FATIMA

THE DAY THE SUN PLUNGED TOWARD THE EARTH

the Wanderling


MIRACLE OF THE SUN

In 1917, three years into World War I, in a small rural community located in mid-central Portugal called Fatima, three young children, a girl age ten and her cousins, a boy age nine and a girl age seven, Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta, in the process of shepherding sheep for their respective families, were visited apparition-like in the hills one fateful day by what they described as a beautiful lady dressed in white more brilliant than the sun who told them she was from heaven. Each succeeding month for several months, on a given date after that, the lady continued to appear before them. The crowds of both faithful and disbelievers grew so large after each successive meeting the anti-religious government stepped in an attempt to shut it down. During the fifth apparition the children begged the lady for an unmistakable sign that all could witness and she ensured them there would be such a miracle on her October 13th visit. An estimated crowd uowards towards and over 70,000 people showed up, and sure enough as predicted a miracle, now known as the "Miracle of the Sun" occurred. The following is what the secular Lisbon daily newspaper O Dia reported on the event:


"At one o'clock in the afternoon, midday by the sun, the rain stopped. The sky, pearly grey in colour, illuminated the vast arid landscape with a strange light. The sun had a transparent gauzy veil so that the eyes could easily be fixed upon it. The grey mother-of-pearl tone turned into a sheet of silver which broke up as the clouds were torn apart and the silver sun, enveloped in the same gauzy grey light, was seen to whirl and turn in the circle of broken clouds. A cry went up from every mouth and people fell on their knees on the muddy ground.

"The light turned a beautiful blue, as if it had come through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral, and spread itself over the people who knelt with outstretched hands. The blue faded slowly, and then the light seemed to pass through yellow glass. Yellow stains fell against white handkerchiefs, against the dark skirts of the women. They were repeated on the trees, on the stones and on the serra. People wept and prayed with uncovered heads, in the presence of a miracle they had awaited. The seconds seemed like hours, so vivid were they."


The person I call my Mentor, or at least my spiritual mentor, who I met between my sophomore and junior year in high school, was in Fatima on that fateful day of October 13, 1917. The meeting between me and my mentor while I was still in high school occurred a full thirty-seven years later, well after the events at Fatima. I had just turned 16, got my first drivers license, and bought my first car, becoming only the second owner to a pristine, albeit over decade old 1940's wooden Ford station wagon, affectionately known in the vernacular as a Woody. Except for my fully restored wooden station wagon, my mentor for the most part, seldom rode in private vehicles, shying away from all motor powered contrivances unless absolutely necessary. He never rode on or in anything that depended on a beast of burden to provide motive power either. One time I took him to Disneyland. On Main Street they have trolly cars that are pulled up and down the street by horses. He refused to ride the trollys because he would not participate in any endeavor that placed animals into a position of being beasts of burden, conveying to me in a sense, albeit in his somewhat oblique fashion and much later appreciation in time for me, his own deep appreciation of the value of Hsing-chiao, "traveling on foot" in the tradition of the Ch'an (Zen) schools of Buddhism. As a teenage boy growing up in the southern California beach culture, not only had I never heard of such a thing, I had never even thought of such a thing.



THE WANDERLING'S '41 FORD SUPER DELUXE WOOD STATION WAGON
(please click image)


My mentor, an older man by the time I met him, had been a pilot during World War I and why he had been in Europe during the time of Fatima in 1917. Although an American, he entered the war two years before the U.S. by crossing into Canada, joining the RAF and flying for the British in France against the Germans. His life, at least up to the early years just before the start of World War II, where he more-or-less disappears from the pages of history except where I pick him up, was chronicled by the noted British playwright and author William Somerset Maugham in a book he wrote titled The Razor's Edge. My mentor, given the name Larry Darrell in the book, as Maugham lays it out, has a major turning point in his life when his best friend dies right in front of his eyes following an attempt to save him in a raging dogfight out over the front during the waning days of the war. However, in a totally unexpected turn of events, although he was successful in saving my mentor, he himself, after setting his plane down and being helped out of the cockpit, had lost so much blood he died on the tarmac. Below, from the page about what kind of plane Patsy and Darrell flew titled Sophwith Camel, is how Maugham writes it:


"I got the blighter who was on your tail," he said.

