Fatima miracle

Article

Fatima miracle is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 01, 2025 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened”; “defuse the fact that the Fatima miracle is ext”; “the Fatima miracle is extremely creepy”. It most often appears alongside A Ordem, Abraham Lincoln, ACX.

Metadata

• Category: Concepts
• Mention count: 2
• Issue count: 2
• First seen: October 01, 2025
• Last seen: October 24, 2025

Appears In

• The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
• Highlights From The Comments On Fatima

Related Pages

• • 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)
• • Catherine wheel (2 shared issues)
• • Catholic Church (2 shared issues)
• • Cross (2 shared issues)
• • Dalleur (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://web.archive.org/web/20230104080248/https://www.rootclaim.com/
• • https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
• • https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html

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

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

Interlude: The Anti-Clerical Union As mentioned briefly before, 1910s Portugal was in a period of transition. In 1910, a group of proto-socialist revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy. The monarchy and church had been in cahoots, so the revolutionaries cracked down on Catholicism, closing the monasteries and persecuting the churches. This was a bold move - only an upper crust of educated urbanites were proto-socialist, and 99%+ of the country identified as Catholic, albeit at various levels of religiosity. In the 1920s, conservatives would regain the upper hand, overthrow the proto-socialists and restore a pro-church dictatorship. Still, the small urban educated ruling class of 1910s Portugal was a hotbed of atheistic anti-church sentiment. Probably the child-seers of Fatima were only dimly aware of this, but their prophecies were a spark entering a powder keg, and many of the more worldly witnesses were aware of this context. While reading through Fatima-related documents, I came across some pamphlets by Grupo Anticlerical, one of the era’s leading atheist organizations. They are totally irrelevant to our primary goal of trying to figure out what’s up with the miracle. But I love them so much that I can’t resist adding one as an interlude. I have slightly edited the machine translation for clarity and readability: To defend the sacred freedom of conscience—guaranteed by the original Law of Separation of Church and State—from the furious attacks of implacable Jesuitism—the greatest enemy of all human happiness!—the Anticlerical Group was organized in this town, similar to what is being done in many parts of the country! This was necessary. They call us to fight. We present ourselves courageously! The great, formidable battle of progress against Ultramontane Reaction, of Freedom against Tyranny, of Truth against Lies is waged again with enthusiasm and ardor! The redemptive dawn that the Portuguese people saw emerge on October 5, 1910, is about to be eclipsed, intercepted by the immense flood of black cassocks!... But in the dark night that seeks to envelop Reason; where moral suffering takes on tragic proportions in a frightening asphyxiation, the Light will once again break through!... the consoling light of elevated spirits... and like a sinister scarecrow, the grim reaction will flee in terror! Liberal people! Hear us! This fight is terrible! Many of our people will perhaps be crushed and tortured on the battlefield, but what does it matter?! Every war against reaction is a holy war because it frees consciences from the clutches of their enemies!... It is the fight of Justice against Iniquity, of Love against Hate, of Good against Evil!... To the fight, then, for the Progress that makes life beautiful; for the Freedom that redeems the people; and for the science that guides us all as an eternal beacon to the Light of Truth! Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral [two Portuguese aviators who had recently flown across the Atlantic] are prodigious spirits before whom our souls kneel religiously – boldly breaking through the air with the mathematical certainty of someone who knows the path to be taken to get from one point to another determined point; flying through the immense blue as sure of their route as any of us walking on earth, they showed us that Science is not an empty word! The power of their prodigious sextant, the fruit of immense scientific lucubrations, is more real and positive than the cross of Christ painted on their device, which could not even have saved them from falling due to lack of gasoline in the middle of the sea at the mercy of the waves. Their extraordinary journey, an adventure which moved us to tears, was the most resounding scientific victory of recent times! It was, above all, a powerful affirmation of science! Let us therefore make science our religion, for scientific religion is Freedom of Thought! To be a Free Thinker is to love immortal science, eagerly waiting for it to reveal to us the truth of the great enigmas of the Universe! And only it can reveal them! People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured. The victory of reaction, of clericalism, of black, cruel and ferocious Jesuitism will result in: the gallows, the acts of faith with their human destruction, persecution, exile, robbery, arson, the deflowering of women, the killing of children, the monstrous torture of all free spirits! The history of so many crimes committed in the name of God horrifies us! The Inquisition, relentlessly slaughtering, tearing, and burning the flesh of so many victims, is still today, in the twentieth century, a sinister specter haunting us!... O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children! Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs: Love Freedom! Love Liberty, O loving mothers, immaculate saints of our altar! We pray for them... for your children, who are the light of your candid eyes, the life of your life... for little children... for all children, tender rosebuds that retrogression furiously lashes, – love Liberty!. And you, O parents! Heads of families who so tremble at your loved ones, snatch them from the merciless clutches of the reactionaries who twist their brains and kill their reason! Hear us all, men, women, and children; listen: Freedom writhes in horrible convulsions... it vibrates in space, echoing from mountain to mountain, an anguished cry for help!... It is Freedom that falls, annihilated! It is Freedom that dies in the bloody clutches of Jesuitism! The Miracle of Fatima, people, is a ridiculous lie, it is a comedy, it is not religion! Come on, liberals! Let us all rise up from this criminal apathy and, without delay, fight not the religious sentiment of the Portuguese people, such a good people, a race of heroes, but rather the exploitation that clericalism is inflicting on the people, foisting upon them, at a good price, images of the saint —trademarked to avoid competition from other vampires! —the shamelessness!—and leading them, through suggestion, to wallow and drink madly, the miraculous water, foul, filthy water, full of rot, pus, and pestilent microbes that the sore flesh of the sick leaves deposited there in the washings! We, all as one man, will fight the reaction, forcing it to retreat and thus, with our efforts, we will save the Republic and the Portuguese Land from its fatal annihilation! … …anyway, Interlude over, let’s get back to the miracle. 2: The Skeptical Explanations Re-invigorated by the rousing prose of Grupo Anticlerical, can we come up with a materialist explanation for the sun miracle? 2.1: Pilgrim, Avert Thine Eyes Starting in October 1917, doubters have focused on one obvious possibility: staring at the sun is harmful to your health. If you stare too long, you go blind. If you stare just slightly less long than that . . . maybe something strange happens? Just to get a particular theory out there: everyone knows that if you stare at a bright light source for a few seconds, you get a temporary afterimage - often pink or bluish-green - on your retina. Suppose the pilgrims stared at the sun. Their eyes would inevitably make microsaccades - small natural jerking motions - and the afterimage would appear somewhere slightly different than the true sun. This might look like the sun turning pink or blue and moving in a zig-zag pattern. Believers in the miracle counter this proposal in several ways. First, although it might explain the sun changing colors and dancing, it doesn’t give an explanation for spinning, sparkling, or falling to earth and threatening to crush everybody (exactly three times in a ten minute interval, no less). Second, although witnesses describe the sun changing color, they also describe everything around them changing color to match the sunlight, which doesn’t match localized afterimages. And one scientifically-minded witness specifically describes closing his eyes to see if there was a persistent afterimage; he says there was not. Third, there are no reports of eye injuries or blindness from a crowd that was, supposedly, staring straight at the sun for ten minutes. This is a good match to witness reports (that the sun was unusually pale and didn’t hurt to look at) and with Dalleur’s theory (that it wasn’t the sun). But it’s a bad match to any theory depending on eye injuries. Fourth, this would require Portuguese people to be total idiots. Everyone already knows bright lights cause afterimages. Surely if you stare at the sun for ten minutes and get some afterimages, you’re not going to freak out and start screaming about miracles and the end of the world. Even if the peasants had somehow remained ignorant of afterimages their whole lives, the scientists and doctors in attendance wouldn’t be fooled. If we are to keep this theory, maybe we should posit some retinal phenomenon much stronger than the ones we know. Everyone thinks they know how much an illusion can fool you - “yeah, okay, obviously the cookie that looks very slightly bigger will actually be the same size” - which is exactly why the really good ones, like the Checker Shadow Illusion, come as such a shock. Squares A and B are the same color. Source: Checker shadow illusion. There’s no way around it: we need to hear from someone who has