Fatima

Article

Fatima is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between October 01, 2025 and December 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “actually, he offhandedly mentions Fatima in three sentences, … to explain the miracle of the sun”; “to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fatima miracle”; “various responses to my Fatima post”. It most often appears alongside Substack, Fatima, Twitter.

Metadata

• Category: Concepts
• Mention count: 5
• Issue count: 5
• First seen: October 01, 2025
• Last seen: December 08, 2025

Appears In

• The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
• Open Thread 403
• Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
• Links For October 2025
• Open Thread 411

Related Pages

• • Substack (4 shared issues)
• • Fatima (3 shared issues)
• • Twitter (3 shared issues)
• • Wikipedia (3 shared issues)
• • A Ordem (2 shared issues)
• • Abraham Lincoln (2 shared issues)
• • ACX (2 shared issues)
• • Alburitel (2 shared issues)
• • Almeida (2 shared issues)
• • Antonio de Paula (2 shared issues)
• • Benin City (2 shared issues)
• • Campo et al (1988) (2 shared issues)

External Links

• • http://web.archive.org/web/20221104130431/https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/1m-bet-rules
• • http://web.archive.org/web/20221129133112/https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-accepts-500000-challenge-on-covid-vaccine-safety-efficacy/
• • http://web.archive.org/web/20221224061743/https://www.skirsch.com/covid/SaarWilf.pdf
• • https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190
• • https://rederror.substack.com/p/preliminary-research-into-the-miracle
• • https://web.archive.org/web/20230104080248/https://www.rootclaim.com/
• • https://www.amazon.com.br/F%C3%A1tima-Milagre-constru%C3%A7%C3%A3o/dp/8528622037
• • https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fatima
• • https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
• • https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-fatima-sun-miracle-much-more
• • https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html
• • https://www.richardhanania.com/p/fatima-and-the-sample-size-compensation

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

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

October 01, 2025 · Original source

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, in which 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 spotted or photographed. 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: A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.

Inline links: Checker shadow illusion, his paper, 2, Secrets of the Great Families, Adam Mastroianni’s blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kvPF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F30bf02a3-f57b-4a9f-a849-e7e318c65b6f_900x600.jpeg, source, 3, cloud iridescence, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y1Qt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9bbd9216-eb7d-4012-b114-bae56dbb0d4c_1024x681.webp, wrote a paper, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Id7a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c37c56e-bdf1-46e2-8d29-d395987be105_851x310.png, 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, a Guardian article, List Of Mass Panic Cases

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, in which 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 spotted or photographed. 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: A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.

Inline links: 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, a Guardian article, List Of Mass Panic Cases

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: 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.

Inline links: really drinking the glass of milk, Halifax Slasher, here, my disappointment in the skeptical community, why it worries me, lets you say, Eucharistic Miracle of Lancio, Miracle of Pellicer’s Leg, trapped prior, of mind, 5, key insight, 6, my source, 7, here, this site, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kukw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F192586f8-d450-4555-88ef-deb6bbe30416_842x613.png, Here, Wikipedia says, WaPo, LIFE, a summary of articles from a local newspaper, is an indirect testimonial, Los Angeles Times, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7J80!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F643b310a-4f76-4de9-8434-c8449f29f686_581x226.png, here, a sun miracle happened at that one too, an account

Open Thread 403

October 13, 2025 · Original source

6: Several people have asked me if I will be responding to various responses to my Fatima post. I’m working on a Highlights From The Comments post, but it might be another week or so before it’s ready. In the meantime, repeat miracles have been known to occur on the anniversary of the original, which is today (Monday). I still disrecommend staring at the sun - but if you see anything unusual, the form is still open.