"What's the matter, Patsy?" I asked.

"Oh, it's nothing. He winged me."

"He was looking deathly white. Suddenly a strange look came over his face. It had just come to him that he was dying, and the possibility of death had never so much as crossed his mind. Before they could stop him he sat up and gave a laugh."

"Well I'm jiggered," he said.

"He fell back dead. He was twenty-two. He was going to marry a girl in Ireland after the war.


According to Maugham, up to that time, seeing his best friend die right in front of his eyes was the most important turning point in my mentor's young life. Without question, a major turning point, but it wasn't exactly the only turning point. It was more like the straw that broke the camel's back. Maugham writes that my mentor was wounded twice. He dosen't make issue with either, simply citing them, then moving on. However, as it was told to me by my mentor, and left out of the narrative by Maugham either because he didn't know it or he didn't want to get into it, one of those two wounds was so serious that following hospitalization he was required to take two weeks mandatory leave in order to recuperate. It was what happened during those two weeks that an issue should have been raised but wasn't, a never reported issue that involved Our Lady of Fatima. Actually, my mentor returned from Fatima filled with enthusiasm, overwhelmed with a positive feeling for the future. He hadn't lost the lust to fly, he just couldn't engage the enemy like he did before. His friend said he lost his edge, letting unflinching adversaries get through. On practically the last day of the war and almost the last hour that's what happened. My mentor's friend doubled back to cover him from German fighters coming up on his tail and lost his life doing so. When my mentor saw his best friend die right in front of his eyes on the tarmac he said being hit in the face by a sledge hammer couldn't have hurt worse. In response to it all, early in the book, Darrell, in conversation with his fiancee' Isabel, says:


"I don't think I shall ever find peace till I make up my mind about things," he said gravely. He hesitated. "It's very difficult to put into words. The moment you try you feel embarrassed. You say to yourself; 'Who am I that I should bother my head about this, that and the other? Perhaps it's only because I'm a conceited prig. Wouldn't it be better to follow the beaten track and let what's coming to you come?' And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun, and he's lying dead; it's all so cruel and so meaningless. It's hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there's any sense to it or whether it's all a tragic blunder of blind fate."


The pilot that lost his life saving my mentor's life was named Patsy. He was a fiery redheaded Irish-Catholic with a just as fiery temper. Not the squadren's most well liked person, he was without a doubt one of the best pilots around and almost every flyer owed him a debt of graditude for having gotten them out of a scrape or two against the enemy at one time or the other. There was a five year age gap between my mentor at age 17 and Patsy at 22 but for some reason Patsy and my mentor hit it off right away with Patsy taking him under his wing and teaching him everything he knew about survival in the air.

British pilots who were wounded and granted leave to recoup could just "hop over the pond" as they called it to be with family and friends. Not so with my mentor. As an American he was thousands of miles from home. About the sametime my mentor was to begin his two weeks recuperation period and at a loss of what to do Patsy was hearing rumblings of deep religious manifestations going on in Portugal and suggested he use those two weeks and go to Portugal. One of the medicos treating my mentor's wounds was a Portuguese doctor identified by my mentor only as Augusto. At the time Augusto had only a rudimentary but growing use of English. He did however overhear the word Fatima during a conversation between my mentor and Patsy one day. The doctor was able to clarify that he was from a village not far from Fatima and would be going there soon on leave. He told my mentor that general tourists just wandering around Europe during the war had become rare and often suspect, that traveling such a distance as a civilian, especially a "war-age" viable male could be tricky. He said although being a medical doctor on leave wasn't exactly a blank check he had done the trip before and learned most of the ins and outs of how to sidestep or avoid authorities telling my mentor he was most welcome to travel with him if he chose to do so, plus he could continue to monitor his wound along the way if need be. Patsy, considering the doctor's suggestion an act of Providence, did everything in his command to force my mentor to go and in the end was successfully in doing so. When they reached the doctor's village my mentor continued on his own to Fatima.