stared directly into the sun. August Meessen was a physics professor at a Catholic university, which sounds like exactly the job profile we want for this sort of thing. He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened. From his paper: In November 2002, I looked directly into the sun, at about 4 p.m. The sun was relatively low above the horizon and its light intensity was attenuated, although the sky was clear. I was able to look right into the sun and was amazed to see that the sun was immediately converted into a grey disc, surrounded by a brilliant ring. The grey disc was practically uniform, while the surrounding ring was somewhat irregular and flamboyant, but did not extend beyond the solar disk. It coincided with its rim. I stopped the experiment, since I wanted to be prudent, but I had experienced myself the initial phase of a typical “miracle of the sun” and I could explain it. The sun became grey, since my eyes immediately responded to its great luminosity by an automatic reduction of their sensitivity. This adaptation is not simply due to the bleaching of pigments in the colour-sensitive cones of the fovea, where the image of the sun is projected, but to secondary processes. By “initial phase”, he means the part where the sun looks pale and well-defined, like a full moon. This isn’t something I think needs explanation (see above), but he sure has explained it. Moving on: In a second experiment, realized at 3 p.m. in December 2002, I looked straight at the sun during a much longer time. After some minutes, I saw impressive colours, up to 2 or 3 times the diameter of the sun. They changed, but were mainly pink, deep blue, red and green. Further away, the sky became progressively more luminous. I stopped there, since I understood that these colours resulted from the fact that the red, green and blue sensitive pigments are bleached and regenerated at different rates. This is frustratingly vague. Are the “impressive colors up to 2-3 times the diameter of the sun” just the normal aftereffects of staring at a bright object? Or something surprising even to physics professors? And the spinning? What about the motions of the sun? I didn’t see them, because I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time or my brain knew already too much. Once, after I had been looking at a very long passing train, I had (for about 30 seconds) the illusion of an opposite motion. Joseph Plateau discovered that when we look at the centre of a spiral that is rotating at some given velocity about this point, and when we stop this rotation, we see a reversed rotation. It lasts for several minutes, although in reality, there is no motion at all. This is a good example of motional after-effects. The “dance of the sun” is initiated, however, by a spontaneous generation of apparent motion. This feels suspiciously like a just-so story. His explanation for the sun falling to earth to crush everyone - which he also did not see - is equally ad hoc: A very interesting study was recently devoted to this “zoom and loom effect”. It tends to appear when the brain is confronted with the two-dimensional retinal image of an object that is situated at some unknown distance. The brain will then consider the possibility that it could come closer, by performing an illusory mental zoom, where the apparent size of the object is progressively increased. This results from the fact that evolution preserved the tendency to take into account the possibility of a dangerous approach: a rapid evasive action could be beneficial for survival. If true, it sounds like you should be able to generate this effect not just by staring at the sun (ill-advised, causes blindness), but by staring at the moon. I would like to test this, but unfortunately I am writing this on the night of a new moon; I’ll check back in two weeks. Still, I am skeptical that no human being living before 1917 AD ever figured out that staring at a celestial body long enough would make it appear to fall to earth and crush you. Compare to much gentler illusions - like how the moon looks bigger right when it starts to rise - which everybody knows about. I was able to find a thirdhand report (Fr. Stanley Jaki → G. J. Strangfeld → consultation with bishop) of another sun miracle investigator, one “Professor Dr. Stöckl” in Germany, who made a similar experiment: After almost a minute (the time varies according to the condition of the atmopshere and the momentary condition of the eyes) one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun (this is already a sign of the highly excited state of the retina). According to my experience … this dark blue disk is somewhat smaller than the solar disk, so that the edge of that disk stands out as a ring beyond that dark blue disk. Then one has right away the impression that the solar disk rotates with great speed in one or the other direction. This I have experienced often enough. All this is a subjective appearance that has nothing to do with the external world. These reports are suggestive, but weaker than all but the barest Fatima testimonials. Dr. Messeen admits as much, saying that “I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time”. Can we find people even more committed - or reckless, or masochistic - than Professors Messeen and Stöckl? Absolutely yes: there was a whole subfield of late 18th / early 19th century psychophysicists who experimented with staring at the sun for long periods, many of whom went blind. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883, went blind in 18432) summarizes their work in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects. He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe what we now recognize as typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin (father of Charles; cf. Secrets of the Great Families). After stating that: The author has frequently observed that when he gazed at the midday sun for a long time, until its disk appeared pale blue, he saw a bright blue specter on other objects for more than two days. …he mentions how When looking at the meridian sun as long as the eyes can well bear its brightness, the disc first becomes pale, with a luminous crescent, which seems to librate from one edge of it to the other owing to the unsteadiness of the eye. Here is pallor, and at least a hint of motion. But it’s pretty different from spinning, and not really clear how it relates to the sun miracle. Gustav Fechner (1801 - 1887, went blind in 1839) may have stared for even longer; you can read more of his story - including his ensuing insanity and subsequent attempts to found a new religion - on Adam Mastroianni’s blog. But all that he records about his ill-fated experiment is that: …after looking at the sun through homogeneously colored lenses, if you close your eyes, the primary impression remains for a long time and the entire afterimage usually disappears without a complementary coloration having clearly emerged. These people are great, and they all sound like minor Sam Kriss characters. But after whole careers dedicated to staring at the sun much longer than any normal person would ever try, they report only the barest hints of odd phenomena. Indeed, if anything they saw less of interest to the Fatimologist than Profs. Messeen and Stöckl. Worse, all of these authorities saw their phenomena after seconds to minutes of deliberate staring. Surely if it had taken a minute of staring at the sun before anything happened, some of our eyewitnesses would have mentioned this; after all, several mention that they were starting to doubt after the child-seers’ deadline had passed a few minutes earlier. But by all accounts, the miracle was near-instantaneous. Although Messeen and Stöckl’s reports of miracle-like phenomena are intriguing, it doesn’t seem like they can be the whole picture. Let’s move on. 2.2: Aurora Borealis? At This Time Of Year? In This Part Of The Country? Localized Entirely Within Your Kitchen? Could the miracle at Fatima have been some kind of weird weather phenomenon? The main argument against is that if it were a common weather phenomenon, it would not have awed and terrified tens of thousands of people. But if it were a rare weather phenomenon, then the seers’ successful prophecy that the rare weather phenomenon would happen at solar noon on October 13 1917 becomes almost as impressive as an outright miracle. The argument in favor is that dozens of people have written books and papers about this possibility, we would feel remiss if we didn’t mention them, and anyway it gives us the opportunity to look at pretty pictures of interesting weather phenomena. This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported. (source) This is a solar corona3; cloud iridescence is a related phenomenon. I don’t know how much work the exposure length is doing in this particular photo, but I’m guessing more than zero. Coronae are also very pretty, and might explain the description of wheels and colors. They seem surprisingly common for something that I can’t ever remember seeing, supposedly happening several times a year in most locations. But they don’t spin, the colors don’t change or stain the surrounding landscape, and they don’t fall to earth and crush people. Let’s keep this one as a backup option and move on. This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding. But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance. At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat! I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them. But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”? Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent) Don’t they usually break windows? Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies? Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak? Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event4? And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance? We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, 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: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wkjz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcff92f63-ad21-42fa-ad6f-c412b71f8524_631x481.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mhyb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5fdf3d3-3e36-403e-95b9-f9fcbe7a06f0_1280x974.png, 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