Inline links: my Fatima post, the form is still open

Highlights From The Comments On Fatima

October 24, 2025 · Original source

A nun stated that some people had seen “something” appear in the sun in Torres Novas, also about 12 miles away, though she is not really clear on whether she saw it herself or is just relaying other people’s impressions. I continue to be confused by a pattern in which we have one or two secondhand testimonies from entire towns that supposedly witnessed a dramatic miracle. Ethan then proceeds to make the situation tougher for himself, describing two witnesses from 120 km and 160 km away. But a 160 km circle includes three big cities - Porto, Coimbra, and Lisbon - along with many medium-sized towns and small villages. When we combine this with the evidence from Ghiaie - where it was witnessed from distant Tavernola but not equally-distant Milan - I think these testimonies are more consistent with a few suggestible people saying “Oh, a cool miracle? Yeah, I definitely saw it too” than sightlines that spread through normal geography. I think people were more likely to say this if they were close (and so it was plausible) than if they were very far away (and so it was less plausible), but that this is some kind of gradually declining function, rather than the sharper function you would expect if there were an actual boundary. (one person in central Germany, about 500 miles away, claimed to see the Ghiaie miracle - I didn’t include this on the original post, because it didn’t seem credible, but I think it’s good evidence that sometimes people say non-credible things) I do continue to be confused by the Alburitel stories, which seem much stronger than the others, and perhaps by the Minde story, which is at least in the right place. 4: Heat I don’t think this made it in the post, but during a conversation Ethan answered one of my objections - that any heat warm enough to dry clothes in Fatima would have started fires and explosions closer to the source - by saying that unlike the light (which was visible omnidirectionally), the heat was a ray shot straight at Fatima, which didn’t affect anywhere else. I admit this answers my objection. I won’t even ask for a complexity penalty here, because it makes sense that a just God would try to avoid frying random villages. 5: Ending One objection I raised to Ethan’s not-the-real-sun story was that, when the miracle ended, the fake sun would either have to disappear, or remain in the sky long enough to be seen alongside the real sun. But witnesses reported neither of these two things. Ethan reports one witness who says they saw a fake sun first leave from, then merge with, the real sun. I have that witness statement too - it’s on my list of weirder testimonies that don’t mesh with everyone else’s. The large majority said they only saw one sun. If most people had seen multiple suns, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. If I understand Ethan correctly (which I might not, I’m having trouble interpreting this passage), he thinks that maybe the clouds cleared enough to reveal the real sun right as the fake sun moved into the same position as the real sun, the crowds were temporarily blinded, and the fake sun took advantage of this to disappear unnoticed. 5.2: Later Miracles I claimed that later miracles were obviously not objective-in-consensus-reality. For example, the Benin City sun miracle was seen by people in one field, but not in the rest of the surrounding city of 1.5 million people; the Lubbock sun miracle was seen by something like 50 - 75% of attendees. I said that this suggested the Fatima miracle wasn’t objective either. Ethan objects that there is no reason the different miracles should be implemented the same way, and that maybe Ghiaie was a unidirectional beam of light focused away from Milan, and that maybe Benin City was entirely subjective, but Fatima was omnidirectional and objective. I of course cannot disprove the possibility that God implements the same miracle in different ways at different times; the most I can do here is ask for a complexity penalty. 5.3: Domingos Pinto Coelho DPC was a lawyer and statesman who saw the miracle at Fatima, wrote an article about it, and dropped at the end that the next time he’d encountered similar weather conditions he’d tried staring at the sun again and seen the same miracle. I described it as a powerful testimony in favor of the illusion/hallucination/suggestion hypothesis. Ethan says that “the Portugese historian Costa Brochado cast doubt on the integrity of this report”: The articles of Dr. Pinto Coelho in A Ordem seem to be very much exaggerated. It is difficult to understand the manifest confusion he establishes between the phenomena at Fatima… and the alterations in solar light that he says he saw in Lisbon some days afterward. But in any case the historical value of the