Almeida

Article

Almeida is a recurring person 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 “when Almeida was asked to write about his own experience”; “Garrett and Almeida weren’t the perfect skeptics they are sometimes portrayed as”. It most often appears alongside A Ordem, Abraham Lincoln, ACX.

Metadata

• Category: People
• 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)
• • 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)
• • Documentacao Critica de Fatima (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://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5114457
• • https://web.archive.org/web/20230104080248/https://www.rootclaim.com/
• • https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
• • https://www.neonarrative.us/p/an-interview-with-scott-alexander
• • 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

Then it returned to its normal position, and the previously drenched crowd noticed they were miraculously dry. …then almost every testimonial contains some elements of the consensus story, in approximately the correct order. The case for self-contradiction is that very few testimonials contain all six elements: most are a random subset of those claims. Also, nobody can agree on which colors were involved in (4), or in which order. A believer might argue that if you encounter six different miracles in close succession, they all sort of blend together and you might forget one or two in your accounting. Or you might turn to your friend and ask what they think, and while you’re not looking you miss part of what’s going on. A skeptic might argue that if the sun falls to earth and appears seconds away from crushing you and everyone around you is screaming because they think it’s the end of the world, approximately 100% of people should mention that in their account of what happened that day, and if it’s more like 50%, then you have a problem. Here are some interestingly discordant testimonies that I came across during my search: Antonio dos Ramos Mira, local resident: A quarter of an hour after the rain stopped, he saw that huge crowd of people, in great clamor and almost all kneeling, facing the sun, which had unusual signs, turning around, trembling, observing at the same time that a yellow-reddish color had appeared around him, which was reflected throughout the crowd and on the horizon, with at the same time a weakening of light and an increase in temperature. The crowd, even the unbelievers, said that it was a known miracle. This is in the third person because the priest and clerk conducting the investigation are summarizing an account being given by an illiterate peasant. The witness names one color - yellow-reddish - and doesn’t mention the sun falling to earth. Antonio Maria Menitra, local property owner: It had rained heavily in the morning, and a little after noon, the rain stopped, and he observed a large crowd of people kneeling down and looking at the sun. He also looked and saw different colors in the sun and in the people. No mention of the sun dancing, spinning, shooting off sparks, or approaching the earth. Joao Martia Lucio Serra, lawyer: Already in some candid souls arose the fear that the foretold event might not occur, when suddenly the entire immense crowd stirred at the seer's voice in a significant brouhaha of astonishment and wonder, raising their heads to the sky, where thousands of eyes gazed in amazement at the sun in full blue, visible to all, without the intensity of its rays harming the retina and hindering vision, crowned with various colors, in a rapid rotation, at times seeming to detach itself from the celestial vault, approaching the earth. The spectators, looking at each other, represented themselves to each other as yellow, and on the horizon, reddish-orange, wherever their eyes looked, they saw beams of dim light, affecting an oval shape, seemingly placed at equal distances, and reflecting on the earth. Nobody else mentions the “beams of dim light, affecting an oval shape, seemingly placed at equal distances”. Maria Augusta Saraiva Vieira de Campos, local resident: Our sense of discouragement was profound, when suddenly we heard from all sides: Miracle! Look at the sun! The rain had stopped as if by magic; hats were closed; a warmth was felt as if we had entered a heated greenhouse, and the disk of the sun began to be seen, clearly discernible in the brownish layer that covered the entire sky. The heat increased, and the sun seemed to sink lower and lower, presenting new and varied changes. We saw a silvery veil, rounded in shape, as if it were a full moon; shortly after, it turned to vivid purple, then red, then emerald green, and finally took on its original color. Cries were heard from all sides as it emerged from the sun like a white, shining snow-like shape, without harming the retina, coming toward us, returning to the sun again, and finally hiding for the third time among the clouds. Everyone wept, and prayers, supplications, and acts of faith were heard from many mouths. Now something is coming down off the sun, instead of the sun itself coming down. Also, the colors are purple → red → green. Goncalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett, mathematics professor: 1st: The phenomena lasted about 8 to 10 minutes; 2nd: The sun lost its dazzling brightness, taking on the appearance of the moon and being easily seen; 3rd: The sun, three times during this period, manifested a rotational movement on its periphery, flashing sparks of light on its edges, similar to what happens with the well-known firework wheels; 4th: This rotational movement of the sun's edges, manifested 3 times and 3 times interrupted, was rapid and lasted 8 or 10 minutes, more or less; 5th: Next, the sun took on a violet color and then an orange, spreading these colors over the earth, finally regaining its brightness and splendor, impossible to be seen with the eyes; 6th: It was shortly after noon and near the zenith (which is very important) that these facts occurred. Do mathematicians really number everything they say like this? We saw this account earlier, and in most ways it matches the consensus story. But even though he’s trying to be methodical, he totally fails to mention the sun descending to crush the world. Instead, it’s the rotational movement that happens three times. Also, the colors are violet → orange Luis Antonio Vieira de Magalhaes e Vasconcelos, nobleman: I was absolutely convinced that I would see nothing. I then remembered, as I had remembered many times before, that principle of Gustave Le Bon, which boils down to the hypnotic current that dominates it. I had to be cautious, not to be influenced. This friend of mine, taking out his watch, said to me: there are five minutes left, at one o'clock look at the sun, that was the time announced by the shepherdesses, then you will tell me. My friends shout to me: look, look, but at first I only saw clouds drifting by, leaving the sun uncovered. Suddenly, I see an intensely pink rim, surrounding the sun, which resembled a disc of dull silver, as someone once said, while giving me the impression that it was moving from its original position. Diaphanous, vaporous clouds, somewhat purple, somewhat orange, permeated the air. At various points along the horizon, contrasting with the leaden hue of the sky, I also saw pink and yellow spots. The clamor grew louder and louder. This didn't last seconds: perhaps minutes. As I observed these manifestations, which I never doubted for a moment were due to the Infinite Omnipotence of God, an indescribable impression came over me. Here are the silver disc and the unusual colors (here “pink, purple, and orange”). But the colors are now merely “clouds” and “spots”, and there is nothing about spinning, dancing, or falling to earth. Antonio de Paula, pilgrim from Lisbon: Suddenly the priest looks at the sun and says that the sun in eclipse was not like that. The deponent also looked and saw that the sun gave no light; a white mist hung over it, it was a dull moon. The sun was to the left, with the rest of the sky obscured. Taking his eyes off the sun, he saw the people a very bright red color; and he exclaimed: "Oh, gentlemen, how the people are all red!" And the priest replied: "Are they red scarves?" To which he remarked: "How can that be? So they had all agreed to have red scarves on their backs?!" Then the people appeared the color of gold. The sun's rotational movements were not visible to them. The people on that occasion cried out loudly, kneeling with their hands raised, shouting for Our Lady, not caring about the thick mud, repeatedly invoking Our Lady. The people's impression was extraordinary. This person saw the silver moon-like sun and the color changes (here “red” and “gold”), but nothing else. He explicitly mentions not seeing the rotation. Luis de Andrade de Silva: The globe of the sun, similar to a disc of dull silver, rotated around an imaginary axis, and at that moment, it seemed to descend through the atmosphere, towards the earth, accompanied at times by an extraordinary brightness, and by an intense heat. The sun's rays were said to have yellow, green, blue and purple colors, but I only noticed the yellow color. After a few minutes, during which these phenomena occurred, no one could look at the sun anymore, because its rays hurt the retina. Only those who witnessed these phenomena can evaluate what happened then, but cannot describe them exactly. He says that although he heard other people mention yellow, green, blue, and purple colors, he only saw yellow. Dominic Reis, American traveler: The sun started to roll from one place to another place, and changed blue, yellow, all colors! Then we see the sun come toward the children, toward the tree. Everybody was hollering out. Some start to confess their sins, ‘cause there were no Priests around there . . . even my mother grabbed me to her and started to cry, saying, ‘It is the end of the world! And we see the sun come right into the trees. And then the little children get up and turn around to the people and told the people, ‘Pray and pray hard because everything is going to be all right.’ This person says the sun didn’t merely fall to earth, but went to the children (ie the child-seers) and the tree (the oak where the Virgin was appearing) in particular. At one point, it is specifically located “right [in] the trees”. But in this account, I am getting the impression that the “sun” is some sort of UFO-like object, maybe the size of a large helicopter, which is in a particular place. I can’t tell if other witnesses also thought this and just didn’t describe it clearly, or whether this testimony is discordant. The interviewer (Haffert again) notices this, and asks whether Reis really thinks it was the sun; Reis gives a weird non-answer (“Well, for my part it was the sun . . . but whether just a light or not, there was something there. I know for sure.”) Dominic Reis, continued from elsewhere in his account: As soon as the sun went back in the right place the wind started to blow real hard, but the trees didn’t move at all. The wind was blow, blow and in few minutes the ground was as dry as this floor here. Even our clothes had dried. We were walking here and there, and our clothes... we don’t feel at all. The clothes were dry and looked as though they had just come from the laundry. I believed. I thought: Either I’m out of my mind or this was a miracle, a real miracle. Although many people said their clothes were miraculously dry, Reis is the only one who mentions a miraculous wind. Everyone else says their clothes were dried by a miraculous heat. Reis does not mention heat. Maria dos Santos On October 13th, when Lucia said: "Our Lady is coming!", one of the deponent's daughters, named Maria, was standing on a rock, a meter from the holm oak tree, on the east side, to guard the bow so the people wouldn't damage it. The girl felt a blow to her face, saw a beautiful light near her, and cried out: "Oh! Our Lady!" The deponent looked and saw a star, a ball, not entirely round, like an egg, very beautiful, with the colors of the celestial rainbow, but much more vivid, with a tail of one and a half meters of brilliant colors. It passed very quickly and close to the holm oak tree, and disappeared a hand's breadth from the ground. She saw the sun sinking low. This is maybe the same UFO-like object that Dominic is reporting. In some of the other Fatima apparitions, the Virgin appears to those who cannot see her true form as a ball of light that comes to the tree where the child-seers are waiting. So maybe there were two things going on - the sun in the sky, and a ball of light (the apparition itself) heading back and forth to the tree. Still, if these are really two different phenomena, only these two accounts mention the second one. I don’t really have much that is non-obvious to say about these discordant testimonies. Aside from the ones with the UFO-like object, they seem about as discordant as you would expect from panicked people seeing a real inexplicable phenomenon - with the exception of some people who are absolutely terrified by the falling sun, and other people who don’t mention it at all. 1.4 Dalleur And The Distant Testimonies Maybe the only interesting advance in Fatimology in the last fifty years is Dalleur (2021), the focus of Muse’s Substack post. Dalleur is a philosophy professor at the Pontifical University in Rome, but clearly a multi-talented individual. He seems to lean toward the “miracle” explanation, but asks a fruitful question that nobody else seems to be considering: if it was a miracle, how was it implemented? That is, the real sun obviously didn’t change color or move - this would have been visible around the world, and would probably have fried the Earth. So what did God or the Virgin do, exactly, to produce the appearance of a moving sun? We can imagine two possibilities. First, they could have implemented the miracle through a “prophetic vision”, where they inspire a sort of mass hallucination in the onlookers. Second, they could have created some kind of objectively-real fiery wheel object in the skies above Portugal, and arranged for people to mistake it for the sun. If they did the second, we should be able to pin down where exactly they created it by triangulating distant testimonies Dalleur and I both found four of these: Joaquim Lourenco, schoolboy, 9 miles from Fatima: I feel incapable of describing what I saw. I looked fixedly at the sun which seemed pale and did not hurt my eyes. Looking like a ball of snow, revolving on itself, it suddenly seemed to come down in a zigzag, menacing the earth. Terrified, I ran and hid myself among the people, who were weeping and expecting the end of the world at any moment. It was a crowd which had gathered outside our local village school and we had all left classes and run into the streets because of the cries and surprised shouts of men and women who were in the street in front of the school when the miracle began. There was an unbeliever there who had spent the morning mocking the ‘simpletons’ who had gone off to Fatima just to see an ordinary girl. He now seemed paralyzed, his eyes fixed on the sun. He began to tremble from head to foot, and lifting up his arms, fell on his knees in the mud, crying out to God. But meanwhile the people continued to cry out and to weep, asking God to pardon their sins. We all ran to the two chapels in the village, which were soon filled to overflowing. During those long moments of the solar prodigy, objects around us turned all colors of the rainbow... When the people realized that the danger was over, there was an explosion of joy. Albano Barros, young boy, 12 miles away: I was watching sheep, as was my daily task, and suddenly there, in the direction of Fatima, I saw the sun fall from the sky. I thought it was the end of the world. I was so distracted that I remember nothing but the falling sun. I cannot even remember whether I took the sheep home, whether I ran, or what I did. Guilhermina Lopes da Silva, local resident, 16 miles away: I could not go [to Fatima] because my husband was an unbeliever. I was looking toward the mountain at noon when suddenly I saw a great red flash in the sky. I called two men who were working for us. They, of course, saw it, too. Afonso Vieria, famous writer, 30 miles away On that day of October 13, 1917, without remembering the predictions of the children, I was enchanted by a remarkable spectacle in the sky of a kind I had never seen before. I saw it from this veranda… Dalleur pins these on a map, which I’ve edited slightly for clearer labeling: The furthest report is 34 km (21 miles) away from Fatima, so Dalleur concludes the phenomenon was visible from about this distance. Further, all witnesses outside Fatima said the phenomenon was coming from the direction of Fatima, not from the direction of the sun (which in some cases was directly opposite Fatima)! By triangulating the accounts, Dalleur estimates that the miraculous light source which appeared to be the sun: was probably located above the hills a few km south of the Cova da Iria [in Fatima]. …ie at the spot indicated by the black sun sign in the purple circle on the map. Dalleur moves on to analyzing photographs of the event: He tries to estimate the angle of the shadows, and, from there, the angle of the light source. I cannot entirely follow his calculations, but he finds that there are two light sources - a diffuse source at about 42° elevation, and a point source at about 30°. The 42° source corresponds to the elevation we would expect the sun to be at in southern Portugal on October 13 around solar noon. It’s diffuse because it’s hidden behind clouds, just as it was all morning. So what is the 30° light source? Dalleur suggests it’s whatever object the witnesses are describing as spinning, moving, and changing color. They’re mistaking it for the sun because the real sun is hidden behind clouds. For a bright round sun-sized object in the sky during the day not to be the sun, isn’t really in most people’s hypothesis space. The paper stops here, but I’m not sure why. Given a distance, an angle, an apparent size (the size of the sun disc), and basic trigonometry, you should be able to calculate the object’s elevation and true size. Do this, and you find that the light source is two miles high and about 200 feet in diameter. That’s about the size of a 747, at about half the 747’s usual cruising altitude. What, who did you think God drafted to play “terrifying spinning fiery disc”? 1.5: Making Sense Of The Testimonies The multitude of testimonies of Fatima may trick us into thinking we understand what the miracle looked like. This complacency deserves to be challenged: “The sun looked pale, like the moon, and was painless to gaze upon”: Most sources treat this as the first aspect of the miracle. Several talk about how unbelievers are going to think it was just fog, but this can’t be true, because the edge of the solar disc was clearly defined, or there was no fog halo, or some other reason like that - and therefore even this first step was clearly miraculous. I feel like I’m going crazy here - I see this regularly! Not often, but a few times a year. When the sun is sort of halfway behind certain types of thin cloud, it looks pale like the moon (I remember, as a child, being uncertain about whether the full moon was somehow out during the day and visible through clouds), is painless to gaze upon, and has a clearly defined edge. Am I hallucinating? I decided to resolve this the same way the new government of Nepal chose its prime minister - via Discord poll: Here’s one of the hits for “sun behind clouds” on Google Images: I don’t know if this is a real picture or used lenses or something, but it’s pretty true to my experience. So why does every previous commentator act as if this is some cosmic mystery to be explained? A few people argue that (although it was a generally cloudy day), the mystery is that the clouds were nowhere near the sun at this point, so they couldn’t have been causing the unusual pallor. But the majority of witnesses say the clouds were absolutely near, or veiling, or even covering the sun. Stanley Jaki makes this a central point of his book, saying that “The great majority of eyewitness accounts, and certainly the most important ones, contain emphatic references to the continued presence of clouds.” I’m going kind of crazy here. I notice that the holdouts on my Discord poll disproportionately come from my non-Californian friends - is this rarer in other locales? I’m not sure. In any case, I will not count this as being one of the mysterious aspects of the miracle requiring explanation. “The sun was spinning”: How can a featureless disc be seen to spin? Despite this being one the most commonly-reported aspects of the miracle, almost nobody explains this point. Some say that only the rim was spinning, but this has the same problem. However, several people compared the sun to a “firework wheel”, also called a “Catherine wheel”. Here is a video of this object, which apparently was well-known in the Portugal of the time: Stanley Jaki relates a story about a priest having this same question and