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

Highlights From The Comments On Fatima

October 24, 2025 · Original source

But if He does try to trick people, He should succeed. I can’t say either of these two things with confidence. Doesn’t the Biblical God sort of try to trick Abraham into thinking he’s going to have to sacrifice his son? And what is God, anyway? Isn’t the whole world a product of God? Does the existence of mirages in the desert count as “God trying to trick people”? Does that fact that we know there are mirages imply that God failed? Still, Ethan’s take on the “sun” miracle of Fatima seems like an unusually clear-cut case of God trying to trick people and failing, and I’m uncomfortable with it. You can always add more overfitting. God’s goal was for the crowds at Fatima to be fooled, but then for Dalleur (2021) to figure it out, and so He achieved His goal perfectly. Okay. But speaking of overfitting… If I understand Ethan right, Fatima was an objective omnidirectional light show, plus a unidirectional heat ray. Ghiaie was a spotlight-shaped unidirectional lightshow. Benin City was a subjective omnidirectional light show limited to a single field, plus an objective unidirectional heat ray. God implemented all of these miracles in completely different ways. Why? Inscrutable God reasons. This isn’t a terrible answer. People often do things for reasons I can’t explain - if I could predict Trump’s behavior, my stock market returns would be much higher. And surely God, as a being with motives and knowledge far beyond my ken, should be even more incomprehensible. But there was an interesting recent Notes debate about a Bentham Bulldog’s post. BB said that atheists had many problems - how was the world created? how do you overcome skepticism? what happened at Fatima? - whereas theism only has one problem - the problem of evil. Evil is a big problem, but it’s at least nice to only have one. Some of the commenters - and I can no longer find the comment I liked anymore, but don’t take this as an original insight from me - pointed out that this is cheap. If you are an atheist, you need to answer many how questions. How did the miracle at Fatima happen? If you try to explain it with natural laws - for example, gravity - it’s fair for an interlocutor to point out that gravity can’t do that; it can only make things fall. If you’re a theist, you have a free option to convert any how question to a why question. How? Because God did it! Your interlocutor can’t object, because we know God can do anything. But in exchange, you now have a why question - why did God do that, and not something else? The sum of all why question - the fact that the real world doesn’t look like it was optimized for some specific plausible motive like goodness - is the problem of evil. Thus, it is exactly equivalent to all the inconvenient “how” questions you hoped you’d avoided. The commenter sarcastically compared this to an attempt to sweep all scientific anomalies under the rug as “the problem of uncharacteristicness”. How did Fatima happen? “Well, it must have been produced by laws of physics, so there!” But the sun spinning and dancing through the sky is hardly what you would expect from the laws of physics. “Yeah, whatever, that’s just the ‘problem of uncharacteristicness’, we’ve already priced that one in, at least we only have one problem!” This made me more attuned to questions of God’s motives. Yeah, it is kind of weird that God would create the same miracle three different ways, and we don’t know why. Yeah, it is kind of weird that God would try to trick people into thinking a non-sun-object was the sun, then let a few smart people working years later see through the deception. Are these problems of motive exactly as problematic for the theist as 70,000 people seeing the sun do impossible things is for the atheist? My gut answer is no. Should I trust my gut? Dylan: In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy Evan wrote the original response to Ethan, before I got involved in the debate. I was a bit harsh on him, saying that his part about the child-seers was fine, but calling his investigation of the sun miracle superficial and unfairly dismissive. Dylan of Chaotic Neutral writes In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy, and Evan additionally defends himself here. Before getting to Dylan’s post - yeah, I was unfair to Evan (partly this is because my brain has trouble remembering that Ethan Muse and Evan Murphy are two different people). In particular, I described his hypothesis on the child-seers as being that they “confabulated” their visions, a term that Evan took great pains to disclaim in his actual post. I was thinking of a broader definition of “confabulation” that includes hallucination-like phenomena - but Evan was right that if I had read his post carefully, I wouldn’t have used the specific word he said he was against. I mostly just skimmed it to see if he had a really good explanation for the sun miracle thing, then got annoyed when he didn’t. But Dylan has additional complaints. He writes: Evan DID give this miracle the attention it deserved. He spent 18 hours researching and writing his article, presenting much of the same evidence and coming to many of the same conclusions that Scott did, and he did it as an ordinary citizen with a “day job” and in a household that “does not possess a dishwashing machine.” What more could you ask of a skeptical individual!? Unlike myself and the other lazy skeptics, he actually did respect this miracle claim enough to do a proper investigation. And towards the end, yes, he decided to wrap up early […] To criticize Evan’s conduct here in this miracle debate is to set an extremely high bar that cannot possibly be met by the overwhelming majority of the skeptical community. Such exacting standards will ultimately only serve to discourage diligent skepticism like Evan’s and incentivize lazy skepticism like mine. I have two partial defenses of my own actions. First, I think the majority of those 18 hours were spent on the child-seer section, which I acknowledged was good. I didn’t care about that part. To me, the trouble of explaining how three children can say in a convincing and honest-sounding and semiconsistent way that they saw the Virgin Mary is a rounding error compared to the trouble of explaining how 70,000 people can say in a convincing and honest-sounding and semiconsistent way that they saw the sun fall from the sky. But second, I think Dylan is arguing that Evan should get an A for effort. I agree. He put in a lot of work, he adhered to good scholarly principles, and he hit all of the beats that a skeptical explanation is supposed to hit. The only thing he didn’t do, from my perspective, is defuse the fact that the Fatima miracle is extremely creepy, and I have no idea what to do with it, and I can’t fit it into my ontology. Evan’s only attempt to defuse the miracle was that it was a hallucination or illusion or something. This is a reasonable conjecture, but for me it was already priced in - as soon as you hear about a miracle, the obvious next step is “well, maybe it was a hallucination or illusion or something”. I didn’t feel like his piece added anything extra. Generously, some of his tangential points - like that Garrett and Almeida weren’t the perfect skeptics they are sometimes portrayed as - might have defused 1% of my discomfort. I think a reasonable conclusion for this would have been “I’ve rehearsed the obvious arguments for why it is possible to be skeptical of anything, I’ve found some tangential facts that maybe remove 1% of the mystery, but man, I don’t know, this really needs lots more investigation”. My research hardly provided any kind of brilliant omni-solution, but I think that learning about the Ghiaie/Benin/Lubbock/Medjugorge followup miracles and the Redditor testimonies each defused about 15% of my reluctance to accept Fatima as natural, and the fire kasina + Khomeini stuff defused another 10%, to the point where I’m only about 60% as confused and unhappy as when I started. I hope I correctly signposted this level of success/failure to the reader. On Miracles Other responses tried to assert a general point that we should always disbelieve miracles. I. Eugene Earnshaw writes that We Do Not Need To Care About Miracles. If I understand his argument right: there are many examples of anomalous phenomena (eg crop circles) and stage magic (eg sawing a woman in half). When we don’t know how these are done, they seem impossible, and (almost) no amount of armchair reasoning can produce a plausible explanation. But in many cases, we have eventually figured them out - some “white hat” crop circlers explain how they make their seemingly-impossible patterns, and some magicians publish explanations of their tricks. After the fact, we can see how these seemingly-impossible things followed natural law after all. So we shouldn’t worry too much each time we encounter a new miracle that hasn’t yet been explained. Okay, but - suppose that the Pope said “I’m tired of convincing you people the normal ways, I’m going to start blowing up mountains”, and pointed his papal staff at Mt. Everest, and it exploded. And then we asked him to repeat the performance, and he did so as many times as we asked him, again and again. Would we shrug and say “Nothing to see here, I’m sure there’s some reasonable explanation”? If the miracle were sufficiently convincing, we would either believe it, or at least think it pointed at something interesting (maybe the Vatican obtained super-nukes and is hiding them under mountains and choreographing their detonations - but this would be pretty important and very different from “nothing to see here”). Ben Landau-Taylor gives a related answer, reminding us that meteorites used to be dismissed on exactly these grounds. The science of the day didn’t allow for non-planet objects to be in space, so rocks falling from the sky was every bit as weird as the sun dancing and changing colors. “When President Jefferson was told that Professors Silliman and Kingsley had described a fall of stones from the sky at Weston, in Connecticut, he remarked: ‘It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors will lie than to believe that stones will fall from heaven.’” In the end, I think we just get back to regular Bayesianism. We have two hypotheses: First, that the world acts entirely according to natural law. Second, that sometimes it includes divine intervention (or very surprising natural laws that we wouldn’t have predicted beforehand). We start with a high prior on the first hypothesis based on our long history of seeing only natural events. When we see evidence that is more likely on the second hypothesis than the first, we update in favor of it. We should remember that “more likely on the second hypothesis than the first” is full of pitfalls - on the first hypothesis, it’s likely that there will be many skilled fraudsters and stage magicians, so even very strange-seeming anomalies might not be very unlikely under it. Still, at the point where the Pope starts blowing up mountains, maybe you think it’s pretty