Astral Codex Ten

Dalleur

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Dalleur

Article

Dalleur 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 “Maybe the only interesting advance in Fatimology in the last fifty years is Dalleur (2021)”; “Dalleur is a philosophy professor at the Pontifical University in Rome”; “Dalleur pins these on a map, which I’ve edited slightly for clearer labeling”. 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

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 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: 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
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: 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
Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
I didn’t mention it in my post because it seemed to be an extraneous detail, but this reader seems to have independently noticed something similar. 3: As a child, I was on many boring car rides with no one to talk to. I would stare out the window often, and occasionally, just at the sun. I would do this -specifically- because of this phenomenon- I had always assumed everyone knew/understood this was something that happened. It was surreal reading it described as a mystery. The way it would appear to me is that if I stared at the sun long enough (through a glass car window), there would appear a very strong blue after image (light blue- as a child, I thought it similar to the color of Neptune/Uranus as shown in books). This after image would be the same size as and almost- but not quite- line up with the sun. It would then proceed to circle the actual sun. The image was very crisp, but the movement was not- moving in a sort of ‘pulse’ (imagine very slow animation, the image not smoothly moving but jumping from one position to the next to give the illusion of movement). This movement was centered roughly around the sun, but since the image was offset it gave an appearance of ‘corkscrewing’ or spinning, not a perfect circle (that is, the image overlapped the center of rotation, rather than rotating around it). The circling would continue some time (as a child I remember thinking it went for a long time, as an adult I would guess in reality it was only some seconds, certainly less than a minute), and would end when I either looked away or the sun became too bright and I was forced to shut my eyes … What made me realize this is definitely, in my mind, the same as being described is because as a child I was convinced the image was falling- I did not, as a child- think it was the sun itself, but thought that it might be the planet Neptune (because it was blue and a large orb (appearing as a disc to the eye) somewhere, presumably, in space). But as said, I was at the time concerned it was falling, and would occasionally badger my parents about it- whether it was possible the blue orb I saw in front of the sun was Neptune, and if so whether it was going to hit the earth because it looked like it was coming towards us. I understood it wasn’t something you would see if you just looked at the sun- rather in my child mind, I assumed it was in some way that staring at the sun let me see more clearly things around it, though as I grew older I increasingly understood the image to likely be caused by staring, rather than revealed. I remember as a child sort of knowing it was an afterimage but also that it was much sharper and more clear than most afterimages. 4: I was in a room at the boarding school I used to attend, looking out through the window. I recall it being low in the sky but circumstancially it would have been midday (so I presume winter months, since I don’t recall thinking that was unusual). The sky was fairly clear. I stared at it for what felt like three minutes at the time but was probably in hindsight 45 seconds. I was a bored child (probably about eight or nine) left alone in a room and it seemed like a fun idea to stare at the sun. The sun seemed to become covered by lots of large irregularly shaped black-brown spots, with the light itself shining from cracks between them. It looked kind of like a simplistic video game lava texture. 5: I was looking at the sun because I was young and stupid. It stopped shining but remained white, except for a few sunspots that could be seen by the naked eye and which indicated the sun was rapidly spinning. There were no other unusual experiences. 6: On several occasions outside I have seen my entire visual field become tinted various colors. Ever since I heard about eye fatigue and after-image based illusions I explained this to myself as it being very bright out and the color tint being from my green being worn out (making everything pinkish) or my blue being worn out (making everything greenish yellow). Unlike typical afterimages which had particular areas in my field of view, these were almost always across my entire visual field, with occasional hot spot areas where deeper afterimages existed. On each of these occasions it has been bright out and once noticing it, unless I have gone inside, it progresses between colors, though I can’t remember any specific order, only that pink is what I remember most frequently. Lasts until I go somewhere darker or the sun is covered by clouds for a while. Including as an aside, since its beyond the event, but relevant to optical experiences, I have a history of staring out into space without realizing it, failure to blink to the point of eye redness and wateriness, falling asleep with my eyes open, and distractedly looking at bright things for long enough without noticing that I develop a disruptive after image for a while after that makes it hard to read. These things make my baseline for having stared at the sun or not squinted enough on a bright day higher, and, to me, seem to explain why these things happen to me on bright days without clouds or rain, since the cloud protection wouldn’t be a necessary factor in my brightness exposure. i wanted to share since this seems like a difference in some part from the sungazers (who saw auras specifically around the sun) but which matches some of the accounts of the Fatima incident. 