by John A. Keel
Lucia later said that the Lady asked them to learn to read. (A big thing to ask of simple peasants in 1917 Portugal.) On July 13 a much larger crowd gathered as the three children knelt and addressed the entity whom only they could see. Ti Marto, one of the adults, reported that he heard a sound “like a horsefly in an empty waterpot.” Hopeful cripples and blind men urged the children to ask for a miracle. Lucia relayed the request and said that the Lady answered, “Continue to come here every month. In October I will tell you who I am and what I wish and will perform a miracle that everyone will have to believe.
“When you shall see a night illuminated by an unknown light,” the Lady continued, “know that it is the great sign that God gives you that He is going to punish the world for its crimes… To prevent this I come to ask the consecration of Russia… If they listen to my requests, Russia will be converted and there will be peace.”
Naturally, these small and simple children knew nothing of Russia (the Russian Revolution began on March 8, 1917) and could not have regarded it as any kind of threat.
It was at this July contact that the children were allegedly given a secret which has never been formally revealed. When adults pressed her for details, Lucia would only say that this secret was “good for some, for others bad.”
The visions of Fatima were now the sensation of Portugal. In August the children were seized and imprisoned by the Administrator of Ourem, who threatened them and tried to make them confess that it was all a hoax. But the children stuck to their story, even when threatened with death. The three youngsters were still being detained in Ourem when August 13 rolled around, but a crowd of 6,000 gathered at the Cova, and according to their testimony, a flash of light appeared in the sky and then something resembling a small, transparent cloud slowly floated down to rest briefly on top of the evergreen tree. At the same moment, all the faces in the crowd were bathed in a multicolored light.
Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinto were freed and returned to the meadow on August 19. They reportedly saw and spoke with the Lady again on that day. Thirty days later, on September 13, the roads around Fatima were teeming with pilgrims, priests, nuns, poor people, and rich. As is usual in events like this, most of these people came to beg for favors from the Lady; they wanted their ailments healed and their troubles righted. They mobbed the poor youngsters and pleaded for miracles, even though the promised miracle of October was common knowledge, and the children could only repeat that earlier promise.
Among the crowds in the field that day was the Reverend Doctor Manuel Nunes Fromigao, canon of the cathedral at Lisbon and professor at the Seminary of Santarem. He later wrote that he noticed a peculiar dimming of the sun in the cloudless sky as the children went into their trance, but he failed to see the luminous globe reported by other witnesses.
Up until this time the Lady had not identified herself in any manner. She had been seen only by the three children, and her voice had been heard by just Lucia and Jacinto. Determined adults had extracted and embellished a description of the Lady from the youngsters, but they never really saw anything beyond a luminous figure. No hair or features were apparently visible.
An estimated 70,000 people collected at the Cova da Iria on October 13, 1917, in anticipation of the promised miracle. Many of them carried cameras, and primitive hand-cranked movie cameras had been set tip by newsreel men. The weather was sour, with dark, sullen skies and a heavy rain. The meadows and fields were a sea of mud, and the faithful huddled under umbrellas. The three children gathered with their parents in front of the little tree and waited. Shortly after noon, Lucia gasped, and her upraised face flushed as she entered a rapturous trance. The Lady had arrived, even though the crowd saw nothing. The children declared that she held an infant in her arms, and for the first time she identified herself, saying that she was “the Lady of the Rosary.” The war was going to end soon, she told them, and all of the soldiers would be returning home. (The war continued for another year.)
Suddenly the crowd screamed, and all the people fell to their knees. Something was coming through the clouds: a huge silver disk which rotated rapidly as it descended toward the mob. Fragile strands of silvery “angel hair” showered from the sky, melting away before any of it could be collected.
The object bobbed up and down, waltzing under the cloud layer, and as it whirled faster, it seemed to change color, going through the whole spectrum. It swooped down and passed low over the terrified people; then it bobbed upward again. These gyrations were continued for a full ten minutes.
Miles from Fatima, others were watching the same object. A well-known poet named Alfonso Lopes Vieira claimed that he saw it from his home at San Pedro de Moel, forty kilometers from Fatima. Eighteen kilometers away in Alburita, Dona Delfina Pereira Lopes, a teacher, and all of her students reportedly witnessed the spectacle. Father Inacio Lourenco described it as looking “like a globe of snow revolving on itself.”
Professor Almeida Garrett, a distinguished scientist from Coimbra University, was in the crowd at Fatima and reported: “It was raining hard… suddenly the sun shone through the dense cloud which covered it; everybody looked in its direction… It looked like a disk, of very definite contour; it was not dazzling. I don’t think it could be compared to a dull silver disk, as someone said later at Fatima. No. It rather possessed a clear, changing brightness, which one could compare to a pearl… It looked like a polished wheel… This is not poetry; my eyes have seen it…This clear-shaped disk suddenly began turning. It rotated with increasing speed… Suddenly, the crowd began crying with anguish. The ‘sun,’ revolving all the time, began falling toward the earth, [now] reddish and bloody, threatening to crush everybody under its fiery weight…”
A wave of heat swept over the crowd, drying their rain-soaked clothes instantly. We might speculate that this same wave of heat may have affected the miraculous healings that reportedly took place among some of the sick people in the crowd, just as the heat from that purple glob in Texas seemed to heal Officer Goode’s infected finger.
