming of the sunlight was felt, accompanied by a sudden flash of lightning, first clearly observed by some bowling players. Looking at the sun, one saw first green, then bright red, then golden yellow, and then it spun around dizzily. At that spectacle, people poured into the streets... One can imagine their comments. The women recited the Holy Rosary, punctuated by the words: "Oh, how beautiful!" After ten minutes, the sun returned to normal. Comments? None. We await an explanation from the appropriate source. For now, we're content to hear the usual strong-minded people call us poor, deluded people, but don't you think this is a rather general illusion? In any case, for now, we're deluded: we'll see later.

The parish priest of Tavernola, director of the bulletin, sending this issue requested by Father Piccardi, wrote on June 27, 1946:

I must assure you that, as written, it is true, and I can also tell you that I was among those deluded that evening. To be prudent, I didn't go out into the street where people were shouting about a miracle, but from a slightly hidden window, I watched the sun change color and spin rapidly... illusion? Many of us here in Tavernola have been deluded. I can also tell you that I was pleased that such an illusion existed in Tavernola, since the people here have always had a great devotion to the Madonna.

There may be more testimonies at this site, but they’re in very old scanned documents that it would be too time-consuming to stick into my machine translation pipeline. Another source says that “On February 24, 1994, [the TV show] ‘Detto tra noi' (Raidue), interviewed some witnesses, who confirmed the solar phenomena of May 21 1944 that were watched by many people“. I think a few hours extra work by an Italian speaker could produce at least five or ten extra Ghiaie testimonies, maybe many more.

But as it is, we have enough to try something interesting: let’s recreate Dalleur’s analysis, but for Ghiaie.

At 6 PM, the sun was shining from almost due west. For the sunlike light source producing the miracles to mimic the real sun, it would have also had to have been to the west of Ghiaie. If we assume it was the same distance as Dalleur’s Fatima light source, it would have been about 2-3 miles to the west of Ghiaie, which puts it above the village of Merate.

We know from the last testimonial that the phenomenon was seen clearly in the village of Tavernola Bergamasca, which is about 22 miles from Ghiaie and 25 from Merate. An Italian source also reports sightings in Brescia and Piacenza, each about 35 miles from Ghiaie. So a Dalleur style analysis might conclude that this event also had a 25 - 35 mile visibility radius, similar to Fatima’s.

…unfortunately a 25 mile circle centered on Merate includes the city of Milan, population 1.1 million, which produced no reports of unusual solar activity. And Milan had clear line-of-sight to Ghiaie and Merate, and so probably better viewing conditions than Tavernola, which (you can see from the map above) has some intervening hills.

Might the miraculous light source have been like a spotlight, aimed in only one direction - that is, east to Ghiaie and Tavernola, but not southwest to Milan? This would contradict Dalleur’s Fatima analysis, since one of the most dramatic testimonies comes from the city of Minde, which is on the opposite side of the presumed light source from Fatima.

I don’t really think it’s possible to maintain a theory where this phenomenon gets transmitted through normal geography.

3.2: Mary Such Cases

At this point, the reader will get the general idea, and we can start moving faster, as there is a large amount of ground to cover.

Heroldsbach, Germany, 1949: The Virgin appeared to four young girls. Rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on December 8th, 10,000 people saw another sun miracle. Here are about a hundred testimonies, gathered with typical German thoroughness. An expert meteorologist brought in to investigate summarized them as follows:

If one now considers the testimony in detail, one encounters a surprisingly small agreement of the observations made. One witness has seen a red sun, the other a yellow, an orange or pink with blue and green, or a whitish sun. A silver one was also observed or all the colors mentioned in colorful change. One wants to have observed an oversized, the other a first small or normal, but then rapidly enlarging and rushing towards the viewer in a frightening way. Most of the witnesses noticed that the solar disk rotated very quickly in two or three phases of rotation for about a quarter of an hour.

The Catholic Church condemned the apparition and miracle as fake, even going so far as to excommunicate the child-seers. Later they relented slightly and un-excommunicated them, but their official position is still that nothing supernatural happened - this sun miracle was merely an overly enthusiastic hallucination!

Necedah, Wisconsin, USA, 1949: A housewife named Mary Ann Van Hoof claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. This is among the less plausible visitations: Van Hoof, who was raised Spiritualist, also claimed to have seen Joan of Arc, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. The messages she channeled seemed less like tidings of peace and love than like a particularly unhinged Truth Social post, and included warnings about the Rothschilds. Still, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15 1950, 50,000 - 100,000 people showed up hoping for a miracle. As for what happened next, Wikipedia says that “witness accounts vary significantly”. WaPo says that “observers saw nothing unusual” and LIFE mentions nothing out of the ordinary. But other sources report sun miracles, and I was eventually able to track down three testimonials in a summary of articles from a local newspaper, which states that “after a rainy morning…”:

It was about noon when Van Hoof came out of the house and a woman screamed, “By God, it’s really true,” and fell to her knees.

Then it happened that the Rapids woman and so many in the crowd saw the sun, covered with a dark, greenish gray disk, spinning down toward the earth. And she testified, “I thought the end of the earth was coming and fell to my knees.”

A Pittsville woman also described the sun spinning closer to the earth. “I and many other people, fell to our knees in awe.”

The Daily Tribune visited the Oct. 7, 1950, event — a 25-minute “last” message from the Mediatrix to the “throng” of 50,000. Responding to this seventh vision, gasps were heard from women who again saw the sun behaving oddly. A Catholic priest told reporters he saw the sun whirl clockwise and jump.

The Catholic Church condemned the apparition as fake, and declared van Hoof’s followers “a cult”.

Lubbock, Texas, USA, 1988. Really? Really? Nothing could be more natural than for the Queen of Heaven to appear to kind-hearted shepherd children in Portugal. Even an appearance in war-torn West Germany makes a certain amount of sense. But Lubbock, Texas? I suppose this must have been how the cool Sanhedrin members felt when they learned the Christ hailed from Nazareth. But that doesn’t make it any better.

Anyway, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15, 1988, about 10,000 people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. Here is an indirect testimonial, a man describing his wife’s experience:

A large crowd had gathered outside Saint John Neumann Church on that very hot August afternoon on the Feast of the Assumption. Mass was being said in the afternoon, and around the time of the Consecration, suddenly her cousin’s wife (a convert, if you remember) said “look at the sun”. When she did, the sun was pulsating, it would look like it was coming down to earth and then go back again, it spun around in circles, much the same as what took place in Fatima in 1917...and changed colors. She looked at it directly for 15 minutes or so without any damage to her eyes. As my wife looked around, the people in the crowd seemed to be bathed in various colors. During all this my wife even saw The Blessed Mother. The Blessed Mother was extending her arms in what appeared to be a welcoming gesture.

