Astral Codex Ten

Necedah

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Necedah

Article

Necedah is a recurring place 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 “Necedah, Wisconsin, USA, 1949”; “it was also a cloudy/rainy day at … Necedah”; “Necedah miracles”. It most often appears alongside A Ordem, Abraham Lincoln, ACX.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • 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
…unfortunately a 25 mile circle centered on Merate includes the city of Milan, population 1.1 million, which produced no reports of unusual solar activity. And Milan had clear line-of-sight to Ghiaie and Merate, and so probably better viewing conditions than Tavernola, which (you can see from the map above) has some intervening hills. Might the miraculous light source have been like a spotlight, aimed in only one direction - that is, east to Ghiaie and Tavernola, but not southwest to Milan? This would contradict Dalleur’s Fatima analysis, since one of the most dramatic testimonies comes from the city of Minde, which is on the opposite side of the presumed light source from Fatima. I don’t really think it’s possible to maintain a theory where this phenomenon gets transmitted through normal geography. 3.2: Mary Such Cases At this point, the reader will get the general idea, and we can start moving faster, as there is a large amount of ground to cover. Heroldsbach, Germany, 1949: The Virgin appeared to four young girls. Rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on December 8th, 10,000 people saw another sun miracle. Here are about a hundred testimonies, gathered with typical German thoroughness. An expert meteorologist brought in to investigate summarized them as follows: If one now considers the testimony in detail, one encounters a surprisingly small agreement of the observations made. One witness has seen a red sun, the other a yellow, an orange or pink with blue and green, or a whitish sun. A silver one was also observed or all the colors mentioned in colorful change. One wants to have observed an oversized, the other a first small or normal, but then rapidly enlarging and rushing towards the viewer in a frightening way. Most of the witnesses noticed that the solar disk rotated very quickly in two or three phases of rotation for about a quarter of an hour. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition and miracle as fake, even going so far as to excommunicate the child-seers. Later they relented slightly and un-excommunicated them, but their official position is still that nothing supernatural happened - this sun miracle was merely an overly enthusiastic hallucination! Necedah, Wisconsin, USA, 1949: A housewife named Mary Ann Van Hoof claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. This is among the less plausible visitations: Van Hoof, who was raised Spiritualist, also claimed to have seen Joan of Arc, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. The messages she channeled seemed less like tidings of peace and love than like a particularly unhinged Truth Social post, and included warnings about the Rothschilds. Still, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15 1950, 50,000 - 100,000 people showed up hoping for a miracle. As for what happened next, Wikipedia says that “witness accounts vary significantly”. WaPo says that “observers saw nothing unusual” and LIFE mentions nothing out of the ordinary. But other sources report sun miracles, and I was eventually able to track down three testimonials in a summary of articles from a local newspaper, which states that “after a rainy morning…”: It was about noon when Van Hoof came out of the house and a woman screamed, “By God, it’s really true,” and fell to her knees. Then it happened that the Rapids woman and so many in the crowd saw the sun, covered with a dark, greenish gray disk, spinning down toward the earth. And she testified, “I thought the end of the earth was coming and fell to my knees.” A Pittsville woman also described the sun spinning closer to the earth. “I and many other people, fell to our knees in awe.” The Daily Tribune visited the Oct. 7, 1950, event — a 25-minute “last” message from the Mediatrix to the “throng” of 50,000. Responding to this seventh vision, gasps were heard from women who again saw the sun behaving oddly. A Catholic priest told reporters he saw the sun whirl clockwise and jump. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition as fake, and declared van Hoof’s followers “a cult”. Lubbock, Texas, USA, 1988. Really? Really? Nothing could be more natural than for the Queen of Heaven to appear to kind-hearted shepherd children in Portugal. Even an appearance in war-torn West Germany makes a certain amount of sense. But Lubbock, Texas? I suppose this must have been how the cool Sanhedrin members felt when they learned the Christ hailed from Nazareth. But that doesn’t make it any better. Anyway, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15, 1988, about 10,000 people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. Here is an indirect testimonial, a man describing his wife’s experience: A large crowd had gathered outside Saint John Neumann Church on that very hot August afternoon on the Feast of the Assumption. Mass was being said in the afternoon, and around the time of the Consecration, suddenly her cousin’s wife (a convert, if you remember) said “look at the sun”. When she did, the sun was pulsating, it would look like it was coming down to earth and then go back again, it spun around in circles, much the same as what took place in Fatima in 1917...and changed colors. She looked at it directly for 15 minutes or so without any damage to her eyes. As my wife looked around, the people in the crowd seemed to be bathed in various colors. During all this my wife even saw The Blessed Mother. The Blessed Mother was extending her arms in what appeared to be a welcoming gesture. But not everyone had the same experience that day: her cousin’s wife and our son saw and believed instantly, but her cousin and brother saw nothing at all. Why did some see these events and others did not? We don’t know...not enough faith? Or perhaps they had enough faith, and they didn’t need a sign! Here we have something special: according to the Los Angeles Times, one pilgrim took a poll about who saw what: A push was on to assemble evidence for the commission in a lawyerly way. Testimonies from 247 people present at the feast had been recorded. The statements were transcribed by volunteers and stored in a computer. Joe James himself indexed the information: 186 had witnessed the spinning of the sun; 75 had seen the Virgin; 64 Jesus; 18 an angel. How could anyone ignore the bulk of such documentation? We don’t know how the 247 people were selected, but very naively it seems like 2/3 of those present saw the sun spinning. This also matches the first person listing 2/4 family members. (the Catholic Church withheld judgment, refusing to either endorse or condemn the visions) Benin City, Nigeria, 2017. On October 13 2017, crowds gathered around the world to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fatima miracle. One such commemoration happened in Benin City, Nigeria, where 30,000 people attended the National Marian Congress and witnessed the re-dedication of Nigeria to Mary’s Sacred Heart. As the speakers commemorated the Fatima event . . . . . . someone pointed to the sky and shouted “It’s happening again!”. It was, indeed, happening again. You can read about ten testimonies here. I’ll quote just one, from Brother Joseph Obiemeka Azih: Immediately after the 3:00 p.m. Divine Mercy prayers, there were brief showers of rain. Then came sudden brightness of the sun, which was hitherto hidden behind layers of dark cloud. We also observed rather surprisingly the mysterious shooting of the sun forward and backward. Intermittently emitting of powerful bluish and golden colors of light from “Our Lady clothed with the Sun.” The sight was indescribably beautiful. We were busy staring at the bright sun steadily for more than twenty minutes without blinking an eye even for a second! People around us were dazzling and reflecting these bluish and golden colors on their dresses and faces. What a mystery! More than 30,000 people inside the arena were seen peering at “the dancing of the sun” bewildered. The miracle lasted for more than 45 minutes after which there was [a] heavy downpour which the Bishops present said [were] “showers of blessing.” I was able to confirm that some of the people whose testimonies were listed on the site are real Nigerian Catholics whose existence is attested in other sources. Two weeks later, there was another Nigerian commemoration of the Fatima anniversary, in Lagos, and a sun miracle happened at that one too. 3.3: Made You Gaze At Medjugorje Medjugorje (Bosnia, 1981) is in many ways a typical Marian apparition site, much like the ones on the list above. Child-seers, warnings to repent, sun miracles, you know the story by now. But in Medjugorje, the miracles keep happening. Pilgrims - or, more cynically, tourists - go there just to see the sun miracles, and many come back satisfied. You can find blogs by people who went to Medjugorje hoping to see a sun miracle, and on their first or fifth or eighth or whatever day, there’s a crowd of people, yelling and pointing at the sun, and they look up and see it too. Here’s an account from Catholic blogger Father Dwight Longernecker: I was an Anglican priest living in England, in 1985 when I was invited by a group of Anglicans and Catholics to visit Medjugorje. I didn’t want to go. Being a former Evangelical-fundamentalist I wasn’t too keen on apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. I opted out. They insisted. I dug in my heels. They said someone else would pay for it. I didn’t want to go. They cajoled and twisted my arm until