unlikely that stage magic could accomplish this, and you update a little. II. Omne Bonum makes a different point: there are many possible miracles. Most do not occur. Yes, a few of them do. But can we be sure it’s above the background rate? Even if there are no true miracles, you’ll get one-in-a-million coincidences one-millionth of the time. If you’re not good at accounting for the 999,999 failures - and people aren’t - this will look impressive. Against this, what is the base rate for the sun changing color and dropping out of the sky, at the precise time that child-seers prophecied a miracle would occur? Seems lower than one in a million. Impossible things should never happen. Something as simple as my pen vanishing from my desk, in plain sight, while I am looking straight at it, should completely demolish all of my priors against miracles and make me near-certain that something beyond normal physical law is going on - or that I’m crazy, or dreaming, or something other than just “well it was a coincidence”. III. FLWAB takes on Hume’s argument against miracles (see also Kenny Easwaran here), which - sorry, I realize it’s suspicious to say this about a famous philosopher - is extremely bad. Hume argues that a miracle is a violation of natural law. And a natural law is something that is always true. But since it’s always true, it can’t be violated. And if we eventually confirmed that it was violated, then we were wrong about it being a natural law. Which means its violation wasn’t even a real miracle anyway. This seems to be a purely semantic argument. We know that the Red Sea usually stays in one place. But suppose Moses lifts his staff and parts the Red Sea, and that all of this is very convincing (we witness it personally, we measure the sea with various instruments, etc). I think Hume would have to say that we have disproven the natural law “the Red Sea usually stays in one place” - but only in favor of a new natural law “the Red Sea stays in one place except when Moses raises his staff”. And since we have never observed a violation of this new natural law, no miracle has occurred! Against this, we can call the way things work 99.999% of the time, when God isn’t acting directly, and when everything is proceeding via predictable material patterns “natural law”, and the very rare deviations that only occur in the presence of God or other extremely holy figures “miracles”. If for some reason you hate that terminology, come up with a new word, “shmiracle”, for the abnormal phenomena that only occur secondary to God’s direct intervention, and then we can argue whether shmiracles exist. IV. Why am I insisting on this so hard? This question of miracles is no different from every other question, where confirmation bias is a part of normal Bayesian reasoning. If you believe that vaccines don’t cause autism, then any given study showing that they do is likely to be a fraud or a mistake - especially given the history of such frauds, and the political pressures for producing them. But you gained your belief that vaccines don’t cause autism through some normal amount of evidence, and if the evidence that they did cause it ever become truly overwhelming, you would switch sides. The key skill of rationality is to know when to update your beliefs how much. These arguments feel like sleights-of-hand arguing that you can avoid ever updating on this question. I don’t think Bayesian reasoning provides an excuse for this. I think some of these arguments attempt to make an objection that the prior probability of miracles is zero, and so no matter how much evidence you get, you can never update towards them. But the prior probability of miracles isn’t zero unless either the prior probability of God’s existence is zero, or the probability that God intervenes in the universe is zero. I don’t know any infinitely-convincing argument for either of these points, so I think miracles have a prior probability above zero, which means we have to treat them the same as any other hypothesis. Yes, we will need many extra guardrails and cautions and good heuristics to prevent ourselves from getting bamboozled by the pitfalls that lurk in this area in particular. But that’s true of everything! You also need extra guardrails and cautions and heuristics to prevent yourself from getting bamboozled by scientific studies! There’s no substitute for doing the work. Actual Highlights From The Actual Comments Josh (blog) writes: I’d add that we have at least one verified case where a sun miracle was occuring, and an actual group of fedora wearing atheists were present with a modified telescope, and did not see anything interesting. >> “At the Conyers site, the Georgia Skeptics group set up a telescope outfitted with a vision-protecting Mylar solar filter, and on one occasion I participated in the experiment. Becky Long, president of the organization, stated that more than two hundred people had viewed the sun through one of the solar filters and not a single person saw anything unusual (Long 1992, 3; see figure 1).” https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2009/11/22164423/p14.pdf Funny, but they don’t provide information like whether people were seeing sun miracles at the exact moment the telescope was being used, or whether anyone who could see a sun miracle without the telescope switched to using the telescope and then it stopped. They just say they brought a telescope to a Marian site where some people had seen sun miracles at some point. Even if they clarified that some people had used the telescope while seeing a sun miracle and had it immediately stop miracle-ing, I don’t think this would update me very much. We know it’s not the real sun (Ethan says fake sun, I say subjective phenomenon), and we know the non-Fatima miracles aren’t objective (Ethan says only Fatima was objective, I say none of them were objective). John Schilling writes: Twenty-nine *thousand* words on this subject, and none of them are “unidentified”, “flying”, or “object”. Well, OK, there are a few uses of that last, but in the strained phrasing of “UFO-like object”, as if we are preemptively discounting the possibility that sun miracles are actually UFOs. Sun miracles are actually UFOs, full stop. Not “flying saucers”, not “alien spaceships”, maybe “divine miracles”, but definitely “unidentified flying objects”. We invented that last phrase for a reason, and this is exactly that reason. Which means, the thing I learned from this is that the younglings have completely forgotten all that was learned in the Before Times about UFOs. And that, in this context, Scott is a youngling - UFOs seem to have faded from pop culture in the 1990s. Thanks for making me feel old, Scott :-) With the benefit of age and experience, I read the first few paragraphs, made the tentative conclusion that this was almost certainly [see section 6], but figured Scott wouldn’t be doing this deep a dive if it was that simple. And here we are. It probably is just that simple, and now we can back that up with a fairly exhaustive look at the alternatives. For which, unironically, thank you Scott. It’s good to sometimes double-, triple-, and quadruple-check the obvious conclusion. But for those of us who grew up in the 1980s, who were “rationalists” when rationalism hadn’t been invented and we had to call ourselves “skeptics”, UFOs were as important a subject of rationalist/skeptical inquiry as is AI risk today (and for about the same reason). People learned an awful lot in those days. One of those things is that most people don’t spend much time really looking at the sky and will consistently fail to recognize even slightly-unusual phenomena, like the sun partially veiled by clouds. And the other, more important thing is that when presented with an image they don’t recognize, people will very predictably see what their culture has taught them to expect to see. In 1880s-1890s America, any weird thing in the sky was clearly a fantastic airship, built by some mad scientist out of a Jules Verne novel, and was perceived with a wealth of surrounding detail all aligned with that model. 1950s-1980s America, the same things were clearly “flying saucers”, fantastic alien spaceships piloted by little green or grey men, with the same level of impossible detail. And anywhere you’ve got ten thousand devout Catholics fervently hoping to see a Miracle involving the Sun, and the weather makes the sun look a bit wonky... For an old-school skeptical experiment at understanding this effect, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1980/04/22165441/p34.pdf TL, DR, a gathering of UFO enthusiasts expecting to see a flying saucer in the night sky, are presented with thirty seconds of a monochromatic point source of light at ground level, stationary and unchanging except for one brief interruption. What is perceived, is an object high in the sky with finite angular size and geometric shape, of multiple colors, and conspicuously moving, all consistent with the pop-culture concept of a flying saucer and not some prankster with a spotlight. I considered discussing the UFO angle (the section heading would have been “Virgin Galactic”), but in the end I couldn’t justify it. Yes, the phenomenon is trivially a UFO (in the sense of a thing in the sky we don’t understand). But does this help us? When I think of UFOs, I think of people arguing about whether something was the planet Venus, or a weather balloon, or aliens. But Fatima obviously wasn’t Venus or a balloon (though, uh, see here for a dissenting take). And if it was aliens, you’d have to explain why they pretended to be the Virgin Mary and discussed a bunch of Catholic inside-baseball with a trio of child-seers for several months. So what’s left? When I asked John, he answered: UFOs, are just people seeing something they don’t understand and trying to interpret it by an overweighted, culturally-transmitted prior. Which differs from culture to culture. And that’s something we know a lot about. Which you seem to have independently rediscovered, but I can’t help thinking you’d have got there a lot faster if you’d had a proper map of the territory. A map which includes no aliens outside of the imaginary sort. Maybe one way to rescue the UFO connection is to say that there’s so much weirdness that we should be less willing to take any given example of weirdness on its own terms. I asked in the comments for other examples of miracles as compelling as Fatima. People suggested some of the better-verified reincarnation accounts, some of the better-verified UFO sightings, and some of the more spectacular psi phenomena. I don’t know if these are all exactly as strong as Fatima, but I think many of them are closer to Fatima than to the traditional skeptical conception of an alcoholic liar asserting with zero evidence that he dun saw dem aliens one night. When viewing all of these anomalies as a gestalt, we can go four different directions: Individualized natural explanations. The UFOs were swamp gas and weather balloons. The reincarnation stories are toddlers who are naturally gifted at cold reading. Fatima was entoptic phenomena. Sea serpents are really big oarfish.