But not everyone had the same experience that day: her cousin’s wife and our son saw and believed instantly, but her cousin and brother saw nothing at all. Why did some see these events and others did not? We don’t know...not enough faith? Or perhaps they had enough faith, and they didn’t need a sign!

Here we have something special: according to the Los Angeles Times, one pilgrim took a poll about who saw what:

A push was on to assemble evidence for the commission in a lawyerly way. Testimonies from 247 people present at the feast had been recorded. The statements were transcribed by volunteers and stored in a computer.

Joe James himself indexed the information: 186 had witnessed the spinning of the sun; 75 had seen the Virgin; 64 Jesus; 18 an angel. How could anyone ignore the bulk of such documentation?

We don’t know how the 247 people were selected, but very naively it seems like 2/3 of those present saw the sun spinning. This also matches the first person listing 2/4 family members.

(the Catholic Church withheld judgment, refusing to either endorse or condemn the visions)

Benin City, Nigeria, 2017. On October 13 2017, crowds gathered around the world to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fatima miracle. One such commemoration happened in Benin City, Nigeria, where 30,000 people attended the National Marian Congress and witnessed the re-dedication of Nigeria to Mary’s Sacred Heart. As the speakers commemorated the Fatima event . . .

. . . someone pointed to the sky and shouted “It’s happening again!”. It was, indeed, happening again. You can read about ten testimonies here. I’ll quote just one, from Brother Joseph Obiemeka Azih:

Immediately after the 3:00 p.m. Divine Mercy prayers, there were brief showers of rain. Then came sudden brightness of the sun, which was hitherto hidden behind layers of dark cloud. We also observed rather surprisingly the mysterious shooting of the sun forward and backward. Intermittently emitting of powerful bluish and golden colors of light from “Our Lady clothed with the Sun.” The sight was indescribably beautiful.

We were busy staring at the bright sun steadily for more than twenty minutes without blinking an eye even for a second! People around us were dazzling and reflecting these bluish and golden colors on their dresses and faces. What a mystery! More than 30,000 people inside the arena were seen peering at “the dancing of the sun” bewildered. The miracle lasted for more than 45 minutes after which there was [a] heavy downpour which the Bishops present said [were] “showers of blessing.”

I was able to confirm that some of the people whose testimonies were listed on the site are real Nigerian Catholics whose existence is attested in other sources.

Two weeks later, there was another Nigerian commemoration of the Fatima anniversary, in Lagos, and a sun miracle happened at that one too.

3.3: Made You Gaze At Medjugorje

Medjugorje (Bosnia, 1981) is in many ways a typical Marian apparition site, much like the ones on the list above. Child-seers, warnings to repent, sun miracles, you know the story by now. But in Medjugorje, the miracles keep happening. Pilgrims - or, more cynically, tourists - go there just to see the sun miracles, and many come back satisfied. You can find blogs by people who went to Medjugorje hoping to see a sun miracle, and on their first or fifth or eighth or whatever day, there’s a crowd of people, yelling and pointing at the sun, and they look up and see it too.

Here’s an account from Catholic blogger Father Dwight Longernecker:

I was an Anglican priest living in England, in 1985 when I was invited by a group of Anglicans and Catholics to visit Medjugorje. I didn’t want to go. Being a former Evangelical-fundamentalist I wasn’t too keen on apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. I opted out. They insisted. I dug in my heels. They said someone else would pay for it. I didn’t want to go. They cajoled and twisted my arm until I said ‘yes’ [...]

On our second day there I sat on the balcony of our guesthouse with a large woman named Eleanor. As we began the rosary I looked up and the sun was a blaze of light in the sky. I looked down to the car parked below and the sun was reflected in the hood of the car as a blaze of light. Eleanor and I prayed the rosary together. I had my eyes closed. At 6:20 Eleanor gave me an elbow in the ribs and pointed. The sun was now a disc of white light in the sky like a Eucharistic host. Then as I watched it began to spin, first clockwise then anti clockwise. Sparks spit out from the rim of the sun like a firework. I looked down and the sun was a white spinning disc on the hood of the car. I don’t think this would have happened if it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. Plus, Eleanor saw it too. That’s why she gave me an elbow in the ribs. I am not sure how long this lasted, but when we spoke about it to our fellow pilgrims they said many people in the town square had reported the same phenomenon.

Some of these tourists capture the phenomenon on video. Unfortunately, the videos are of three types:

1. Videos of a bunch of people pointing at the sun, and shouting the word “Miracle!” in various languages, and obviously looking extremely excited, but the sun itself looks totally normal, and the person taking the video apologizes and says that their camera isn’t good enough to capture it.

2. Grainy, low-quality videos of the sun making staccato pulsations that don’t look like anyone’s previous descriptions of the sun miracle, but do look like a cell phone camera having a stroke.

3. Maybe one video which is actually good.

A good representative of the first category is this video from 2023:

The quality is very high. You can see everything clearly - at least on the ground. The crowds are obviously seeing something. The videographer interviews some people in the crowds and they say that the sun is spinning. But the sun itself just looks like a bright smudge. The videographer apologizes constantly for this and seems to think that if he could film it clearly, we would all agree it was spinning. Here’s another one like this:

Same videographer, different witnesses, same story.

We move on to the second category, videos that claim to capture the phenomenon but look more like a cell phone camera having a stroke. Here’s one from 2009:

Some sample testimonials from the comments section:

I, along with many others at the same time in Medjugorje, was able to look at the sun with the naked eye, in the summer, under a clear sky, without any discomfort. And we watched it spin this way and that like a top, to everyone's amazement. Then, when it stopped, it hurt your eyes and blinded you even if you tried to look at it with two or three pairs of sunglasses. It was incredible and I'll never forget it. Seeing it on camera doesn't have much of an effect on me, and I think it might be due to the lens not reacting well to sunlight. But seeing it with the naked eye is incredible.

…

I saw the solar phenomenon in Medjugorje with my dear late mother, along with a large group of people, in 2010. It was a wonderful and unforgettable spectacle. It was possible to watch it without discomfort. It pulsated and changed colors around me, red, blue, green... incredible. I've read various explanations, but none can match or explain what I saw. Only something from the sky could have created it. I rule out an atmospheric phenomenon. From what I've heard, it doesn't happen often, but only every now and then.

…

When the digital camera's sensor becomes saturated with excess light, the image is interrupted for an instant, that is, for the time necessary to bring the semiconductors responsible for recording the image back into operation. In fact, this phenomenon is visible only through the camera and not directly, as one might understand from the comments in the video. Therefore, it is a physical phenomenon linked to the control and measurement equipment (the camera itself) which malfunctions due to its incorrect use, namely pointing the lens towards a source that is too bright, such as the sun.