7: As a kid, I would stare at the sun sometimes (I eventually abandoned this after I got a headache from doing it; I don’t know whether this has caused any of my minor eye problems later in life), and it would usually resolve to a discolored disk “swirling” slowly around the bright outline of the sun. I assume this is what people mean when they say the sun was “spinning”, although I’m not completely sure. I do not believe I was primed to see something interesting, since I grew up in a nonreligious household and nobody talked to me about sungazing; I only did it because people told me not to stare at the sun for very long. 8: There was an upcoming eclipse when I was a kid and all the talk about “don’t look at the sun” was a temptation I could not resist. I stared at the sun at least a couple of times, but somebody caught me doing it (I think my mother but I do not remember in detail) and made me stop. It was very much like the Fatima miracle people describe—in fact I was a bit confused when I started reading your post because it was immediately clear to me that this is just what it looks like when you stare at the sun (or I guess, under some circumstances?). I did not realize until now that this was a rare or special experience. From what I recall, the rim of the sun remained sharp and bright, but within the circle, the color changed the longer I looked. It had a silvery, almost liquid appearance. I remember the spinning vividly, but it felt to me like it was an illusion happening because of small eye movements, and by shifting my eyes a little bit I could exaggerate or lessen the movement. I could see bright color changes too, around the edge and as afterimages or “tracers” after moving my focus. The “falling to earth” description seems pretty similar to how I remember the tracers appeared when I looked away. I do not remember exactly how long I looked, but I would guess perhaps 1-3 minutes at a time. 9: My mother and sister went sun viewing in ~2009. It was a six-to-nine months long fad in southern Minas Gerais (São João del Rei diocese), Brazil. People reported seeing Jesus and Mary in the sun, and that it spun. No reports of it changing color, though. I dont know the logistical details, who organized these outings (I was indeed just a child, my mom also didn’t care enough at the time to ask things like that). It was a series of monthly weekend mystical appearances that occurred in a bunch of different small cities, attracting, in a rough guess, 500 to a thousand pilgrims each. Always in a rural location, sometimes near small chapels. They did not charge money for the viewing, I believe only the transportation people made a profit. My sister remembers being very hungry, as they didn’t serve (or sell) food at the place, and it went from morning to sundown. My father was a complete skeptical; my mother, extremely Catholic, did not question its veracity: it was just something religious to do, and religion is good. The practice died that same year, because the local Bishop was hard against it, forbidding it. My sister didn’t see anything. My mother also saw nothing, but left feeling spiritually in peace, a very positive sentiment. 10: I used to be very confused about why the sun was portrayed as yellow, because I had looked directly at the sun (I don’t recall how many times; perhaps only once, and I was pretty young), and the sun was clearly bright pink. My default mental image of the sun is still that of a bright pink disk. It did not change colors or move or do any of the other exotic things mentioned in your post. 11: As a kid (maybe 10-13?), I would stare into the sun repeatedly for the weird experience of overexposed eyes. I’d never heard of the Fatima miracle prior to your article, but parts of it seem completely normal to my experience. The center of the sun soon stops looking intolerably bright, and instead seems like a disc of metal of an uncertain color. Its apparent color irregularly shifts between purple, silver, blue and green. My interpretation at the time was that my eyes were probably unable to strongly identify the color, because if I told myself that I expected it to be silver, it would normally be seen as silver. I have to emphasize how non-radiant the center of the sun appears at this point; it looks more like an object illuminated by the sun than like a light source But the outer rim of the sun remains bright. I assume this is because those parts of the retina have not been completely overexposed, and so can still give accurate signals that they’re receiving a ton of light. And the exact amount of ‘bright outside’ and its exact location on the sun varies a lot based on small eye movements; the central disc can appear to shift around and grow/shrink slightly in the sun. In short, the descriptions of the sun as a silver or pulsating multi-colored disc with fireworks on the outside seem entirely normal for “sungazing” for me. I did not see: 1) Rotation 2) The sun falling to earth and looking like it’s going to crush me 3) Any apparitions of people 12: Outside my home, I would frequently stare at the sun for long periods, between the ages of (young, my memory goes back to 4-ish) and 7. I would stare at various times of day — noon, sunset, etc. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just curious. I had a habit of staring for long periods at everything around me. The sun appeared various colors on first looking at it, most commonly orange or yellow. On closer inspection, this turned to white. Then shimmery blue patches would appear in the white, always touching the edge, which would appear to spin and reverse quickly. This impression of a blue-white rapidly spinning sun was observed reliably whenever the sun was far enough above the horizon on a clear day. It would continue as long as I looked at the sun. I think I would look for several minutes at a time; less than an hour. (Among my family and friends I was well known for ‘blanking out’ and staring at things for long periods.) As far as I was aware, it was not an ‘optical effect’, just the sun’s normal appearance. I had no impression of the sun falling to earth. I was a very imaginative child with many imaginary friends, ufo sightings, and mysterious experiences. I don’t remember anything imaginative, visionary, creative, etc. associated with looking at the sun. It just seemed like a straightforward observation, like many I made. In later years, I have often observed, as you