I said ‘yes’ [...] On our second day there I sat on the balcony of our guesthouse with a large woman named Eleanor. As we began the rosary I looked up and the sun was a blaze of light in the sky. I looked down to the car parked below and the sun was reflected in the hood of the car as a blaze of light. Eleanor and I prayed the rosary together. I had my eyes closed. At 6:20 Eleanor gave me an elbow in the ribs and pointed. The sun was now a disc of white light in the sky like a Eucharistic host. Then as I watched it began to spin, first clockwise then anti clockwise. Sparks spit out from the rim of the sun like a firework. I looked down and the sun was a white spinning disc on the hood of the car. I don’t think this would have happened if it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. Plus, Eleanor saw it too. That’s why she gave me an elbow in the ribs. I am not sure how long this lasted, but when we spoke about it to our fellow pilgrims they said many people in the town square had reported the same phenomenon. Some of these tourists capture the phenomenon on video. Unfortunately, the videos are of three types: Videos of a bunch of people pointing at the sun, and shouting the word “Miracle!” in various languages, and obviously looking extremely excited, but the sun itself looks totally normal, and the person taking the video apologizes and says that their camera isn’t good enough to capture it.
Inline links: Here, Wikipedia says, WaPo, LIFE, a summary of articles from a local newspaper, is an indirect testimonial, Los Angeles Times, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7J80!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F643b310a-4f76-4de9-8434-c8449f29f686_581x226.png, here, a sun miracle happened at that one too, an account
Scientists have tried to measure the number of extra retinopathy cases presenting at eye clinics after major eclipses. A survey after the 1999 British eclipse found 70 patients, all of whom made full recoveries after six months; another after the 2017 US eclipse found 113. If 154 million Americans viewed the 2017 eclipse, and only 74% used proper eclipse glasses, that suggests that 40 million people viewed the eclipse without glasses. Suppose that 3/4 of those people were at least slightly responsible - they only took short glances, or they only looked during full totality. That’s still 10 million people irresponsibly staring directly at the sun. Only ~100 of these made it to a clinic to report eye damage, for a 1/100,000 injury rate. This paper on a UK eclipse goes into more detail about the exposure times: The time spent looking at the eclipse was reported to be seconds (less than 1 min) in 39% of cases. In a quarter of cases the time spent looking at the eclipse was minutes (range 1-45 min). The duration of exposure in the remaining percentage of cases was unspecified. Taken seriously, this is pretty surprising. If there were a simple dose-response relationship between sun-staring and damage, we would expect everyone with damage to have stared longer than a certain threshold. But in fact, we get a wide variety of doses, with some people reporting damage after ~10 seconds, and others taking 45 minutes. My very weak guess here is that claims like “I stared for three minutes” hide a lot of diversity. Many people who stare at the sun for a long time and get eye damage will feel stupid and claim that they stared for a shorter time. Other people who say they stared for a long time will actually have taken short “breaks”, or even made involuntary microsaccades that shift the sunlight onto a different part of the retina. Everyone will be blinking at some rate which might be faster or slower. And different people will have pupils that contract different amounts in response to light. Finally, we previously discussed how the sun seemed to have been filtered by clouds during the Fatima miracle. This seems to be a common feature - it was also a cloudy/rainy day at Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, Lubbock, and the Medjugorje examples we have good videos of. Cloud filters do not make it absolutely safe to stare at the sun, and experts explicitly say not to let your guard down in situations like these. But GPT estimates they decrease solar radiation by a factor of 4 - 20x, and might push time-to-damage more towards the forty-five minutes side of the window. Out of ten million estimated irresponsible eclipse viewers, only a hundred (1/100,000) came to medical attention. Out of a million Medjugorge pilgrims per year, only about ten (1/100,000) have come to medical attention. I don’t know why these numbers are so low, and I still don’t recommend staring at the sun. But it doesn’t seem completely implausible that the 70,000 people at Fatima could do it for ten minutes on a cloudy day and not cause a medically-noticeable mass blindness epidemic. 