…

One thing is certain: if this solar phenomenon is due to the Virgin Mary, the epileptics who were there were not happy.

…

At least a few of the people who have seen the miracle in person describe the video as not completely foreign to their experience. I’m still a little skeptical because of even worse videos like this one:

The sun seems to be expanding whenever he raises the camera, and shrinking whenever he lowers it. This is some kind of auto-brightness adjust. If it wasn’t, and there was a real miracle going on, at least one member of the crowd would be watching it instead of praying quietly.

The best video I could find of the Benin City, Nigeria, 2017 miracle is also in the cell-phone-stroke category:

…and here is another one from the same miracle (remember, there was a crowd of 30,000+ for this one) where the sun seems completely normal.

But that brings us to the third category, the one video which is actually good.

In 2000, God told a prayer group in the Philippines to build a very big church. If it was meant as a divine test, they passed:

Since then, people have reported miracles at the site regularly. Most interesting for our purposes, some say that the Miracle of the Sun occurs there every Divine Mercy Sunday (the Sunday after Easter). I’m not sure this is right - I can only find evidence of it occurring in about a third of years - but that’s still a pretty good record. Here is the miracle from 2010 (starts at 3:11):

Although the sun isn’t vastly clearer than any of the other videos, it’s obvious in this one that the oohs and aahs of the crowd match up with the pulses recorded on video - so it doesn’t seem like it can just be a camera failure. A more experienced critic on Reddit agrees:

I would have expected that having dozens of videos of the sun miracle would finally clarify things. Instead, they’ve only gotten more confusing. The part that should be most easily captured even on blurry cell phone footage - the sun changing color and staining everything around different colors - is totally absent. Yet it seems like something must be happening to impress all of these crowds, and that the camera is able to capture some of it.

3.4: Any Little Maid That Walks In Good Thoughts Apart

What updates should we make based on all these other miracles?

First, we must discard our exotic meteorologic hypotheses. It might be barely possible for a rare dust storm, or a perfectly-timed ice whirlwind, to coincide with a prophecied apparition once. For it to do so every time a little girl says she sees the Virgin Mary defies belief.

Second, we may want to rule out the actual Virgin Mary, at least insofar as she can be considered allied with the Catholic Church. It seems that sun miracles are common even at apparitions which the Church denounces as misguided or heretical; surely the Virgin would not want to confuse people by lending miraculous signs to false prophecies.

(a true believer may posit that the miracles associated with real apparitions were caused by the Virgin, those associated with fake apparitions were caused by demons, and those that were neither - like Salema Manoel on her car ride home - were the demons again, trying to confuse us. I can only cite the usual prior against conspiracy theories; the conspirators being demons hardly makes things better.)

This seems to leave illusions/hallucinations as a leading candidate. We previously came up with four arguments that seemed to rule these out:

• Dalleur and others have collected testimonies from people many miles from the Fatima crowd, which seems to rule out mass suggestion and demand and objective explanation.

• Other people who look at the sun - from amateur Fatimologists to masochistic scientists to just ordinary people who steal a glance now and then - don’t see these kinds of weird phenomena.

• There were no reports of blindness or even temporary damage from Fatima, even though they seem to have stared at the sun for ten minutes. This requires either a miracle, or at least an explanation of why they did better than the scientists who stared longer and saw less.

To these, we can add two new objections:

• At Lubbock, 2/3 of attendees saw the sun spinning. But about a quarter saw either Jesus or the Virgin Mary, and almost 10% saw angels. The afterimage of the sun, burnt onto the retina, may look like a spinning sun, or a multicolored sun, or an ominious looming sun. But surely it doesn’t look like the Virgin with baby Jesus cradled in her arms and the letters I H S flaring above them. Yet many witnesses report visions at least this complicated, especially at Lubbock and Heroldsbach. And when we look back upon the Fatima testimonies, we find that 5-10% of them report things of this nature as well! We had previously brushed these aside - the Catholics don’t like it because it ruins their nice objective miracle where everyone saw the same thing, and the atheists don’t like it because it ruins their simple meteorological phenomenon, so the secondary sources downplay this kind of thing. But in the original testimonies these are pretty common.

• The Filipino video seems okay, and you can’t capture hallucinations on camera.

I will not be able to form an opinion on the Filipino video; I leave it for someone with better understanding of photography and film. In the rest of this post, I’ll try my best to rebut the other four objections: Dalleur’s distant testimonies and shadow analysis, lack of retinopathy, lack of non-Fatima sun phenomena, and more complex visions.

4: Contra Dalleur On Distant Testimonies And Shadow Analysis

A refresher: Dalleur is able to find four distant testimonies of the Fatima miracle:

1. A schoolboy in Alburitel (8 miles away) who says his whole school saw it

2. A poet in Sao Pedro de Moel (25 miles away) who saw it from his veranda.

3. A housewife in Leiria (12 miles away) who saw it with some workers

4. A child in Minde (6 miles away) who saw it while watching sheep

I hoped to be able to debunk some of these testimonies, but at least in the first case, that of the schoolboy Joaquim Lourenco, the opposite was true: the harder I looked, the more Alburitel testimonies I found, until I ended up with three. All three seem to be talking about the same event - a crowd who gathered outside the school to watch the phenomenon. Luckily, one of the witnesses adds a key detail. From Jaki’s God And The Sun At Fatima, p. 293:

She then reported a detail of great importance, namely, that in Alburtel it was “anticipated that the miracle would involve the stars”. She added that in the morning of October 13, “the people of Alburitel were darkening bits of glass by exposing them to candle-smoke so that they might watch the sun, with no harm to their eyes.”

So it seems the people of Alburitel were expecting a miracle of the sun, one person saw it and called out, a crowd gathered around them, and all three witnesses were from this crowd. This is, at least, an independent replication of what happened at Fatima, but we cannot describe it as uncontaminated, or immune to possible expectation/suggestion effects.

Moving on to the poet - Alfonso Lopes Vieria by name - this testimony is on shakier ground. We hear it secondhand, from the writer of a book on Fatima who claims to have interviewed the poet almost twenty years later - and then from a confirmation by his widow thirty years later, who told another writer that yes, he definitely said it. But in his book, Jaki raises several reasons for doubt:

• The poet says in his testimony that he had “no recollection” that a miracle was planned for Fatima that day. But it was all anyone was talking about, for weeks, and the roads the previous day would have been choked with pilgrims heading for the town. How did he not know about this?

• After the miracle, the local bishop put out a request for witnesses, especially those with unusual testimonies or those who had seen it from a distance. The poet’s testimony would have been priceless. But although the poet wrote the bishop about other matters during the interim, he does not mention having seen the miracle, and the bishop seems unaware of him in his summary of the evidence.