grilling a witness; the witness finally claimed that the sun traced a circle (like a basket in a Ferris wheel) rather than merely rotating. But this contradicts several claims that it “rotated around its own axis”, and I wonder if the witness was intimidated by the seeming contradiction in her story and was trying to weasel out of her own confusion. If we treat the miracle as the result of some kind of illusion, this becomes slightly easier to explain; there are plenty of visual distortions that look like a spinning motion, and since it is the visual field itself that is spinning, rather than any particular object, it can be seen whether the object is a disc or not. “The sun seemed to fall to earth”: In what sense did it seem like this? If the sun had simply gone down in the sky, people would have said it was setting, the same way it does every evening. One witness does say this. Most other witnesses say it was terrifying, and they felt like they (as opposed to other people living near the horizon) were about to be crushed. If the sun had simply gotten bigger - wouldn’t people have just said it looked bigger? Isn’t this a more natural way to record that the sun’s disc seemed to expand? Fr. Jaki combs his selection of witness accounts (larger than mine), but is only able to find one person who says “it got bigger” in so many words, compared to the dozens who talk about it looming, or falling to earth. Some people say that the sun “left the sky” or “left its place in the sky” at this point. In what sense? If the object that appeared to be the sun at Fatima had been visible as an object of a particular size (let’s imagine it as a flying saucer), then not only would this have been remarked upon, but it would have appeared to threaten some parts of the crowd in particular (that is, a descending saucer would look like it was about to land on some specific area). But this is not the consensus description, and several people say they thought the sun might crush the entire world. Several witnesses say it approached Earth with a jerky or zig-zag motion. If I imagine something else approaching Earth - let’s say a jumbo jet or asteroid - I can tell that it’s approaching rather than getting bigger because there’s multiple components to its trajectory that let me separate size change from forward movement. When I think of this aspect, I imagine the sun very suddenly growing in size and brightness to take up a substantial fraction of the sky (maybe >50%?!), maybe with some jerky motion on the side. Although it’s hardly scientific, I was charmed by John Touhey’s project of trying to visualize the miracle by using witness descriptions as prompts for ChatGPT. His work is a year old, and so several GPT iterations out of date. When I repeat his work with the current version, I get these: Interlude: The Anti-Clerical Union As mentioned briefly before, 1910s Portugal was in a period of transition. In 1910, a group of proto-socialist revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy. The monarchy and church had been in cahoots, so the revolutionaries cracked down on Catholicism, closing the monasteries and persecuting the churches. This was a bold move - only an upper crust of educated urbanites were proto-socialist, and 99%+ of the country identified as Catholic, albeit at various levels of religiosity. In the 1920s, conservatives would regain the upper hand, overthrow the proto-socialists and restore a pro-church dictatorship. Still, the small urban educated ruling class of 1910s Portugal was a hotbed of atheistic anti-church sentiment. Probably the child-seers of Fatima were only dimly aware of this, but their prophecies were a spark entering a powder keg, and many of the more worldly witnesses were aware of this context. While reading through Fatima-related documents, I came across some pamphlets by Grupo Anticlerical, one of the era’s leading atheist organizations. They are totally irrelevant to our primary goal of trying to figure out what’s up with the miracle. But I love them so much that I can’t resist adding one as an interlude. I have slightly edited the machine translation for clarity and readability: To defend the sacred freedom of conscience—guaranteed by the original Law of Separation of Church and State—from the furious attacks of implacable Jesuitism—the greatest enemy of all human happiness!—the Anticlerical Group was organized in this town, similar to what is being done in many parts of the country! This was necessary. They call us to fight. We present ourselves courageously! The great, formidable battle of progress against Ultramontane Reaction, of Freedom against Tyranny, of Truth against Lies is waged again with enthusiasm and ardor! The redemptive dawn that the Portuguese people saw emerge on October 5, 1910, is about to be eclipsed, intercepted by the immense flood of black cassocks!... But in the dark night that seeks to envelop Reason; where moral suffering takes on tragic proportions in a frightening asphyxiation, the Light will once again break through!... the consoling light of elevated spirits... and like a sinister scarecrow, the grim reaction will flee in terror! Liberal people! Hear us! This fight is terrible! Many of our people will perhaps be crushed and tortured on the battlefield, but what does it matter?! Every war against reaction is a holy war because it frees consciences from the clutches of their enemies!... It is the fight of Justice against Iniquity, of Love against Hate, of Good against Evil!... To the fight, then, for the Progress that makes life beautiful; for the Freedom that redeems the people; and for the science that guides us all as an eternal beacon to the Light of Truth! Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral [two Portuguese aviators who had recently flown across the Atlantic] are prodigious spirits before whom our souls kneel religiously – boldly breaking through the air with the mathematical certainty of someone who knows the path to be taken to get from one point to another determined point; flying through the immense blue as sure of their route as any of us walking on earth, they showed us that Science is not an empty word! The power of their prodigious sextant, the fruit of immense scientific lucubrations, is more real and positive than the cross of Christ painted on their device, which could not even have saved them from falling due to lack of gasoline in the middle of the sea at the mercy of the waves. Their extraordinary journey, an adventure which moved us to tears, was the most resounding scientific victory of recent times! It was, above all, a powerful affirmation of science! Let us therefore make science our religion, for scientific religion is Freedom of Thought! To be a Free Thinker is to love immortal science, eagerly waiting for it to reveal to us the truth of the great enigmas of the Universe! And only it can reveal them! People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured. The victory of reaction, of clericalism, of black, cruel and ferocious Jesuitism will result in: the gallows, the acts of faith with their human destruction, persecution, exile, robbery, arson, the deflowering of women, the killing of children, the monstrous torture of all free spirits! The history of so many crimes committed in the name of God horrifies us! The Inquisition, relentlessly slaughtering, tearing, and burning the flesh of so many victims, is still today, in the twentieth century, a sinister specter haunting us!... O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children! Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs: Love Freedom! Love Liberty, O loving mothers, immaculate saints of our altar! We pray for them... for your children, who are the light of your candid eyes, the life of your life... for little children... for all children, tender rosebuds that retrogression furiously lashes, – love Liberty!. And you, O parents! Heads of families who so tremble at your loved ones, snatch them from the merciless clutches of the reactionaries who twist their brains and kill their reason! Hear us all, men, women, and children; listen: Freedom writhes in horrible convulsions... it vibrates in space, echoing from mountain to mountain, an anguished cry for help!... It is Freedom that falls, annihilated! It is Freedom that dies in the bloody clutches of Jesuitism! The Miracle of Fatima, people, is a ridiculous lie, it is a comedy, it is not religion! Come on, liberals! Let us all rise up from this criminal apathy and, without delay, fight not the religious sentiment of the Portuguese people, such a good people, a race of heroes, but rather the exploitation that clericalism is inflicting on the people, foisting upon them, at a good price, images of the saint —trademarked to avoid competition from other vampires! —the shamelessness!—and leading them, through suggestion, to wallow and drink madly, the miraculous water, foul, filthy water, full of rot, pus, and pestilent microbes that the sore flesh of the sick leaves deposited there in the washings! We, all as one man, will fight the reaction, forcing it to retreat and thus, with our efforts, we will save the Republic and the Portuguese Land from its fatal annihilation! … …anyway, Interlude over, let’s get back to the miracle. 2: The Skeptical Explanations Re-invigorated by the rousing prose of Grupo Anticlerical, can we come up with a materialist explanation for the sun miracle? 