Maugham doesn't mention or write about such a venture anywhere, and like I say, he may have not even known, but known or not, my mentor, thanks to the doctor, was in the fields of Fatima not far from the childern on October 13, 1917, the day of the Miracle of the Sun and witnessed the whole thing from start to finish. I can see why Maugham would chose to ignore it if he did know. Not to have would have opened up a veritable can of worms that would have completely distracted from his main thesis and veered the whole thing off course. Up until this page I've done mostly the same thing for the same reasons. Maugham chose to do the same thing when it came to the The Hemis Manuscripts by the way.


A couple of years before I met my mentor, actually one month before I started my freshman year in high school, a movie about Our Lady of Fatima was released. One year prior to that one of my favorite science fiction movies, When World's Collide, came out. The story line of that movie has a rogue star or sun passing through the solar system with the Earth plunging into it. When the Our Lady of Fatima movie came out the next year, theater lobby posters hyped it with hugh headlines reading "the day the sun plunged into the Earth." Typically a movie such as the Fatima wouldn't interest me much, but the posters caught my attention enough to learn one of the primary actors was a man named Gilbert Roland and secondly, it was produced by Bryan Foy, both enough for me to go see it. Why would a just about to enter high school teenager care about either?

During World War II my dad worked in the shipyards building Liberty ships. When the war ended and no longer any need for Liberty ships, he along with thousands of others, was let go. With the help of a friend in the movie industry he was able to find regular work for a major Hollywood studio constructing backlot scenery and sound stage sets. In that environment, because of a startling resemblence between my dad and the actor Gilbert Roland he was often confused as being Roland, which my dad always took as a compliment. Because of that, as a kid, I always looked for movies Roland was in. As for Bryan Foy, and I write about this elsewhere, me as a young boy knowning about him may have semed a little odd, but not so much so when the facts are in.(see) When my mentor began telling me about his experience at Fatima it dawned on me, even though I hadn't thought about it much at the time, I had seen a movie about the samething just a few years before. We scrounged around and found an art-house dump of a theater in Santa Monica or West Hollywood that was having a weekend religious movie marathon of which one was the Miracle of Fatima with Gilbert Roland. So off we went, getting there just in time to see it and the movie screened just before it as well, a 1935 black and white film titled The Last Days of Pompeii that I had seen in re-release in 1949.

By the time my mentor and I got around to seeing the Our Lady of Fatima movie a couple of years had gone by since we first met. I was reaching towards the end of my high school years and would soon be going on a summer long trip deep into Mexico with a high school buddy as well as facing Uncle Sam and the military draft. After returning from Mexico my mentor gave me two brand new just released hardback books. One was They All Discovered America by John Boland and the other Meet the Witnesses by John Haffert. The first book related to my trip to Mexico, especially Chapter Four on Hoei Shin of which my mentor bookmarked because of dealing more specifically with Buddhism In America Before Columbus. Hoei Shin, also spelled Hui Shen, was a Buddhist monk said to have visited the Americas, especially so Mexico and Mesoamerica between the years 458 AD and 499 AD in search of one Quatu-zacca, a Buddhist monk later mentoned in the writings by the scribes of the Spanish conquistadors such as Coronado, et al, in the 1540's. The second book related to the Our Lady of Fatima and presented a huge number of personal interviews of what witness after witness reported seeing and experincing during the Miracle of the Sun. The Boland book held the most interest at the time because I had only returned from Mexico a short time when my mentor gave it to me. Haffert's book Meet the Witnesses I really sort of set aside, not coming back to it with any depth for several years and by then my mentor had already told me what he himself had seen and experienced specifically. Much to my surprise I found mention of the Portuguese doctor Augusto in a chapter on his brother.

The attendance figures for the total number of people at Fatima on October 13, 1917 for the opportunity of viewing the Miracle of the Sun varies considerably, ranging from as few as 30,000 to a high well over a 100,000, typically with the lower numbers emanating from anti-Fatima folk and the higher numbers coming from the pro-Fatima camp. Most seriously interested parties have pretty much settled on a figure of around 70,000. Everything I've seen, read, and studied on the subject seems to substantiate that number or easily surpass it. Beginning from the very first hours after the event up to the 1960's and beyond, when eyewitnesses were getting harder and harder to locate, many hundreds of those thousands have been interviewed, and what they experienced reported.