• The poet also corresponded with Manuel Formigao, a man who spent his life gathering evidence for the Miracle of the Sun and who is remembered as the foremost promoter of Fatima. But he never bothered to say “Hey, you know the thing you’ve devoted your life to? I have priceless evidence that it’s completely real.” He just mentioned other things - like how much he enjoyed a Fatima pilgrimage - and Formigao never mentioned the poet’s testimony in any of his books.

I think this testimony is on shakier evidence than most of the others.

Moving on to the housewife, Guilhermina Lopes da Silva, her story seems real enough, but she tells us that “I could not go [to Fatima] because my husband was an unbeliever.” She knew a miracle was predicted, wanted to see it, but had to stay home. She says that she was “looking towards the mountain” when it happened - I can’t tell whether she means she was deliberately looking for the miracle, or just happened to be gazing in that direction, but I don’t think she can be described as uncontaminated.

From the child, Albano Barros, we have only two sentences, not enough to know whether he was contaminated or not. But he was nine years old, and his account was collected thirty years later. How much opportunity might there be for recall bias to creep in when asked to remember a miracle that happened thirty years ago when you were nine?

These are relatively weak counterarguments - they perhaps give us a tiny sliver of ability to doubt these testimonies, but do not demand doubt. Are there any affirmative reasons to doubt Dalleur’s story of an objective miracle that took place in consensus reality and was visible according to normal geography? I have seven.

First, there were about 300,000 people living within a 20 mile radius of Fatima in 1917. If 50,000 of those had gone to Fatima itself, and another 100,000 were in the southeast area blocked by mountains, then 150,000 people outside Fatima still should have seen the miracle. Of those 150,000, we have four to six testimonies - compared to 100+ testimonies from the mere 70,000 at Fatima itself. Is this surprising?

Maybe not: it was a rainy day; many people stayed inside. And the event might have been very dramatic at Fatima, but only slightly visible as an odd flickering on the horizon elsewhere. Maybe you had to be outside in the rain, staring directly at the right part of the horizon, and not that many people were in that category.

Against this, the child 6 miles from Fatima and the schoolboy 8 miles from Fatima both described huddling in terror, thinking the world was coming to an end. This doesn’t sound like something only slightly visible as an odd flickering on the horizon. If Dalleur’s location hypothesis is correct, then the child is only 3 miles from the event source - the same distance as Fatima - but the schoolboy is still about 10 miles. Dalleur must believe that the event seemed cataclysmic up to at least a 10 mile radius. So where are all the other distant witnesses?

Second, we have at least one explicit negative distant witness. This is Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constancio, who we met before - she missed the miracle when her car got stuck in a ditch a few miles outside Fatima. But she describes the accident as happening “shortly after leaving Torres Novas”, which would put her about seven miles from the event. If it was visible within a twenty miles radius, she shouldn’t have missed the miracle at all!

Believers argue that Torres Novas’ view of the event was blocked by the hills. But as we saw above, if we believe Dalleur’s location, we can use trigonometry to estimate the light source’s elevation at >1 mile. This could not have been blocked by the small hills near Torres Novas, and so the explicit negative evidence from Constancio - not to mention the implicit negative evidence from the other 40,000 residents of Torres Novas - becomes damning.

Third, Dalleur argues that the light source was hot enough to rapidly dry clothes three miles of land distance away. If so, the area directly underneath it - which includes the small village of Geisteria - should have more or less ignited. But there is no record of any damage to the small villages in that area. Of course, God and the Virgin Mary can presumably choose to have heat work however they want - maybe this was a perfectly uniform heat defying all normal laws of radiation - but this seems somewhat against the spirit of the exercise.

Fourth, the witnesses at Fatima agree that a small window opened up in the cloud cover that let them see the sun (or “the sun”). Using the same trigonometry and some educated guesses about cloud height, the window in the clouds must only have been a few thousand feet wide. So why should people many miles away have been able to see the sun at all? Were they using a different window?

Fifth, Dalleur claims the light source was not the sun at all, but some sort of artificial miraculous object. But if this were true, how did the miracle end? No witness describes seeing the pale sun disappear. They only say it went back to its usual place in the sky. Later in the day, the clouds cleared and it became a normal sunny day. But nobody reports seeing two suns. At some point, either the first light source must have vanished (which would have been noticed), or there must be two suns in the same sky (which would also have been noticed). Therefore, it seems like the miraculous light source must have been the sun after all, which throws Dalleur’s calculations into disarray.

Sixth, although I was not personally able to follow the work Dalleur did to argue that the shadows in the photographs proved two different light sources, I corresponded with two people who did more thorough analyses:

• I came across Mark Grant in the comments section of Ethan and Evan’s blogs, where he was making some great points and had discovered sources that I missed. In his analysis, he argues that there aren’t enough beam lines to calculate shadows properly, that the direction the people are looking doesn’t match Dalleur’s claimed light source, and that the odd patches on some people’s clothes are more likely photographic defects than artifacts of miraculous drying.

• Georgia Ray of Eukaryote Writes also brings up the beam lines (is this nominative determinism?) and points out that there are so many steps involving estimation, with such wide confidence intervals, that it’s unclear whether the normal sun position is within the calculation’s margin of error (maybe someone should try Guesstimate?)

Seventh, although Dalleur’s theory somewhat makes sense for Fatima, it stumbles for Ghiaie and becomes completely incoherent for Benin City. At Ghiaie, the miracle was seen 15-25 miles away to the east (in Tavernola), but not 15-25 miles away to the southwest (in Milan), even though the line-of-sight from Milan was clearer. In Benin City, the miracle was localized entirely to one large field, while the rest of the city (population 1.5 million) saw nothing.

For all of these reasons, I don’t think we can conceptualize the Fatima miracle as occurring in a geographically sensible way. It was either localized entirely to the crowd at Fatima, or seen by a tiny number of subsidiary groups (like the group of schoolboys at Alburitel) rather than the large region within viewing distance of the supposed event. This removes one of the major barriers to illusion/hallucination-based explanations.

5: I Feel The Eyes Are Slowly Melting

We previously resolved to address three other barriers to explanations based on optical phenomena: the lack of retinal burns/blindness, the lack of similar phenomena observed outside Fatima, and the inability to explain complex visions like the Cross or the Virgin’s face.

As we assess the situation with retinal burns, it may be helpful to start with the opthalmalogical journals, which recognize a condition called Medjugorje maculopathy. Some of the pilgrims who look for sun miracles at Medjugorje do get retinal burns (or other forms of eye injury) from staring at the sun too long. I can’t access all the papers, but this one discusses four cases:

1. A 58 year old man visiting a Marian site in Ireland stared at the sun for six minutes. No miracles were witnessed. He had minor eye damage which remained after sixteen months.