2.1: Pilgrim, Avert Thine Eyes Starting in October 1917, doubters have focused on one obvious possibility: staring at the sun is harmful to your health. If you stare too long, you go blind. If you stare just slightly less long than that . . . maybe something strange happens? Just to get a particular theory out there: everyone knows that if you stare at a bright light source for a few seconds, you get a temporary afterimage - often pink or bluish-green - on your retina. Suppose the pilgrims stared at the sun. Their eyes would inevitably make microsaccades - small natural jerking motions - and the afterimage would appear somewhere slightly different than the true sun. This might look like the sun turning pink or blue and moving in a zig-zag pattern. Believers in the miracle counter this proposal in several ways. First, although it might explain the sun changing colors and dancing, it doesn’t give an explanation for spinning, sparkling, or falling to earth and threatening to crush everybody (exactly three times in a ten minute interval, no less). Second, although witnesses describe the sun changing color, they also describe everything around them changing color to match the sunlight, which doesn’t match localized afterimages. And one scientifically-minded witness specifically describes closing his eyes to see if there was a persistent afterimage; he says there was not. Third, there are no reports of eye injuries or blindness from a crowd that was, supposedly, staring straight at the sun for ten minutes. This is a good match to witness reports (that the sun was unusually pale and didn’t hurt to look at) and with Dalleur’s theory (that it wasn’t the sun). But it’s a bad match to any theory depending on eye injuries. Fourth, this would require Portuguese people to be total idiots. Everyone already knows bright lights cause afterimages. Surely if you stare at the sun for ten minutes and get some afterimages, you’re not going to freak out and start screaming about miracles and the end of the world. Even if the peasants had somehow remained ignorant of afterimages their whole lives, the scientists and doctors in attendance wouldn’t be fooled. If we are to keep this theory, maybe we should posit some retinal phenomenon much stronger than the ones we know. Everyone thinks they know how much an illusion can fool you - “yeah, okay, obviously the cookie that looks very slightly bigger will actually be the same size” - which is exactly why the really good ones, like the Checker Shadow Illusion, come as such a shock. Squares A and B are the same color. Source: Checker shadow illusion. There’s no way around it: we need to hear from someone who has stared directly into the sun. August Meessen was a physics professor at a Catholic university, which sounds like exactly the job profile we want for this sort of thing. He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened. From his paper: In November 2002, I looked directly into the sun, at about 4 p.m. The sun was relatively low above the horizon and its light intensity was attenuated, although the sky was clear. I was able to look right into the sun and was amazed to see that the sun was immediately converted into a grey disc, surrounded by a brilliant ring. The grey disc was practically uniform, while the surrounding ring was somewhat irregular and flamboyant, but did not extend beyond the solar disk. It coincided with its rim. I stopped the experiment, since I wanted to be prudent, but I had experienced myself the initial phase of a typical “miracle of the sun” and I could explain it. The sun became grey, since my eyes immediately responded to its great luminosity by an automatic reduction of their sensitivity. This adaptation is not simply due to the bleaching of pigments in the colour-sensitive cones of the fovea, where the image of the sun is projected, but to secondary processes. By “initial phase”, he means the part where the sun looks pale and well-defined, like a full moon. This isn’t something I think needs explanation (see above), but he sure has explained it. Moving on: In a second experiment, realized at 3 p.m. in December 2002, I looked straight at the sun during a much longer time. After some minutes, I saw impressive colours, up to 2 or 3 times the diameter of the sun. They changed, but were mainly pink, deep blue, red and green. Further away, the sky became progressively more luminous. I stopped there, since I understood that these colours resulted from the fact that the red, green and blue sensitive pigments are bleached and regenerated at different rates. This is frustratingly vague. Are the “impressive colors up to 2-3 times the diameter of the sun” just the normal aftereffects of staring at a bright object? Or something surprising even to physics professors? And the spinning? What about the motions of the sun? I didn’t see them, because I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time or my brain knew already too much. Once, after I had been looking at a very long passing train, I had (for about 30 seconds) the illusion of an opposite motion. Joseph Plateau discovered that when we look at the centre of a spiral that is rotating at some given velocity about this point, and when we stop this rotation, we see a reversed rotation. It lasts for several minutes, although in reality, there is no motion at all. This is a good example of motional after-effects. The “dance of the sun” is initiated, however, by a spontaneous generation of apparent motion. This feels suspiciously like a just-so story. His explanation for the sun falling to earth to crush everyone - which he also did not see - is equally ad hoc: A very interesting study was recently devoted to this “zoom and loom effect”. It tends to appear when the brain is confronted with the two-dimensional retinal image of an object that is situated at some unknown distance. The brain will then consider the possibility that it could come closer, by performing an illusory mental zoom, where the apparent size of the object is progressively increased. This results from the fact that evolution preserved the tendency to take into account the possibility of a dangerous approach: a rapid evasive action could be beneficial for survival. If true, it sounds like you should be able to generate this effect not just by staring at the sun (ill-advised, causes blindness), but by staring at the moon. I would like to test this, but unfortunately I am writing this on the night of a new moon; I’ll check back in two weeks. Still, I am skeptical that no human being living before 1917 AD ever figured out that staring at a celestial body long enough would make it appear to fall to earth and crush you. Compare to much gentler illusions - like how the moon looks bigger right when it starts to rise - which everybody knows about. I was able to find a thirdhand report (Fr. Stanley Jaki → G. J. Strangfeld → consultation with bishop) of another sun miracle investigator, one “Professor Dr. Stöckl” in Germany, who made a similar experiment: After almost a minute (the time varies according to the condition of the atmopshere and the momentary condition of the eyes) one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun (this is already a sign of the highly excited state of the retina). According to my experience … this dark blue disk is somewhat smaller than the solar disk, so that the edge of that disk stands out as a ring beyond that dark blue disk. Then one has right away the impression that the solar disk rotates with great speed in one or the other direction. This I have experienced often enough. All this is a subjective appearance that has nothing to do with the external world. These reports are suggestive, but weaker than all but the barest Fatima testimonials. Dr. Messeen admits as much, saying that “I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time”. Can we find people even more committed - or reckless, or masochistic - than Professors Messeen and Stöckl? Absolutely yes: there was a whole subfield of late 18th / early 19th century psychophysicists who experimented with staring at the sun for long periods, many of whom went blind. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883, went blind in 18432) summarizes their work in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects. He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe what we now recognize as typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin (father of Charles; cf. Secrets of the Great Families). After stating that: The author has frequently observed that when he gazed at the midday sun for a long time, until its disk appeared pale blue, he saw a bright blue specter on other objects for more than two days. …he mentions how When looking at the meridian sun as long as the eyes can well bear its brightness, the disc first becomes pale, with a luminous crescent, which seems to librate from one edge of it to the other owing to the unsteadiness of the eye. Here is pallor, and at least a hint of motion. But it’s pretty different from spinning, and not really clear how it relates to the sun miracle. Gustav Fechner (1801 - 1887, went blind in 1839) may have stared for even longer; you can read more of his story - including his ensuing insanity and subsequent attempts to found a new religion - on Adam Mastroianni’s blog. But all that he records about his ill-fated experiment is that: …after looking at the sun through homogeneously colored lenses, if you close your eyes, the primary impression remains for a long time and the entire afterimage usually disappears without a complementary coloration having clearly emerged. These people are great, and they all sound like minor Sam Kriss characters. But after whole careers dedicated to staring at the sun much longer than any normal person would ever try, they report only the barest hints of odd phenomena. Indeed, if anything they saw less of interest to the Fatimologist than Profs. Messeen and Stöckl. Worse, all of these authorities saw their phenomena after seconds to minutes of deliberate staring. Surely if it had taken a minute of staring at the sun before anything happened, some of our eyewitnesses would have mentioned this; after all, several mention that they were starting to doubt after the child-seers’ deadline had passed a few minutes earlier. But by all accounts, the miracle was near-instantaneous. Although Messeen and Stöckl’s reports of miracle-like phenomena are intriguing, it doesn’t seem like they can be the whole picture. Let’s move on. 2.2: Aurora Borealis? At This Time Of Year? In This Part Of The Country? Localized Entirely Within Your Kitchen? Could the miracle at Fatima have been some kind of weird weather phenomenon? The main argument against is that if it were a common weather phenomenon, it would not have awed and terrified tens of thousands of people. But if it were a rare weather phenomenon, then the seers’ successful prophecy that the rare weather phenomenon would happen at solar noon on October 13 1917 becomes almost as impressive as an outright miracle. The argument in favor is that dozens of people have written books and papers about this possibility, we would feel remiss if we didn’t mention them, and anyway it gives us the opportunity to look at pretty pictures of interesting weather phenomena. This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported. (source) This is a solar corona3; cloud iridescence is a related phenomenon. I don’t know how much work the exposure length is doing in this particular photo, but I’m guessing more than zero. Coronae are also very pretty, and might explain the description of wheels and colors. They seem surprisingly common for something that I can’t ever remember seeing, supposedly happening several times a year in most locations. But they don’t spin, the colors don’t change or stain the surrounding landscape, and they don’t fall to earth and crush people. Let’s keep this one as a backup option and move on. This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding. But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance. At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat! I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them. But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”? Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent) Don’t they usually break windows? Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies? Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak? Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event4? And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance? We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, 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: Dalleur (2021), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NeXK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffebd07d1-3975-4603-8c98-8ca3707ec2b8_612x447.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SjQ8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79b42000-faa4-443f-8a5c-7f000582410e_657x459.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XQWF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f301773-b8b8-45c1-99c3-908c5b5f5524_1145x1192.png, Nepal chose its prime minister, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-qHG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6cbf5f49-7c02-4d1d-9b2c-b3ea2ff962f5_656x235.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AM8u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F852624ae-e398-4a8a-9cd7-44a99710c478_612x408.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GnUV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9b2c6498-11a6-4276-8a66-0555ca5141e5_1296x730.webp, John Touhey’s project, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ybv5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6509924b-583f-4686-8ba9-cd4185892199_1012x463.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!12sU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d21e8d2-ad0d-4a15-9ad0-0048338bcb33_1012x470.png, 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

The Hindu milk miracle of 1995. Starting from the bottom: In 1995, a man in New Delhi noticed that an idol of the elephant-god Ganesh seemed to be really drinking the glass of milk left as an offering. The story went viral - or as viral as things could go in 1995 - and Hindus around the world noticed the same thing. There was “an increase in overall milk sales in New Delhi by over 30%”. Scientists investigated and determined that a sculpted stone elephant trunk could sometimes absorb milk through capillary action. This was a story about rumor, interpretation, and context, but not really “hallucination”. The drinking effect was real. The Halifax Slasher was a typical supercriminal story. Two women reported being attacked by a mysterious and oddly-dressed knifeman; others followed. “Vigilante groups were set up on the streets, and several people, mistakenly assumed to have been the attacker, were beaten up; business in the town was all but shut down”. Although there was a Halifax resident with a history of knife crime, “he was quickly ruled out of the 1938 attacks on account of his large nose, which none of the 1938 victims had described”. Eventually several of the victims admitted to having made it up, and the whole thing went away. Supercriminal cases most often result from people making things up. Occasionally, seemingly-honest people report seeing the supercriminal in poor lighting conditions across a dark alley or something. But even if we consider these to be “hallucinations”, it is usually the one or two most vulnerable people in a town at the time. I can’t find any examples of true “mass hallucinations” - entire towns seeing a nonexistent supercriminal or monster at the same time. Koro is the psychosomatic disease par excellence; I’ve written about it before here. Victims, always male, believe that their penis has disappeared or retracted into their body; they often blame penis-stealing witches. Koro occurs at some very low background rate in every society (including ours), but occasionally wells up into mass panics in primitive cultures that take witchcraft seriously and have traditions of worrying about this sort of thing. Still, I don’t think any panic ever affects more than half of a village’s males, and usually not at the exact same time; it’s a smoldering panic over days or weeks, not a single instant of horrified realization. Also, although I’m not sure and would love to learn more about this, I don’t think the koro victim is having a visual hallucination of not having a penis at all. I think they think their penis is much smaller or shorter than it should be - which only requires some sort of obsessive worrying and (perhaps motivated) mis-remembering of its normal length. None of these are “mass hallucinations” in the sense where the sorts of visual hallucinations typical of certain mentally ill people occur en masse in a crowd of thousands with >50% prevalence - that is, the type of mass hallucination that would be required to explain Fatima. As far as I know, there are no confirmed cases of this ever happening. Still, from the Hindu milk miracle, we can learn that religious people can miss a real phenomenon for a long time, then notice it all at once with great fanfare. And from the koro cases, we can learn that a rare phenomenon can become more common in situations of widespread belief and social pressure. Interlude: It Seems Like Years Since It’s Been Clear This is around the stopping point of the previous Substack discussion. I’ve tried to cover most of Ethan and Evan’s arguments, go through the chain of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals, and maybe pull on a few of the more tempting loose threads that they’ve left. As best I can tell, this level of investigation ends in a decisive victory for the believers. They have a stock of seemingly-unimpeachable testimonies; the skeptics have only a few leads that don’t seem on track to pan out. Eye damage can maybe produce a few odd effects, but - in the entire history of tens of billions of people living daily underneath a sun that they are able to view at any moment - we have not yet found anyone who reports the full constellation of Fatima experiences just from seeing the sun. No exotic weather phenomenon is a perfect match. Mass hallucinations are real but comparatively weak. At least this is my assessment. Skeptic blogs don’t agree. They propose one of these things (with no consensus as to which one) then act like they’ve debunked the miracle, then skip to the really important part: laughing at how obviously wrong it is. I’ve written before about my disappointment in the skeptical community and why it worries me, and here I feel it as acutely as ever. Sitting with my disappointment and trying to put it into words, I think my worries come down to a tangling of the Bayesian graph. The straightforward Bayesian way to do this is to start with some prior probability that there is a God who causes miracles (let’s say 1%), notice that the evidence for Fatima being a miracle naively seems very high (let’s say 90%), multiply out, and end up with a higher (8.3%) probability of God’s existence and a lower (8.3%) chance that Fatima in particular was miraculous. This is liberating. It lets you say “This piece of evidence is very strong, but my prior is very low, so even without being able to debunk the evidence, I continue to disbelieve.” But doing this the straightforward Bayesian way doesn’t work. First of all, what would it mean to naively (even before factoring in that you don’t believe in miracles) say Fatima seems 90% likely to be miraculous. Before factoring in that you don’t believe in miracles, surely the probability is much higher! But also, if you try this, then as soon as you find two similar miracles (I’ve been told the next two are the Eucharistic Miracle of Lancio and the Miracle of Pellicer’s Leg) your probability of God goes up to 88%! But I don’t think there’s any real atheist whose probability would rise in such a straightforward linear way. You need some kind of model where either it’s almost trivially possible to generate an arbitrary number of convincing-yet-false miracles, or it isn’t. But this doesn’t match the “virtuous” approach of addressing each miracle on its own terms - where you try to understand the Sun Miracle by learning things about the sun, or entoptic phenomena, or 1910s Portugal. And it does match the skeptical approach I’m complaining about, where you say “it’s probably swamp gas or something, lol, imagine being so dumb that you believe in miracles.” So I cannot object too strongly. Still, my greatest fear in this and all other problems of reasoning method is the trapped prior, where people take this too far and become impervious to evidence entirely. I think it’s worth untangling the whole Bayesian graph, trying to keep this whole structure in mind, if it prevents people from accidentally propagating an update down a logical chain, then propagating the same update back up the chain, again and again, ad infinitum, until they become arbitrarily sure of themselves. “We can be sure all miracle claims, even the convincing ones, are false, because there’s no God - and we can be sure there’s no God because all miracle claims are so risibly false.” Even if this is harmless - even if it turns out correct in the case of religion - it teaches such dangerous habits of mind that I’m willing to err in the direction of going way too far taking such claims seriously - at least in the “entertaining an idea without accepting it” sense. Everyone gets to decide what is and isn’t worth their time. I think deciding that these sorts of miracles aren’t worth your time is fine, as long as you’re propagating all the probabilities correctly and not accidentally treating your own hurriedness as a cause to update the rest of your belief graph. As for me, I don’t know, I just find this fascinating. In Evan’s skeptical take on the conversation, he starts strong, but after the topic switches to Part LXXVII of Dalleur’s discussion of photograph angles, he stops and asks: What the fuck are we doing? What are we talking about? What have I spent (conservatively) 18 hours of my life on? We’re addressing what Stanley Jaki called the most important event of the 20th century! We’re debating the existence of God, the most important question possible! If God is real, then