Miracle of the Sun

Miracle of the Sun

Type	Case (mass sighting; religious event)
Portuguese name	Milagre do Sol; also the Miracle of Fátima
Date	About midday, 13 October 1917
Place	Cova da Iria, Fátima, Portugal; also reported from up to 18 km away
Crowd	Estimated 50,000–70,000
Seers	Lúcia Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto
Church status	Declared "worthy of belief" by Bishop José da Silva, 13 October 1930
Proposed explanations	Divine miracle; optical and retinal effects of sun-gazing; atmospheric dust or cloud; suggestion; UFO (Vallée and others)
Also known as	Fátima 1917, Miracle of Fátima

The Miracle of the Sun (Portuguese: Milagre do Sol), also called the Miracle of Fátima, is a series of events reported on 13 October 1917 by a crowd of tens of thousands gathered at Fátima, Portugal, in response to a prophecy by three shepherd children, Lúcia Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, that the Virgin Mary would appear and perform a miracle that day. Newspapers published testimony from witnesses who said the Sun appeared to "dance" or zigzag in the sky, plunge toward the Earth, or give off multicoloured light, for about ten minutes.^[1]

The Catholic Church declared the miracle "worthy of belief" in 1930, and it has had a lasting influence on Catholic devotion. Critics point to inconsistent witness accounts and to the effects of staring at the Sun, and some ufologists, beginning with Jacques Vallée, have interpreted it as a mass UFO sighting described in religious terms, which is why it is included here.^[1][2][4]

Background

In the spring of 1916 three Catholic shepherd children near Fátima reported visions of an angel, and from May 1917 apparitions of the Virgin Mary, whom they called the Lady of the Rosary. They said the Lady told them that prayer would bring an end to the Great War, and that on 13 October she would reveal who she was and perform a miracle "so that all may believe". In her memoirs Lúcia wrote that at the third apparition, on 13 July 1917, she had asked the Lady for a miracle, and was told to keep coming to the Cova da Iria each month until October, when it would occur. The children also reported messages later known as the Three Secrets of Fátima, the first two written down by Lúcia in 1941 and the third, written in 1944, disclosed by the Vatican in 2000.^[1]

Newspapers reported the prophecies and pilgrims began visiting the area. The children's claims were deeply controversial, drawing criticism from both secular and religious authorities, and a provisional administrator briefly took them into custody, believing the prophecies were politically motivated against the officially secular First Portuguese Republic established in 1910. According to witnesses, some people expected the miracle to involve the Sun or the stars: in Alburitel, villagers darkened bits of glass with candle smoke on the morning of 13 October so they could watch the Sun safely, and some at earlier gatherings had claimed the Sun dimmed enough for stars to appear.^[1]

The event

Estimates of the crowd range from about 50,000 to 70,000 people. Many witnesses said that after a period of rain the dark clouds parted, revealing the Sun as an opaque, spinning disc, much duller than usual, which cast multicoloured light over the landscape, the people and the clouds. It then seemed to careen toward the Earth before zigzagging back to its normal position. Witnesses said their soaked clothes and the muddy ground became "suddenly and completely dry". Not everyone saw the same thing: some saw only the colours, some said they saw the Virgin Mary, and a number saw nothing at all. The children reported a series of visions, including Jesus, Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Saint Joseph blessing the people.^[1]

Witness accounts

The Italian priest John De Marchi, who spent 1943 to 1950 in Fátima interviewing the principal figures, wrote that the crowd included believers and non-believers, "pious old ladies and scoffing young men", that hundreds gave formal testimony, and that although details varied, none to his knowledge denied "the visible prodigy of the sun". The secular Lisbon newspaper O Século sent the journalist Avelino de Almeida, who described the crowd's reactions in detail, and its photographer Judah Ruah photographed the crowd.^[1]

Domingos Pinto Coelho, writing for the Catholic paper Ordem, described a sun ringed by scarlet flame, then yellow and deep purple, whirling swiftly and seeming to approach the earth, "strongly radiating heat". A reporter for O Dia described a "silver sun" whirling in a circle of broken clouds while the light turned blue, as if through stained glass. A description attributed by De Marchi to the Coimbra science professor Gonçalo de Almeida Garrett — but, according to the priest and physicist Stanley Jaki, actually given by his son José, a young lawyer — said the Sun spun "in a mad whirl" and seemed to advance on the earth "as if to crush us". The priest Manuel Nunes Formigão described it revolving like a firewheel in all the colours of the rainbow, three times, for about ten minutes, and the Rev. Joaquim Lourenço recalled seeing it as a boy in Alburitel, 18 kilometres away, pale "like a ball of snow" and coming down in a zigzag. The poet Afonso Lopes Vieira said he saw a remarkable spectacle from his veranda without remembering the predictions.^[1]

Photographs

Although hundreds of reporters and photographers were present, there is no authentic photograph of the solar phenomenon. A widely circulated picture of the Sun breaking through dark clouds, published by L'Osservatore Romano in 1951, was later found to have been taken about eight years after the event in a different Portuguese town, of a different solar phenomenon; the Catholic broadcaster EWTN acknowledges it is not from Fátima. The skeptic Brian Dunning noted that nothing in it looks unusual anyway, and the religion professor Lisa Schwebel says another photo often presented as authentic shows a solar eclipse elsewhere before 1917.^[1][2]