2. A 39 year old man visiting Medjugorge stared at the sun and saw "a vision". The next day, hoping to repeat the miracle, he stared at the sun for forty-five minutes. Instead, he got minor eye damage, which remained after ten months.

3. A 23 year old woman visiting Medjugorge stared at the sun for ten minutes. She saw that "it went a deep green, surrounded by a gold rim", but she also got minor eye damage, which only partially improved after three weeks.

4. A 33 year old woman visiting Medjugorge stared at the sun for "a few minutes". She saw that it "danced and changed color from orange to black to white", but also got minor eye damage, which persisted after two months.

These fascinate me because they suggest that the type of staring-at-the-sun that lets you see the miracle, and the type that causes eye injury, cannot be entirely different. After all, cases 3 and 4 got both!

But they also suggest that eye injuries are less common than miracle viewings. After all, a million pilgrims go to Medjugorje each year. A substantial fraction either see the miracle, or at least look for it. But the cases of Medjugorje maculopathy in the literature number in the single digits.

Medical risk factors usually fall within a certain window of dangerousness. If they’re not dangerous at all, then there’s no risk. But if they’re maximally dangerous - jumping off cliffs, sticking one’s hand in fire - then everyone notices and nobody does them. It’s the things like drunk driving, or smoking, or leaving a child unattended near a pool - risky practices which often go fine but sometimes lead to disaster - that really get you. Medjugorje maculopathy seems to be in this same gray area.

Can we quantify the risk further? Solar eclipses provide an analogous situation of thousands of people staring at the sun for several minutes. Authorities warn against viewing eclipses without protective equipment, but not everyone heeds their advice:

Scientists have tried to measure the number of extra retinopathy cases presenting at eye clinics after major eclipses. A survey after the 1999 British eclipse found 70 patients, all of whom made full recoveries after six months; another after the 2017 US eclipse found 113. If 154 million Americans viewed the 2017 eclipse, and only 74% used proper eclipse glasses, that suggests that 40 million people viewed the eclipse without glasses. Suppose that 3/4 of those people were at least slightly responsible - they only took short glances, or they only looked during full totality. That’s still 10 million people irresponsibly staring directly at the sun.

Only ~100 of these made it to a clinic to report eye damage, for a 1/100,000 injury rate. This paper on a UK eclipse goes into more detail about the exposure times:

The time spent looking at the eclipse was reported to be seconds (less than 1 min) in 39% of cases. In a quarter of cases the time spent looking at the eclipse was minutes (range 1-45 min). The duration of exposure in the remaining percentage of cases was unspecified.

Taken seriously, this is pretty surprising. If there were a simple dose-response relationship between sun-staring and damage, we would expect everyone with damage to have stared longer than a certain threshold. But in fact, we get a wide variety of doses, with some people reporting damage after ~10 seconds, and others taking 45 minutes.

My very weak guess here is that claims like “I stared for three minutes” hide a lot of diversity. Many people who stare at the sun for a long time and get eye damage will feel stupid and claim that they stared for a shorter time. Other people who say they stared for a long time will actually have taken short “breaks”, or even made involuntary microsaccades that shift the sunlight onto a different part of the retina. Everyone will be blinking at some rate which might be faster or slower. And different people will have pupils that contract different amounts in response to light.

Finally, we previously discussed how the sun seemed to have been filtered by clouds during the Fatima miracle. This seems to be a common feature - it was also a cloudy/rainy day at Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, Lubbock, and the Medjugorje examples we have good videos of. Cloud filters do not make it absolutely safe to stare at the sun, and experts explicitly say not to let your guard down in situations like these. But GPT estimates they decrease solar radiation by a factor of 4 - 20x, and might push time-to-damage more towards the forty-five minutes side of the window.

Out of ten million estimated irresponsible eclipse viewers, only a hundred (1/100,000) came to medical attention. Out of a million Medjugorge pilgrims per year, only about ten (1/100,000) have come to medical attention. I don’t know why these numbers are so low, and I still don’t recommend staring at the sun. But it doesn’t seem completely implausible that the 70,000 people at Fatima could do it for ten minutes on a cloudy day and not cause a medically-noticeable mass blindness epidemic.

5.1: reddit.com/r/sungazing

August Messeen stared at the sun for a little while, and only saw mildly interesting minor phenomena; I said we needed to find someone dumber and more masochistic than he was.

The great 19th century psychophysicists like Joseph Plateau and Gustav Fechner stared at the sun for a medium while, and also didn’t see very much. Can we find people even dumber and more masochistic than they were?

This is the 21st century, we have the Internet, and the answer to this kind of question is always “yes”.

Sungazing is an ancient spiritual practice which, like most ancient spiritual practices, was invented by a 1900s quack doctor. According to its practitioners, staring at the sun for long periods heals your eyesight, improves your health, and confers spiritual benefits.

The r/sungazing subreddit is a veritable Athens of our times, with its 2,039 readers boldly exploring the important spiritual questions surrounding the technique:

There are guides to sungazing safely; the most important rule seems to be to only gaze around sunrise/sunset, and only for a very short period of time. I don’t know whether these rules actually make sungazing safe - the posts above suggest no - but it doesn’t matter; many users proudly ignore them. Sungazing Redditors often say they do their sungazing at high noon, or for extreme durations:

Have any of these Buddhas-of-our-age noticed unusual phenomena similar to those reported at Fatima? Here are some selections from r/sungazing and some associated subreddits:

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Most of these come from one topic in the forum, Sun Turned Purple? There are hundreds of other topics about optimal sungazing times, lists of benefits, and (of course) various people who got severe eye damage, and none of these people ever mentioned the color-changing swirling sun until this one topic, where one person says “has anyone else ever seen this?” and dozens of people agree that they have. Does that mean that lots of people might have seen it, and it’s just too weird to talk about?

These comments show some clear resemblances to the Fatima account. They talk about a swirling motion and color changes⁸. Many focus on purple in particular, but that might just be primed by the topic name. Also, compare to Jose Garrett’s account of Fatima:

Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground.

Still, the pattern of occurrences is confusing. Some of these people sungaze every day, but say they’ve only seen this once or twice. Others say they see it every time, and still others say they saw it the very first time they started sungazing. It seems like there must be plenty of variability - both between people (in their tendency to see it) and between times (in whether conditions are optimal to cause it). It’s still not obvious why some experienced sungazers go years without seeing it or never see it at all, but all 70,000 people at Fatima saw it immediately the first time they looked.

This is our most promising lead yet, but still not perfect. Let’s move on.