5.1: reddit.com/r/sungazing August Messeen stared at the sun for a little while, and only saw mildly interesting minor phenomena; I said we needed to find someone dumber and more masochistic than he was. The great 19th century psychophysicists like Joseph Plateau and Gustav Fechner stared at the sun for a medium while, and also didn’t see very much. Can we find people even dumber and more masochistic than they were? This is the 21st century, we have the Internet, and the answer to this kind of question is always “yes”. Sungazing is an ancient spiritual practice which, like most ancient spiritual practices, was invented by a 1900s quack doctor. According to its practitioners, staring at the sun for long periods heals your eyesight, improves your health, and confers spiritual benefits. The r/sungazing subreddit is a veritable Athens of our times, with its 2,039 readers boldly exploring the important spiritual questions surrounding the technique: There are guides to sungazing safely; the most important rule seems to be to only gaze around sunrise/sunset, and only for a very short period of time. I don’t know whether these rules actually make sungazing safe - the posts above suggest no - but it doesn’t matter; many users proudly ignore them. Sungazing Redditors often say they do their sungazing at high noon, or for extreme durations: Have any of these Buddhas-of-our-age noticed unusual phenomena similar to those reported at Fatima? Here are some selections from r/sungazing and some associated subreddits: (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) Most of these come from one topic in the forum, Sun Turned Purple? There are hundreds of other topics about optimal sungazing times, lists of benefits, and (of course) various people who got severe eye damage, and none of these people ever mentioned the color-changing swirling sun until this one topic, where one person says “has anyone else ever seen this?” and dozens of people agree that they have. Does that mean that lots of people might have seen it, and it’s just too weird to talk about? These comments show some clear resemblances to the Fatima account. They talk about a swirling motion and color changes8. Many focus on purple in particular, but that might just be primed by the topic name. Also, compare to Jose Garrett’s account of Fatima: Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground. Still, the pattern of occurrences is confusing. Some of these people sungaze every day, but say they’ve only seen this once or twice. Others say they see it every time, and still others say they saw it the very first time they started sungazing. It seems like there must be plenty of variability - both between people (in their tendency to see it) and between times (in whether conditions are optimal to cause it). It’s still not obvious why some experienced sungazers go years without seeing it or never see it at all, but all 70,000 people at Fatima saw it immediately the first time they looked. This is our most promising lead yet, but still not perfect. Let’s move on. 5.2: Visual Release Hallucinations Some people at Fatima, Heroldsbach, and Lubbock saw things beyond just the spinning sun - complex visions of the cross, the Virgin, or other holy symbols. These confound optical/hallucinatory explanations and Dalleur-style “objective miracle” explanations alike. They seem to demand some sort of prophetic vision. Is there any way to reconcile them with a scientific/materialist story? Visual release hallucinations are a class of complex hallucinations caused by visual loss, common in cataracts and macular degeneration. The brain, denied useful input, takes a cue from chatbots and exam-takers and simply makes things up. Wikipedia describes the symptoms: Complex hallucinations may depict silent, non-interactive figures, whether multitudes of people, animals, or surreal objects, that appear life-like, as well as highly detailed landscapes or objects. The most common hallucination is of faces or cartoons. If anything, this paragraph undersells the weirdness of this condition: in its most famous variant, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, the hallucinatory content is specifically elves, fairies, and leprechauns (yes, they are dressed exactly how you would expect elves, fairies, and leprechauns to be dressed). Why elves, fairies, and leprechauns? There is no consensus theory. We know that humans have hyperactive agent detection - we see faces in the clouds, interpret dark trees as menacing giants, and imagine storms as punishment from wrathful gods. If whatever “noise” produces Charles Bonnet hallucinations is too small to resolve into a full-sized figure, maybe the brain resolves it into a tiny figure, and then - groping for a top-down prior to constrain what a tiny figure should look like - settles on elves or fairies or leprechauns. In a typical case, the condition does not affect reasoning, and patients are able to infer that their hallucinations cannot be real. In an atypical case, you get this website by someone