Inline links: an interesting recent Notes debate, In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy, defends himself here, We Do Not Need To Care About Miracles, explain, gives, Omne Bonum, takes on Hume’s argument against miracles, here, confirmation bias is a part of normal Bayesian reasoning, blog, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2009/11/22164423/p14.pdf, writes, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1980/04/22165441/p34.pdf, see here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!H6Qh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6087bbd3-2496-46b1-87e0-f96ce73c19d2_522x223.png

I didn’t mention it in my post because it seemed to be an extraneous detail, but this reader seems to have independently noticed something similar. 3: As a child, I was on many boring car rides with no one to talk to. I would stare out the window often, and occasionally, just at the sun. I would do this -specifically- because of this phenomenon- I had always assumed everyone knew/understood this was something that happened. It was surreal reading it described as a mystery. The way it would appear to me is that if I stared at the sun long enough (through a glass car window), there would appear a very strong blue after image (light blue- as a child, I thought it similar to the color of Neptune/Uranus as shown in books). This after image would be the same size as and almost- but not quite- line up with the sun. It would then proceed to circle the actual sun. The image was very crisp, but the movement was not- moving in a sort of ‘pulse’ (imagine very slow animation, the image not smoothly moving but jumping from one position to the next to give the illusion of movement). This movement was centered roughly around the sun, but since the image was offset it gave an appearance of ‘corkscrewing’ or spinning, not a perfect circle (that is, the image overlapped the center of rotation, rather than rotating around it). The circling would continue some time (as a child I remember thinking it went for a long time, as an adult I would guess in reality it was only some seconds, certainly less than a minute), and would end when I either looked away or the sun became too bright and I was forced to shut my eyes … What made me realize this is definitely, in my mind, the same as being described is because as a child I was convinced the image was falling- I did not, as a child- think it was the sun itself, but thought that it might be the planet Neptune (because it was blue and a large orb (appearing as a disc to the eye) somewhere, presumably, in space). But as said, I was at the time concerned it was falling, and would occasionally badger my parents about it- whether it was possible the blue orb I saw in front of the sun was Neptune, and if so whether it was going to hit the earth because it looked like it was coming towards us. I understood it wasn’t something you would see if you just looked at the sun- rather in my child mind, I assumed it was in some way that staring at the sun let me see more clearly things around it, though as I grew older I increasingly understood the image to likely be caused by staring, rather than revealed. I remember as a child sort of knowing it was an afterimage but also that it was much sharper and more clear than most afterimages. 4: I was in a room at the boarding school I used to attend, looking out through the window. I recall it being low in the sky but circumstancially it would have been midday (so I presume winter months, since I don’t recall thinking that was unusual). The sky was fairly clear. I stared at it for what felt like three minutes at the time but was probably in hindsight 45 seconds. I was a bored child (probably about eight or nine) left alone in a room and it seemed like a fun idea to stare at the sun. The sun seemed to become covered by lots of large irregularly shaped black-brown spots, with the light itself shining from cracks between them. It looked kind of like a simplistic video game lava texture. 5: I was looking at the sun because I was young and stupid. It stopped shining but remained white, except for a few sunspots that could be seen by the naked eye and which indicated the sun was rapidly spinning. There were no other unusual experiences. 6: On several occasions outside I have seen my entire visual field become tinted various colors. Ever since I heard about eye fatigue and after-image based illusions I explained this to myself as it being very bright out and the color tint being from my green being worn out (making everything pinkish) or my blue being worn out (making everything greenish yellow). Unlike typical afterimages which had particular areas in my field of view, these were almost always across my entire visual field, with occasional hot spot areas where deeper afterimages existed. On each of these occasions it has been bright out and once noticing it, unless I have gone inside, it progresses between colors, though I can’t remember any specific order, only that pink is what I remember most frequently. Lasts until I go somewhere darker or the sun is covered by clouds for a while. Including as an aside, since its beyond the event, but relevant to optical experiences, I have a history of staring out into space without realizing it, failure to blink to the point of eye redness and wateriness, falling asleep with my eyes open, and distractedly looking at bright things for long enough without noticing that I develop a disruptive after image for a while after that makes it hard to read. These things make my baseline for having stared at the sun or not squinted enough on a bright day higher, and, to me, seem to explain why these things happen to me on bright days without clouds or rain, since the cloud protection wouldn’t be a necessary factor in my brightness exposure. i wanted to share since this seems like a difference in some part from the sungazers (who saw auras specifically around the sun) but which matches some of the accounts of the Fatima incident. 7: As a kid, I would stare at the sun sometimes (I eventually abandoned this after I got a headache from doing it; I don’t know whether this has caused any of my minor eye problems later in life), and it would usually resolve to a discolored disk “swirling” slowly around the bright outline of the sun. I assume this is what people mean when they say the sun was “spinning”, although I’m not completely sure. I do not believe I was primed to see something interesting, since I grew up in a nonreligious household and nobody talked to me about sungazing; I only did it because people told me not to stare at the sun for very long. 8: There was an upcoming eclipse when I was a kid and all the talk about “don’t look at the sun” was a temptation I could not resist. I stared at the sun at least a couple of times, but somebody caught me doing it (I think my mother but I do not remember in detail) and made me stop. It was very much like the Fatima miracle people describe—in fact I was a bit confused when I started reading your post because it was immediately clear to me that this is just what it looks like when you stare at the sun (or I guess, under some circumstances?). I did not realize until now that this was a rare or special experience. From what I recall, the rim of the sun remained sharp and bright, but within the circle, the color changed the longer I looked. It had a silvery, almost liquid appearance. I remember the spinning vividly, but it felt to me like it was an illusion happening because of small eye movements, and by shifting my eyes a little bit I could exaggerate or lessen the movement. I could see bright color changes too, around the edge and as afterimages or “tracers” after moving my focus. The “falling to earth” description seems pretty similar to how I remember the tracers appeared when I looked away. I do not remember exactly how long I looked, but I would guess perhaps 1-3 minutes at a time. 9: My mother and sister went sun viewing in ~2009. It was a six-to-nine months long fad in southern Minas Gerais (São João del Rei diocese), Brazil. People reported seeing Jesus and Mary in the sun, and that it spun. No reports of it changing color, though. I dont know the logistical details, who organized these outings (I was indeed just a child, my mom also didn’t care enough at the time to ask things like that). It was a series of monthly weekend mystical appearances that occurred in a bunch of different small cities, attracting, in a rough guess, 500 to a thousand pilgrims each. Always in a rural location, sometimes near small chapels. They did not charge money for the viewing, I believe only the transportation people made a profit. My sister remembers being very hungry, as they didn’t serve (or sell) food at the place, and it went from morning to sundown. My father was a complete skeptical; my mother, extremely Catholic, did not question its veracity: it was just something religious to do, and religion is good. The practice died that same year, because the local Bishop was hard against it, forbidding it. My sister didn’t see anything. My mother also saw nothing, but left feeling spiritually in peace, a very positive sentiment. 