Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (52 page)

“If the kids saw a woman dressed in white, who else could she be but Our Lady?” Lucia's father, António, asked with some reason. But his ten-year-old daughter was not so sure. Nor was his wife, Maria Rosa. More skeptical by nature, she asked Lucia to specify exactly what she had seen. The girl made herself quite clear: “I never said that it was Our Lady—rather, a small, pretty lady. . . . She told me that we should continue to go there for six consecutive months, on the 13th of each month, and that at the end of that time, she would tell us who she was and what she wanted of us.”
⁴
Maria Rosa would remain circumspect and careful about what her daughter had seen. In
The Official Interrogations of 1923
, she is recorded as testifying that her daughter had “said that she saw a small, pretty lady; that her dress was completely white; and that to the question, ‘Where are you from?' she had pointed to the sky, saying she was from there.”
⁵

Originally, little Lucia was even more uncertain. In her
Memoirs
, she relates how she considered not returning in July for the third encounter, since she feared that the apparitions might be the work of the Devil—hardly a ringing endorsement of a transparent and unproblematic Marian reading.
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Later, in the convent and under the watchful eyes of the bishop and her ecclesial superiors now, Lucia would adopt, no doubt sincerely, the orthodox interpretations and write about the events accordingly. The little woman dressed in white from the heavens had indeed become “Our Lady of Fátima” from Heaven. It was an easy transformation. Lucia's father had been right all along.

Maybe. Memories, much less memoirs, are famously malleable, and differing details and alternative interpretations in the newspapers and the historical records abound—so many glitches in the Matrix of Roman Catholicism. The Lady was said to be a little over one meter tall and fourteen to fifteen years of age. She did not look like the images of the Blessed Virgin known in the devotional iconography of the local churches. She was enveloped in a kind of light that was more beautiful than the sun and very bright. Her dress, which appears to have hugged her body somewhat,
covered
her from the neck to the feet and emitted a similar white light. Some descriptions have her wearing a robe or cape extending to her knees, something on her head (it is not at all clear what), and a chain with a golden ball attached to it at about the level of her waist. She had black eyes and looked serious. Her mouth did not move when she spoke. She did not use her feet when she moved. Rather, she glided or floated.

The children obediently returned every month as instructed, each time with more people in tow. In June there were about 40; in July over 4,000; in August 18,000;
⁷
in September 30,000; in October, between 50,000 and 70,000, depending upon which account you accept. But, really, who could count them all now? Interestingly, not everyone could see the apparitions, and those who did often saw quite different things. And then there was the weird but beautiful “buzzing.” When the Being of Fátima spoke to the children, the witnesses often heard a distinct insectoid buzzing, like a bee or cicada or, as another had it, “like that which is heard next to a hive, but altogether more harmonious, even though words were not heard.”
⁸

Some also spoke of how the ground shook and described hearing thunder or a rumbling as the Being approached and departed from the tree. The tree moved, as in a wind or suction effect, when the little lady left. There were other technological allusions too, or at least descriptions that could easily be read in this way. “[W]hen our Lady withdrew from the tree, it was like a distant gust from a rocket when it lifts off.” Or again, in a more natural register: “When Lucia said, ‘There She goes,' I heard a roaring in the air that seemed like the beginning of thunder.”
⁹
Some thought that the globe that brought the Being down in September was shaped like an airplane. Others described it as oval-shaped, with the bottom side being larger than the top side. Others thought it was taller than it was wide. One man saw “a cross of great size exit the sun” and fly toward the east.
¹⁰
In October, Gilberto dos Santos saw a “ramp of light,” even a “street” in the sky.
¹¹
Today, one might say a “beam.”

Then there were the bizarre cloud formations. Witnesses commonly saw a cloud, haze, or fog envelop the tree where the Being apparently stood. They also saw colored clouds in the sky moving in strange, unnatural ways. At least one man, Manuel Marto, saw “a type of luminous globe gyrating within the clouds.”
¹²
In June, as the Being departed, Lucia clearly saw her leave, but all that the people saw was a little cloud: “But it was apparent that Lucia was still seeing something, because she paid no attention to us, until, at last, she said: ‘There! Now it can't be seen. It has just now entered the sky and the doors have closed.'
”
¹³
Doors.

There
were also sometimes strange perfume-like odors in the air, and the atmosphere would either cool down or heat up considerably at different points of the apparitions. Even stranger, on some occasions, the entire landscape would light up with weird kaleidoscopic effects: “The ground was divided into squares, each one a different color.”
¹⁴
There were also “rains of flowers” in September of that year, and then again on May 13 of 1918, 1923, and 1924, as if to mark the anniversary of the Lady's first appearance, and then again on October 17, 1957, the latter event “missing” by four days the anniversary of the final and most famous apparition. Described as “angel hair,” as petals of flowers, as white balls, or as snow, the material would dematerialize just over the heads of the witnesses, or disappear into nothing when they tried to pick it up. One newspaper account wrote of “white flakes” that seemed like silk, some of which made it to the ground where it could be photographed: “The flakes made a slight sound, like a buzzing, when they were stretched between the hands, and they came apart as if by magic,” reported another newspaper.
¹⁵

As extraordinary as this all might sound, it paled before what happened on October 13, 1917, exactly as the Being had promised six months earlier. The Miracle of the Sun. Some reports have as many as seventy thousand people in the cove that day, including numerous intellectuals, journalists, clerics, skeptics, and atheists. As the crowd gathered in the morning, it poured down heavy rain, soaking everyone. Except the oak tree. Alas, it was no more. A victim of devotion and faith, it had been stripped and stripped until there was nothing left but a stump sticking a few inches out of the ground.