Ground zero where the event occurred was located in a shallow bowl shape land-depression called Cova da Iria, some two miles north northwest of Fatima, named after the Portuguese martyr Saint Iria or Irene, but more specifically within that land-depression, a small bush or tree known as a holm oak where the three shepards saw a most beautiful Lady almost as if standing in the air above the foliage, the Lady telling the shepards she was from Heaven. Although not deemed a physical astronomical or celestial event, the experience and visual phenomenon that was focused directly on the oak tree in the Cova that was viwed not only by those thousands in close attendance, but also witnessed by people in the surrounding area incorporating up to and over 600 square miles.

Within less than eight weeks following the events at Fatima, on December 3, 1917, a reputable eyewitness to those events, Goncalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett, professor of mathematics at Coimbra University, came forward with what he saw and experienced that day in the Cova:


  • The phenomenon lasted about 8 to 10 minutes.

  • The sun lost its blinding brightness, taking on a moonlike glow easy to watch.

  • For three times during this event, the sun appeared gyrating in its periphery, flashing sparks of light on its edges, as the well-known firework wheels.

  • This circling movement of the edges of the sun, three times manifested and interrupted, was speedy.

  • The sun turned violet and then orange, spreading these colors over the earth, regaining its shine and brightness, impossible to gaze.

  • These facts happened shortly after noon and near the zenith.


Then, years later, in 1961, in a broad generalization concensus sort of way of what people saw and experienced that day at the Cova John Haffert, in his book Meet the Witnesses, mentioned prevously, writes:


  • The time and place of this event was predicted in advance.

  • A light of extraordinary power was seen over a radius of more than twenty miles like a "Catherine wheel" of fireworks, sending off great shafts of colored light which tinted objects on the ground.

  • It plummeted toward the earth after several minutes, assuming such a gigantic nearness that the tens of thousands of witnesses thought it was the end of the world.

  • The great ball of fire stopped just as it was about to crash upon the earth, and returned into the sky.

  • It came from and went back to the location of the sun, so that those who saw it actually thought it was the sun.

  • The top of the mountain where this occurred, which had been drenched by several hours of constant rain, suddenly dried within a matter of minutes.

  • Tens of thousands of witnesses of all classes and of various creeds, extended over an area of about six hundred square miles.


Skeptics have blamed the events at Fatima on everything from atmospheric lenses, plasma vortexes, refraction of light through ice crystals called sundogs, visual distortion from volcanic ash and/or dust from the Sahara, abnormal auroras, retinal phosphenes, fatigue, brain illusions, collective hallucinations, mass suggestions, hysteria, UFOs, and just plain lies.

Long before I had done any amount of study or in-depth formal research into the goings on involving the events at Fatima, before even seeing the movie with my mentor and possibly having been tainted by any of it, my mentor had already graphically told me what he himself as an eyewittness had experienced and seen personally. Although much of what he told me generally jibes with the observations of Goncalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett and John Haffert above as well as what the Lisbon daily newspaper O Dia reported on the event as seen back up the page, the what and how of his interpretations of those same events as he saw them varies considerably.

First of all, what the vast numbers of people saw and experienced that day in the cova, and initally peceived and thought of as being the sun itself, wasn't the sun as we know it that the Earth orbits around, but a full-on outward manifestation of the miracle promised by the "Lady." Secondly, the Lady wasn't God. God level miracles such as the flood of Noah or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was probably much more than what could be found in her handbag of abilities. Moving the sun is no easy task, so she did what she could do. Not a universe or solar system size manifestation, or even a world wide one, but one more intimate to her and her concerned followers, done over a 1200 or so square mile local area. Perhaps not the same as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, but a worthy miracle nontheless.

Where some say they saw a sun-like disc spinning around a mid-point central axis like a bullseye others saw a sun-like high speed sometime summersaulting rotating globe with a north-pole south-pole top-bottom polar axis. My mentor saw what he described as being more closely akin to a spinning standing up on-edge silver coin. He showed me so by standing a silver dollar up on edge and flipping it with his finger so the edges spun around and around so fast in an upright position past my eyes it gave off all the visual appearences of a globe. If the shining-spun rotating disc my mentor saw at Fatima was illuminated by its own light or depended on reflected light from an outside source, he didn't say. He did say as the leftside forward leading edge of the disc was approaching him the light wavelength, because it was approaching, contracted, shifting it to a short wavelength, thus emitting colors in the blue range. On the rightside receding edge the lightwaves were stretched or lengthened emitting colors in the red end of the spectrum. So, like the light from a lighthouse, your specific location as an observer within the sweep of the disc's light, determined what colors you saw or didn't see at any given time, an explanation of which I've heard from nowhere else.