articles of the leading Catholic organ is almost nil… We believe that we can declare, after patient research on the matter, that the articles of Dr. Pinto Coelho ought to be read from a political point of view, since their objective was, as the author himself came to declare, to serve as the devil’s advocate As far as I can tell, this is just a historian named Costa Brochado saying he doesn’t believe Coelho. I don’t know why we should trust Costa Brochado, but since we’re bringing in random historians’ unsupported assessments of Coelho’s honesty, here is Father Stanley Jaki: Nobody could doubt that he [DPC] was a man of utter veracity, a point to which no proper attention has been paid in the Fatima literature. There he is all too often ignored and when not, he is dismissed as someone who had an axe to grind on behalf of Church authorities wary of Fatima…in view of Coelho’s unquestionable probity, one has to assume that he saw, with eyes unblurred, what he claimed to have seen, a repetition of the miracle of the sun. He never retracted, however slightly, his claim. As one who in his last hours fervently invoked the help of Jacinta who he came to venerate as a saint, Coelho would have hardly lived with the knowledge that he had intentionally mislead countless readers of his in a matter that so closely involved Jacinta and the other two videntes…Coelho surely must have thought that Rather than keep calling character witnesses, I think it’s more helpful to note that we now have two more testimonies of people who saw the miracle once, then were able to reproduce it under less holy conditions. One is Case One of Nix & Apple, who describe someone who saw the miracle in Medjugorje, then went home to New Orleans and was able to see it again. The other is person #14 on my list of survey responses. I emailed him and asked him to confirm that he was claiming that he could repeat the miracle when the weather conditions were just right. He responded: Yes, exactly. Excluding sunsets, I was able to focus on the sun when it was in a cloudless area of the sky only once (after the pouring rain had just stopped); on all other occasions, the intensity of the light made it impossible to focus on the sun. With translucent clouds, focusing on the sun was easier, and the visual changes (colors, apparent movement) appeared consistently after a few seconds. Even though it wasn’t asked in the questionnaire, I have a hypothesis about the physiology underlying the phenomenon, or at least the parts I experienced. Thinking back to those experiences, I might hypothesize that the intense white light of the sun caused the simultaneous formation of afterimages of different colors in the same area of the visual field. It could be that the visual system, in the presence of conflicting signals, instead of integrating the information by creating a white afterimage, rapidly switched attention from one color to another, creating the alternating colors. If this process occurs unevenly across the afterimage area, different parts of the area will change color at slightly different times, creating the appearance of movement within the area itself. I think the reason this phenomenon is not very common is because there is a narrow window between “light too bright to stare at the sun” and “light too dim for the alterations to appear.” The reason I was able to get these results repeatedly was because I was trying to replicate them, so whenever I saw translucent clouds, I tried to conduct the experiment. With clouds that were too thin I failed, but with clouds that I believe belonged to the Stratus translucidus or Altostratus translucidus category, I succeeded. I would have agreed with this earlier, but it’s awkward to have so many people who say they’ve seen this in a completely clear sky. Very speculatively, there might be some individual variability in the ability of the eye to adjust out brightness, and different people will reach their sweet spots in clouded vs. clear skies. 6: “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should change his mind.” Speaking of complexity penalties, I have a broader objection to some of the moves Ethan is making here. If I understand his theory correctly, it goes like this: the miraculous object at Fatima was not the sun. But God put a lot of effort into tricking people into thinking that it was. Even though the object was below the clouds, He made the clouds clear around it at the moment of its appearance, so that it looked like the clearing clouds had revealed a normal above-the-clouds sun. Then, when it was time to remove the object, He made it disappear at the exact moment that the real sun came out behind clouds, so that the crowds would be too dazzled to notice that the object and the sun were two different things. This leaves a bad taste in my mouth, for two reasons: God shouldn’t try to trick people.