have, conditions of mist, cloud, rain or (most memorably) snow or ice, which allow the sun to be seen easily as a silvery round disc like the moon. Outside of these conditions, sunrises, and sunsets, I don’t look at the sun anymore, and have never had any vision damage i know of. 13: I’m less stupid than I used to be, but when younger would sometimes look at the sun out of curiosity. I also spent much too much time lighting things on fire with a magnifying glass. So this is not so much “I saw a miracle” as “here are my general notes from looking at the sun”. The silvery sun thing is something I can attest to. At first the sun is too bright to look at, but after a couple of seconds it goes silvery and is more bearable. A slightly twirling of the sun is also something I’ve seen. It’s more like a rotation of its black border? Something like if you’d make a drawing of the sun with a black pen and then coloured it in with yellow (or whatever), the border (i.e. the black ink of the pen) rotates? This doesn’t make sense when I describe it like that, but my brain sees it twirling. I don’t recall colour changes other than everything looking washed out. 14: The first [time I saw it],(before I knew about Fatima) was in summer (I think August). The sun was setting (about an hour before sunset), and I saw the sun change color (alternating blue and pink with an apparent rotational motion around its center, like a Catherine wheel). I don’t remember if it was obscured by clouds. I don’t remember how long the event lasted. After discovering the Fatima event, I decided to personally verify the hypothesis that it was a natural phenomenon due to temporary vision changes. During September 2022, on a couple of occasions, in the early afternoon, while the sun was obscured by translucent clouds, I saw color changes (alternating blue and pink), a rotational motion (like a Catherine wheel), and the sun oscillating (as if vibrating or moving rapidly in a zigzag pattern). On both occasions, the event lasted about a minute, as I then had to look away due to discomfort. On only one occasion, after a heavy rain, and much later (around 5:00 PM), I managed to gaze at the cloudless sun, and only for a few seconds. I saw the same phenomena as when it was covered by clouds, but following this occasion, an afterimage appeared in the center of my field of vision that remained for a couple of days (the afterimage was not severe enough to prevent me from carrying out my activities, including reading and writing, and once it disappeared, I did not suffer any permanent damage to my vision). I must admit that, with the exception of the first case, I had to force myself to look at the sun, as a slight discomfort was present from the first few seconds. In the above cases the edge of the solar disk was not blurred. These were the best of 45 answers. Most of the rest saw normal afterimages, or wanted to say that they, too, had seen the sun look like a pale full moon behind clouds, or saw weird things in the sky that didn’t seem Fatima-related. Interview With A Medjugorje Witness One person filled out the form to say they had seen the miracle at Medjugorje, and kindly agreed to anonymously answer followup questions: SA: Tell me what happened. MW: I was in Medjugorje, I don’t remember the exact year but late 90s or early 2000s. This was not at the same time as one of the apparitions. We were outside, I think in the evening in summer (6pm maybe) Some people pointed out the sun, which was low in the sky, maybe just above eye level from our vantage point, nowhere near setting. Me and my mum looked at it, and it was spinning and pulsing, almost throbbing. I always compared it to a Catherine Wheel before even knowing it was a common comparison, it matched the way it was almost violently moving at risk of leaping off its axis. It changed colours, like it was having a filter passing over it. Not a smooth gradient change but as if a coloured lens was moved over it. There were points it had two or more colours over different sections. I don’t remember the exact colours but it included deep sunset reds, when the sky was high over the horizon. There wasn’t any pain or discomfort from looking at it. Eventually it stopped. The reaction from the people I was with was more quiet awe. Oddly subdued for such a strange moment! We didn’t discuss with others there, as we didn’t speak the same language. I don’t remember any other visions or apparitions. I was a believer at the time, so I was quite sensitive to what I felt were spiritual experiences, but I didn’t encounter any others on this trip. My mum has had other spiritual experiences there, including what she says was a vision of Mary in the 80s which was seen by herself and several others. I’m an atheist these days, and obviously don’t put much stock in the Marian appararitions in Medjugorje now. For instance, it seems the fire and brimstone idea of hell was a Renaissance invention, and the looming end times dynamic has been a constant across many religions. But the sun miracle remains a completely unexplainable experience! SA: What led you to go to Medjugorje? When you set off, did you know about sun miracles? Was there an expectation of seeing one? MW: My mum took me. She’s been on quite a few occasions over the years and took me there on 2/3 occasions. I didn’t know about sun miracles happening there and had no expectation of seeing any. I was aware of the Fatima sun miracle. And my mum often watched quite dramatic, apocalyptic VHSs with meteors falling from the sky etc, so I had a finely developed sense of imminent supernatural events! SA: How long did you spend in Medjugorje before seeing the miracle? How long did you stay afterwards? Did you make multiple attempts to see the miracle before it happened? Did you try to see it again afterwards? MW: I think the trip was 7-10 days. It happened in the second half of the trip, 2-3 days from the end maybe. I definitely kept an eye on the sun when it approached a similar time of day. Now I look into it, the daily apparations were at 6.40pm, I don’t remember if that was the exact time of the sun miracle but it would have been close to that time. I came back to Medjugorje with my mum as a teenager and brother, nothing happened that time! SA: Did you get any chance to talk to other people