5.2: Visual Release Hallucinations

Some people at Fatima, Heroldsbach, and Lubbock saw things beyond just the spinning sun - complex visions of the cross, the Virgin, or other holy symbols. These confound optical/hallucinatory explanations and Dalleur-style “objective miracle” explanations alike. They seem to demand some sort of prophetic vision. Is there any way to reconcile them with a scientific/materialist story?

Visual release hallucinations are a class of complex hallucinations caused by visual loss, common in cataracts and macular degeneration. The brain, denied useful input, takes a cue from chatbots and exam-takers and simply makes things up. Wikipedia describes the symptoms:

Complex hallucinations may depict silent, non-interactive figures, whether multitudes of people, animals, or surreal objects, that appear life-like, as well as highly detailed landscapes or objects. The most common hallucination is of faces or cartoons.

If anything, this paragraph undersells the weirdness of this condition: in its most famous variant, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, the hallucinatory content is specifically elves, fairies, and leprechauns (yes, they are dressed exactly how you would expect elves, fairies, and leprechauns to be dressed). Why elves, fairies, and leprechauns? There is no consensus theory. We know that humans have hyperactive agent detection - we see faces in the clouds, interpret dark trees as menacing giants, and imagine storms as punishment from wrathful gods. If whatever “noise” produces Charles Bonnet hallucinations is too small to resolve into a full-sized figure, maybe the brain resolves it into a tiny figure, and then - groping for a top-down prior to constrain what a tiny figure should look like - settles on elves or fairies or leprechauns. In a typical case, the condition does not affect reasoning, and patients are able to infer that their hallucinations cannot be real. In an atypical case, you get this website by someone who believes that their Charles Bonnet syndrome gives them special access to a non-material reality.

If CBS patients can see leprechauns, can their hallucinations be shaped by other cultural archetypes - like religious beliefs? Unsurprisingly, yes. Here is an example of a CBS sufferer seeing the Devil. Here is an example of auditory CBS (maybe cheating?) centering around religious hymns.

We cannot invoke CBS itself to explain visions associated with the dancing sun, because it typically develops months to years after visual loss (although there are scattered examples of it appearing on timescales as short as ten minutes). And most people who see the dancing sun see it quickly, before severe retinal damage has had a chance to occur, and without any long-term visual abnormalities. We would have to posit an entirely new kind of visual release hallucination, previously unknown to science, in which the temporary bedazzlement of staring at the sun counts as the sort of visual release that makes the brain start confabulating. Also, I haven’t made a formal study of the testimonies, but I don’t think every single person who sees the Virgin Mary at a Marian apparition has been staring at the sun. Some people just see her on the ground nearby.

But of all the places to find supplemental evidence, I was able to get one story from Robert (father of Charles) Darwin’s book on his sungazing experiments:

Benvenuto Celini , an Italian artist, a man of strong abilities, relates, that having passed the whole night on a distant mountain with some companions and a conjurer, and performed many ceremonies to raise the devil, on their return in the morning to Home, and looking up when the sun began to rise, they saw numerous devils run on the tops of the houses, as they passed along; so much were the spectra of their weakened eyes magnified by fear, and made subservient to the purposes of fraud or superstition.

And another from, of all places, Facebook:

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The swirling, colorful sun sounds like the miracle of Fatima. The “tree of life symbol” might be a Purkinje tree, an established entoptic phenomenon. As for the rest, your guess is as good as mine.

For what it’s worth, evangelical Christians warn that Demons Enter By Sungazing. This could just be the evangelical Christian tendency to worry about demons being associated with every unusual spiritual practice. But those figures walking out of the lake will haunt my dreams.

6: And I Say, It’s All Right

Here’s the most sensible story I can generate for the Sun Miracle of Fatima:

There is some previously unknown optical illusion that potentially causes the sun to appear to change colors and spin. This phenomenon is rare and inconsistent, and usually appears only after someone has stared at the sun a very long time. This explains why it’s only reported in the wild by a few weird Redditors who stare at the sun on purpose every day.

The appearance of this illusion is somehow modulated by cloud cover. In normal conditions (bright day, no clouds) it’s almost impossible to summon without long periods of sungazing. But when the sun is half-hidden by translucent clouds, the illusion happens much faster. This explains why the Fatima, Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock miracles - as well as some of the most impressive Medjugorje cases - all happened just after rain stopped and the clouds were just starting to clear. It also explains why Fatima witnesses say that the sun was “covered in gauze” or “blocked by smoked glass” or “had a diaphanous veil” or “looked like it was seen through a window”. It’s also why, during the most impressive instances of the miracle, people say they can stare at the sun without it being too bright or hurting their eyes.

But like koro, the illusion is also modulated by expectations and social priming. Paying attention to the sun, expecting something weird to be there, is much more likely to generate the illusion than catching a casually glance of it. This explains why it is most common during Marian apparitions and other Catholic events full of people familiar with Fatima, and only very occasionally appears to weird Redditors who aren’t specifically looking for it. It also explains why Professors Messeen and Stöckl (who were specifically thinking about Fatima at the time) got better results than earlier scientists (who were observing without preconceptions).

At Fatima, the basic illusion, the meteorologic conditions, and the social priming all came together to a point where 80%+ of the pilgrims saw the phenomenon quickly enough that they neither stopped looking nor perceived it as taking unreasonably long. The conditions lasted ten minutes, during which time the sun peeked out from behind the clouds three times; to people who had been staring at the (veiled) sun with their pupils dilated, this looked like the sun suddenly flaring up monstrously large and hurling itself towards Earth (and speculatively, maybe something similar is responsible for the changes in the Filipino video).

A small number of mentally susceptible people, already in a vulnerable state because of this apparent miracle, influenced by a process similar to visual release hallucinations, saw additional visions, like the Virgin Mary or the Cross.

Some distant witnesses remembered that someone had prophecied a nearby miracle for that day. Because they were not so distant as to have totally different meteorologic conditions, when they looked up at the sky trying to catch the miracle, they saw it too.

After the miracle ended, the people who saw it were primed to see it again for the next few weeks - partly because they were looking at the sun expectantly, and partly because they were in a susceptible frame of mind (cf discussion of delusional parasitosis here, panic attacks here, or chronic pain here) - explaining Garrett’s claim that “now everyone sees [the sparkling rotations of the sun] many days and many times”. Even thinking about the miracle served as a form of priming, so further Marian devotions in Fatima and elsewhere became hotspots for miraculous activity.

This theory avoids some of the pitfalls of its component parts:

• I previously said that entoptic phenomena / hallucinations / illusions couldn’t explain the miracle, because normal sungazers don’t report it. This new theory adds modulation by meteorologic conditions and social priming. Absent these factors, the miracle will only occur for a small fraction of sungazers after many minutes spent gazing (producing the scattered Reddit reports). Given these factors, it can occur en masse.