Inline links: Nix & Apple

Generalized one-fell-swoop paranormal explanations. Demons are trying to confuse us, or the simulation is glitching, or there’s some kind of Harry Potter-esque masquerade overflowing with wizards and monsters that carefully hides itself from us Muggles but occasionally leaks. UFOs do not really lend themselves to an individualized paranormal explanation - too many weird aliens in saucers trying to send whichever message of peace and love is most politically popular at the time of the abduction, too few Matrioshka brains with nanotech - so bringing them into our attention may make us more interested in looking for a generalized paranormal explanation which is merely pretending to be all these specific supernatural beings, including the Virgin. I take this one sort of seriously, but I also think it violates a general heuristic against conspiracies and false flag attacks. If some incredibly powerful being is telling you that it’s the Virgin Mary, and discussing Catholic doctrine, and performing healing miracles, I think you should at least start with a presumption of taking it seriously. But at this level of distance from any well-established priors, who even knows? GedAtThwll writes: This account reminds me of the semi-famous Ariel School UFO encounter [in Zimbabwe], covered well on YouTube and Wikipedia. Basically, ~60 kids saw a “silver craft” descend, and aliens (of debatable description) came out and did various things (described differently by participants). Oddly similar to the silver sun -> hallucinations. I don’t know how much it reminds me of Fatima, but I agree “sixty people all say they saw a UFO and some aliens” is the sort of mass hallucination I claimed basically doesn’t happen. I was going to attribute this something about the psychic makeup of poor uneducated Zimbabwean children, but according to Wikipedia, “Ariel School was an expensive private school [and] most of the pupils were from wealthy white families in Harare.” One interesting feature of this story is that it happened a few days after a previous UFO panic in Zimbabwe - thousands of people said they saw some kind of fiery spaceship in the sky. This was very likely true - their accounts match a Russian rocket that reentered and burned up in the atmosphere around that time. So it seems like maybe the rocket primed people into a UFO mania, and that caused . . . sixty schoolkids to all hallucinate the same thing? At least to the point where some later investigators who are accused of maybe asking some leading questions could get them to give similar answers? Peter McLaughlin (blog) writes: This is excellent. One additional strand that I’d like to see someone tug on – maybe I will. The Irish nationalist poet W. B. Yeats has a poem about the 1891 funeral of Irish nationalist political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. The poem describes how clouds covered the sky on the day of the funeral, the sun could be seen through a gap in the clouds, and then a star “shoots down”. Most people who write about this poem take this to be pure symbolism (the next stanza describes a scene of pagan sacrifice that definitely is pure symbolism), but a while ago I came across an essay where Yeats insists that no, this actually happened. He wasn’t at the funeral himself, but he knew lots of people who were. He cites his unrequited love Maud Gonne telling him afterwards about “the star that fell broad daylight as Parnell’s body was lowered into the grave”, and quotes the writer Standish O’Grady: ‘I state a fact - it was witnessed by thousands. While his followers were committing Charles Parnell’s remains to the earth, the sky was bright with strange lights and flames. Only a coincidence possibly, and yet persons not superstitious have maintained that there is some mysterious sympathy between the human soul and the elements, and that storm, and other elemental disturbances have too often succeeded or accompanied great battles to be regarded as only fortuitous...’ Now, Yeats was exceptionally credulous and prone to exaggeration. And he wrote the poem years after the funeral: while I think it’s very unlikely, it’s not impossible that he was ‘contaminated’ by subsequent knowledge of the reports from Fatima, and this coloured the way he stitched together the testimony he’d heard. The two sources he cites are less obviously Fatima-esque than his poem (though they don’t contradict each other, and altogether they add up to something exceptionally Fatima-esque with the lights and the falling object etc.; and, again, my knowledge of Yeats’ biography makes contamination seem unlikely). Even accounting for all this, the similarities between Yeats’ poem and the Fatima sun miracle are really striking to me. I think this is a potentially very important datapoint, because it’s an almost entirely non-religious example. To be sure, you can define ‘religion’ so that Irish nationalism can be a religion, but it’s very different from a bunch of people huddling on a hill because someone told them the Virgin Mary might appear. And indeed Parnell was in the unique position of being the Protestant leader of a mostly-Catholic political movement, cutting across Ireland’s religious divide. If there really was a Fatima-esque sun miracle at Parnell’s funeral, it strongly suggests that the correct explanation is (a) non-religious/materialist but also (b) ‘objective’ (or at least as intersubjective as optical illusions) rather than a matter of pure mass hysteria or hallucination. Which is exactly what this post suggests. And Parnell’s funeral came several decades before Fatima, so genuine primary sources would rule out ‘social contagion’ completely. This has been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while, but if enough people are interested I may try to track down the sources. The main published collection of Yeats’ letters to and from Gonne starts in 1893, two years after the funeral, so the main source he cites might be tricky to verify. But there might be independent diaries or newspaper reports from people at the funeral who weren’t in Yeats’ social circle, and at very least I can check the quote from Standish O’Grady. Melias (blog) writes: This is my perspective as an Orthodox Christian, and a possible framework for interpreting Fatima as a real miracle without becoming a fire-and-brimstone