As it turned out, the little lady had something far more dramatic than a landing pad on top of an oak tree in mind. A dark cloud approached from the east. The rain stopped, “and avery white and brilliant little cloud raced across the sky, and all the people who [had] surrounded the oak trees fell to their knees without concern for the mud.”
¹⁶
According to some, black clouds and some lovely pink clouds now appeared. George Barroinski saw a glowing green cloud, which changed colors rapidly, after which “an oval object appeared and left the area, followed by some type of flame.”
¹⁷
Others saw alternating chromatic effects illuminating the entire landscape, people and all. Then the clouds seemed to part and a shining sun was revealed in full splendor.

It did a good deal more than shine, however. It spun. And then it fell to the earth with a terrifying zigzag motion. People were screaming in horror and praying in sheer terror. The End was not near. It had arrived. Different reports described the Day of Judgment in different ways. To some,
the
sun was not spherical, and it shone very much unlike the sun, more like a conch shell or a moon. Others were a bit more specific, describing it rather bluntly as “a metallic disk as if of silver,” or as “a very clear, silvery blue disk.”
¹⁸
Apparently, something “stood out” from the sun that could be looked at, that could be seen, that was not the sun. And this is what fell to the earth. The chromatic colors returned: lilac, blue, red, orange, yellow, “that ultra-special electric blue”—everything, including the people, were caught in the cosmic kaleidoscope once again.
¹⁹

The “sun” continued to fall until it almost touched the ground, until it got to the height of a pine tree, as one report had it. It seemed that close. And then it went back up, with the same weird zigzag motion, until it was its old stable self again. Some people now found themselves completely dry, while others, oddly, were still soaking wet. Some went home to find themselves cured of various ailments and chronic illnesses. The papers went wild.

The general outline of these events and their orthodox interpretation are widely known in Catholic devotional circles. My own home church in Nebraska, for example, displayed a classical Our Lady of Fátima statue to the right of the altar, in clear view of any and all. Except for her height (about one meter tall), the statue looked nothing like the Being of Fátima, the little pretty lady whom the children originally described with such wonder and puzzlement. As a pious adolescent and young man, I used to pray the rosary before this image, always with elderly women, before Mass. We all knew the story.

At least we thought we did. I was unaware of all the glitches. I did not know that the children had not originally identified the Being as the Blessed Virgin Mary. Nor did I realize how eerily similar many of the details of the story are to the phenomenology of UFO encounters both before and after the events of 1917. As Paul Misraki, one of the inspirations for Vallee's work, pointed out some time ago, such parallels are not simply imaginative or general. They are precise and exact. We are not dealing with a vague analogy here; we are dealing with an identity.
²⁰

Consider the following comparative facts. UFO encounters have often been accompanied by the sound of “buzzing bees,” by small humanoid figures approximately one meter tall, and by a classic zigzag descent pattern known in ufological circles as “the falling leaf.” UFO encounters are also often associated with lightning and/or thunder, strange cloud formations, bizarre chromatic effects, cooling and heating effects, perfume-like odors, and spontaneous healings and cures. The oval, spherical, vertical oblong, and cross shapes reported at Fátima are also well known, indeed they are
classic
in the ufological literature. As are the ramps of light and the angel hair (known as “fibralvina” in ufology and already reported by Fort in
The Book of the Damned
in 1919).
²¹
And this, of course, is before we even get to the silvery spinning disks seen in the clouds above the cove.

And there is more. On the humorous side, the Lady's skirt in some reports was all wrong for the Catholic Virgin. It stopped at her knees, not her toes. This sounds tame enough now, but it would have been truly scandalous at a time when not even prostitutes wore such things.
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A later church official would pick up on this little detail of “Our Lady,” who “obviously could not have appeared other than dressed with the utmost decency and modesty,” in order to suggest that such obvious indecency was proof that the vision was “prepared by the Prince of Darkness” himself.
²³
I don't know about the Prince of Darkness, but just how many Madonna statues
have
you seen showing leg?

There is also the curious scene during which an angel gives the children “Communion,” or at least some kind of liquid and solid that were meant to look like the Catholic sacrament. Interestingly, the main visionary, Lucia, received a solid “host,” whereas the two other children received a strange liquid. Francisco at least could not identify whatever it was he drank from the chalice. Joaquim Fernandes and Fina D'Armada make comparative sense of this scene by describing multiple UFO encounters in which the contactee is given a strange substance to eat or liquid to drink and then has a mystical vision or is made to understand a message. Their conclusion is clear enough: “The recurring theme in all of these types of cases involves the access to communication and dialogue
requiring
the ingestion of drugs as a means of entering into an extra-human plane.”
²⁴

On the tragic side, Michael Persinger points out that whereas little Francisco died during the influenza epidemic of 1918, Jacinta's premature death displayed symptoms strongly suggestive of lung cancer, which he relates to radiation emitted around the tree before, during, and after the visions. This, after all, was also the children's common playground.

Persinger has written extensively on paranormal phenomena. He is well known in ufological circles for his lab research on the “alien visitation” phenomenon, a humble analog of which he is able to induce in the lab with electromagnetic fields mathematically calibrated to “entrain” specific altered states in the temporal lobes of a human brain via a helmet fitted with solenoids. He is also well known for his tectonic strain hypothesis, which interprets the balls of light common in UFO encounters as temporary spikes of electromagnetic energy created by stressed tectonic plates in the earth, which then interact with the subtle magnetic fields of the human
neural
net to create the various local illusions and religious visions of the typical UFO encounter (or Marian apparition). Persinger has also suggested a correlation between high geomagnetic activity and poltergeist activity and hauntings, a suggestion that recalls Jung's earlier comparison of UFOs to planetary poltergeists.
²⁵
Also, for what it is worth (quite a bit, I think, in this context), Fort repeatedly suggested that all those “super-constructions” in the sky appear during or around earthquakes.
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