in Medjugorje, either pilgrims or locals, and gauge what percent of them had seen the miracle, or how many times they had seen it? MW: I didn’t get to discuss with anyone. A short “wow did you see that” with my mum, but it’s not even the weirdest thing she’s seen there given she thinks she saw Mary appear. SA: When people gestured to you to look at the sun, did you see the miracle immediately, or did it take you a while of concentrating and straining? If the latter, how long? MW: I remember it being fairly immediate. Obviously I had to look at the sun, as it’s not like the surroundings were going disco coloured, it didn’t affect the actual light the sun gave off on my surroundings. But I don’t remember staring at a normal looking sun for any period before the effect started. It was wobbling and spinning right away, although the colour changes may have come after the violent spinning. SA: Having [now] read about the theories that it’s just afterimages, or illusions, or something like that - does that accord with your experience? Does it feel like you just saw minor perturbations that could have been illusions? Or did it seem perfectly clear, totally beyond the ability to be an illusion? MW: It felt completely beyond any possibility of it being an illusion. It was too instantaneous, and the effects too strong. No clouds or signs of interference over the sun. And someone else drew my attention to it! For afterimages specifically, they still have that very strong searing quality, which wasn’t a factor here in the same way. SA: Did it look like it looks in the videos linked in the post? MW: No, it didn’t bear much resemblance to the videos. The pulsing wasn’t present with what I saw. Violent spinning and colour changes only, and an effect kind of similar to an eclipse initially that changed to colours changing, but not in the same fashion as an afterimage. SA: Can you tell me more about being an atheist? How does this mesh with you having seen a hard-to-explain miracle? MW: I just gradually became disillusioned with Catholicism. My mum is very devout and pushed it very hard on me, so there’s a strong aspect of teenage rebellion. Fundamentally, I couldn’t reconcile the existence of the kind, loving, individually interested God I’d been taught about with the world as I came to see it (partly the problem of evil, partly seeing the gap between OT and NT as signs of scripture being a historical construct). So either God didn’t exist, did in a form that I had no respect or interest in. The sun miracle was a major reason I called myself agnostic for a very long time. To this day, I can’t explain what happened. I just accept that certain, supernatural appearing, phenomena can occur which we can’t explain. Now I’ve stopped believing such things are possible, they’ve stopped happening. Which I’ve taken as evidence that there’s some degree of self induced receptiveness, like shamanist practices, at play. Although I know the counterargument would be I’ve merely closed myself off from God. SA: Thank you. Ethan: It Wasn’t The Sun Ethan Muse, who wrote the original pro-miracle post that started this discussion, responded to me here: It Wasn’t The Sun. His main goal remains supporting Dalleur’s assertion that Fatima was an objective miracle, implemented through a fiery object which was not the real sun (and therefore cannot be explained by the sun giving people afterimage-related hallucinations), and which was seen by many distant witnesses (and therefore cannot be explained by suggestibility). I won’t answer every one of his objections, both in the interests of time and because I don’t have good answers to every one of his objections, but some highlights: 1.1.1: Cloud Dimming In my original post, I was unimpressed by the “miracle” of people seeing the sun very clearly (including the sharp outline of the solar disc) without being blinded, because I had seen this myself regularly, when the sun was partly dimmed by clouds. Some of the Fatima witnesses had said it couldn’t be clouds, because the disc was visible very clearly rather than the foggy appearance you would get from - well - fog, but I insisted this didn’t update me, because I myself had seen the disc clearly through cloud cover. Ethan says I must be mis-remembering, because my claimed experience is physically impossible: The luminance of the solar disc at its zenith is on the order of 10⁹ cd/m².1 The maximum luminance that an on-axis, compact source can have without causing observers to experience discomfort glare is on the order of 10³ cd/m². Bringing the Sun’s luminance down from 10⁹ cd/m² to 10³ cd/m² requires an attenuation factor of 10⁶. By Beer’s law, that presupposes clouds with an optical depth of roughly 14. When obscured by clouds that thick, the solar beam is essentially extinguished. All that reaches observers is light that has undergone multiple scattering within clouds, emerging from many directions rather than straight paths from the solar disc. The solar disc is reduced to a bright patch or vanishes entirely. Why does Scott have the impression that he has stared at the Sun while it was veiled by thin clouds without experiencing discomfort? It is possible that he is remembering episodes where he briefly glanced at the Sun when it was low on the horizon. Even then, however, luminance should have exceeded the comfort ceiling. Another possibility is that he is accurately recalling that the Sun appeared to be pale, but is forgetting that he squinted, experienced discomfort glare, and/or diverted his gaze. Against this, I posted a Discord poll in which 13/16 respondents agreed they had seen the same thing. After my post, people in the ACX Discord channel independently replicated the poll, with the following results: The Discord comments were pretty interesting, because some people said they could imagine this happening during a forest fire or something - and other people said no, what were they talking about, this happened all the time with totally normal clouds. It really does seem like there’s a pretty sharp distinction between people who recognize and don’t recognize the description. Some people chimed in on the comments of the main post, or the form I set up for people who wanted to send reports, saying the same. From Measure: I have seen the [thin clouds make