who believes that their Charles Bonnet syndrome gives them special access to a non-material reality. If CBS patients can see leprechauns, can their hallucinations be shaped by other cultural archetypes - like religious beliefs? Unsurprisingly, yes. Here is an example of a CBS sufferer seeing the Devil. Here is an example of auditory CBS (maybe cheating?) centering around religious hymns. We cannot invoke CBS itself to explain visions associated with the dancing sun, because it typically develops months to years after visual loss (although there are scattered examples of it appearing on timescales as short as ten minutes). And most people who see the dancing sun see it quickly, before severe retinal damage has had a chance to occur, and without any long-term visual abnormalities. We would have to posit an entirely new kind of visual release hallucination, previously unknown to science, in which the temporary bedazzlement of staring at the sun counts as the sort of visual release that makes the brain start confabulating. Also, I haven’t made a formal study of the testimonies, but I don’t think every single person who sees the Virgin Mary at a Marian apparition has been staring at the sun. Some people just see her on the ground nearby. But of all the places to find supplemental evidence, I was able to get one story from Robert (father of Charles) Darwin’s book on his sungazing experiments: Benvenuto Celini , an Italian artist, a man of strong abilities, relates, that having passed the whole night on a distant mountain with some companions and a conjurer, and performed many ceremonies to raise the devil, on their return in the morning to Home, and looking up when the sun began to rise, they saw numerous devils run on the tops of the houses, as they passed along; so much were the spectra of their weakened eyes magnified by fear, and made subservient to the purposes of fraud or superstition. And another from, of all places, Facebook: (source) The swirling, colorful sun sounds like the miracle of Fatima. The “tree of life symbol” might be a Purkinje tree, an established entoptic phenomenon. As for the rest, your guess is as good as mine. For what it’s worth, evangelical Christians warn that Demons Enter By Sungazing. This could just be the evangelical Christian tendency to worry about demons being associated with every unusual spiritual practice. But those figures walking out of the lake will haunt my dreams. 6: And I Say, It’s All Right Here’s the most sensible story I can generate for the Sun Miracle of Fatima: There is some previously unknown optical illusion that potentially causes the sun to appear to change colors and spin. This phenomenon is rare and inconsistent, and usually appears only after someone has stared at the sun a very long time. This explains why it’s only reported in the wild by a few weird Redditors who stare at the sun on purpose every day. The appearance of this illusion is somehow modulated by cloud cover. In normal conditions (bright day, no clouds) it’s almost impossible to summon without long periods of sungazing. But when the sun is half-hidden by translucent clouds, the illusion happens much faster. This explains why the Fatima, Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock miracles - as well as some of the most impressive Medjugorje cases - all happened just after rain stopped and the clouds were just starting to clear. It also explains why Fatima witnesses say that the sun was “covered in gauze” or “blocked by smoked glass” or “had a diaphanous veil” or “looked like it was seen through a window”. It’s also why, during the most impressive instances of the miracle, people say they can stare at the sun without it being too bright or hurting their eyes. But like koro, the illusion is also modulated by expectations and social priming. Paying attention to the sun, expecting something weird to be there, is much more likely to generate the illusion than catching a casually glance of it. This explains why it is most common during Marian apparitions and other Catholic events full of people familiar with Fatima, and only very occasionally appears to weird Redditors who aren’t specifically looking for it. It also explains why Professors Messeen and Stöckl (who were specifically thinking about Fatima at the time) got better results than earlier scientists (who were observing without preconceptions). At Fatima, the basic illusion, the meteorologic conditions, and the social priming all came together to a point where 80%+ of the pilgrims saw the phenomenon quickly enough that they neither stopped looking nor perceived it as taking unreasonably long. The conditions lasted ten minutes, during which time the sun peeked out from behind the clouds three times; to people who had been staring at the (veiled) sun with their pupils dilated, this looked like the sun suddenly flaring up monstrously large and hurling itself towards Earth (and speculatively, maybe something similar