Here we had an event of major importance with 70,000 witnesses, many of them priests, scientists, and journalists. It came at a time when Europe was shuddering with the violence of the First World War and religious faith was being strained by the inanity of sudden death. It would become one of the most thoroughly investigated UFO-type incidents of the period. Innumerable books were written about it, yet none of these books contained photos of the actual object. There were plenty of pictures of the crowds, many of whom were pointing cameras skyward. But what happened to all of the pictures they must have taken? What happened to all of the movie footage? I have tried to locate some of these photographs without success. I can only assume that they were collected by somebody and locked away in some secret archive. Because there was no U.S. Air Force and no CIA to blame this on, who did confiscate those pictures?
In the initial reports of the phenomenon, all the witnesses agreed that the object was white and seemingly metallic, and that it changed color as the speed of rotation increased. Later, myth and mysticism replaced fact. The disk became “the sun,” even though observatories around the world assured the press that the sun remained in its usual place during the miracle. As the years passed, the miracle of “the sun” was gradually played down, and emphasis was shifted to the saintliness of the three children. The silvery angel hair is now described as “rose petals” in most current literature.
Analysis of the Miracle
Fatima was not an accidental contact; it was obviously a carefully planned and deliberately executed demonstration. Dr. Jacques Vallee, Antonio Ribera, and other well-known UFO researchers have written extensively about it, but following the style of contemporary UFO research, they concentrated on the descriptions of the object and the fact that 70,000 witnesses were present, and they studiously ignored the whole pattern of events that preceded the appearance of the object. Those events were far more important than the climactic sighting.
The correlations are very cl
ear. First, Lucia was singled out in 1915 for the cautious initial contacts. She saw something in the sky that summer, and a few weeks later she and her friends were approached by a luminous transparent figure which appeared to be a fifteen-year-old boy. Because the children came from strict Catholic backgrounds, the contact was conducted on a religious level. The boy asked the children to join him in prayer. Fear was replaced by reverence and awe. The experience undoubtedly amplified Lucia’s religious beliefs and increased her interest in religious training. A study of her autobiography and the thorough reports written during and after the miracle suggest that she had many of the medium characteristics mentioned earlier and that she willingly prepared her mind for the events of 1917.
In modern contactee reports we find that initial contact is sometimes carried out months or even years before the contactee is finally fully involved in the situation.
(Small children often have a high degree of ESP, but as they grow older and develop reason—and skepticism—and their minds become more disciplined to the material world around them, these powers seem to slip away. A remarkable Italian teacher, Maria Montessori, worked out educational methods that took advantage of this fact, and she founded the school system which bears her name. Four- and five-year-olds in Montessori schools learn to read, write, and work out complicated mathematical problems by themselves. The teacher serves more as a consultant and does no lecturing or open teaching. There are now Montessori schools worldwide, and many of her methods have been absorbed into our conventional educational system. It is probable that small children make excellent contactee material because of these factors, and that may explain why so much UFO, ghost, and poltergeist activity seems to surround children.)
The world was in foment in 1917, and the ultraterrestrials may have decided that some form of impressive demonstration was necessary to restore faltering human values. Random appearances of “signs in the sky” could not accomplish this. Nor would a repetition of the miracle of La Salette achieve this.
The world was more sophisticated in 1917 than it had been in 1858. The ultraterrestrials could see our future, and they wanted somehow to guide us and help us try to correct our course. It must have been extremely important to them for them to make such an effort.
They therefore selected three small children in Portugal and launched their careful plan. The events had to be staged so that they would support one another. Valid prophecies had to be made so that the prophecies dealing with the more distant future would be taken seriously. And the whole situation had to fit into the context of the UFO incidents which were still to come.
In May 1917, the first contact was made in the usual UFO manner. A globe of light appeared, and a faceless entity spoke to the children, probably through ESP or the trance state. Little Francisco could see the entity but could not hear it. Lucia had already been prepared through her earlier encounters so she served as a catalyst. In that first meeting the entity spoke of religious matters in a way that the children could understand and promised to return on the thirteenth of each month for the next six months.
When the children excitedly reported this to adults in their village, some of the more devout were impressed with their obvious sincerity, and the stage was set for the succeeding contacts. Adults who accompanied them to the field in the months that followed heard sounds and saw aerial lights and were convinced by the trance which the children entered into. They spread the word and repeated the Lady’s prophecies. During one of the early contacts, she promised a big miracle on October 13. Had this failed to materialize, the whole Fatima thing would have collapsed, but because it did occur precisely as the children said it would months before, we are obliged to take all of their story seriously.
Many of the Lady’s statements and prayers, as related by the children, were phrased in perfect Catholic dogma, a fact which impressed the attending priests, because it was very unlikely that the children could have known enough about theology to make such things up. But all these things were probably superficial trappings, quite similar to the endless descriptions of life on other planets given to UFO contactees. The only important things in the statements were the basic prophecies themselves.