10: I used to be very confused about why the sun was portrayed as yellow, because I had looked directly at the sun (I don’t recall how many times; perhaps only once, and I was pretty young), and the sun was clearly bright pink. My default mental image of the sun is still that of a bright pink disk. It did not change colors or move or do any of the other exotic things mentioned in your post. 11: As a kid (maybe 10-13?), I would stare into the sun repeatedly for the weird experience of overexposed eyes. I’d never heard of the Fatima miracle prior to your article, but parts of it seem completely normal to my experience. The center of the sun soon stops looking intolerably bright, and instead seems like a disc of metal of an uncertain color. Its apparent color irregularly shifts between purple, silver, blue and green. My interpretation at the time was that my eyes were probably unable to strongly identify the color, because if I told myself that I expected it to be silver, it would normally be seen as silver. I have to emphasize how non-radiant the center of the sun appears at this point; it looks more like an object illuminated by the sun than like a light source But the outer rim of the sun remains bright. I assume this is because those parts of the retina have not been completely overexposed, and so can still give accurate signals that they’re receiving a ton of light. And the exact amount of ‘bright outside’ and its exact location on the sun varies a lot based on small eye movements; the central disc can appear to shift around and grow/shrink slightly in the sun. In short, the descriptions of the sun as a silver or pulsating multi-colored disc with fireworks on the outside seem entirely normal for “sungazing” for me. I did not see: 1) Rotation 2) The sun falling to earth and looking like it’s going to crush me 3) Any apparitions of people 12: Outside my home, I would frequently stare at the sun for long periods, between the ages of (young, my memory goes back to 4-ish) and 7. I would stare at various times of day — noon, sunset, etc. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just curious. I had a habit of staring for long periods at everything around me. The sun appeared various colors on first looking at it, most commonly orange or yellow. On closer inspection, this turned to white. Then shimmery blue patches would appear in the white, always touching the edge, which would appear to spin and reverse quickly. This impression of a blue-white rapidly spinning sun was observed reliably whenever the sun was far enough above the horizon on a clear day. It would continue as long as I looked at the sun. I think I would look for several minutes at a time; less than an hour. (Among my family and friends I was well known for ‘blanking out’ and staring at things for long periods.) As far as I was aware, it was not an ‘optical effect’, just the sun’s normal appearance. I had no impression of the sun falling to earth. I was a very imaginative child with many imaginary friends, ufo sightings, and mysterious experiences. I don’t remember anything imaginative, visionary, creative, etc. associated with looking at the sun. It just seemed like a straightforward observation, like many I made. In later years, I have often observed, as you have, conditions of mist, cloud, rain or (most memorably) snow or ice, which allow the sun to be seen easily as a silvery round disc like the moon. Outside of these conditions, sunrises, and sunsets, I don’t look at the sun anymore, and have never had any vision damage i know of. 13: I’m less stupid than I used to be, but when younger would sometimes look at the sun out of curiosity. I also spent much too much time lighting things on fire with a magnifying glass. So this is not so much “I saw a miracle” as “here are my general notes from looking at the sun”. The silvery sun thing is something I can attest to. At first the sun is too bright to look at, but after a couple of seconds it goes silvery and is more bearable. A slightly twirling of the sun is also something I’ve seen. It’s more like a rotation of its black border? Something like if you’d make a drawing of the sun with a black pen and then coloured it in with yellow (or whatever), the border (i.e. the black ink of the pen) rotates? This doesn’t make sense when I describe it like that, but my brain sees it twirling. I don’t recall colour changes other than everything looking washed out. 14: The first [time I saw it],(before I knew about Fatima) was in summer (I think August). The sun was setting (about an hour before sunset), and I saw the sun change color (alternating blue and pink with an apparent rotational motion around its center, like a Catherine wheel). I don’t remember if it was obscured by clouds. I don’t remember how long the event lasted. After discovering the Fatima event, I decided to personally verify the hypothesis that it was a natural phenomenon due to temporary vision changes. During September 2022, on a couple of occasions, in the early afternoon, while the sun was obscured by translucent clouds, I saw color changes (alternating blue and pink), a rotational motion (like a Catherine wheel), and the sun oscillating (as if vibrating or moving rapidly in a zigzag pattern). On both occasions, the event lasted about a minute, as I then had to look away due to discomfort. On only one occasion, after a heavy rain, and much later (around 5:00 PM), I managed to gaze at the cloudless sun, and only for a few seconds. I saw the same phenomena as when it was covered by clouds, but following this occasion, an afterimage appeared in the center of my field of vision that remained for a couple of days (the afterimage was not severe enough to prevent me from carrying out my activities, including reading and writing, and once it disappeared, I did not suffer any permanent damage to my vision). I must admit that, with the exception of the first case, I had to force myself to look at the sun, as a slight discomfort was present from the first few seconds. In the above cases the edge of the solar disk was not blurred. These were the best of 45 answers. Most of the rest saw normal afterimages, or wanted to say that they, too, had seen the sun look like a pale full moon behind clouds, or saw weird things in the sky that didn’t seem Fatima-related. Interview With A Medjugorje Witness One person filled out the form to say they had seen the miracle at Medjugorje, and kindly agreed to anonymously answer followup questions: SA: Tell me what happened. MW: I was in Medjugorje, I don’t remember the exact year but late 90s or early 2000s. This was not at the same time as one of the apparitions. We were outside, I think in the evening in summer (6pm maybe) Some people pointed out the sun, which was low in the sky, maybe just above eye level from our vantage point, nowhere near setting. Me and my mum looked at it, and it was spinning