is responsible for the changes in the Filipino video). A small number of mentally susceptible people, already in a vulnerable state because of this apparent miracle, influenced by a process similar to visual release hallucinations, saw additional visions, like the Virgin Mary or the Cross. Some distant witnesses remembered that someone had prophecied a nearby miracle for that day. Because they were not so distant as to have totally different meteorologic conditions, when they looked up at the sky trying to catch the miracle, they saw it too. After the miracle ended, the people who saw it were primed to see it again for the next few weeks - partly because they were looking at the sun expectantly, and partly because they were in a susceptible frame of mind (cf discussion of delusional parasitosis here, panic attacks here, or chronic pain here) - explaining Garrett’s claim that “now everyone sees [the sparkling rotations of the sun] many days and many times”. Even thinking about the miracle served as a form of priming, so further Marian devotions in Fatima and elsewhere became hotspots for miraculous activity. This theory avoids some of the pitfalls of its component parts: I previously said that entoptic phenomena / hallucinations / illusions couldn’t explain the miracle, because normal sungazers don’t report it. This new theory adds modulation by meteorologic conditions and social priming. Absent these factors, the miracle will only occur for a small fraction of sungazers after many minutes spent gazing (producing the scattered Reddit reports). Given these factors, it can occur en masse.
Inline links: found 70 patients, found 113, 154 million Americans, Sungazing, r/sungazing, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0q4D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F447f33ae-2e10-4d9b-aedf-66c86b2a278f_967x327.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-LI_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc3e062eb-2b2a-4402-bd14-6edf35bccfaa_929x194.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Q0mC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64ee6a7a-725c-4e5b-a10f-801395fddbbf_940x265.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bcW-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb4decaf-6bb6-4857-ba2f-4a32a41a2c29_857x155.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0lHW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb1b85717-26e1-4148-8200-5cd3182da6ce_867x149.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bzRr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb2d5558-9620-4f33-be30-57e29aba1e97_907x794.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PNtD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0f35d939-7107-41c2-b02c-b4debff88687_921x836.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vKRy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3338fedb-3164-4217-acd4-4626ceb1d2e8_1007x587.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rwPY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F21dac42b-d8c4-4a06-bbbd-4993700c7312_865x269.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!z3WC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fab662837-a9bd-41f3-ad37-784c1a83a108_854x231.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!M6xn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe12f5540-70b0-42cc-9761-7120e4f5639c_875x283.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JvKD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1a91c47-c9ac-4ab6-b9bc-66516404667b_915x297.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Iwq-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d4b5f36-df71-466c-a221-89e697adfd6b_915x92.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3px-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc956da20-4dfe-4140-b794-78fd9a211642_869x222.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E0tO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffcf0e506-9a14-42c6-927a-ffd8c7a54654_838x177.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7qb-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3eb70355-fbbb-41af-bcf8-2fbd5e58fe31_772x258.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kjJE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d265b86-9dcd-4cee-97a6-43f288c7157b_857x130.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LCXU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb4ba5d7-1af9-4bef-be3f-8e85908b563a_854x86.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!snSc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcfd83276-81e7-48be-9e4e-94a75f7cc406_861x154.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!daqR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28c56670-ffe1-4908-9ccb-9e82185f5379_850x92.png, source, 8, Wikipedia, hyperactive agent detection, this website, Here, Here, scattered examples, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xSbu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc386c06d-173d-44be-9c13-f74ad59ff3b2_698x421.png, source, a Purkinje tree, Demons Enter By Sungazing, here, here, here