Catholic. It’s possible that Fatima et al. are partially or entirely from God. It’s also possible they are partially or entirely demonic phenomena, though often repurposed by God to good ends. Either way, if I have good reason to believe the Catholic Church is not fully in accord with Divine Truth, these miracles on their own shouldn’t make me change my mind. Christ Himself tells us to believe for His own sake, not for the sake of miracles. I believe in the supernatural because of numerous miracle stories that are impossible to explain otherwise. But my non-materialism is specifically Orthodox Christian because I can’t explain Jesus unless He’s the Christ, and I find Him most clearly in the practice and teachings of the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy has plenty of miracles too, but that’s not why I’m here. I.E. Christ Himself gives you permission to decouple the reality of a supernatural occurrence from an associated claim to Divine Truth. You can use Fatima to update the chance of P(supernatural) without an equal update to P(Catholicism). Anyway, if you do want to keep going down the miracle rabbit-hole, the Orthodox equivalent of Fatima is the annual miracle of the Holy Fire. The main miracle - that a candle is miraculously lit while the Patriarch of Jerusalem is alone in the Holy Sepulchre - has supposedly been debunked since the Middle Ages. Even many Orthodox doubt it. But pilgrims regularly report a secondary miracle: For the first few minutes, candles lit from the Holy Fire don’t burn things, at least not how they should. Some videos [Video 1 here] Looks like this guy should have severe burns [Video 2 here] My brain tells me this might be possible with regular candles... but her sleeve gets plenty of time under intense flame [Video 3 here] They don’t leave their flesh in the flame for too long, but my brain tells me that putting the bundle of candles directly under your chin like the man does at 0:07 should also result in serious burns I pray before a single small candle every night. If I put my hand two inches above the visible flame, I can only hold it for ~2 seconds until it hurts too much. I find the videos and first-hand testimony (see Rod Dreher’s blog for one example) pretty convincing. Deiseach writes: Ah, I’m not pushed about Marian apparitions. The miracle of the sun is along the lines of the Shroud of Turin - you don’t have to believe the shroud is really the shroud of Jesus Christ, nobody is making you, it’s not doctrine. At the same time, if you want to venerate it (as you would a crucifix) that’s okay. Keep away from making extravagant claims, don’t contradict received doctrine, and it’s fine. Did a miracle happen at Fatima? I have no idea. I believe in God and the supernatural and all that jazz, but I’m not living and dying on “did this one event at this one apparition site really happen? if you prove it didn’t, oh no my faith is destroyed!” During the moving statue craze in Ireland, we had our own little local apparition. At the height of it, tour buses used to come with people to pray at the site. That has long died down, and I don’t recall that there were any earth-shattering revelations claimed by the visionaries, what remains is a quiet revival in people going to pray the rosary at the grotto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues There are a *lot* of alleged apparitions and private revelations that are never officially accepted by the Church, and a lot more which are condemned as fakes and frauds. Ross Douthat writes (on Twitter): Re-read Scott Alexander’s Fatima post (why not?) and I think this is where his analysis goes astray - after realizing there were a bunch of “echo” miracles like the initial case, not all church-approved, he decides that *strengthens* a skeptic’s case. But you don’t have to postulate demons to see why a big miracle might have non-church-approved sequelae. 1) Catholicism could be fallible in discerning which miracles are legit. 2) Even seers have free will; visions could fall on fallible ppl who run wild with dubious claims and 3) you’d expect a big miracle to have some sequels where enthusiasm does get the better of people (which any theory of miracles obviously has to allow for). Clearly (if He exists) God doesn’t force ppl to correctly interpret every experience He grants them, and so a multiplicity of miracle sequels, some of which seem credible and even produce video evidence, and some of which veer off into left field, seems entirely compatible with the original one actually being a divine intervention - if that’s where the core evidence points. I answered: Thanks for engaging in depth. I admit that was a surprising direction for that result to go, but I mostly stand by it. I think first, that the extra miracles demonstrate it has to be a subjective phenomenon. Partly because it was unclear at Fatima whether there were any people who didn’t see it (the two negative testimonies were such a small number compared to the many positive ones that it was tempting to dismiss them as lying, or confused, or looking the wrong direction) - but at several of the other miracles it’s much clearer that large fractions, sometimes a majority, saw nothing. Partly because in some cases (Benin City, Lagos) a stadium full of people saw it, but people in the same city, just outside the stadium, reported nothing unusual. And partly because the miracle can’t be caught on video (the one video that I thought was okay, the Filipino one, got picked apart in the comments). It being a subjective phenomenon doesn’t prove it’s not a miracle (it could be a sort of prophetic vision), but it at least opens the door to that possibility. And second, although I don’t claim to be able to know for certain what God will or won’t do, I think at least the Necedah event meets any bar a reasonable person might set for “too dumb and heretical to be a real apparition”. If overly enthusiastic worshippers at a fake apparition can report sun miracles, that implies that the human capacity for hallucination is strong enough / specific enough to potentially produce spectacular sun miracles in some situations. But once we admit that, it’s only a trivial extension to say that this same human capacity to hallucinate sun miracles could have been responsible for the original sun miracle, which was more impressive