The Miracle of the Sun at Fátima

Between May and October 1917, three children reported six monthly apparitions of a Lady in the Cova da Iria, a field near Fátima. Their names were Lúcia dos Santos, Francisco Marto and Jacinta Marto. Portugal was divided, its secular Republic at odds with Catholics. The children made a promise. On 13 October, the Lady would perform a miracle.

Saturday, 13 October 1917. By ten o'clock, the rain came hard. It soaked a crowd estimated at 30,000 to 100,000. Most sources settle near 70,000.

Then the clouds parted. Avelino de Almeida, reporter for the anticlerical O Século, wrote: "The star resembles a plate of opaque silver and it is possible to stare at the disc without the most minimal effort." Domingos Pinto Coelho saw it "at one moment surrounded with scarlet flame, at another aureoled in yellow and deep purple." Almeida Garrett wrote that it "spun round on itself in a mad whirl."

About 18 km away, in Alburitel, Rev. Joaquim Lourenço saw it too. "Looking like a ball of snow, revolving on itself, it suddenly seemed to come down in a zig-zag, menacing the earth." At the Cova da Iria, the cry went up. "Miracle, miracle! A marvel! A marvel!" The priest Manuel Nunes Formigão said it "was repeated three distinct times, lasted for about ten minutes." Then the sun resumed its course.

Almeida's article, "Coisas Espantosas", ran on 15 October, while engineer Judah Bento Ruah photographed the crowd looking up. None of his pictures shows the sun doing anything unusual. On 13 October 1930, Bishop José Alves Correia da Silva of Leiria declared the visions "worthy of belief". Pope Pius XII approved the apparitions in 1940. According to Cardinal Federico Tedeschini, Pius XII saw the same miracle from the Vatican gardens in 1950, and his handwritten notes, found in 2008, say he was "awestruck."

Sceptics looked to the eye and the sky. Joe Nickell, in the Skeptical Inquirer, pointed to retinal distortion from staring at the sun, to cirrostratus or sundogs, and to possible "mass hysteria". The sun looked normal over Paris and London. Steuart Campbell blamed stratospheric dust. Physicist Auguste Meessen blamed afterimages. Stanley L. Jaki proposed a temperature inversion and a rotating lens of ice crystals. Kevin McClure found the accounts "simply not consistent."

Others push back. Scott Alexander argues that afterimages do not explain an ordered, three-fold descent. Dalleur's 2021 study of the photographs found shadows cast by a pale sun near 30° of elevation, when the real sun should have stood near 42°. Yet sun miracles were also reported at Torres Novas and in Lisbon. As Gonçalo de Almeida Garrett wrote, "now everyone sees them many days and many times."

Jacques Vallée was among the first to suggest in public that the solar dance was a UFO. "Not only was a flying disc or globe consistently involved, but its motion, its falling-leaf trajectory, its light effects… are frequent parameters of UFO sightings everywhere." Joaquim Fernandes and Fina d'Armada returned to the original documents. In Heavenly Lights (2005), they argued the 1917 events were close encounters, not Marian apparitions, citing buzzing sounds, strange clouds and "angel hair". Eric Ouellet called the reading "very biased".

Francisco and Jacinta Marto were canonised after Pope Francis approved a miracle in March 2017. Lúcia was declared Venerable on 22 June 2023. Films followed in 1952 and 2020. In 2024, 6.2 million people took part in at least one celebration at the Shrine. Whatever the crowd saw that day, the pilgrims never stopped coming.