the sun easy to look at with a crisp edge] phenomenon many times (midwest US, usually early in the morning, but occasionally nearer midday). From a respondent to my survey: I have not seen the sort of behavior described, but I just wanted to say that when there’s just the right amount of cloud cover I can *definitely* look at the sun without my eyes hurting, and it looks like a dull silvery-grey disc. I happen to catch the sun like this every few months (I live in New England), peer at it for a few seconds to see if I can make out sunspots with the naked eye, then think better of my eye health and look away. It’s really weird to me that some people you asked had never experienced this. I thought it was a mundane, normal thing everyone knows! How do we square this with Ethan’s claim that this is impossible? I have no expertise in optical physics and cannot begin to comment on this. GPT-5, after I attempt to give it a neutral prompt that doesn’t reveal which side of the issue I’m on, says that the disc-like sun is possible, and Ethan is wrong because “Cloud droplets are large (Mie regime) and have a strongly forward-peaked phase function. Even when they dim the Sun a lot, they don’t behave like a perfect diffuser”. I don’t know what this means or whether it’s actually a good response. I welcome input from human physicists in the comments. In a private conversation, Ethan continued to assert that I was misremembering, and that all the Discord users and commenters who agreed with me had been contaminated by my testimony and become victims of suggestibility. I think this is a pretty crazy point to suddenly convert to the doctrine of eyewitness fallibility, contamination, and suggestibility - but I leave further discussion to people who understand optical physics. Despite believing I’m right on this factual point, I’m no longer sure it matters - some of the Medjugorje pilgrims say they saw the miracle in a completely clear sky, and that while it was happening it didn’t hurt to stare at the sun. 1.1.2: Eyewitness Testimony Ethan takes issue with my citing Fatima expert Stanley Jaki’s claim that “the great majority of eyewitness accounts, and certainly the most important ones, contain emphatic references to the continued presence of clouds.” He says that: Scott neglects the fact that those ‘emphatic references’ both explicitly and implicitly contradict his proposal . . . Sampling from Scott’s collection of testimonies from 60 eyewitnesses, I found 15 statements that unambiguously describe the behavior of clouds during the event. All of them confirm that, although clouds were present and sometimes passed in front of the ‘Sun,’ cloud coverage was partial, nonuniform, and intermittent. I agree with Doug Summers Stay’s proposal that: I don’t see any mention here of different layers of clouds. It is possible to have both cumulus clouds and cirrus clouds at the same time, so what we think of as “clouds” part and behind them is another layer of clouds blocking the sun. It seems to me, especially from watching the videos and videos in the comments, that there is some rare kind of clouds, perhaps caused by high ice crystals, that can produce a variety of optical effects: motion, changing color, and changing size. That this should happen at a time when a lot of people are looking at the sun expecting something to happen is a big coincidence, but in the end only a coincidence. On this model, there was a thick layer, obvious as clouds to the observers, which had been producing the rainstorm, and which cleared just before the miracle. There was also a thinner layer, which dimmed the sun but didn’t hide it, and which was sometimes - but not consistently - reported as clouds by witnesses. Many witness testimonies say that, although the main layer of clouds had cleared, there was some kind of veil over the sun. O Seculo: The sun had a kind of veil like transparent gauze so that eyes could gaze at it. Almeida describes the sun as …a disc of smoky silver. Compare to our photo of the sun filtered through clouds: From Domingos Pinto Coelho: The sun, until then concealed, showed itself among the clouds that moved fairly fast. Because their density was variable, the veil which they threw over the king of stars was diaphanous. Like the multitude, we then looked toward the sun with rapt attention, and through the clouds, we saw it under new aspects. From Nascimento e Sousa: The sun, which was surrounded by clouds, trembled hesitatingly…I saw there a very pronounced yellow color, and it seemed to me that I saw a silver color beneath the solar disc, but I don’t guarantee that. From Maria de Campos: We started to see the disk of the sun, and see it clearly against the dark gray layer which covered the entire sky…we saw something like a silver-lined veil, with a round shape, as if it were a full moon. Again, I’m not sure this matters, since some of the later miracles were in a clear sky. 1.1.3 - Inconsistency Ethan points out that if the sun were partially veiled by clouds, to the point where it was not too bright to stare at, then it presumably also would not bright enough to produce weird entoptic phenomena and hallucinations. When we discussed this, I had no better solution than to say that maybe there was a level of brightness which was dim enough to look at, but still bright enough to produce phenomena/hallucinations. But again, I’m no longer sure this matters. Many people in the comments to the original post report staring at the completely-non-veiled sun without feeling pain or having negative effects, many Medjugorje pilgrims say they saw the miracle in a completely clear sky without pain, and fire kasina practitioners can get imagery/phenomena from looking at dim or medium-brightness lights. I agree with Ethan that the sun at midday is so bright that it’s painful for me to look at for even a fraction of a second, and I don’t understand how so many people are saying they stare at the sun for minutes at a time at any time of day just because they’re bored. 2: Distant Witnesses Ethan was able to find more medium-distant witnesses than I could: The two witnesses at Alburitel, who I thought were in the same group, were actually in two different groups (is it surprising that our only witnesses from each of these two groups are each other’s brother?)