(source) The swirling, colorful sun sounds like the miracle of Fatima. The “tree of life symbol” might be a Purkinje tree, an established entoptic phenomenon. As for the rest, your guess is as good as mine. For what it’s worth, evangelical Christians warn that Demons Enter By Sungazing. This could just be the evangelical Christian tendency to worry about demons being associated with every unusual spiritual practice. But those figures walking out of the lake will haunt my dreams. 6: And I Say, It’s All Right Here’s the most sensible story I can generate for the Sun Miracle of Fatima: There is some previously unknown optical illusion that potentially causes the sun to appear to change colors and spin. This phenomenon is rare and inconsistent, and usually appears only after someone has stared at the sun a very long time. This explains why it’s only reported in the wild by a few weird Redditors who stare at the sun on purpose every day. The appearance of this illusion is somehow modulated by cloud cover. In normal conditions (bright day, no clouds) it’s almost impossible to summon without long periods of sungazing. But when the sun is half-hidden by translucent clouds, the illusion happens much faster. This explains why the Fatima, Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock miracles - as well as some of the most impressive Medjugorje cases - all happened just after rain stopped and the clouds were just starting to clear. It also explains why Fatima witnesses say that the sun was “covered in gauze” or “blocked by smoked glass” or “had a diaphanous veil” or “looked like it was seen through a window”. It’s also why, during the most impressive instances of the miracle, people say they can stare at the sun without it being too bright or hurting their eyes. But like koro, the illusion is also modulated by expectations and social priming. Paying attention to the sun, expecting something weird to be there, is much more likely to generate the illusion than catching a casually glance of it. This explains why it is most common during Marian apparitions and other Catholic events full of people familiar with Fatima, and only very occasionally appears to weird Redditors who aren’t specifically looking for it. It also explains why Professors Messeen and Stöckl (who were specifically thinking about Fatima at the time) got better results than earlier scientists (who were observing without preconceptions). At Fatima, the basic illusion, the meteorologic conditions, and the social priming all came together to a point where 80%+ of the pilgrims saw the phenomenon quickly enough that they neither stopped looking nor perceived it as taking unreasonably long. The conditions lasted ten minutes, during which time the sun peeked out from behind the clouds three times; to people who had been staring at the (veiled) sun with their pupils dilated, this looked like the sun suddenly flaring up monstrously large and hurling itself towards Earth (and speculatively, maybe something similar is responsible for the changes in the Filipino video). A small number of mentally susceptible people, already in a vulnerable state because of this apparent miracle, influenced by a process similar to visual release hallucinations, saw additional visions, like the Virgin Mary or the Cross. Some distant witnesses remembered that someone had prophecied a nearby miracle for that day. Because they were not so distant as to have totally different meteorologic conditions, when they looked up at the sky trying to catch the miracle, they saw it too. After the miracle ended, the people who saw it were primed to see it again for the next few weeks - partly because they were looking at the sun expectantly, and partly because they were in a susceptible frame of mind (cf discussion of delusional parasitosis here, panic attacks here, or chronic pain here) - explaining Garrett’s claim that “now everyone sees [the sparkling rotations of the sun] many days and many times”. Even thinking about the miracle served as a form of priming, so further Marian devotions in Fatima and elsewhere became hotspots for miraculous activity. This theory avoids some of the pitfalls of its component parts: I previously said that entoptic phenomena / hallucinations / illusions couldn’t explain the miracle, because normal sungazers don’t report it. This new theory adds modulation by meteorologic conditions and social priming. Absent these factors, the miracle will only occur for a small fraction of sungazers after many minutes spent gazing (producing the scattered Reddit reports). Given these factors, it can occur en masse.
Inline links: source, a Purkinje tree, Demons Enter By Sungazing, here, here, here
Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
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