• I previously said that mass hallucinations / social priming couldn’t explain the miracle, because there are no reports of these factors creating vivid hallucinations out of nothing. This new theory says that they only amplify a pre-existing natural tendency to this type of illusion.

• I previously said that meteorologic events couldn’t explain the miracle, because they had to happen regularly enough to regularly coincide with Marian apparitions. But this new theory only requires that the sun be partially obscured by clouds after a rainstorm. Depending on how you operationalize “partially obscured by clouds”, this happens somewhere between once every few days and once every few months, so its occasional co-occurence with Marian apparitions is unsurprising.

It nevertheless retains a number of weaknesses:

• It posits a new type of illusion which hasn’t really been observed in laboratories and which has only speculative mechanism (although one with close analogies to retinal bleaching and closed-eye visuals).

• It adds some ad hoc risk factors to the illusion - why should it be more common on cloudy days? Speculatively, it might be easier for people to genuinely stare at the sun (as opposed to making constant involuntary microsaccades away and back) at such times - but this is only a guess.

• It has only the barest skeleton of an explanation for more complex visions like the Virgin’s face or the Cross.

• It can’t explain true uncontaminated distant witnesses, and must either dismiss distant witness testimonies, or assume that they had been contaminated by hearing someone mention the possibility of a nearby miracle that day. In defense of this assumption, we have testimony that the clearest example of distant witnesses to Fatima (the Alburitel schoolchildren) were definitely contaminated.

• It can’t explain why some people said that they were sopping wet when the miracle began, but their clothes had dried completely by the end of it (noted both at Fatima and Heroldsbach). It must dismiss this as people not being very good at assessing exactly how wet their clothes were, or how quickly one would normally expect them to dry (see eg here).

• It can’t explain videos of the sun miracle, and must dismiss them as fakes or camera malfunctions (except for a few which might show the same sun-peeking-out-from-behind-clouds phenomena that I proposed explained the solar descents in the original miracle).

These are serious weaknesses. But I was immensely heartened when I finally found the primary source for one of the classic Fatima testimonies - that of the lawyer, Catholic activist, and Portuguese senator Domingos Pinto Coelho. After discussing his awe at witnessing the miracle - the part everyone always quotes in their Fatima writeups - he said (using the royal “we” for an official newspaper column):

One doubt remained, however. Was what we had seen in the sun something exceptional? Or could it be reproduced in similar circumstances? This very analogy of circumstances was provided for us yesterday. We could see the sun half-obscured by clouds, as on [October 13]. And honestly: we saw the same successions of colors, the same rotation, etc.

This testimony is especially precious because Coelho had seen the true miracle. He was already socially primed, he knew what meteorologic conditions to watch for, and he knew what the miracle was “supposed to” look like - that is, he wouldn’t notice some irrelevant visual blur and count it as exactly equal to the great Miracle of Fatima⁹. I would like to think of it as confirmation that we’re on the right track.

I hope this post doesn’t inspire another round of “miracle believers TOTALLY DEVASTATED by IRREFUTABLE debunking”. I don’t think we have devastated the miracle believers. We have, at best, mildly irritated them. If we are lucky, we have posited a very tenuous, skeletal draft of a materialist explanation of Fatima that does not immediately collapse upon the slightest exposure to the data. It will be for the next century’s worth of scholars to flesh it out more fully.

6.1: Sun, Sun, Sun, Here It Comes

…maybe including you!

At this point, you’re either bored to death by this topic or nerdsniped like me. If it’s the second one, and you want to channel your interest into something useful, there were several paths that I found myself unable to take in the time I allotted to this project. People have been studying Fatima for 108 years, but the Internet is comparatively new, and it provides a force multiplier for progress. I think we might be able to crack this one where everyone else failed.

Please don’t stare at the sun. I guessed earlier that only 1/10,000 people who casually stare at the sun one time will suffer permanent eye damage. But I’m not confident in that number. And even if I’m right, 100,000 people read the average ACX post. If you all go out and stare at the sun, then ten of you will go blind. This would make me very sad, and you even sadder.

But if you’ve seen a sun miracle already, please fill out this form. I’m looking for people who have visited Marian shrines, people who have sungazed, and people who just happen to have seen something odd about the sun in their daily lives. I know this has selection bias, but I want to get some preliminary qualitative data first. I’ll do something more formal on the next ACX survey, but that won’t happen for a while. And if you have something to share that isn’t a good match for the form, mention it in the comments.

Beyond that, here are some tasks that interested people could pursue. If you try any of these, please email me:

1. Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima, collected by the organization that runs the Fatima shrine in Portugal. This is entirely in Portuguese. A 633 page overview is available for free download (and so machine translation) and was my main source in this post. The rest is available only as physical books, $15 + shipping each. Somebody should buy the books, scan them, machine translate the testimonies, and put the translations online. The most important is Volume III, which contains some otherwise unobtainable testimonies. I think that there are ways to do this that don’t violate copyright law (the testimonies themselves were recorded in 1917 - 1930, so copyright should have expired); I also think (hope) that the shrine is most interested in spreading information about the miracle and isn’t going to try to file an international lawsuit over edge cases.

2. Someone accustomed to dealing PDFs of old scanned documents should translate the Ghiaie testimonies here and see if there’s any interesting information.

3. There are a few articles about solar retinopathy in the context of Marian shrines that I couldn’t access, including at least Nix and Apple (1987) and Campo et al (1988). I’d also be interested in Needham and Taylor (2000) on atypical Charles Bonnet syndrome.

4. Someone who understands videography (or maybe someone who specifically doesn’t understand videography, idk) should do lots of experiments with videotaping the sun on normal days and see whether they can replicate the pulsing effect seen in the Medjugorje, Benin City, and Philippines video. If it’s just a natural artifact of trying to record the sun with a cell phone camera, it should pretty easy to replicate. If you try this, please email me your results whether or not you’re able to produce the effect.

5. Someone should search for more information about Joe James’ poll of Lubbock pilgrims. Was it taken from a random sample of attendees? How much did the various categories overlap? Did it get any more information?

6. Someone with access to a stream of Medjugorje pilgrims - either because they live in Medjugorje, or because they work with a Catholic pilgrimage agency, or because they attend a pilgrimage-heavy Catholic church - should survey them. What percent see the miracle? Are we able to correlate the percent who see the miracle on any given day with the weather conditions on that day? Do people who see the miracle at Medjugorje ever see it again after they go back home?

7. Someone should figure out whether the Divine Mercy shrine in the Philippines really sees sun miracles every year, or only some years. How many people go there? Do they all see it? Are there years when people go there and try to see and don’t? Do they all not see it? Can we go there?