nothing could be more important than establishing this: in the best case, we will come to believe; at worst, we will be able to tell St. Peter that our failure was honest and not from lack of trying. If He is not, then we can do whatever we want here on Earth, and surely one of the noblest ways to spend our short existence is expanding the frontiers of the known into the borderlands of mystery! In particular, if the God of Fatima exists, we are in deep trouble. I said I wouldn’t talk about exactly what the Virgin Mary told the child-seers, but the short version is that the First Secret was a very, very nasty vision of Hell. It looked exactly the way a ten-year-old child might expect: a lake of fire populated by ebon-skinned demons and horrendous tortures; the lead child-seer said that if the Virgin had not begun by promising that she personally would never go there, “she would have died of fright”. As it was, the consequences of the vision were grim. The child-seers got it into their minds that they could perhaps save sinners from the fire by “doing penance”. They drank only stagnant, scum-encrusted water, in the hopes that this might help some otherwise hell-bound soul; on some especially hot days, they ceased drinking water at all. When they found particularly painful ropes, they tied them around their bodies so hard that they bled (later, the Virgin mercifully told them they didn’t need to wear the ropes at night - they could stick to daytime only). After so many mortifications, they were easy prey for the Spanish Flu; two of the three perished before their tenth birthday. As they lay dying in the hospital, they were recorded as freaking out every time they saw a nurse or visitor with “immodest dress”, saying that they would not act in such a way if they knew how long Eternity was, or what awaited them there5. If all of this is the true opinion of the Lord of the Universe, we had better figure it out quick. If it isn’t, then the words of the Grupo Anticlerical: People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured . . . O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children! Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs! …take on new meaning and urgency. I will admit my bias: I hope the visions of Fatima were untrue, and therefore I must also hope the Miracle of the Sun was a fake. But I’ll also admit this: at times when doing this research, I was genuinely scared and confused. If at this point you’re also scared and confused, then I’ve done my job as a writer and successfully presented the key insight of Rationalism: “It ain’t a true crisis of faith unless it could go either way”. But now that we’ve let Ethan, Evan, and the rest dig us into as deep a hole as possible, let’s try to dig our way out. 3: Our Lady Of Everywhere Else One question that Ethan, Evan, and Dalleur fail to ask is: what if people are basically always seeing the sun spin and change colors and and fall from the sky? What if this is the most common experience in the world? What if it’s a minor miracle every time you get more than a handful of people together and they don’t fall down in awe and terror at the manifestations of the sun? Goncado Xavier de Almeida Garrett is one of the star witnesses of the Fatima miracle, quoted above. His testimony comes from a letter written to Father Formigao, a local priest, about two months after the event. But although pro-Fatima sources quote the testimony at the beginning of the letter, they conveniently leave out what follows: I ask your excellency to please tell me if you confirm this narrative: the Bishop of Portalegre and Mrs. Maria de Jesus Raposo report that while they were with other people in Torres Novas, on the 20th of October at the end of the day, they saw the sun rotate and change its colors. They said this was different from Fátima and did not have the importance of October 13th. I would like clarification on the differences. It is urgent to know what the differences are, since they attended both […] Until now, no one saw the sun's sparkling rotations, and now everyone sees them many days and many times. Many days and many times? Remember, the Virgin Mary first appeared at Fatima on May 13. She promised to return on the 13th of each successive month until October, when she would perform a great miracle. But she never said she wouldn’t perform any miracles until October. So on the 13th of each month, a medium-sized crowd gathered. They didn’t leave disappointed. I won’t include every claimed supernatural occurrence, but here are the ones relevant to our subject: Olimpia de Jesus, about July 13: [On July 13], at her sister-in-law's house, when they heard the people shouting, he asked, "What's going on over there?" [Olimpia] looked at the sun and said, "The sun is different." The people came and reported that they had seen signs in the sun and in the sky. Joaquim Inacio Vicente, about August 13: This hour was a moment of terror for all who were there. Some lost their senses, others believed it to be the last day of their lives and their day of Judgment, and for some, afterwards, it was a wonder to see the admirable colors that successively took on the clouds that obscured the sun's rays—colors from bright red to pink and from there to blue—the color of anise, as several people declared to me minutes later in my home. Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constancio, about August 13: Everyone looked up at the sky, which was covered by a light cloud, like a very fine white lace, pink in places. The sun, which had been completely hidden for a moment, left us illuminated by a strange light, with yellow spots visible on the ground and above us all, and a great drop in temperature, as happens during a solar eclipse. Manuel Pedro Marto, about August 13 and September 13: [On August 13, he] saw a kind of luminous globe rotating in the clouds […] On September 13th, he also went to Cova da Iria. He was a little away from the children. He saw nothing, nor heard anything, but he heard that some people had seen extraordinary things in the atmosphere. Joaquim Xavier Tuna, about August 13 and September 13: On the 13th of August, I saw the sun lower in the sky at the hour of its appearance. It never lowered as much as that time, not even on October 13th. All the objects around me turned yellow. On September 13th, I saw a large cross emerge from the sun and head east. Its progress was not very hurried. Sometimes it appeared, sometimes it disappeared, until it disappeared from view. I also saw other things that I cannot explain. In the Lapas area, there were people who, at the same time, saw the cross. Then there was the great miracle on October 13. Remember, I was only able to find a handful of negative testimonies - people who said they didn’t see it. One was from a woman named Leonor das Dores Salema Manoel, who said she saw “nothing of what others saw”, at least at Fatima. But on the drive home from Fatima that evening6: I saw [the sun] pass through different colors that I can't remember and it turned green, very light green, like a green salad with a golden rim around it, and spinning. Very long rays seemed to touch the earth and the sun seemed to be separated from the sky. Then the sky took on pink flashes, changing to a yellowish hue around the sun, and further away, spots here and there. After a few long moments that I can't remember, it returned to normal and I couldn't look at it again. The next occurence was early the following year. From the parish inquiry’s interview with Jacinto de Almedia Lopes: He further said that on the day of Our Lady of Purification, that is, on the second of February, 1918, he about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, being in the same place, he noticed signs in the sun identical to those of the thirteenth of October, which he had not noticed on many other days when he had been there. And next, from a letter by Gilberto Fernandes dos Santos: I must inform you that I went to Fátima on [June 13, 1920]… at that very moment, the people were kneeling on the ground, shouting, praying loudly, weeping, begging forgiveness with their hands raised, because they were witnessing a solar phenomenon similar to that of October 13, 1917. And next, from Dr. Henrique Weiss de Oliviera, describing events on May 13, 1923: I ate my meal in a car on the road near Cova da Iria [in Fatima], from half past noon to one in the afternoon, and when I returned to the Chapel, I heard the groups I passed exclaiming in admiration about a marvelous phenomenon that they claimed was occurring in the sun toward which they were directing their gaze. Deeply doubting the repetition of the marvelous phenomena that had dazzled thousands of people, according to reliable reports, during the last apparition of Our Lady in 1917, I was about to pass on without even bothering to look. I remembered, however, that when I first went to Fátima on October 13th of last year, and upon hearing similar admiring rumors around me, I had seen nothing during my quick inspection, perhaps because I was filled with that spirit of doubt. I therefore wanted to be certain this time so that I could, with full awareness, give my testimony to whoever and whenever I was asked. And, having stopped near a group and stared at the sun, carefully shielding my eyes from the direct sunlight, so as not to see anything, they immediately advised me to insist that I would see something. It took a long insistence to finally see what amazed everyone and caused astonishment that I could not see it. And I saw with precise clarity, and twice, what the common people, in their imaginary language, very accurately likened to: almond blossom petals. They fell from a great height (no longer seeing them detach from the sun as the people around me saw them) For myself, I finally, and after a considerable time, concluded that there is no such natural phenomenon, neither known nor described, thus leaning toward the supernatural. Today I firmly believe that this was the case, because I have had testimonies that allow me to reconstruct the phenomenon as it appears to have occurred according to these testimonies. First, one could gaze at the sun for a long time and with impunity, seeing magnificent phenomena of beauty and color; then began an abundant rain of the aforementioned petals; and when I arrived, it was no longer possible to gaze at the sun, and the phenomenon, which had been quite lengthy, was at its end, which explains my difficulty in witnessing it now. And from Joao Amael, on October 13, 1925: I do not know why, I suddenly felt a desire to look at the sun. [I would hear] other educated persons admit having seen phenomena in the sun on that day and hour. I looked at the sun. Before that, nothing special could be seen. But now I looked at the sun without hurting my eyes, without any retina resisting. I became more intent. To my astonishment, the sight became even clearer. The sun turned on itself in a very small circle, and in the center it turned into a dark disk in rapid rotation. During some minutes, very impressive and overwhelming, I could clearly verify this strange process. Then, without revealing anything of what I observed, for fear of autosuggestion, I asked my companion to look at the sun and see whether it really appeared. And my companion was describing exactly the phenomenon, the same extraordinary phenomenon. The test was achieved. And I gained further assurance, when various other people later told me that they had seen what I saw clearly, at the same hour, as they kept looking at the sun, without the slightest sensation of pain. Amael’s report of a miracle in 1925 is the last recorded case I can find at Fatima. I don’t know if this was when the sun miracles stopped happening there, or when people stopped including them in the Critical Documents collection. In either case, there were plenty of other places willing to pick up the torch. 