Inline links: It Wasn’t The Sun, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!iQhN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7a99a023-dcb0-4cb2-98ef-e0800fc7b5a3_1107x174.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x0Vw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc6946e4b-8bb6-4169-8954-a33875f9d053_1059x265.png, Measure, says that the disc-like sun is possible, and Ethan is wrong because, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!N1Km!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1ad98a6a-898d-44ec-9b8b-a759d4303cca_151x132.png
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
Generalized one-fell-swoop paranormal explanations. Demons are trying to confuse us, or the simulation is glitching, or there’s some kind of Harry Potter-esque masquerade overflowing with wizards and monsters that carefully hides itself from us Muggles but occasionally leaks. UFOs do not really lend themselves to an individualized paranormal explanation - too many weird aliens in saucers trying to send whichever message of peace and love is most politically popular at the time of the abduction, too few Matrioshka brains with nanotech - so bringing them into our attention may make us more interested in looking for a generalized paranormal explanation which is merely pretending to be all these specific supernatural beings, including the Virgin. I take this one sort of seriously, but I also think it violates a general heuristic against conspiracies and false flag attacks. If some incredibly powerful being is telling you that it’s the Virgin Mary, and discussing Catholic doctrine, and performing healing miracles, I think you should at least start with a presumption of taking it seriously. But at this level of distance from any well-established priors, who even knows? GedAtThwll writes: This account reminds me of the semi-famous Ariel School UFO encounter [in Zimbabwe], covered well on YouTube and Wikipedia. Basically, ~60 kids saw a “silver craft” descend, and aliens (of debatable description) came out and did various things (described differently by participants). Oddly similar to the silver sun -> hallucinations. I don’t know how much it reminds me of Fatima, but I agree “sixty people all say they saw a UFO and some aliens” is the sort of mass hallucination I claimed basically doesn’t happen. I was going to attribute this something about the psychic makeup of poor uneducated Zimbabwean children, but according to Wikipedia, “Ariel School was an expensive private school [and] most of the pupils were from wealthy white families in Harare.” One interesting feature of this story is that it happened a few days after a previous UFO panic in Zimbabwe - thousands of people said they saw some kind of fiery spaceship in the sky. This was very likely true - their accounts match a Russian rocket that reentered and burned up in the atmosphere around that time. So it seems like maybe the rocket primed people into a UFO mania, and that caused . . . sixty schoolkids to all hallucinate the same thing? At least to the point where some later investigators who are accused of maybe asking some leading questions could get them to give similar answers? Peter McLaughlin (blog) writes: This is excellent. One additional strand that I’d like to see someone tug on – maybe I will. The Irish nationalist poet W. B. Yeats has a poem about the 1891 funeral of Irish nationalist political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. The poem describes how clouds covered the sky on the day of the funeral, the sun could be seen through a gap in the clouds, and then a star “shoots down”. Most people who write about this poem take this to be pure symbolism (the next stanza describes a scene of pagan sacrifice that definitely is pure symbolism), but a while ago I came across an essay where Yeats insists that no, this actually happened. He wasn’t at the funeral himself, but he knew lots of people who were. He cites his unrequited love Maud Gonne telling him afterwards about “the star that fell broad daylight as Parnell’s body was lowered into the grave”, and quotes the writer Standish O’Grady: ‘I state a fact - it was witnessed by thousands. While his followers were committing Charles Parnell’s remains to the earth, the sky was bright with strange lights and flames. Only a coincidence possibly, and yet persons not superstitious have maintained that there is some mysterious sympathy between the human soul and the elements, and that storm, and other elemental disturbances have too often succeeded or accompanied great battles to be regarded as only fortuitous...’ Now, Yeats was exceptionally credulous and prone to exaggeration. And he wrote the poem years after the funeral: while I think it’s very unlikely, it’s not impossible that he was ‘contaminated’ by subsequent knowledge of the reports from Fatima, and this coloured the way he stitched together the testimony he’d heard. The two sources he cites are less obviously Fatima-esque than his poem (though they don’t contradict each other, and altogether they add up to something exceptionally Fatima-esque with the lights and the falling object etc.; and, again, my knowledge of Yeats’ biography makes contamination seem unlikely). Even accounting for all this, the similarities between Yeats’ poem and the Fatima sun miracle are really striking to me. I think this is a potentially very important datapoint, because it’s an almost entirely non-religious example. To be sure, you can define ‘religion’ so that Irish nationalism can be a religion, but it’s very different from a bunch of people huddling on a hill because someone told them the Virgin Mary might appear. And indeed Parnell was in the unique position of being the Protestant leader of a mostly-Catholic political movement, cutting across Ireland’s religious divide. If there really was a Fatima-esque sun miracle at Parnell’s funeral, it strongly suggests that the correct explanation is (a) non-religious/materialist but also (b) ‘objective’ (or at least as intersubjective as optical illusions) rather than a matter of pure mass hysteria or hallucination. Which is exactly what this post suggests. And Parnell’s funeral came several decades before Fatima, so genuine primary sources would rule out ‘social contagion’ completely. This has been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while, but if enough people are interested I may try to track down the sources. The main published collection of Yeats’ letters to and from Gonne starts in 1893, two years after the funeral, so the main source he cites might be tricky to verify. But there might be independent diaries or newspaper reports from people at the funeral who weren’t in Yeats’ social circle, and at very least I can check the quote from Standish O’Grady. Melias (blog) writes: This is my perspective as an Orthodox Christian, and a possible framework for interpreting Fatima as a real miracle without