Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  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.22 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 mak
e 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.26

  In this haunting reading, the Virgin, or the energy spike that produced her, at least, actually killed little Jacinta. To support such an interpretation, Persinger points out that the Fátima area is well known as a tectonic strain hotspot, and that the strongest earthquake on record was the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (Fátima is about eighty-six miles north of the city). Fernandes and D’Armada make the same point, citing an earthquake that measured an astonishing 9.0 on the Richter scale that once ripped through Fátima itself.27 The seismic activity could have created immense geomagnetic fields, which would then collect and discharge on tall structures, like the tree on which the apparition appeared. As for the regular periodic nature of the six monthly events, Persinger relates these to a lunar phase, that is, another supermagnetic phenomenon with a strong, predictable, periodic nature. The same magnetic discharges, he speculates, would have powerfully stimulated the children’s temporal lobes, resulting in the visions.

  The specifics and, of course, the later interpretation of the apparitions were shaped “by their obsession with religious themes, their lack of education [all three children were illiterate], and their behavior at the time of the experience . . . If they had grown up in a world of Star Wars, they would have seen and heard some variant of Luke Skywalker.”28 Not that the visions were entirely consonant with the children’s Catholicism. As we have seen, they were not. Francisco, for example, did not hear the little lady speak and remembered seeing a haze that he interpreted as a headless angel!

  There is more than a little justification for such a literally radioactive reading. Numerous individuals reported intense heat and the almost instant drying of both their clothes and the previously soaked soil during “the Miracle of the Sun,” features entirely consistent with immense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. The “buzzing” noises can be fit in here as well, as individuals exposed to microwave radiation between 200 and 3,000 MHz commonly experience buzzing noises inside their heads. Raul Berenguel goes even further, pointing out that hearing voices in the interior of the cranium and the phenomenon of buzzing “is identical to what is felt by individuals subjected to mind control technologies that use microwaves.”29 We are back to an eerie and potentially troubling scene reminiscent of Vallee’s alien-control hypothesis.

  Fernandes and D’Armada add one more truly fascinating suggestion that seems particularly impossible. Curiously, the shape of a rosary laid flat on a table (a circle with a line and a cross jutting out) forms the astrological sign of the planet Venus (which is also known as the Morning Star, a common epithet of the Virgin), the goddess Venus, and now the female chromosome.30 They speculate that we are dealing here with an ancient pagan symbolism rendered Christian by local context and elaborate processes of interpretation, devotion, and official spinning spread out over centuries. The cultural context of rural Catholic Portugal, of course, more or less guaranteed the traditional Marian reading. By the sixth visitation in October, everyone “knew” who the little lady was. Who else could she be? Certainly not Venus, the pagan goddess of sex and love. She was “Our Lady,” the Catholic Virgin. In this way, “[t]he paranormal became the supernatural, and the supernatural became the religious.”31

  A Venus-Virgin with a knee-high skirt, alien insectoid buzzing, and spinning metallic disks in the sky above Fátima. In effect, a Marialien. Now that would have changed how I prayed my rosary. I might even still be praying it.

  Required Reading (That Is Never Read)

  A SELECT ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  In the midst of all the nonsense and excessive silliness proclaimed in the name of psychic phenomena, the misinformed use of the term “parapsychology” by self-proclaimed “paranormal investigators,” the perennial laughingstock of magicians and conjurers . . . this is for real?

  The short answer is, Yes.

  —DEAN RADIN, The Conscious Universe

  Most discussions of psychical and paranormal phenomena take place in a near total ignorance of the nature, extent, and quality of the ethnographic and empirical data collected over the last two centuries. I am reminded here of something Major General Edmund R. Thompson, the U.S. Army assistant chief of staff for intelligence between 1977 and 1981, once said about the occasional stunning efficacy of the remote-viewing programs that he oversaw and sponsored: “I never liked to get into debates with the skeptics, because if you didn’t believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn’t done your homework.”1 The same is true, I fear, of the paranormal and the modern study of religion. We simply have not done our homework.

  The same conclusion can be drawn from more mundane methods. In 1977, Stanford astrophysicist Peter Sturrock performed a poll of over one thousand members of the American Astronomical Society about UFOs. He discovered that the more they had read, the more likely they were to think that the subject deserved more attention, and, conversely, that the less they had read about the subject, the less they thought about it. Such a conclusion is not rocket science, even with rocket scientists.2

  It is in this academic context of near total ignorance that I list below, in rough chronological order, what I consider to be some of the most important studies that need to be read if one is truly serious about inquiring into these matters. I, of course, have not read all of this material either.

  Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living, 2 vols. (London, 1886). Treating 702 cases, this work constitutes the first major publication of the S.P.R. and stands to this day as one of the most impressive works of psychical research ever published. Read before and alongside Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, these four volumes constitute a single masterwork composed by many lives and, more to the point, many deaths. A searchable online version of all four volumes can be found at: http://www.esalenctr.org.

  George Devereux, ed., Psycho-analysis and the Occult (New York: International Universities Press, 1953). A marvelous collection of essays by seventeen authors, including six by Freud himself, published at the high watermark of psychoanalytic interest in these topics at midcentury. The authors show through a blitz of case studies that, because psychical effects are often mediated by unconscious processes (repression, distortion,
displacement, symbolization, and so on), observers unfamiliar with psychoanalytic methods often miss the presence of such phenomena altogether, whereas those trained in the psychoanalytic hermeneutic recognize them as important dimensions of dreams, intuitions, and the “parapsychology of everyday life.” Far from being a materialist bludgeon, then, psychoanalysis becomes a method of interpretation that reveals more psychical connections and communications.

  C. D. Broad, Lectures on Psychical Research: Incorporating the Perrott Lectures Given in Cambridge University in 1959 and 1960, International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method, ed. A. J. Ayer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). A series of lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge University, over a two-year period, this book is one of the finest examples that we have of a trained philosopher engaging the data fairly and thoroughly.

  Jule Eisenbud, The World of Ted Serios: “Thoughtographic” Studies of an Extraordinary Mind (New York: William & Morrow Company, 1967). Eisenbud was a prominent Denver psychiatrist, Serios a struggling alcoholic who could barely stay off the street but who could also imprint detailed images on camera film with his mind under carefully controlled conditions. Eisenbud generally interprets these images as dreamlike projections from the psyche of Serios. They often included buildings in the real world or, in one really eerie case, Russian Vostok rockets, “apparently in space,” Eisenbud calmly notes (226). My favorite section is chapter 14, “The Anatomy of Resistance,” in which Eisenbud uses the history of religions and psychoanalysis to explain the dissonance between the data and the denials. The anatomy of resistance boils down for him to an attempt to keep in check “a demonic side of man of almost limitless potency” (324). Not for the metaphysically timid.