According to many believing Catholics, a strange and miraculous event occurred on October 13th, 1917 near the town of Fatima in Portugal [1]. In the months before the purported miracle, three children named Lucia, Jacinta, and Francisco had allegedly received visions of an apparition of the virgin Mary. One of three predictions made by the children was that this apparition, known as "Our Lady of Fatima," would reveal herself through a miracle that would take place on October 13th. Accounts of the event estimate that on that day thousands witnessed the sun dance in the sky, change to a dull silver color, and then descend towards the earth in a zig-zag pattern before returning to normal.

The so-called 'miracle of the sun' is often touted as evidence of god's divine hand at work in the world. It has been a source of interest and focus for many, especially with some accounts claiming that up to 100,000 eyewitnesses were present, including non-believers. But what does a careful examination of the evidence reveal?

I. Consider the Source(s)

One significant detail often omitted from tellings of the sun miracle is that the common reports seem primarily rooted in a single source. In 1952, John De Marchi, a Catholic priest, published a book on his research on the Fatima miracle, collected between 1943 and 1950. De Marchi's description is the most widely used source, and yet it compiles varying accounts and even outright rejections of the supernatural claims in some cases, as the author admits [2]. It is frequently noted that a few of the sources incorporated by De Marchi were Masonic, or anticlerical, in nature and thus less likely to be biased. The interesting end of this comes in a source which plainly states: "it is affirmed, or rather invented, that the sun, at a certain hour on October 13, 1917... was seen to dance a fandango in the clouds!"

When a non-Catholic source, such as O Seculo, affirms the miracle, it's counted as evidence, but when a non-Catholic source rejects and repudiates the miracle, it's still counted as evidence and presumed that anticlerical sentiments were at work in suppression of the truth. This hardly seems like a fair way to evaluate the information, and De Marchi's book is littered with political commentary regarding Communism and Masonry. Catholic reaction to the Masons could be called paranoid at times too, as historian Stanley G. Payne has pointed out:

Portugal may have fallen into such exaggerations as well, since Stanley explains that by 1912 the country had fewer than 3,000 Masons [4]. Therefore, a powerful Masonic plot to discredit the Catholic miracle claim at Fatima is a gross assumption. Additionally, bias would not necessarily mean a source is inaccurate. The rejection of the sun miracle by some of De Marchi's sources should not be dismissed. More intriguing is the fact that some believers present for the 'event' even espoused this rejection, stating that they saw nothing strange or miraculous on October 13th, 1917 [5].

So who are we to believe? Remember the prediction made by the three children. Thousands of people had shown up expecting to see a miracle. Just as there were non-Catholics who believed they saw something, there were Catholics who did not see what they had hoped to see. Then there is the fact that De Marchi is really the only source for many of these alleged accounts, of which only a few are cited - nowhere close to 70,000 independent testimonies exist. These factors make the sun miracle difficult to accept in the first place, and there is still more to be considered.

II. The Power of Suggestion

Could a case of mass hysteria be the truth behind the Fatima sightings? It's not unthinkable, with a large group of believers present and expecting to see a miracle. However, some have objected to mass hysteria on the grounds that so many allegedly witnessed the dancing sun. How could 70,000 people have all hallucinated or lied about the same thing, they ask. As I've already noted, the number of witnesses is both inconsistent in certain accounts and entirely unverified. Much like the 500 witnesses in 1 Corinthians 15:6, a figure is given with no further information to allow for accuracy to be checked. Because confirming the number of witnesses is next to impossible, the estimates of a few individuals are all that can be relied on, and human beings are known to make mistakes, especially in dealing with large groups during unusual circumstances.

Yet even if so many had claimed to see something at Fatima on October 13th, would that cast any doubt on the power of suggestion? A series of studies conducted in the 1950s sought to test the influence of groups on individuals. The studies, known as the Asch conformity experiments, demonstrate that the tendency to conform to the actions and behavior of others in a group is stronger depending on the size of the group [6]. By surrounding a person with confederates, Solomon Asch discovered that when groups of three or more provided a single answer to a certain question, the test subject would be more prone to conform to the group's answer. Even when confederates provided incorrect answers, the subject would conform 32% of the time. Perhaps most significant is that the subjects attributed the reason of their conformity to personal error, bad vision, and other factors, basically presuming that the agreement of the group was more likely to reflect the truth than their own experience or reason.

