by D W Pasulka
June 13, the children saw a beautiful lady. The lady was ex-
pected to appear again on August 13, but the local parish
priest had become so concerned about the growing publicity
the sightings were generating that he held the children in
jail on that day. By that time crowds of people had begun
showing up to experience the apparitions.
The children reported seeing the apparition six times
in al . The culminating event was the “Miracle of the Sun,”
witnessed by thousands of people, including avowed skeptics,
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on October 13, 1917. The Portuguese media covered the
event and captured the phenomena with photographs.
Although the story of Fatima is known by almost all
Catholics, and even to millions of non- Catholics, Jacques
notes that the actual events are mostly unknown and have
been changed through media and over time. Few people
realize
that the entire sequence of observations of an entity thought
to be the Holy Virgin had begun two years previously with
a fairly classical sequence of UFO sightings. . . . The B.V.M.
[Blessed Virgin Mary] may dress in golden robes and smile
radiantly to children, but the technology which “she” uses is
indistinguishable from that of gods and goddesses of other
tongues and garb; it is also indistinguishable from the tech-
nology surrounding the UFO phenomenon.13
The technology includes recurring images (Jung would say
archetypes) and elements, including the arrival of a shining
being in a small sphere (much like the spheres described by
Alison Kruse), spinning aerial discs, humming noises, heat
effects, healing phenomena, some people witnessing it while
others do not (as when Eddy W. saw the saucers and his wife
did not), and the message of the beings, which seems absurd
and often includes the injunction to remain silent (here, the
secrets of Fatima).
Months before the apparitions of the Virgin, Lucia was
out walking on a hil side when she saw a shining cloud de-
scend from the sky. In the cloud was the outline of a human
form. She saw this again on a subsequent walk. Then one
day when she and her cousins were out playing, a white
light passed over them and the humanlike being appeared
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again. This time she was clearly observable as a shining
youth. She gave the children instructions. They were to pray
and do penance. The experience left the children physical y
enervated for hours; as noted by Jacques, this is a pattern in
UFO contact events. The request that the children perform
prayers and penances reminded me of Tyler’s protocol of
practices that he believes help him connect with his beings.
The records of the children’s testimonies indicate that
they identified the lady just as “a lady,” not as the Virgin Mary,
although the entity had said that she was from heaven. She
first appeared to the children in an oval of bright light, and
she instructed them to return to the same place every month,
where she would greet them. They did so, and as rumors of the
events spread, crowds swelled to thousands. Although only
the children could see the lady, others reported seeing a cloud
descend when the lady was supposed to appear and ascend
when she disappeared. They also reported hearing a buzzing
sound when the lady was supposedly speaking to the chil-
dren. Journalist Maria de Freitas interviewed an eyewitness:
“Lucia jumped up and exclaimed ‘Oh Jacinta, there she comes
already, there was the lightning,’ and then ran to kneel at the
foot of the oak.
“And did you not see anything?” de Freitas asked.
“Me? No ma’am. And no one boasted about seeing the
lightning. We would follow the children and kneel in the
middle of the field. Lucia would raise her hands and say ‘You
bade me come here, what do you wish of me?’ And then could
be heard a buzzing sound that seemed to be like that of a bee.
I took care to discern whether it was the Lady speaking.”
“And everyone heard it?” the reporter asked.
“Wel , it could be heard very well!” she answered.14
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At least thirty thousand and perhaps as many as one hun-
dred thousand people showed up to see the display that the
children predicted would happen on May 13, among them
skeptics, journalists, and of course believers. The following
account was written by Professor José Maria de Almeida
Garrett, who was on the faculty at the Sciences of Coimbra,
Portugal.
It must have been 1:30 p.m. when there arose, at the exact
spot where the children were, a column of smoke, thin,
fine and bluish, which extended up to perhaps two meters
above their heads, and evaporated at that height. This phe-
nomenon, perfectly visible to the naked eye, lasted for a few
seconds.
The sky, which had been overcast all day, suddenly
cleared; the rain stopped and it looked as if the sun were about
to fill with light the countryside that the wintery morning had
made so gloomy. I was looking at the spot of the apparitions in
a serene, if cold, expectation of something happening and with
diminishing curiosity because a long time had passed without
anything to excite my attention.
