Miracle of the Sun

Between May and October 1917, three children, Lucia dos Santos, Francisco Marto and Jacinta Marto, reported six meetings with a figure they identified as the Virgin Mary at Cova da Iria, a field outside the Portuguese village of Fatima. At the fifth meeting, Lucia said the figure promised a miracle in October so that everyone would believe. Word spread through the surrounding countryside, and estimates of the crowd that gathered on 13 October range from about thirty thousand to as many as one hundred thousand, assembled in steady rain.

What happened next is reported with unusual breadth for an event of this kind. Witnesses, including people with no stake in the apparitions, described the clouds parting and the sun appearing as a spinning disc that threw off colored light and seemed to zigzag toward the crowd before returning to its place. The Lisbon newspaper O Seculo, edited by an anticlerical journalist, Avelino de Almeida, ran an account describing the sun dancing in the sky, which mattered to later defenders of the event because the paper had no interest in supporting a Catholic claim. Ground and clothing soaked by the morning rain were reported dry afterward by some witnesses. Not everyone present described the same details, and a number of people in the crowd reported seeing nothing unusual at all, a variation later investigators on both sides have had to account for.

The Diocese of Leiria opened a canonical inquiry into the Fatima events in 1922, interviewing surviving witnesses over several years. In October 1930, Bishop Jose Alves Correia da Silva declared the apparitions worthy of belief, permitting public devotion, and the Holy See canonized Francisco and Jacinta Marto in May 2017, citing the Fatima events in the canonization Mass. The church process weighed the visionaries testimony and the conduct of the devotion. It did not attempt a physical account of what the wider crowd at Cova da Iria saw.

The physical question is where skeptics have concentrated. The researcher Joe Nickell, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2009, argued that the reported solar effects match known consequences of staring at the sun for a sustained period: retinal afterimages, temporary color distortion and involuntary eye movement produced by the strain of trying not to look directly at it. He noted that observers outside the crowd, looking at the same sun from elsewhere in Portugal, reported none of the described motion, which tells against an actual astronomical event and toward a shared visual and psychological experience among people primed by months of anticipation to see a sign. The wide variation among the crowd's own accounts, some detailed and dramatic, some reporting nothing at all, is easier to reconcile with that reading than with a single external event visible identically to everyone present.

Sources Holy Mass and Canonization of the Blesseds Francisco Marto and Jacinta Marto, Fatima, 13 May 2017Holy See Press Office with The Real Secrets of FatimaJoe Nickell