and pulsing, almost throbbing. I always compared it to a Catherine Wheel before even knowing it was a common comparison, it matched the way it was almost violently moving at risk of leaping off its axis. It changed colours, like it was having a filter passing over it. Not a smooth gradient change but as if a coloured lens was moved over it. There were points it had two or more colours over different sections. I don’t remember the exact colours but it included deep sunset reds, when the sky was high over the horizon. There wasn’t any pain or discomfort from looking at it. Eventually it stopped. The reaction from the people I was with was more quiet awe. Oddly subdued for such a strange moment! We didn’t discuss with others there, as we didn’t speak the same language. I don’t remember any other visions or apparitions. I was a believer at the time, so I was quite sensitive to what I felt were spiritual experiences, but I didn’t encounter any others on this trip. My mum has had other spiritual experiences there, including what she says was a vision of Mary in the 80s which was seen by herself and several others. I’m an atheist these days, and obviously don’t put much stock in the Marian appararitions in Medjugorje now. For instance, it seems the fire and brimstone idea of hell was a Renaissance invention, and the looming end times dynamic has been a constant across many religions. But the sun miracle remains a completely unexplainable experience! SA: What led you to go to Medjugorje? When you set off, did you know about sun miracles? Was there an expectation of seeing one? MW: My mum took me. She’s been on quite a few occasions over the years and took me there on 2/3 occasions. I didn’t know about sun miracles happening there and had no expectation of seeing any. I was aware of the Fatima sun miracle. And my mum often watched quite dramatic, apocalyptic VHSs with meteors falling from the sky etc, so I had a finely developed sense of imminent supernatural events! SA: How long did you spend in Medjugorje before seeing the miracle? How long did you stay afterwards? Did you make multiple attempts to see the miracle before it happened? Did you try to see it again afterwards? MW: I think the trip was 7-10 days. It happened in the second half of the trip, 2-3 days from the end maybe. I definitely kept an eye on the sun when it approached a similar time of day. Now I look into it, the daily apparations were at 6.40pm, I don’t remember if that was the exact time of the sun miracle but it would have been close to that time. I came back to Medjugorje with my mum as a teenager and brother, nothing happened that time! SA: Did you get any chance to talk to other people in Medjugorje, either pilgrims or locals, and gauge what percent of them had seen the miracle, or how many times they had seen it? MW: I didn’t get to discuss with anyone. A short “wow did you see that” with my mum, but it’s not even the weirdest thing she’s seen there given she thinks she saw Mary appear. SA: When people gestured to you to look at the sun, did you see the miracle immediately, or did it take you a while of concentrating and straining? If the latter, how long? MW: I remember it being fairly immediate. Obviously I had to look at the sun, as it’s not like the surroundings were going disco coloured, it didn’t affect the actual light the sun gave off on my surroundings. But I don’t remember staring at a normal looking sun for any period before the effect started. It was wobbling and spinning right away, although the colour changes may have come after the violent spinning. SA: Having [now] read about the theories that it’s just afterimages, or illusions, or something like that - does that accord with your experience? Does it feel like you just saw minor perturbations that could have been illusions? Or did it seem perfectly clear, totally beyond the ability to be an illusion? MW: It felt completely beyond any possibility of it being an illusion. It was too instantaneous, and the effects too strong. No clouds or signs of interference over the sun. And someone else drew my attention to it! For afterimages specifically, they still have that very strong searing quality, which wasn’t a factor here in the same way. SA: Did it look like it looks in the videos linked in the post? MW: No, it didn’t bear much resemblance to the videos. The pulsing wasn’t present with what I saw. Violent spinning and colour changes only, and an effect kind of similar to an eclipse initially that changed to colours changing, but not in the same fashion as an afterimage. SA: Can you tell me more about being an atheist? How does this mesh with you having seen a hard-to-explain miracle? MW: I just gradually became disillusioned with Catholicism. My mum is very devout and pushed it very hard on me, so there’s a strong aspect of teenage rebellion. Fundamentally, I couldn’t reconcile the existence of the kind, loving, individually interested God I’d been taught about with the world as I came to see it (partly the problem of evil, partly seeing the gap between OT and NT as signs of scripture being a historical construct). So either God didn’t exist, did in a form that I had no respect or interest in. The sun miracle was a major reason I called myself agnostic for a very long time. To this day, I can’t explain what happened. I just accept that certain, supernatural appearing, phenomena can occur which we can’t explain. Now I’ve stopped believing such things are possible, they’ve stopped happening. Which I’ve taken as evidence that there’s some degree of self induced receptiveness, like shamanist practices, at play. Although I know the counterargument would be I’ve merely closed myself off from God. SA: Thank you. Ethan: It Wasn’t The Sun Ethan Muse, who wrote the original pro-miracle post that started this discussion, responded to me here: It Wasn’t The Sun. His main goal remains supporting Dalleur’s assertion that Fatima was an objective miracle, implemented through a fiery object which was not the real sun (and therefore cannot be explained by the sun giving people afterimage-related hallucinations), and which was seen by many distant witnesses (and therefore cannot be explained by suggestibility). I won’t answer every one of his objections, both in the interests of time and because I don’t have good answers to every one of his objections, but some highlights: 1.1.1: Cloud Dimming In my original post, I was unimpressed by the “miracle” of people seeing the sun very clearly (including the sharp outline of the solar disc) without being blinded, because I had seen this myself regularly, when the sun was partly dimmed by clouds. Some of the Fatima witnesses had said it couldn’t be clouds, because the disc was visible very clearly rather than the foggy appearance you would get from - well - fog, but I insisted this didn’t update me, because I myself had seen the disc clearly through cloud cover. Ethan says I must be mis-remembering, because my claimed experience is physically impossible: The luminance of the solar disc at its zenith is on the order of 10⁹ cd/m².1 The maximum luminance that an on-axis, compact source can have without causing observers to experience discomfort glare is on the order of 10³ cd/m². Bringing the Sun’s luminance down from 10⁹ cd/m² to 10³ cd/m² requires an attenuation factor of 10⁶. By Beer’s law, that presupposes clouds with an optical depth of roughly 14. When obscured by clouds that thick, the solar beam is essentially extinguished. All that reaches observers is light that has undergone multiple scattering within clouds, emerging from many directions rather than straight paths from the solar disc. The solar disc is reduced to a bright patch or vanishes entirely. Why does Scott have the impression that he has stared at the Sun while it was veiled by thin clouds without experiencing discomfort? It is possible that he is remembering episodes where he briefly glanced at the Sun when it was low on the horizon. Even then, however, luminance should have exceeded the comfort