Suddenly I heard the uproar of thousands of voices, and
I saw the whole multitude spread out in that vast space at
my feet . . . turn their backs to that spot where, until then,
all their expectations had been focused, and look at the sun
on the other side. I turned around, too, toward the point
commanding their gaze and I could see the sun, like a very
clear disc, with its sharp edge, which gleamed without
hurting the sight. It could not be confused with the sun seen
through a fog (there was no fog at that moment), for it was
neither veiled nor dim. The most astonishing thing was to
be able to stare at the solar disc for a long time, brilliant
with light and heat, without hurting the eyes or damaging
the retina. [During this time], the sun’s disc did not remain
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immobile, it had a giddy motion, [but] not like the twinkling
of a star in all its brilliance for it spun round upon itself in
a mad whirl.
During the solar phenomenon, which I have just
described, there were also changes of color in the atmosphere.
Looking at the sun, I noticed that everything was becoming
darkened. I looked first at the nearest objects and then ex-
tended my glance further afield as far as the horizon. I saw
everything had assumed an amethyst color.
Then, suddenly, one heard a clamor, a cry of anguish
breaking from all the people. The sun, whirling wildly, seemed
all at once to loosen itself from the firmament and, blood red,
advance threateningly upon the earth as if to crush us with its
huge and fiery weight. The sensatio
n during those moments
was truly terrible.
All the phenomena which I have described were observed
by me in a calm and serene state of mind without any emo-
tional disturbance. It is for others to interpret and explain
them. Final y, I must declare that never, before or after
October 13 [1917], have I observed similar atmospheric or
solar phenomena.15
Different people reported seeing different things, yet all
were convinced that they had witnessed something entirely
supernatural. The church, after thirteen years of investiga-
tion, approved the event as worthy of belief, albeit under the
category of “private revelation,” as distinguished from “public
revelation,” which is something Catholics are obligated to
believe:
The phenomenon, which no astronomical observatory reg-
istered and which therefore was not natural, was witnessed
by persons of all categories and of all social classes, believers
and unbelievers, journalists of the principal Portuguese
T H E M AT E R I A L C O D E | 1 69
newspapers and even by persons some miles away. Facts which
annul any explanation of collective il usion.16
Even without the church’s endorsement, the Fatima
apparitions would have a deep influence on the imaginations
and real lives of Catholics. One of the predictions of the lady
was that Jacinta and Francisco would die before they reached
adulthood, which sadly proved true. Lucia entered the Order
of Carmelites as a nun and would live as a cloistered member
of the convent until her death in 2005.
In his close readings of the apparitions, Jacques’s strategy
is to attend as much as possible to the first order of events
as they transpired, keeping to the original language used by
the experiencers, whom he cal s percipients. He ignores the
second- order, evaluative interpretations of the entity as being
the Virgin Mary. He takes the same approach to UFO events.
He refuses to believe or disbelieve, for example, that Betty and
Barney Hill received messages from extraterrestrials from
the star system of Zeta Reticuli, which is what they claimed.
He does not, however, dismiss the experiences as not having
been real . He borrows his methodology from anthropologist
Cynthia Nelson, who studied apparitions of the Virgin Mary
in Zeitoun, Egypt. “As phenomenologists,” Nelson writes, “we
suspend judgment as to whether the apparition is real y real
(a question for scientific naturalism) and attempt rather to
understand what people do when confronting stress. If men
define situations as real they are real in their consequences.”17
This makes it possible to analyze the social effects of the
phenomenon without being distracted by the content of the
experiences. This method helped Jacques discover that if
one graphs the occurrence of UFO flaps, which are multiple
sightings over time, the graph appears to suggest a schedule
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of reinforcement.18 Jacques is not committed to the conclu-
sion suggested by the graph, but offers it as a speculation and
possible way forward in research. He is, however, committed
to the idea that the phenomena appear to be technological.
The idea that contact events like apparitions of the Virgin
Mary function in ways similar to technologies was also
suggested to me by another innovative scholar long before
I had ever met Jacques or had even thought of UFOs. When
I was applying to graduate programs, I took the opportunity
to interview a professor whose work on technology inspired
me. Donna Haraway was known for her work on how human–
technological engagement effaces the conventional binaries
between humans and technology, humans and animals, ani-
mals and technologies, and so forth. Her work presaged fem-
inist technoscience and cyborg epistemologies, or theories of
knowledge. I arrived during her office hours, when she was
official y available to talk to students, and explained my plan
of study. I told her that I wanted to study the then- recent
apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorje, a small town
in what was then Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina.