3.1: The Ghiaie Variations As far as I can tell, Fatima was only the second-largest crowd to have ever witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. The largest was a group of 200,000 - 300,000 people in Ghiaie, a tiny village near Bonate, Italy. On May 13th, 1944 - the same day of the year that the child-seers of Fatima saw their first apparition - a seven-year old girl went out to pick flowers and had a vision of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin promised to return to her for nine successive evenings; at some point (although I cannot follow this part of the story) she must also have promised to return four times the following week, as large crowds gathered in expectation. According to my source, on the ninth appearance: Many testimonies from the site of the apparition and from surrounding villages described an impressive solar phenomenon. The sun came out of the clouds, whirled dizzily on itself, and projected beams of yellow, green, red, blue, and violet light in all directions. The beams of light colored the clouds, fields, trees, and the stream of people. After a few minutes the sun stopped its whirling, and those phenomena began soon again. Many noticed that the disc had turned white like a Host. The clouds seemed to be lowering down on the people. Some noticed a Rosary in the sky. Others saw a majestic Our Lady with a trailing cloak. Some people, who were at greater distance, saw Our Lady's face looming in the sun. From nearby Bergamo many witnesses observed the sun become pale and radiate all of the rainbow's colors in all directions. They also noticed a large yellow light beam falling over Ghiaie, perpendicularly. The blog says there were similar solar phenomena during the tenth and twelfth appearances, as well as on the following June 13th and July 13th7. All of this is from a random Catholic blog; can we find clear testimonies? The miracle of Fatima was heavily promoted by Portuguese, Vatican, and American Catholics, leading to a large body of sources being available in English. The Ghiaie apparition has gotten less attention, and so I can find fewer testimonies, have had to clunkily machine translate some things, and had a harder time tracing the exact chain-of-transmission. Still, here’s what we’ve got, mostly from here: Don Giuseppe Piccardi: The people cried out to the miracle; I turned between the intrigued and the distrustful, and I saw the sun that-comes from the clouds - turned on itself and the speed of movement seemed to be skidding. At the same time I saw that he projected light beams, then, for me, almost constantly yellow gold. This color I contemplated it even when the sun was veiled with uncaught clouds. Slightly hard to figure out from the machine translation, but I think this is Bishop Adriano Bernareggi: At 6:00 PM I was at the Patronato for the feast of St. John Bosco. Just at that time I finished speaking in front of the church. Then I entered the church for the Benediction with the Blessed Sacrament. But most of the crowd remained outside because they said they had observed for about ten minutes the sun rotating on its axis, also suddenly changing color: yellow, red, blue. The sun could be observed without disturbance. The phenomenon was also observed in other places. I only noticed at the end of the service a yellow color in the houses, as when there is a partial eclipse of the sun at sunset. At 7:45 PM they said the phenomenon was repeated. I watched too. By staring into the dazzling sun, you could end up seeing the sun stand out clearly, giving the impression that it was rotating. Then everything took on a red color. But then it was clearly an optical phenomenon. Don Luigi Cortesi, a local seminary teacher who was a strong skeptic of the apparitions and even borderline-kidnapped the child-seer to convince her to recant: A shiver runs through me for a second. I react forcefully, forcing myself not to lose my mind, not to let myself be overwhelmed. I desperately squeeze my pupils and look at the sun: I see a large, clear spot without sharp edges, then, when my eye has adjusted, I see a disk of intense whiteness that seems liquid. Staring at the edges of the disk, I detect a dizzying rotation, like an electric circular motion, like a dizzying pinwheel, except that the direction of motion changes rapidly from left to right and then from right to left. I remember Fatima. Except this time, the sun revolves around a fixed axis, without moving in the sky. I return to the earth, to the crowd: I notice that the faces, the hands, the trees pierce through all the colors of the rainbow. It's natural, I think to myself: when the eye is offended by an intense light or an equivalent stimulus, it projects a stain on objects, which fades from red to violet and tints the objects it encounters with different colors; the stain disappears when the eye, rested, has returned to normal. In fact, a few minutes later, I no longer see those iridescent colors; every object has returned to its natural hue. The phenomenon of rotation leaves me dubious. A neighbor offers me his smoked glasses, and I look: the sun continues to rotate. He offers me a telescope, and I invert it, the screen, and look: the sun is still rotating. Then I can't take it anymore: even today, I'm not convinced that seeing a cosmic prodigy is worth losing my sight. Back then, I wasn't even convinced I was seeing a prodigy, since a plausible natural explanation for the phenomenon quickly emerged in my mind. However, urged by the neighbors to get excited, I remain silent. And I silence them by pinching and slapping the arms of those around me, which are stretched out towards the sky." From the parish bulletin of Tavernola, the exact author is slightly confusing but it was either written by or signed/confirmed by Piero Bonicelli, local provost: On the 28th in the evening of Pentecost, something happened that made a profound impression on everyone. At 6:00 PM sharp, a dimming of the sunlight was felt, accompanied by a sudden flash of lightning, first clearly observed by some bowling players. Looking at the sun, one saw first green, then bright red, then golden yellow, and then it spun around dizzily. At that spectacle, people poured into the streets... One can imagine their comments. The women recited the Holy Rosary, punctuated by the words: "Oh, how beautiful!" After ten minutes, the sun returned to normal. Comments? None. We await an explanation from the appropriate source. For now, we're content to hear the usual strong-minded people call us poor, deluded people, but don't you think this is a rather general illusion? In any case, for now, we're deluded: we'll see later. The parish priest of Tavernola, director of the bulletin, sending this issue requested by Father Piccardi, wrote on June 27, 1946: I must assure you that, as written, it is true, and I can also tell you that I was among those deluded that evening. To be prudent, I didn't go out into the street where people were shouting about a miracle, but from a slightly hidden window, I watched the sun change color and spin rapidly... illusion? Many of us here in Tavernola have been deluded. I can also tell you that I was pleased that such an illusion existed in Tavernola, since the people here have always had a great devotion to the Madonna. There may be more testimonies at this site, but they’re in very old scanned documents that it would be too time-consuming to stick into my machine translation pipeline. Another source says that “On February 24, 1994, [the TV show] ‘Detto tra noi' (Raidue), interviewed some witnesses, who confirmed the solar phenomena of May 21 1944 that were watched by many people“. I think a few hours extra work by an Italian speaker could produce at least five or ten extra Ghiaie testimonies, maybe many more. But as it is, we have enough to try something interesting: let’s recreate Dalleur’s analysis, but for Ghiaie. At 6 PM, the sun was shining from almost due west. For the sunlike light source producing the miracles to mimic the real sun, it would have also had to have been to the west of Ghiaie. If we assume it was the same distance as Dalleur’s Fatima light source, it would have been about 2-3 miles to the west of Ghiaie, which puts it above the village of Merate. We know from the last testimonial that the phenomenon was seen clearly in the village of Tavernola Bergamasca, which is about 22 miles from Ghiaie and 25 from Merate. An Italian source also reports sightings in Brescia and Piacenza, each about 35 miles from Ghiaie. So a Dalleur style analysis might conclude that this event also had a 25 - 35 mile visibility radius, similar to Fatima’s. …unfortunately a 25 mile circle centered on Merate includes the city of Milan, population 1.1 million, which produced no reports of unusual solar activity. And Milan had clear line-of-sight to Ghiaie and Merate, and so probably better viewing conditions than Tavernola, which (you can see from the map above) has some intervening hills. Might the miraculous light source have been like a spotlight, aimed in only one direction - that is, east to Ghiaie and Tavernola, but not southwest to Milan? This would contradict Dalleur’s Fatima analysis, since one of the most dramatic testimonies comes from the city of Minde, which is on the opposite side of the presumed light source from Fatima. I don’t really think it’s possible to maintain a theory where this phenomenon gets transmitted through normal geography. 