Another study which may be relevant to the Fatima event is the Milgram experiment conducted in the 1960s. Stanley Milgram set up a test where subjects would teach another individual certain words and then quiz them over the material. If a wrong answer was given, an electric shock would be administered as punishment. Unknown to the subject (teacher), the participant learning the words was an actor that merely imitated being electrocuted. The experimenter would instruct the teacher how to respond to the learner's answers, and every so often the voltage level would be increased. The results of the study showed that authority figures serve as a strong influence in whether or not a person will conform to behavior that may conflict with their own conscience [7]. Finally, studies have additionally shown that our perceptions, even of a visual nature, are largely affected by wishes, preferences, and desires. Psychologists Emily Balcetis and David Dunning from Cornell University performed five different studies to determine the relationship of motivational states to visual perception. "These studies suggest," they explain, "that the impact of motivation on information processing extends down into preconscious processing of stimuli in the visual environment and thus guides what the visual system presents to conscious awareness" [8]. In layman's terms, this means some of us do see what we want to see when there is strong motivation.

The Milgram experiment tested the conformity of an individual to the instruction of an authority figure.

The power of suggestion ought not to be underestimated or dismissed in a case such as that of the Fatima 'miracle.' The Asch experiments demonstrate the likelihood that individuals present at Fatima on the date of the purported event may have simply gone along with the claims of others, because of the size of the group. The Milgram experiment demonstrates that some who were present may also have reported the vision under the influence of authority figures (children and parents, husbands and wives, etc). The studies of Balcetis and Dunning demonstrate that it would be possible for some of the believers who had shown up desperately hoping to see a miracle to convince themselves that they had in fact seen one. Altogether this constitutes a powerful challenge to the veracity of the sun miracle claim.

It should be recognized that these studies can be applied to other alleged phenomena that are said to be witnessed by numerous individuals, like UFO and alien encounters. In fact, one alternative interpretation of the Fatima event is that religious believers mistook a UFO sighting for a divine miracle [9]. Yet again, who are we to believe? When something is so open to interpretation that some called it a vision of Mary, others are calling it UFOs, and still others said they never saw anything at all, the power of suggestion seems the most likely culprit.

III. Miraculous Vision or Scientific Phenomenon?

Despite the fact that some in attendance saw no miracle on October 13th, and the fact that no observatory reported any of the strange visions that day, scientific explanations have been put forward in an attempt to account for the sun miracle claims. A few of these explanations are a bit hard to swallow, like a dust cloud from the Sahara [10] or a solar storm [11], but there are a couple of more interesting and probable ones that are worth looking at. We should also remember that supernatural explanations have a zero percent track record for supplanting natural explanations, and for this reason, as well as the rarity of miracles by definition, natural explanations ought to be accorded a higher probability than supernatural explanations.

Auguste Meessen, a professor of the Institute of Physics at the Catholic University of Louvain, has proposed that the visions at Fatima were simply the optical effects of prolonged staring at the sun. The changes in color were caused by the bleaching of photosensitive retinal cells, and the appearance of the sun dancing in the sky was due to retinal after-images, Meessen states [12]. Anyone who spent time staring at the sun as a child can see the validity in this explanation. Even staring at a light bulb for an extended time can produce a similar effect. When you shift your focus slightly away, strangely colored 'duplicates' of the light source become visible and may appear to move or dance. These phenomena are known as after-images, and are the result of the cone cells in our eyes losing sensitivity in the process of working out the overstimulation that comes from staring at a light source.

Meessen also points out that sun miracles have been reported in France, Germany, Italy, Rwanda, and many other areas, frequently bearing the same characteristics as the visions claimed by witnesses at Fatima. In his own experiment, Meessen looked directly into the sun at a time when its light intensity was attenuated, being low above the horizon. His experience nearly replicates all the claims of Fatima, and the circumstances seem to be key as well, since the reports of the sun miracle indicate that it had ceased raining before the event, which would have left humidity in the air that would attenuate the light intensity and allow for prolonged sun-staring without physical pain.