becoming a fire-and-brimstone Catholic. It’s possible that Fatima et al. are partially or entirely from God. It’s also possible they are partially or entirely demonic phenomena, though often repurposed by God to good ends. Either way, if I have good reason to believe the Catholic Church is not fully in accord with Divine Truth, these miracles on their own shouldn’t make me change my mind. Christ Himself tells us to believe for His own sake, not for the sake of miracles. I believe in the supernatural because of numerous miracle stories that are impossible to explain otherwise. But my non-materialism is specifically Orthodox Christian because I can’t explain Jesus unless He’s the Christ, and I find Him most clearly in the practice and teachings of the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy has plenty of miracles too, but that’s not why I’m here. I.E. Christ Himself gives you permission to decouple the reality of a supernatural occurrence from an associated claim to Divine Truth. You can use Fatima to update the chance of P(supernatural) without an equal update to P(Catholicism). Anyway, if you do want to keep going down the miracle rabbit-hole, the Orthodox equivalent of Fatima is the annual miracle of the Holy Fire. The main miracle - that a candle is miraculously lit while the Patriarch of Jerusalem is alone in the Holy Sepulchre - has supposedly been debunked since the Middle Ages. Even many Orthodox doubt it. But pilgrims regularly report a secondary miracle: For the first few minutes, candles lit from the Holy Fire don’t burn things, at least not how they should. Some videos [Video 1 here] Looks like this guy should have severe burns [Video 2 here] My brain tells me this might be possible with regular candles... but her sleeve gets plenty of time under intense flame [Video 3 here] They don’t leave their flesh in the flame for too long, but my brain tells me that putting the bundle of candles directly under your chin like the man does at 0:07 should also result in serious burns I pray before a single small candle every night. If I put my hand two inches above the visible flame, I can only hold it for ~2 seconds until it hurts too much. I find the videos and first-hand testimony (see Rod Dreher’s blog for one example) pretty convincing. Deiseach writes: Ah, I’m not pushed about Marian apparitions. The miracle of the sun is along the lines of the Shroud of Turin - you don’t have to believe the shroud is really the shroud of Jesus Christ, nobody is making you, it’s not doctrine. At the same time, if you want to venerate it (as you would a crucifix) that’s okay. Keep away from making extravagant claims, don’t contradict received doctrine, and it’s fine. Did a miracle happen at Fatima? I have no idea. I believe in God and the supernatural and all that jazz, but I’m not living and dying on “did this one event at this one apparition site really happen? if you prove it didn’t, oh no my faith is destroyed!” During the moving statue craze in Ireland, we had our own little local apparition. At the height of it, tour buses used to come with people to pray at the site. That has long died down, and I don’t recall that there were any earth-shattering revelations claimed by the visionaries, what remains is a quiet revival in people going to pray the rosary at the grotto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues There are a *lot* of alleged apparitions and private revelations that are never officially accepted by the Church, and a lot more which are condemned as fakes and frauds. Ross Douthat writes (on Twitter): Re-read Scott Alexander’s Fatima post (why not?) and I think this is where his analysis goes astray - after realizing there were a bunch of “echo” miracles like the initial case, not all church-approved, he decides that *strengthens* a skeptic’s case. But you don’t have to postulate demons to see why a big miracle might have non-church-approved sequelae. 1) Catholicism could be fallible in discerning which miracles are legit. 2) Even seers have free will; visions could fall on fallible ppl who run wild with dubious claims and 3) you’d expect a big miracle to have some sequels where enthusiasm does get the better of people (which any theory of miracles obviously has to allow for). Clearly (if He exists) God doesn’t force ppl to correctly interpret every experience He grants them, and so a multiplicity of miracle sequels, some of which seem credible and even produce video evidence, and some of which veer off into left field, seems entirely compatible with the original one actually being a divine intervention - if that’s where the core evidence points. I answered: Thanks for engaging in depth. I admit that was a surprising direction for that result to go, but I mostly stand by it. I think first, that the extra miracles demonstrate it has to be a subjective phenomenon. Partly because it was unclear at Fatima whether there were any people who didn’t see it (the two negative testimonies were such a small number compared to the many positive ones that it was tempting to dismiss them as lying, or confused, or looking the wrong direction) - but at several of the other miracles it’s much clearer that large fractions, sometimes a majority, saw nothing. Partly because in some cases (Benin City, Lagos) a stadium full of people saw it, but people in the same city, just outside the stadium, reported nothing unusual. And partly because the miracle can’t be caught on video (the one video that I thought was okay, the Filipino one, got picked apart in the comments). It being a subjective phenomenon doesn’t prove it’s not a miracle (it could be a sort of prophetic vision), but it at least opens the door to that possibility. And second, although I don’t claim to be able to know for certain what God will or won’t do, I think at least the Necedah event meets any bar a reasonable person might set for “too dumb and heretical to be a real apparition”. If overly enthusiastic worshippers at a fake apparition can report sun miracles, that implies that the human capacity for hallucination is strong enough / specific enough to potentially produce spectacular sun miracles in some situations. But once we admit that, it’s only a trivial extension to say that this same human capacity to hallucinate sun miracles could have been responsible for the original sun miracle, which was more impressive than Necedah in degree but not in kind. Together, I think these are a significant negative update from where we would be if we only had the original miracle, where we might have assumed (like Dalleur) that it was an objective phenomenon that everyone could see, and that there was no way anyone could be “enthusiastic” enough to hallucinate something so striking. Valerio writes: I am Italian from the south of Italy. I was talking to my mom about your analysis of the Fatima mystery (which is very famous here). My mom told me she had exactly the same experience when she was doing