Church recognition

The local bishop opened a canonical investigation in November 1917. The priest who conducted it was particularly impressed by concurring testimony from secular reporters, officials and sceptics. On 13 October 1930 Bishop José da Silva declared the miracle "worthy of belief", officially permitting the cult of Our Lady of Fátima, and a shrine was built near the site. Pope Pius XII approved the Fátima apparitions in 1940.^[1]

At Fátima on 13 October 1951 the papal legate, Cardinal Federico Tedeschini, told a crowd of a million that Pius XII had himself witnessed the miracle of the Sun from the Vatican gardens in 1950, the week he defined the dogma of the Assumption. According to the pope's handwritten notes, discovered in 2008 and later put on display, he first saw it at 4 p.m. on 30 October 1950 by the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes and was "awestruck", and saw it again on 31 October and on 1 and 8 November, but not on other days when he looked. In March 2017 Pope Francis approved a miracle attributed to Francisco and Jacinta Marto, leading to their canonisation that May; Lúcia was declared venerable on 22 June 2023.^[1]

Believers' explanations

For Catholics, the event fulfilled Mary's promise to show that the children were telling the truth. Father Andrew Pinsent of Oxford's Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion has argued that science does not rule out miracles and called Fátima "a public miracle of the most extraordinary kind and credibility". Stanley Jaki proposed that God used a natural substratum: a sudden temperature inversion could have propelled a rotating lens of air filled with ice crystals toward the earth and back, refracting the Sun's rays, and the coordination of so many factors at the predicted moment was itself the miracle. De Marchi argued that the prediction, the abrupt start and end, the varied backgrounds and numbers of witnesses, and reports from up to 18 km away made mass hallucination unlikely, and cited engineers who said drying the pools on the field in minutes would have needed enormous energy.^[1]

Leo Madigan, a former psychiatric nurse and Fátima journalist, rejected mass hypnosis and attributed inconsistencies to the witnesses' emotions. Philippe Dalleur, a philosopher-priest at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, analysed shadows in Judah Ruah's crowd photographs and argued that there were two light sources, and that distant witnesses placed the "silver sun" not where the real Sun was but in the direction of Fátima, concluding it was a real luminous object over Fátima.^[1]

The UFO interpretation

The ufologist Jacques Vallée was one of the first to suggest publicly that the "solar dance" at Fátima was a UFO, regarding the Fátima events and other Marian apparitions as a class of UFO encounter that should be studied outside its religious context; he has speculated similarly about Lourdes and the revelations of Joseph Smith. The Portuguese researchers Joaquim Fernandes and Fina d'Armada later also argued that Fátima was a mass UFO sighting, which the largely Catholic witnesses described in religious terms. The physicist Auguste Meessen rejected the UFO hypothesis, arguing that an object large enough to be mistaken for the Sun from places 18 km apart would have cast a "cone of shadow" that was not observed.^[2][3][4]

Skeptical explanations

The science writer Benjamin Radford points out that "everyone on Earth is under the same sun", so if it had really danced, billions of others would have noticed; no observatory recorded anything unusual. He attributes the reports to suggestion and pareidolia, while stressing that no one suggests the witnesses were lying, and notes that photographs do not show that it had rained as much as reported. Kevin McClure wrote in 1983 that the accounts of the "dance of the sun" were "simply not consistent", and Schwebel likewise noted that not everyone saw the phenomenon and that witnesses disagreed about what they saw. One witness, Joaquim Gregório Tavares, said he had come with "cool-headed persons" who were anticipating colour changes in the Sun.^[1][3]

Staring at the Sun

Radford and others note that people looking at or around the Sun for long enough can get the illusion of it moving as their eye muscles tire. The Louvain physicist Auguste Meessen, presenting his analysis at a 2003 symposium, argued that retinal after-images from sun-gazing produce the dancing effect and that bleaching of the retina's light-sensitive cells explains the colour changes. He listed similar "miracles of the sun" at many sites of reported Marian apparitions where pilgrims were encouraged to look at the Sun, including Tilly-sur-Seulles (1901), Heroldsbach in Germany (1949), where many in a crowd of over 10,000 reported similar sights, and Kibeho (1983); the Regensburg meteorologist Professor Stöckl made similar observations. Domingos Pinto Coelho himself wrote on 17 October 1917 that a few days later, with the Sun again half overcast in Lisbon, he saw "the same succession of colors, the same rotary movement".^[1][3]

Atmospheric effects

Others suggest that clouds, atmospheric effects and sunlight combined to produce the sights. Steuart Campbell proposed in the Journal of Meteorology in 1989 that a cloud of stratospheric dust made the Sun easy to look at and made it appear yellow, blue and violet and to spin, citing a blue and reddened Sun reported in China in 1983, and Paul Simons suggested dust from the Sahara. Joe Nickell attributed the effects to the Sun seen through thin cloud as a silver disc, changes in cloud density that made it brighten and dim and so seem to advance and recede, moisture or dust refracting colours, retinal distortion, or a sundog, together with the suggestibility of devout crowds "fully expecting some miraculous event", as at later reported apparitions in Lubbock, Texas (1988), near Denver (1992) and Conyers, Georgia, in the 1990s. Prosper Alfaric of the University of Strasbourg linked the phenomenon to the culture of a poor, isolated village, wartime food shortages and Portugal's conflict between the secular republic and the clergy.^[1]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Miracle of the Sun”, “List of reported UFO sightings”, “Milagre do Sol (in Portuguese)”, “Jacques Vallée”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.