So too, regardless of what others say, the hair, headgear, footwear, and clothing of all the people at the cova, or at least those around my mentor up to and including himself, had been completely soaked through, with many and he too as well, standing in up to ankle deep mud. Then suddenly they all found themselves and the ground around them quickly and mysteriously dry, as if there never had been a drenching rain all morning long.

My mentor underlined the drying aspect to me explicitly because of his role during the war. He was a pilot, not just any pilot, but an American who came to the war early. One-on-one air-to-air combat was new and the pilots imbued it, at least in the beginninng, with a certain knightly virtue. That went as far as how they presented themselves, with many pilots having tailored uniforms and handmade boots. When my mentor went to Fatima he went as a civilian, but wore his aviator flying boots, being the only footwear he had, covered by baggy pants. Not only the trip but the constant rain and mud at the cova that day along with the instant drying should have ruined his boots beyond any presentable knightly virtue uniform-like repair. He even recalled having in passing a rather morbid thought that that late in the war, if he needed to replace his boots, he would probably only able to find some by getting or taking a pair from a deceased or severely injured flyer. But instead, when the rain finally stopped and the cova suddenly dried up the thick caked on mud turned to dry dirt and dust and simply fell off leaving the leather, except for the wear and tear of the trip and lack of daily upkeep, not baked, cracked, or dried, but soft and supple like it always had been.


The insantaneous drying of the clothes and mud that morning in the cova near Fatima on October 13, 1917 is the biggist sticking point in the craw of most of the scientists that have studied the events there. Since it defies all laws of nature and unwilling to ascribe it to some divine nature they either pass over it, say it never rained that hard in the first place, was mass hallucinations, or that it never happened.

If you do any amount of serious research into Fatima you will soon find, as I have, there are reams and reams of articles, books, and materials, both pro and con, about the events that happened there. Con people debunk the whole thing citing all kinds of scienctific reasons why they could not have happened. Pro people who have found faith not enough to convince many of the multitudes cite scienctific counter arguments, many over the years convincingly so. However, one of the things I discovered was that there is a kind of "Pulling Up By the Bootstraps" time loop paradox use of facts that exists among the various writings on the subject. By that I mean, like the Bootstrap Paradox, there is a sort of circular substantiation of facts and views by using each other to verify facts until the verification comes around back on itself with no beginning to substantiate the facts. Below are the two main examples of quotes that show up over and over in relation to the sudden and miraculous drying of the people and fields after the morning long drenching rain previously cited. Although minor word variations show up here and there between the quotes depending on the author doing the quoting and maybe the two I've presented, the overall context remains the same:


"The amount of energy needed to accomplish this process of instantaneous drying, would have incinerated everyone present had it taken place in the natural order of things. This aspect of the miracle radically contradicts the laws of nature to have achieved it."

"Engineers that have studied the case reckoned that an incredible amount of energy would have been necessary to dry up those pools of water that had formed on the field in a few minutes as it was reported by witnesses."


The first of the two quotes above, the top one, is typically atributed to Father Gregory Hesse, S.T.D., J.C.D. The second of the two, the bottom one, is usually given credit to Father John de Marchi, I.M.C. When it comes to Fatima both Hesse and de Marchi have dogs in the hunt as both are Catholic priests. Neither, however, substantiate their statements with any proof or back up. In Hesse's case, what would be the amount of energy needed? In de Marchi's case, who are the engineers or where are their case studies? While both statements have common sense and possibly the Second Law of Thermodynamics and her other running dog laws to grasp both statements as understandable and true, neither of the two Father offers up where, who, or how they arrived at their decision.


Scrolling down the page will take you to two graphics, one on the 1952 Our Lady of Fatima movie with Gilbert Roland mentioned in the main text above and one on the 1946 movie The Razor's Edge. Clicking the graphics will take you to the movies, online, free, and with no sign ups.





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