Fatima.
At about noon, on October 13, 1917, near the hamlet of Fatima, Portugal, a crowd of about 100,000 witnessed an extraordinary event.
Of that multitude, only a few (as far as we know) --newspaper reporters and a college professor among them-- looked carefully and left a record of what they saw.
Below is a partial description of the event as witnessed by Almeida Garrett of the University of Coimbra. The setting is this: a multitude of the curious and the devout have gathered in a pasture near a remote hamlet to witness an appearance of the Virgin Mary promised by Lucy dos Santos who claimed that Mary had been appearing to her and her two younger cousins as they tended sheep. It had rained earlier, and the sky was overcast and the sun occluded. The crowd, most of whom had spent the night outdoors, expectantly awaited the hour of noon.
Garrett says:
" The sun had broken jubilantly through the thick layer of clouds just a few moments before.
"It was shining clearly and intensely. I turned to this magnet that was drawing all eyes.
"It looked to me as a luminous and brilliant disc, with a bright well-defined rim.
"It did not hurt the eyes. The comparison (which I heard while still at Fatima) with a disc of
dull silver did not seem right to me. The color was brighter, far more active and richer than
dull silver, with the tinted luster of the orient of a pearl.
"Nor did it resemble the moon on a clear night. Everyone saw and felt that it was
a body with life. I was not spheric like the moon, neither did it have an equal tonality of
color. It looked like a small, brightly polished, wheel of iridescent mother-of-pearl.
"It could not be taken for the sun as seen through a fog. There was no fog at the time
(the rain and fog had stopped). The sun was not opaque, veiled, or diffused. It gave
light and heat and was brilliantly outlined by a beveled rim.
"The sky was banked with light clouds, patched with blue here and there. Sometimes
the sun stood out alone in rifts of clear sky. The clouds scuttled along from west to
east without dimming the sun. They gave the impression of passing behind it, while
white puffs gliding sometimes in front of the sun seemed to take on the color of rose
or a delicate blue.
"It was wonderful that all this time it was possible for us to look at the sun, a blaze of light
and blinding heat, without pain to the eyes or blinding of the retina. This phenomenon
must have lasted about ten minutes, except for two interruptions when the sun darted
forth its more refulgent, lightning-like, rays which forced us to look away.
"The sun had an eccentricity of movement. It was not the scintillation of a celestial
body at its highest power. It was rotating upon itself with exceedingly great speed.
Suddenly the people broke out with a cry of extreme anguish. The sun, still rotating,
had loosed itself from the skies and came hurtling toward the earth. This huge, firey,
millstone threatened to crush us with its weight. It was a dreadful sensation."
Reporters for the big city dailies described the event in the same vein. O Dia noted, "The sun seemed veiled with a transparent gauze to enable us to look at it without difficulty. The greyish tint of mother-of-pearl began changing as if into a shining silver disc, that was growing slowly, until it broke through the clouds. And the silvery sun, still shrouded with the same lightness of gauze, was seen to rotate and wander within the circle of the receded clouds!"
O Seculare commented: "The sun called to mind a plate of dull silver. It could be stared at without the least effort."
We might comment. first of all, that the real sun was hidden by clouds at the time of the apparition. A bright light was seen which was mistaken for the sun, except for the two instances above when the real sun broke momentarily through the clouds.
The event at Fatima is truly remarkable. It is not only the first mass UFO sighting of modern times (for, what else might it be?), but perhaps the outstanding paranormal event of history in terms of the number of people witnessing a single happening ,even though there have been more conservative estimates of the crowd's size put forth.
Most of the pious saw a miraculous event of the sun dancing in the sky ( the 'dance' per se can be attributed to a "zig-zag" motion as the craft descended, perhaps the famous 'falling leaf' descent pattern of classic UFO sightings. None of the observers thought they were seeing a machine, albeit a very sophisticated machine. Even the professional observers could not quite bring themselves to say that it was not the sun they were seeing, although Garrett noted the clouds "gave the impression" of passing behind the object. And yet even the reporters and Garrett, apparently, did not see it all. Lucy later described a much more detailed account involving associated apparitions.
Our private conclusion, based on this and other events, is that this represents a deliberate effort to change events on this planet (Portugal, incidentally, at the time was a focus of Communism), not by alien races or angels, but by legitimate human beings--our cousins--from elsewhere. Such individuals, who are the same sort of fools we are,( perhaps rescued and relocated elsewhere by real aliens during some catastrophic series of events of the past) have their own beliefs, and knowledge, of spiritual and social development and are concerned that their country cousins do not get too far off the track of normal development. It might even be that the greater number of the human race do not reside on our planet.
Now this brings us to an important aspect of such apparitions and their confused interpretations. Our cultural concept of perception assumes that every person has as much ability to see, or sense, an event as anyone else. If some see, and others do not see, the event does not seem real .
In the series of visitations by Mary to the children--in which she appeared over a holmoak bush--little Francesco, the youngest of the children-- could, at first, not see Mary until he had said a decade of the rosary. There were others of the countrymen and women who had been present during some of these visitations and some saw merely a light, and some merely had the sensation of something happening.
A young lady with a background similar to Lucy dos Santos was Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes, France, in the previous century. Bernadette was also a poorly educated, rural, girl who had spent the previous summer tending sheep in the mountains.
While gathering firewood with a group of children near Lourdes, Bernadette saw a "beautiful lady," in a grotto near a river the girl was preparing to cross. Bernadette's vision was hers, alone, for none of the others (later there were groups present) saw the lady who told Bernadette, "I am the Immaculate Conception." The parish priest , who had a less than sanguine opinion of the girl's experience, told her in no uncertain terms that the "immaculate conception "(of Jesus) was a thing, and could not be a person. Both Lourdes and Fatima are major Roman Catholic shrines, as everyone knows.
Bernadette in her earlier life had experienced troubling visions. Lucy dos Santos became a nun and also experienced a number of visions including a graphic vision of hell where tortured souls were punished for criticizing the Pope and the Church. So on one hand there is the mass apparition brought about through the agency of a young girl, and on the other , the religious fantasies of a pre-adolescent , poorly educated, religiously devout, shepherd of rural Portugal of the early 20th Century. We might say the same of Bernadette, of France of the 19th Century, who also had claimed to see disturbing vision of demons.
It is perhaps worthy of note that the principal characters in poltergeist are usually teen or preteen children--mainly girls.
We are indebted in the account of the Fatima visitation to Fr. John Di Marchi, an American Catholic priest who went to Portugal years after the event to interview witnesses, especially Sister Maria Lucia, who, as a ten-year-old country girl was the principal character of the Fatima visitations. Di Marchi published his findings in a little booklet, millions of which were distributed free. Synchronistically enough, the Imprimatur of the booklet was granted in 1947, a major year for UFOlogy.