than Necedah in degree but not in kind. Together, I think these are a significant negative update from where we would be if we only had the original miracle, where we might have assumed (like Dalleur) that it was an objective phenomenon that everyone could see, and that there was no way anyone could be “enthusiastic” enough to hallucinate something so striking. Valerio writes: I am Italian from the south of Italy. I was talking to my mom about your analysis of the Fatima mystery (which is very famous here). My mom told me she had exactly the same experience when she was doing a “religious trekking” trip in a small city called Gallinaro (Frosinone). She was around 18 at the time (she is 70 now). She saw a pulsating sun, like it would get closer and closer and then the go back again. This effect repeated several times (3/4) and she got really scared. Importantly, at the time she didn’t know about this effect of the pulsating sun (she learnt about it later). Also importantly she claimed they were not staring particularly at the sun nor they were expecting any miracle. They were actually sitting down on a bench nearby a cliff eating a sandwich. She doesn’t remember whether if was cloudy or not but she says she was able to stare in the sun, so maybe it was. As she was coming down the trip, her group met a local lady that confirmed those types of visions would occur there. This place is famous cause a young little girl and her grandma had a vision in a cave ( little Jesus, no more details provided) few years back. When my mom visited the little girl was still alive, not sure about now. As I am writing this , she just told me the story so didn’t have the time to research it independently . Victoria F writes: I think you put too much stock in the Catholic Church excommunicating someone and how much that reduces the odds that Mary was involved or not. Pope St. Leo I and St. Joan of Arc have also been excommunicated. Many seers are given difficult treatment by the Catholic Church at first. Lot of people here say this is the the “best” miracle. I think the many spontaneous healings at Lourdes are perhaps better: https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf though I’m not sure how to get the medical records myself https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/the-medical-bureau-of-the-sanctuary/ Our Lady of Zeitoun is also perhaps a better apparition. At least it has some cool photos. I admit excommunication of the seers/believers is not proof that some of the other miracles were fake, but the Necedah one, where Mary gave warnings about the Rothschilds, and the “seer” also talked to the ghosts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, seems pretty bad. An acquaintance claims to have done their own analysis of Lourdes and found that the impressiveness of the healings predictably decreased over time as record-keeping and medical verifiability got better, but I haven’t seen his work. There’s an interesting Substack post by a Zeitoun skeptic here. Marcel writes: Speculative hypothesis that might be worth exploring: could the perceptual mechanisms involved in the Fatima Sun Miracle be related to those underlying Tögal visions in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism? In Tögal (an advanced, traditionally esoteric practice), meditators report experiences of multicolored, moving light displays in response to sky or light gazing. The parallels with the Fátima reports are striking: light as a trigger, dancing colors, and evolving visionary forms. If so, Tögal might provide a reproducible framework for studying how visual and neurological processes, shaped by expectation and attention, can generate experiences of radiance that are interpreted as miraculous or sacred. Another Buddhist explanation! I can’t find a Tögal source anywhere near as clear as Daniel Ingram’s work on fire kasina, but for what it’s worth, the symbol of Dzogchen Buddhism, the thigle, looks like this: …with some representations being even more suggestive: Nikita Sokolsky (blog) writes: » Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima [...] 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 I’ve ordered Volume III - though shipping anywhere outside Portugal cost $48 (not surprising for a 639 page book, I guess). They promise delivery by Oct 12th. » 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) Emailed you both. Thank you, Nikita! I’ve uploaded Campo here, and Nix & Apple here. Campo is only a few paragraphs, and contains little of interest if you’ve read the original post. Nix & Apple profiles several cases in New Orleans, including a pilgrim who saw the miracle in Medjugorje and then went home and saw it again in New Orleans, and a second person who skipped Medjugorje and saw it in New Orleans with no previous exposure. There was also an interesting case of someone who stared at the sun for 15 minutes with no injury, then tried again for 15 seconds and did get an injury that time. My days of not understanding the function mapping sungazing length to injury probability are definitely coming to a middle. The eye doctors who wrote the article only say that “Evidence suggests a great individual variation in the susceptibility for developing solar retinopathy, as the cause of the lesion is felt to be a photochemical injury rather than a thermal injury of the retina and retinal pigment epithelium.” The Ghiaie translations are in a form that makes them harder to upload, but there are about a dozen which contain descriptions of a sun miracle, all of which match the Fatima testimonies closely. The one I found most interesting was a monk nearby, who originally doubted the apparitions; he was in his monastery doing normal work when he saw the sun miracle, which included a beautiful white cross appearing in the sky. Other monks saw it too. The next day, he says that a secular newspaper claimed local astronomers had found some kind of ice crystal phenomenon responsible for the event, but he didn’t believe it. He didn’t clarify exactly where this happened (though his address was Castelnuovo Don Bosco, about 80 miles from Ghiaie) or when (though the testimonial implies it was at the same time as the Ghiaie miracle). Main Conclusions And Updates I’m impressed by the fire kasina correspondence, but the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.