8. Under Dalleur’s model, ~200,000 people in the surrounding area could have seen the events at Fatima, but we only got 4-6 testimonials. Is this a plausible rate? We might be able to figure this out by finding a similar event - perhaps a very impressive meteor which was dazzling and colorful but didn’t make any noise - and see how many people talked about it. For best results, this should be around the same period (since, for example, many more people will talk about things in the age of social media). I don’t know how would adjust for the increased interest in Fatima and the people who went around soliciting testimony, but there ought to be something along these lines which is valuable.

9. Someone with expertise in ophthalmology or physics should point me to a better model for why some people claim eye damage after a few seconds gazing at the sun, other people can gaze for fifteen to thirty minutes without issue, and a crowd of 70,000 people did it for ten minutes at Fatima without enough negative consequences for any of them to reach the historical record. Is it all just cloud cover, or is our understanding of solar retinopathy incomplete?

10. I know that everyone who sees hallucinations says they look completely real, and if someone says the sun miracle looks completely real with 0% chance it’s just an optical illusion I probably won’t update at all - but I still have a perverse urge to interview someone who saw the miracle and ask them “so, did it really look completely real?” in a hundred different phrasings, and see if that helps in some way.

Again, please don’t research this by staring at the sun.

Bibliography: Virgin Records

In the process of writing this post, I collected a trove of Fatima data. Some of it came from long Googling or GPT queries; others from setting up a pipeline of PDF splitters, OCR software, and machine translation. In case it helps future researchers, I’m including the some of the most precious and hardest-to-find resources below.

1. My spreadsheet of ~60 eyewitness accounts with chain-of-transmission.

2. Document with the testimonies of the 60 most easily confirmed eyewitnesses.

3. Document with the weirdest and most interesting testimonies.

4. Documentação Crítica de Fátima, English translation (1-250, 250-500, 500-633)

5. English translation of Pier Angelo Gramaglia’s Fatima (beginning, middle)

6. Full PDF of Meet The Witnesses, by John Haffert (hosted on basicincome.com, for some reason).

7. Domingos Pinto Coelho’s Ordem article (original, English translation)

8. List of testimonies from Heroldsbach, Germany miracle (hosted on kommherrjesus.de).

9. List of testimonies from Ghiaie, Italy miracle (many on scanned PDFs in Italian)

10. Translation of the Tavernola distant testimony from Ghiaie.

1. This was written in a view-from-nowhere journalistic style; later, when Almeida was asked to write about his own experience, he said:

And, when I no longer imagined I saw anything more impressive than that noisy yet peaceful crowd, animated by the same obsessive idea and driven by the same powerful longing, what else truly strange did I see on the Fátima moor? The rain, at the pre-announced hour, stopped falling; the dense mass of clouds broke, and the sun—a disc of dull silver—appeared at its zenith and began dancing in a violent and convulsive dance, which many people imagined to be a serpentine dance, so beautiful and shimmering colors successively covered the surface of the sun.

Miracle, as the people cried? Natural phenomenon, as wise men say? I don't care to know it now, but only tell you what I saw - the rest is up to Science and the Church.

A few years after Almeida’s death, a colleague of his, Martins de Carvalho, said that in a private conversation Almeida had been much cagier and given the impression that maybe he was writing down what other people saw, but hadn’t been convinced himself. This was a big scandal in the Fatimology world, but Almeida himself was too dead to weigh in, and it went nowhere.

2. Plateau attributes his own blindness to an ill-advised experiment where he stared at the sun for twenty-five seconds straight. But modern biographers argue that the blindness only began years after that experiment, that twenty-five seconds is not long enough to cause permanent damage, and that it was more likely uveitis, an unrelated condition.

3. Cloud coronae are caused by quantum diffraction of sunlight as it enters clouds, and are considered “one of the few quantum color effects that can be easily seen with the unaided eye”. I am rooting for this one, but only because “did you know that apparitions of the Virgin Mary are really just caused by quantum mechanics?” would be the most Reddit atheist phrase ever.

4. The longest-lasting meteor for which we have ironclad documentation was a fireball in the Western US that was visible in the sky for forty seconds. But there are a few scattered conflicting eyewitness reports of the Tunguska strike by rural Siberians, and one of them says the impact body could be seen burning in the sky for ten minutes. Still, the Tunguska event destroyed an area the size of Rhode Island; probably ordinary meteors that don’t even reach the ground or produce shock waves will not equal its duration.

5. Modest dress seems to have been an obsession for everyone in Portugal at this time. In the account of Father Formigao, one of the primary Fatima investigators, one of the strongest objections he can muster to the veracity of the children’s vision was that the Virgin’s dress didn’t meet his modesty standards!

The angel of darkness sometimes transforms into an angel of light to deceive believers. Will this be the case now? Jacinta claims that the Lady's dress reaches only to her knees. Lúcia and Francisco declare that it reaches near her ankles. Is there confusion on this point among the children, especially the youngest? If not, this point becomes difficult to explain and resolve.

Our Lady could evidently appear only in the most decent and modestly dressed manner. The dress should have reached down to her feet. Otherwise, setting aside the hypothesis of a mistake by the children — permissible, however, because they might not have noticed properly, might not have been able to fully examine the apparition's attire, especially since they do not possess the gift of infallibility — the opposite, I say, constitutes the most serious difficulty opposing the supernaturality of the apparition and gives rise to the fear that it is a hoax, prepared by the spirit of darkness.

6. Source: Fatima: Milagre ou construção; the author cites a volume of the Critical Documents which is not available in English. Thanks to commenter Mark for making me aware of this and helping me track it down.

7. All six of the Virgin’s Fatima appearances were on the 13th of the month, she also first appeared at Ghiaie on the 13th, she made 13 total appearances in Ghiaie, and the last two sun miracles in Ghiaie were on the 13th of the month. It’s enough to give someone triskaidekaphobia - although the linked Wikipedia article says the number 13 is sometimes considered lucky in France and Italy

8. What is this, exactly? I couldn’t find an optical illusion that was an exact match, but the closest was the discussion of Level 3 Closed Eye Visuals here. When people close their eyes, many get minor visual noise. People who meditate, use psychedelics, or are just more constitutionally prone to visual noise can get more impressive phenomena than others, and some very competitive eye-closer ranked them into levels. Level 3 looks like this:

…ie a swirling vortex (not really visible in this image, clearer on the original page) with occasional discs of color.

9. Coelho, a lawyer by trade, was considered an expert navigator of church politics, and wrote his article in a climate where different Catholic subfactions were clamoring for people to acknowledge or disclaim the miracle, so one might worry that his claim to have seen it again later was part of some political strategem. But Fatima scholar Stanley Jaki describes him as a man of “unquestionable probity” and believes his story absolutely.