I explained that I thought I would use Freudian analysis to
understand the phenomenon. After a silence that seemed
to last forever, I quickly learned that this was a bad idea.
Dr. Haraway asked why I would use a Western European
theory to analyze another culture’s belief system. After an-
other long, seemingly interminable silence, Dr. Haraway
offered some guidance. She asked me to think about what
was happening internal y to the experiencers who were
watching the apparitions. I thought about that, and at the
time, I had no idea. She then asked another question: What
happens to you when you watch a movie? I still didn’t under-
stand the point she was trying to make, but these questions
T H E M AT E R I A L C O D E | 1 7 1
would later help me understand Jacques’s research on the
connections between contact events and technologies.19
Could media technologies, even movies like 2001: A Space
Odyssey, function like apparitions?
2 0 0 1 : A S PAC E O DY S S E Y
R E V I S I T E D, A N D
N E T WO R K R E L I G I O N ’ S
AU TO N O M O U S AG E N T S
Toward the end of The Invisible College, Jacques outlines
a morphology of miracles. He places the elements of
apparitions alongside elements of UFO sightings and events.
They include the following: humming sounds associated
with a sighting; the arrival of a shining disc, globe, or sphere;
feelings of enervation after a sighting; sounds like thunder
or booms; and unusual clouds. He does not mention, al-
though he could have, the ensuing transformation of person-
ality that often occurs, in which the experiencers feel as if
they have a mission and completely rearrange their lives to
fulfill it. There is also the “psychic component” that Jacques
mentions, which was reported by the children who witnessed
the apparition, as well as by St. Teresa of Avila. This compo-
nent is experienced as a direct knowing of what the beings
seem to communicate. It is as if the beings somehow get in-
side the heads of the experiencers, as if there are no barriers
between them.
In the 1970s, Jacques offered technology studies as a
possible explanatory framework for these odd events and
strange patterns of effects. Subsequent research in the inter-
disciplinary studies of embedded and extended cognitions
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has sharpened the frame that Jacques constructed. The work
of scientists like Andy Clark helps frame the psychic elements
of the percipients’ experiences. Clark challenges the conven-
tional assumption that what happens in the mind originates
there. He argues that cognition, or thinking, or what’s in our
heads, is not bounded by the skul
. Instead, “cognitive sys-
tems may include both non- neural parts of the body and
even the beyond- the- body environment.”20 The idea that
technologies and other tools can extend human mental
capacities is not new; Marshall McLuhan aired this propo-
sition in the 1950s. What is new is the recognition of an au-
tonomy that technologies have achieved or, probably, already
had all along. This autonomy is now supercharged by the
technologies’ ability to program themselves. As I write this,
the headlines are abuzz with news that the social media site
Facebook shut down two social robots that had created their
own language that was unknown to their human creators.21
Media technologies inhabit human consciousness in ways
that have been largely unacknowledged and in ways that are
disturbingly autonomous.
This research, supplemented by neuroscientist Zacks’s
analysis of film’s impact on cognition, helps make the
connection between events like apparitions and UFO
sightings and media technologies. Both movies and sightings
are “events” in that they have distinct beginnings and endings.
Zacks’s research indicates that people cognize some media
or film events in ways that are similar to real- life events.22
Returning again to the example of 2001: A Space Odyssey,
one finds many of the elements of the UFO event. In Clarke’s
book the monolith is described as exuding a humming
noise. When the monolith appears in the opening scenes of
the movie, in the soundtrack we hear Richard Strauss’s tone
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poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra. It begins with humming and
leads into methodic drumming sounds. In each scene in
which the monolith appears, so does some form of humming.
Technology is a constant feature in the movie, in which the
artificial intelligence is named Hal, whose autonomy turns
out to be deadly. The climax of the film reveals a baby (pos-
sibly) within a shining globe or sphere. The appearance of the
baby perhaps signifies the transformation of the main char-
acter, astronaut David Bowman. It’s all there— the glowing
sphere, the humming noises, the strange artifact, and the
transformation.
Placed within the context of human–
technology
networks, the film could certainly function like a mass ap-