ceiling. Another possibility is that he is accurately recalling that the Sun appeared to be pale, but is forgetting that he squinted, experienced discomfort glare, and/or diverted his gaze. Against this, I posted a Discord poll in which 13/16 respondents agreed they had seen the same thing. After my post, people in the ACX Discord channel independently replicated the poll, with the following results: The Discord comments were pretty interesting, because some people said they could imagine this happening during a forest fire or something - and other people said no, what were they talking about, this happened all the time with totally normal clouds. It really does seem like there’s a pretty sharp distinction between people who recognize and don’t recognize the description. Some people chimed in on the comments of the main post, or the form I set up for people who wanted to send reports, saying the same. From Measure: I have seen the [thin clouds make the sun easy to look at with a crisp edge] phenomenon many times (midwest US, usually early in the morning, but occasionally nearer midday). From a respondent to my survey: I have not seen the sort of behavior described, but I just wanted to say that when there’s just the right amount of cloud cover I can *definitely* look at the sun without my eyes hurting, and it looks like a dull silvery-grey disc. I happen to catch the sun like this every few months (I live in New England), peer at it for a few seconds to see if I can make out sunspots with the naked eye, then think better of my eye health and look away. It’s really weird to me that some people you asked had never experienced this. I thought it was a mundane, normal thing everyone knows! How do we square this with Ethan’s claim that this is impossible? I have no expertise in optical physics and cannot begin to comment on this. GPT-5, after I attempt to give it a neutral prompt that doesn’t reveal which side of the issue I’m on, says that the disc-like sun is possible, and Ethan is wrong because “Cloud droplets are large (Mie regime) and have a strongly forward-peaked phase function. Even when they dim the Sun a lot, they don’t behave like a perfect diffuser”. I don’t know what this means or whether it’s actually a good response. I welcome input from human physicists in the comments. In a private conversation, Ethan continued to assert that I was misremembering, and that all the Discord users and commenters who agreed with me had been contaminated by my testimony and become victims of suggestibility. I think this is a pretty crazy point to suddenly convert to the doctrine of eyewitness fallibility, contamination, and suggestibility - but I leave further discussion to people who understand optical physics. Despite believing I’m right on this factual point, I’m no longer sure it matters - some of the Medjugorje pilgrims say they saw the miracle in a completely clear sky, and that while it was happening it didn’t hurt to stare at the sun. 1.1.2: Eyewitness Testimony Ethan takes issue with my citing Fatima expert Stanley Jaki’s claim that “the great majority of eyewitness accounts, and certainly the most important ones, contain emphatic references to the continued presence of clouds.” He says that: Scott neglects the fact that those ‘emphatic references’ both explicitly and implicitly contradict his proposal . . . Sampling from Scott’s collection of testimonies from 60 eyewitnesses, I found 15 statements that unambiguously describe the behavior of clouds during the event. All of them confirm that, although clouds were present and sometimes passed in front of the ‘Sun,’ cloud coverage was partial, nonuniform, and intermittent. I agree with Doug Summers Stay’s proposal that: I don’t see any mention here of different layers of clouds. It is possible to have both cumulus clouds and cirrus clouds at the same time, so what we think of as “clouds” part and behind them is another layer of clouds blocking the sun. It seems to me, especially from watching the videos and videos in the comments, that there is some rare kind of clouds, perhaps caused by high ice crystals, that can produce a variety of optical effects: motion, changing color, and changing size. That this should happen at a time when a lot of people are looking at the sun expecting something to happen is a big coincidence, but in the end only a coincidence. On this model, there was a thick layer, obvious as clouds to the observers, which had been producing the rainstorm, and which cleared just before the miracle. There was also a thinner layer, which dimmed the sun but didn’t hide it, and which was sometimes - but not consistently - reported as clouds by witnesses. Many witness testimonies say that, although the main layer of clouds had cleared, there was some kind of veil over the sun. O Seculo: The sun had a kind of veil like transparent gauze so that eyes could gaze at it. Almeida describes the sun as …a disc of smoky silver. Compare to our photo of the sun filtered through clouds: From Domingos Pinto Coelho: The sun, until then concealed, showed itself among the clouds that moved fairly fast. Because their density was variable, the veil which they threw over the king of stars was diaphanous. Like the multitude, we then looked toward the sun with rapt attention, and through the clouds, we saw it under new aspects. From Nascimento e Sousa: The sun, which was surrounded by clouds, trembled hesitatingly…I saw there a very pronounced yellow color, and it seemed to me that I saw a silver color beneath the solar disc, but I don’t guarantee that. From Maria de Campos: We started to see the disk of the sun, and see it clearly against the dark gray layer which covered the entire sky…we saw something like a silver-lined veil, with a round shape, as if it were a full moon. Again, I’m not sure this matters, since some of the later miracles were in a clear sky. 1.1.3 - Inconsistency Ethan points out that if the sun were partially veiled by clouds, to the point where it was not too bright to stare at, then it presumably also would not bright enough to produce weird entoptic phenomena and hallucinations. When we discussed this, I had no better solution than to say that maybe there was a level of brightness which was dim enough to look at, but still bright enough to produce phenomena/hallucinations. But again, I’m no longer sure this matters. Many people in the comments to the original post report staring at the completely-non-veiled sun without feeling pain or having negative effects, many Medjugorje pilgrims say they saw the miracle in a completely clear sky without pain, and fire kasina practitioners can get imagery/phenomena from looking at dim or medium-brightness lights. I agree with Ethan that the sun at midday is so bright that it’s painful for me to look at for even a fraction of a second, and I don’t understand how so many people are saying they stare at the sun for minutes at a time at any time of day just because they’re bored. 2: Distant Witnesses Ethan was able to find more medium-distant witnesses than I could: The two witnesses at Alburitel, who I thought were in the same group, were actually in two different groups (is it surprising that our only witnesses from each of these two groups are each other’s brother?)

Inline links: It Wasn’t The Sun, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!iQhN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7a99a023-dcb0-4cb2-98ef-e0800fc7b5a3_1107x174.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x0Vw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc6946e4b-8bb6-4169-8954-a33875f9d053_1059x265.png, Measure, says that the disc-like sun is possible, and Ethan is wrong because, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!N1Km!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1ad98a6a-898d-44ec-9b8b-a759d4303cca_151x132.png

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

Backlinks

• Concepts: F
• Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
• The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know