3.2: Mary Such Cases At this point, the reader will get the general idea, and we can start moving faster, as there is a large amount of ground to cover. Heroldsbach, Germany, 1949: The Virgin appeared to four young girls. Rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on December 8th, 10,000 people saw another sun miracle. Here are about a hundred testimonies, gathered with typical German thoroughness. An expert meteorologist brought in to investigate summarized them as follows: If one now considers the testimony in detail, one encounters a surprisingly small agreement of the observations made. One witness has seen a red sun, the other a yellow, an orange or pink with blue and green, or a whitish sun. A silver one was also observed or all the colors mentioned in colorful change. One wants to have observed an oversized, the other a first small or normal, but then rapidly enlarging and rushing towards the viewer in a frightening way. Most of the witnesses noticed that the solar disk rotated very quickly in two or three phases of rotation for about a quarter of an hour. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition and miracle as fake, even going so far as to excommunicate the child-seers. Later they relented slightly and un-excommunicated them, but their official position is still that nothing supernatural happened - this sun miracle was merely an overly enthusiastic hallucination! Necedah, Wisconsin, USA, 1949: A housewife named Mary Ann Van Hoof claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. This is among the less plausible visitations: Van Hoof, who was raised Spiritualist, also claimed to have seen Joan of Arc, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. The messages she channeled seemed less like tidings of peace and love than like a particularly unhinged Truth Social post, and included warnings about the Rothschilds. Still, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15 1950, 50,000 - 100,000 people showed up hoping for a miracle. As for what happened next, Wikipedia says that “witness accounts vary significantly”. WaPo says that “observers saw nothing unusual” and LIFE mentions nothing out of the ordinary. But other sources report sun miracles, and I was eventually able to track down three testimonials in a summary of articles from a local newspaper, which states that “after a rainy morning…”: It was about noon when Van Hoof came out of the house and a woman screamed, “By God, it’s really true,” and fell to her knees. Then it happened that the Rapids woman and so many in the crowd saw the sun, covered with a dark, greenish gray disk, spinning down toward the earth. And she testified, “I thought the end of the earth was coming and fell to my knees.” A Pittsville woman also described the sun spinning closer to the earth. “I and many other people, fell to our knees in awe.” The Daily Tribune visited the Oct. 7, 1950, event — a 25-minute “last” message from the Mediatrix to the “throng” of 50,000. Responding to this seventh vision, gasps were heard from women who again saw the sun behaving oddly. A Catholic priest told reporters he saw the sun whirl clockwise and jump. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition as fake, and declared van Hoof’s followers “a cult”. Lubbock, Texas, USA, 1988. Really? Really? Nothing could be more natural than for the Queen of Heaven to appear to kind-hearted shepherd children in Portugal. Even an appearance in war-torn West Germany makes a certain amount of sense. But Lubbock, Texas? I suppose this must have been how the cool Sanhedrin members felt when they learned the Christ hailed from Nazareth. But that doesn’t make it any better. Anyway, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15, 1988, about 10,000 people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. Here is an indirect testimonial, a man describing his wife’s experience: A large crowd had gathered outside Saint John Neumann Church on that very hot August afternoon on the Feast of the Assumption. Mass was being said in the afternoon, and around the time of the Consecration, suddenly her cousin’s wife (a convert, if you remember) said “look at the sun”. When she did, the sun was pulsating, it would look like it was coming down to earth and then go back again, it spun around in circles, much the same as what took place in Fatima in 1917...and changed colors. She looked at it directly for 15 minutes or so without any damage to her eyes. As my wife looked around, the people in the crowd seemed to be bathed in various colors. During all this my wife even saw The Blessed Mother. The Blessed Mother was extending her arms in what appeared to be a welcoming gesture. But not everyone had the same experience that day: her cousin’s wife and our son saw and believed instantly, but her cousin and brother saw nothing at all. Why did some see these events and others did not? We don’t know...not enough faith? Or perhaps they had enough faith, and they didn’t need a sign! Here we have something special: according to the Los Angeles Times, one pilgrim took a poll about who saw what: A push was on to assemble evidence for the commission in a lawyerly way. Testimonies from 247 people present at the feast had been recorded. The statements were transcribed by volunteers and stored in a computer. Joe James himself indexed the information: 186 had witnessed the spinning of the sun; 75 had seen the Virgin; 64 Jesus; 18 an angel. How could anyone ignore the bulk of such documentation? We don’t know how the 247 people were selected, but very naively it seems like 2/3 of those present saw the sun spinning. This also matches the first person listing 2/4 family members. (the Catholic Church withheld judgment, refusing to either endorse or condemn the visions) Benin City, Nigeria, 2017. On October 13 2017, crowds gathered around the world to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fatima miracle. One such commemoration happened in Benin City, Nigeria, where 30,000 people attended the National Marian Congress and witnessed the re-dedication of Nigeria to Mary’s Sacred Heart. As the speakers commemorated the Fatima event . . . . . . someone pointed to the sky and shouted “It’s happening again!”. It was, indeed, happening again. You can read about ten testimonies here. I’ll quote just one, from Brother Joseph Obiemeka Azih: Immediately after the 3:00 p.m. Divine Mercy prayers, there were brief showers of rain. Then came sudden brightness of the sun, which was hitherto hidden behind layers of dark cloud. We also observed rather surprisingly the mysterious shooting of the sun forward and backward. Intermittently emitting of powerful bluish and golden colors of light from “Our Lady clothed with the Sun.” The sight was indescribably beautiful. We were busy staring at the bright sun steadily for more than twenty minutes without blinking an eye even for a second! People around us were dazzling and reflecting these bluish and golden colors on their dresses and faces. What a mystery! More than 30,000 people inside the arena were seen peering at “the dancing of the sun” bewildered. The miracle lasted for more than 45 minutes after which there was [a] heavy downpour which the Bishops present said [were] “showers of blessing.” I was able to confirm that some of the people whose testimonies were listed on the site are real Nigerian Catholics whose existence is attested in other sources. Two weeks later, there was another Nigerian commemoration of the Fatima anniversary, in Lagos, and a sun miracle happened at that one too. 3.3: Made You Gaze At Medjugorje Medjugorje (Bosnia, 1981) is in many ways a typical Marian apparition site, much like the ones on the list above. Child-seers, warnings to repent, sun miracles, you know the story by now. But in Medjugorje, the miracles keep happening. Pilgrims - or, more cynically, tourists - go there just to see the sun miracles, and many come back satisfied. You can find blogs by people who went to Medjugorje hoping to see a sun miracle, and on their first or fifth or eighth or whatever day, there’s a crowd of people, yelling and pointing at the sun, and they look up and see it too. Here’s an account from Catholic blogger Father Dwight Longernecker: I was an Anglican priest living in England, in 1985 when I was invited by a group of Anglicans and Catholics to visit Medjugorje. I didn’t want to go. Being a former Evangelical-fundamentalist I wasn’t too keen on apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. I opted out. They insisted. I dug in my heels. They said someone else would pay for it. I didn’t want to go. They cajoled and twisted my arm until I said ‘yes’ [...] On our second day there I sat on the balcony of our guesthouse with a large woman named Eleanor. As we began the rosary I looked up and the sun was a blaze of light in the sky. I looked down to the car parked below and the sun was reflected in the hood of the car as a blaze of light. Eleanor and I prayed the rosary together. I had my eyes closed. At 6:20 Eleanor gave me an elbow in the ribs and pointed. The sun was now a disc of white light in the sky like a Eucharistic host. Then as I watched it began to spin, first clockwise then anti clockwise. Sparks spit out from the rim of the sun like a firework. I looked down and the sun was a white spinning disc on the hood of the car. I don’t think this would have happened if it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. Plus, Eleanor saw it too. That’s why she gave me an elbow in the ribs. I am not sure how long this lasted, but when we spoke about it to our fellow pilgrims they said many people in the town square had reported the same phenomenon. Some of these tourists capture the phenomenon on video. Unfortunately, the videos are of three types: Videos of a bunch of people pointing at the sun, and shouting the word “Miracle!” in various languages, and obviously looking extremely excited, but the sun itself looks totally normal, and the person taking the video apologizes and says that their camera isn’t good enough to capture it.

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

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

Highlights From The Comments On Fatima

October 24, 2025 · Original source

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: 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

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

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