Fatima: Did 70,000 people witness a miracle?

Even if the miracle of the sun could be attributable to mass hysteria, how would that explain the suddenly dry clothes, after the downpour.

It would be so much simpler to just attribute it to the status of urban legend along with dragons and unicorns.

Even if the miracle of the sun could be attributable to mass hysteria, how would that explain the suddenly dry clothes, after the downpour..

It isn't inconceivable that a rare event viewed by a population that is highly religious and limited in their knowledge of any natural explanation for the event could be easily convinced it was of supernatural origin.

Plenty of things that have perfectly reasonable, natural explanations have been attributed to supernatural forces throughout history. For example, we now know that one can observe a "plague of locusts" pretty much every time there is sufficient rain in the desert for the eggs latent in the ground to hatch.

What�s important here is the fact that not everybody saw this so-called miracle. As I just noted, more than half of the witnesses present during the event never saw anything unusual at all. Of those who did, there are discrepancies among the reports and the details often vary. Some individuals saw the sun sway from side to side in the sky much like a falling leaf in the wind while others claimed to have watched it spin violently in circles. Still others saw "a sun casting rainbow-colored light over everything, a 'luminous globe,' a 'night-time star' and a 'rain of flowers'", as one source describes it. Some reported seeing the sun change colors, giving off red, then yellow, then purple light while others saw the sky change from gray to a vivid blue. In the notes section of Borderlands, author Mike Dash quotes from a book called The Evidence for Visions of the Virgin Mary, which highlights this problem, "Nothing about Fatima has turned out to be in the least bit simple or straightforward...I have never seen such a collection of contradictory accounts in any of the research I have done in the past 10 years."

If you have ever looked directly into a bright light, perhaps having been caught looking into the high-beams of an on-coming car, then you know an after-image remains "burned" onto your retinas for a short period of time. During that time, the light obscures your visual field and "jumps" around to wherever you happen to move your eyes. The act of darting your eyes around would make the light appear to be dancing back and forth. This sort of thing, to a lesser extent, has happened to me before, and the image of the light even changed a few colors before it faded away.

Just such a thing seemed to have happened when five to six thousand pilgrims flocked to a mountaintop shrine in Denver in the expectation of a sun miracle. The Rocky Mountain Skeptics reported that, "One of the most significant physical results of the event of December eighth was retinal burning caused by staring directly at the sun. We had talked with people who said the sun was "dancing" and that it changed color. We had suspected that this could be caused by their looking directly at the sun and receiving temporary, and possibly permanent, damage to their retinas." Sure enough, that's what happened.

Another similar event happened in Conyers, Georgia in 1990. A woman named Nancy Fowler claimed to have begun experiencing visions of the Virgin in the early 1980s, and by 1990 she had amassed a large number of followers. During one visitation, her pilgrims which had gathered on her 34-acre site claimed to experience sun miracles with the usual descriptions. Paranormal investigator Becky Long visited the site and determined that most people were claiming that the sun was either pulsating or dividing into multiple lights.

Fortunately, members of the group Georgia Skeptics were on site and had brought with them a telescope with solar filters. People who wanted to get a close-up view of the "miracles" they were seeing flocked to the telescope. Long reported, "I estimate that well over two hundred people viewed the sun through one of our solar filters, and without exception they saw nothing unusual when looking through the mylar." Contrary to what some believers would like to believe, such events do happen as a consequence of staring directly up at the sun.

This could certainly explain some of the reports of dancing suns. Of course, I don't personally recommend that you go outside and attempt to look directly into the sun. However, this doesn't leave me completely satisfied. I find it much more likely that this phenomenon, like many others, can be adequately explained if we delve a bit into the mysterious world of psychology.

Controversies of Recent Development

In 1992, the Documentae da Critica de Fatima was published, containing documents whose authenticity cannot be traced and accounts which appear to dramatically contradict the well-known accounts published closer to the actual events.

Please believe me...i'm Portuguese, this history is just non-sensical and tedious

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miracle_of_the_Sun

Look at the Critical Evaluation of the event.

You need to spend less time with oranges.

[insult deleted by Ivan]... erroneously supposing that science supercedes reason. Indeed it is the other way around; the scientific method, though wonderful, is only one expression of valid reason. Just because the scientific method cannot explain something does not mean that reason also cannot.

Your prejudice against the miraculous is entirely unjustified. You only label those things you don't WANT to be true as hallucinations. You would of course never dare label as a hallucination those observations made by scientists to form the foundation of those physical laws in which you put all of your faith and hope.