Skepticism being what it is, the ultraterrestrials realized that the only way to win attention to these prophecies was to stage a careful demonstration which would be practically irrefutable and that would convince the Church—and the world—that the children had been speaking the truth. Thus the miracle of Fatima came about.
Among the minor prophecies was the prediction that Jacinto and Francisco would soon die. (They were delighted with this in their childlike way because it meant they would be going to heaven.) Lucia entered a convent, became a nun, was renamed Maria of the Sorrows, and was hidden away from the world for many years. The major prophecies of Fatima had been written down, sealed in an envelope, and turned over to the Vatican. They were supposed to be revealed to the world in 1960, but Pope John XXIII “decided it was advisable to preserve the mystery,” according to Alfredo Cardinal Ottavianni, head of the Vatican’s sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Pope John took the secret with him to his grave.
Or did he? All kinds of rumors have leaked from the Vatican about that secret. It is said to be a prediction of the end of the world.
Fatima was a modern event, yet it is already clouded with the distortions of belief. The photographs of the object have “disappeared.” The key prophecy has been suppressed. Lucia shut herself away from the world. As the years passed, the object was turned into a “dancing sun,” the angel hair became “rose petals,” and the entire phenomenon was removed from the field of science and entrusted to the religionists.
The carefully planned and deliberately executed demonstration at Fatima was therefore a failure so far as the ultraterrestrials were concerned. Such demonstrations had proved highly effective in Biblical times, but times were changing and new methods were called for. Mankind was getting scientific—so perhaps the phenomenon should be altered to a seemingly scientific framework. A scientific (i.e., seemingly interplanetary) series of demonstrations might capture the imaginations of those who had abandoned religion.
There have been many modern miracles of the Fatima type, but they rarely gain much attention outside of religious circles. The flying saucers get much more publicity than the miracles.
Other Miracles. Other Correlations
Between the years 1937 and 1945, an entity who identified herself as the Queen of the Universe appeared more than 100 times to four young girls in the tiny hamlet of Heede, Germany. The girls, aged twelve through fourteen, were Anna Schulte, Greta and Maria Ganseforth, and Susanna Bruns. These visions began in November 1937 and continued throughout the war, with the Lady urging the world to “pray, pray much, especially for the conversion of sinners.” Hitler was probably none too happy about all of this, especially because he openly considered himself to be the Antichrist.
(There are all kinds of stories and rumors that Hitler was a trance medium himself and was in contact with evil entities who advised him and directed many of his genocidal policies.)
Lesser miracles have included weeping statues and pictures that seem to fit into the poltergeist category. A plaster Virgin began crying real tears in Syracuse, Sicily, on August 29, 1953, and continued to “weep” until September 1. Investigators could find no rational cause of the phenomenon. In other cases, pictures and statues have shed human blood.
On Sunday, June 18, 1961, four young girls were playing marbles outside of the little village of Garabandal, Spain, when they suddenly saw an “angel.” The girls, Mary Cruz Gonzalez, eleven, Conchita Gonzalez, twelve, Jacinta Gonzalez, twelve, and Mary Loly Mazon, twelve (none of the Gonzalez girls were directly related), said that he appeared to be about nine years old, was dressed in a long, seamless blue robe, had a small face with black eyes, and “fine hands and short fingernails.” For some reason, he gave the impression of being very strong. This figure was surrounded by a dazzling gl
ow and faded into thin air without saying a word.
The excited youngsters ran into the village and told everyone that they had seen an angel. Fatima was about to be repeated all over again. Most of the adults scoffed, but those whose faith was extreme listened and spread the word. An angel had visited Garabandal (a village in the heart of the Cantabrian Mountains in northern Spain; elevation about 2,000 feet; it’s about 150 miles from Lourdes, France).
Two days later the same four children were walking along a path outside the town when suddenly a brilliant white light exploded in front of them, terrifying them and blinding them briefly. (Brilliant flashes of light from an unknown source are frequently reported by contactees and UFO witnesses. There was an epidemic of such flashes in the spring of 1968. Often people reported that these flashes suddenly occurred directly in front of their moving automobiles. Others said that a flash “like a flashgun going off” burst near them as they stepped outside their homes. These flashes do not seem to be related to the “mystery photographers” who frequently turn up and photograph the homes of witnesses.)
Soon after these initial experiences, the girls began to go into trances (termed a state of ecstasy by the religionists) during which they would see the Lady. Sometimes these trances would last for hours, and the girls would remain fixed in an awkward kneeling position with their heads thrown back and their eyes staring at the vision, totally oblivious of the hundreds of people swarming around them.
One of their first visits with the Lady is of very special interest here. Shortly before 6 P .M. on Sunday, July 2, 1961, the children trooped to their now-sacred spot outside of Garabandal and immediately entered the trancelike state. They were later able to describe in detail what they had seen. These descriptions were dutifully recorded in the religious literature later published by Church-affiliated groups.