Steuart Campbell suggests that a stratospheric dust cloud may have played a role in the apparent color change, movement, and ease of viewing of the sun [13]. Campbell cites an example of this in reports of the sun changing colors in China around 1983. Skeptic and paranormal researcher Joe Nickell has advanced an explanation that a sundog was the real phenomenon witnessed by believers in Fatima [14]. A sundog, or parhelion in scientific terms, is a common atmospheric optical effect that gives the illusion of multiple light sources or suns.

In response to these possibilities, believers in the Fatima miracle often choose one or another detail to nitpick, from which they feel justified to write off the entire explanation as too far-fetched to be plausible. Sundogs are stationary illusions, so how does that explain the dancing? How could 70,000 people, some watching from miles away, mistake the effects of a dust cloud for the miracle they saw? Such objections truly are ignorant of the evidence, because, as I've already stated, not everyone present saw the sun dance. Not everyone saw the sun change colors. Some didn't see anything unusual at all. There is no excuse for presuming uniformity among accounts when there is none. Kevin McClure, a paranormal investigator, wrote about the compilation of sources for the Fatima miracle, saying he had "never seen such a collection of contradictory accounts in any of the research I have done in the past 10 years" [15].

IV. In Summary

The testimonies for the Fatima sun miracle are inconsistent. Some are not verifiable, relying only on the word of a single priest who compiled them, and the estimates of those in attendance vary widely enough to be largely indeterminate. This is very weak evidence to build a miracle case on, and it's far removed from the claims about the strength of evidence that are typically made by Fatima-believers. In addition, we have studies that show the powers of suggestion and conformity among groups, as well as the tendency to see what we want to see when the motivation is strong. And if it's hard to believe that a group of believers might subconsciously invent an experience of something they had turned out expecting to see, then the scientific explanations can serve as likely possibilities for what was witnessed.

To conclude, there is no justifiable reason for considering the Fatima event a miracle. Whatever the attendants saw, or thought they saw, the involvement of the supernatural has not been demonstrated. It falls in dead last for likely explanations too, because no miracle claim has been demonstrated to be in fact miraculous (despite the insistence of believers), and the accummulated data is problematic enough to support natural explanations that would be perceived relatively, like suggestion and after-images, yet it is nowhere near the caliber we should expect from divine revelation. Once more, it leads me to ask: why do divine beings always seem to reveal themselves in such vague, obtuse, and errant ways?

1. Lord, B. & Penny Lord. Miracle of the Sun. Discover-Catholic-Miracles.com. Retrieved July 12, 2011.
2. De Marchi, J. (1952) The True Story of Fatima. 143.
3. Payne, S. (1984) Spanish Catholicism: An Historical Overview. p. 127.
4. Payne, S. Portugal Under the Nineteenth Century Constitutional Monarchy. A History of Spain and Portugal. Vol. 2.
5. Jaki, S. (1999) God and the Sun at Fatima. Real View Books.
6. Asch conformity experiments. Wikipedia. Retrieved July 12, 2011.
7. Milgram experiment. Wikipedia. Retrieved July 12, 2011.
8. Balcetis, E. & David Dunning. (2006) See What You Want to See... Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Retrieved July 12, 2011.
9. Vallee Says Fatima Event Was UFO. Ufoseek.org. Retrieved July 12, 2011.
10. Simons, P. (2005) "Weather Secrets of Miracle at Fatima." The Times.
11. Filer, G. (2000) Massive Coronal Ejection From Sun. National UFO Center. Retrieved July 12, 2011.
12. Meessen, A. (2003) Apparitions and Miracles of the Sun. Science, Religion and Conscience. Retrieved July 13, 2011.
13. Campbell, S. (1989) "The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima." Journal of Meteorology. Vol. 14, No. 142.
14. Nickell, S. (1993) Looking for a Miracle. Prometheus.
15. McClure, K. (1983) The Evidence for Visions of the Virgin Mary. Aquarian Press.