a “religious trekking” trip in a small city called Gallinaro (Frosinone). She was around 18 at the time (she is 70 now). She saw a pulsating sun, like it would get closer and closer and then the go back again. This effect repeated several times (3/4) and she got really scared. Importantly, at the time she didn’t know about this effect of the pulsating sun (she learnt about it later). Also importantly she claimed they were not staring particularly at the sun nor they were expecting any miracle. They were actually sitting down on a bench nearby a cliff eating a sandwich. She doesn’t remember whether if was cloudy or not but she says she was able to stare in the sun, so maybe it was. As she was coming down the trip, her group met a local lady that confirmed those types of visions would occur there. This place is famous cause a young little girl and her grandma had a vision in a cave ( little Jesus, no more details provided) few years back. When my mom visited the little girl was still alive, not sure about now. As I am writing this , she just told me the story so didn’t have the time to research it independently . Victoria F writes: I think you put too much stock in the Catholic Church excommunicating someone and how much that reduces the odds that Mary was involved or not. Pope St. Leo I and St. Joan of Arc have also been excommunicated. Many seers are given difficult treatment by the Catholic Church at first. Lot of people here say this is the the “best” miracle. I think the many spontaneous healings at Lourdes are perhaps better: https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf though I’m not sure how to get the medical records myself https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/the-medical-bureau-of-the-sanctuary/ Our Lady of Zeitoun is also perhaps a better apparition. At least it has some cool photos. I admit excommunication of the seers/believers is not proof that some of the other miracles were fake, but the Necedah one, where Mary gave warnings about the Rothschilds, and the “seer” also talked to the ghosts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, seems pretty bad. An acquaintance claims to have done their own analysis of Lourdes and found that the impressiveness of the healings predictably decreased over time as record-keeping and medical verifiability got better, but I haven’t seen his work. There’s an interesting Substack post by a Zeitoun skeptic here. Marcel writes: Speculative hypothesis that might be worth exploring: could the perceptual mechanisms involved in the Fatima Sun Miracle be related to those underlying Tögal visions in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism? In Tögal (an advanced, traditionally esoteric practice), meditators report experiences of multicolored, moving light displays in response to sky or light gazing. The parallels with the Fátima reports are striking: light as a trigger, dancing colors, and evolving visionary forms. If so, Tögal might provide a reproducible framework for studying how visual and neurological processes, shaped by expectation and attention, can generate experiences of radiance that are interpreted as miraculous or sacred. Another Buddhist explanation! I can’t find a Tögal source anywhere near as clear as Daniel Ingram’s work on fire kasina, but for what it’s worth, the symbol of Dzogchen Buddhism, the thigle, looks like this: …with some representations being even more suggestive: Nikita Sokolsky (blog) writes: » Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima [...] The rest is available only as physical books, $15 + shipping each. Somebody should buy the books, scan them, machine translate the testimonies, and put the translations online. The most important is Volume III I’ve ordered Volume III - though shipping anywhere outside Portugal cost $48 (not surprising for a 639 page book, I guess). They promise delivery by Oct 12th. » There are a few articles about solar retinopathy in the context of Marian shrines that I couldn’t access, including at least Nix and Apple (1987) and Campo et al (1988) Emailed you both. Thank you, Nikita! I’ve uploaded Campo here, and Nix & Apple here. Campo is only a few paragraphs, and contains little of interest if you’ve read the original post. Nix & Apple profiles several cases in New Orleans, including a pilgrim who saw the miracle in Medjugorje and then went home and saw it again in New Orleans, and a second person who skipped Medjugorje and saw it in New Orleans with no previous exposure. There was also an interesting case of someone who stared at the sun for 15 minutes with no injury, then tried again for 15 seconds and did get an injury that time. My days of not understanding the function mapping sungazing length to injury probability are definitely coming to a middle. The eye doctors who wrote the article only say that “Evidence suggests a great individual variation in the susceptibility for developing solar retinopathy, as the cause of the lesion is felt to be a photochemical injury rather than a thermal injury of the retina and retinal pigment epithelium.” The Ghiaie translations are in a form that makes them harder to upload, but there are about a dozen which contain descriptions of a sun miracle, all of which match the Fatima testimonies closely. The one I found most interesting was a monk nearby, who originally doubted the apparitions; he was in his monastery doing normal work when he saw the sun miracle, which included a beautiful white cross appearing in the sky. Other monks saw it too. The next day, he says that a secular newspaper claimed local astronomers had found some kind of ice crystal phenomenon responsible for the event, but he didn’t believe it. He didn’t clarify exactly where this happened (though his address was Castelnuovo Don Bosco, about 80 miles from Ghiaie) or when (though the testimonial implies it was at the same time as the Ghiaie miracle). Main Conclusions And Updates I’m impressed by the fire kasina correspondence, but the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.
Inline links: writes, on YouTube, Wikipedia, match a Russian rocket, blog, writes, blog, writes, Video 1 here, Video 2 here, Video 3 here, writes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues, writes, writes, https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf, https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/the-medical-bureau-of-the-sanctuary/, some cool photos, here, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tnHP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcaa90086-ed0b-4620-b0e5-502d1d34419d_800x800.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EVex!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c466a55-ea5c-4698-a27c-4947720edcfa_736x368.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vVge!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3052f661-b774-4dcb-9734-7c2e297c082a_225x225.jpeg, blog, Campo here, Nix & Apple here