Inline links: writes, on YouTube, Wikipedia, match a Russian rocket, blog, writes, blog, writes, Video 1 here, Video 2 here, Video 3 here, writes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues, writes, writes, https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf, https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/the-medical-bureau-of-the-sanctuary/, some cool photos, here, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tnHP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcaa90086-ed0b-4620-b0e5-502d1d34419d_800x800.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EVex!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c466a55-ea5c-4698-a27c-4947720edcfa_736x368.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vVge!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3052f661-b774-4dcb-9734-7c2e297c082a_225x225.jpeg, blog, Campo here, Nix & Apple here

[original post here]

Inline links: original post here

Links For October 2025

October 30, 2025 · Original source

26: Richard Hanania responds to my post on Fatima. He argues that if there’s some consistent bias that makes people imagine miracles, then the number of witnesses is unimpressive - much as you can’t rescue a biased polling methodology by increasing the sample from 1,000 to 10,000 people. I respond here. Richard seems to think that a certain type of less-than-fully-modern religious person - even when well-educated - can have a weird enough mental structure to hallucinate basically anything if it’s congruent with their religion. I agree that we have to posit something like this to save a non-miraculous account of Fatima; I only want people to understand how extreme an ask this is. Suppose that 10,000 eyewitnesses say they saw Richard stab someone in broad daylight. Can the defense argue “Well, people often hallucinate, and most of the witnesses were liberal, and the liberal worldview makes it attractive to imagine a right-wing blogger stabbing people, so who knows if he did it or not?” Usually we bound the power of mass hallucination at some level much lower than this! (EDIT: Hanania responds here)

Inline links: Richard Hanania responds to my post on Fatima, here, Hanania responds here

27: Also Fatima-related: in the comments highlights post, I linked FLWAB’s criticism of David Hume’s argument against ever believing miracles. Joe James argues that FLWAB, myself, and other critics are misunderstanding Hume’s argument. FLWAB says no he isn’t. They continue the discussion in the comments, but neither comes off looking great, and they don’t get anywhere. I’m unfortunately still confused - there are many cases where something that never happened before happens for the first time. For example, nobody had ever seen a grizzly-polar bear hybrid until recently, so “the universal testimony of mankind” was that this didn’t happen. But when a reliable person did see it, we had little trouble imagining that we were wrong and it was simply very rare, or a new thing happening now because of climate change. If nobody has ever seen a sea part before, but then many people say they saw Moses part the Red Sea, what is different about this such that “the universal testimony of mankind” suddenly becomes a disqualifier? Hume seems to be trying to make this same distinction in his eight days of darkness example, but there it seems like he is only saying he will accept non-religious anomalies, but rule out religious ones, because religious people often lie. But then what happened to the “universal testimony of mankind” argument? I kind of get the impression that he’s groping towards Bayes’ Theorem, but hard-coding in a belief that the prior probability of lots of religious people lying is higher than the probability of a miracle. If that’s his belief, then fair enough, but I guess I expected the much-vaunted Hume’s Argument Against Miracles to be something more than this.

Inline links: criticism of David Hume’s argument against ever believing miracles., are misunderstanding Hume’s argument, no he isn’t, eight days of darkness example

Open Thread 411

December 08, 2025 · Original source

4: The Fatima discussion successfully nerd-sniped ACX reader Nikita Sokolsky, who’s been doing great work finding, digitizing, and translating other sources I didn’t have access to. Here’s his version of Critical Documentation Volume 4 (he wanted Volume 3, but they sent him 4 by mistake; he hopes to get 3 later). Here are his versions of some Portuguese-language books. And here is (an AI-assisted version of) his own speculations.

Inline links: Fatima discussion, Critical Documentation Volume 4, versions of some Portuguese-language books, his own speculations

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