What happened at Fatima, Portugal between May & October 1917? Six Mary appearances?

I have seen descriptions of the Fatima appearances while reading about unidentified flying objects.During one of the sightings, a super wet crowd of thousands were miraculously dried after a UFO broke through the thick rain clowds. The ground went from being very muddy and in like a minute became crusty dry.Why was a crowd there?Because previously private appearances of "Mary" to Lucia Dos Santos, Francisco Marto, and Jacinta Marto involved specific details describing future time and place visitations - yes, they were spoken words from the supernatural entity .So it resulted in the 3 kids talking about the future visit, and the results included crowds forming for the hopes of being witness to the vision that might happen.It wound up being a mass vision.The kids were threatened by local authorities with death by boiling oil if they didn't recant their story. But they held fast.Lucia Dos Santos live till 2005 when the 97 year old died. (Though there is a conspiracy theory around that describes the 97 year old as an imposter and not the "real Sister Lucia" )I wonder if this evidence counts as something abnormal or just a mass hallucination. Or outright fraud.The first thing we can do is be grateful for so many witnesses and the other thing should be gratitude for some witnesses being around for so long. The Catholic Church accepted the appearances as real back in 1930 fwiw. Edited by AdminPhat, : fixed dates

I put Fatima 1917 into google, and every hit was right on topic.GoogleI found this hitThe Lady of Fátima & the Miracle of the Sun | Live Science

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The Lady of Ftima & the Miracle of the Sun

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By Benjamin Radford, Live Science Contributor | May 2, 2013 06:47pm ET

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The story of a famous miracle in Ftima, Portugal, began in May 1917, when three children (ages 7, 9, and 10) claimed to have encountered the Virgin Mary on their way home from tending a flock of sheep. The oldest girl, Lucia, was the only one to speak to her, and Mary told the children that she would reappear to them on the thirteenth day of the next six months. She then vanished.

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The children soon told their parents, and while some in the village didn't believe their tale, others did and told more people. As the weeks and months passed, more and more of the faithful made pilgrimages to Ftima, where the children claimed to receive Mary's visits. Still no one else saw the Virgin Mary; instead, the gathered adults would stand riveted as Lucia took the lead and began to describe her visions.

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It was Mary's final appearance, on Oct. 13, 1917, that became the most famous. In his book "Looking for a Miracle," Joe Nickell states that "an estimated 70,000 people were in attendance at the site, anticipating the Virgin's final visit and with many fully expecting that she would work a great miracle. As before, the figure appeared, and again only to the children. Identifying herself as 'the Lady of the Rosary,' she urged repentance and the building of a chapel at the site. After predicting an end to [World War I] and giving the children certain undisclosed visions, the lady lifted her hands to the sky. Thereupon Lucia exclaimed, 'The sun!' As everyone gazed upward, and saw that a silvery disc had emerged from behind clouds, they experienced what is known [as] a 'sun miracle'."

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Here is the wikipedia articleMiracle of the Sun - WikipediaI haven't found much discussion of the dry clothes & mud issue.But most of the criticism centers around the idea that , "It surely couldn't have been anything real since we all have the same Sun, and nobody anywhere else (outside Fatima) saw the sun move around and shine all silvery".The weight of criticism of a abnormal event seems to be that "the sun just doesn't do that".I think it is much better to see this as a UFO type of event, and a darn credible one at that.I say credible because the UFO issues back in this time involved cigar shaped zeppelin type of craft, and not silvery, shining discs.Here was my description of descriptions I heard:

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During one of the sightings, a super wet crowd of thousands were miraculously dried after a UFO broke through the thick rain clowds. The ground went from being very muddy and in like a minute became crusty dry.

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Jar said this:

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I'm sorry but once something that silly gets introduced into a discussion all that's left to do is laugh.

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Nice to see that the spirit of free and open inquiry is alive and well here at EvC.Here are some pastes from the Wikipedia link.

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Miracle of the Sun
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The Miracle of the Sun (Portuguese: O Milagre do Sol) was an event which occurred on 13 October 1917, attended by a large crowd who had gathered near Ftima, Portugal in response to a prophecy made by three shepherd children that the Virgin Mary, referred to as Our Lady of Fatima, would appear and perform miracles on that date. Newspapers published testimony from reporters and other people who claimed to have witnessed extraordinary solar activity, such as seeing the sun "dance" or zig-zag in the sky, careen towards the earth, or emit multicolored light and radiant colors. According to these reports, the event lasted approximately ten minutes.

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The event was officially accepted as a miracle by the Catholic Church on 13 October 1930. On 13 October 1951, the papal legate, Cardinal Tedeschini, told the million people gathered at Ftima that on 30 October, 31 October, 1 November, and 8 November 1950, Pope Pius XII himself witnessed the miracle of the sun from the Vatican gardens.[1][2]

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There has been much analysis of the event from critical sociological and scientific perspectives. According to critics, the eyewitness testimony was actually a collection of inconsistent and contradictory accounts. Proposed alternate explanations include witnesses being deceived by their senses due to prolonged staring at the sun and then seeing what they had come to the site expecting to see - something unusual.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]

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Then

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Believers' explanation

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Religion, science and history

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Research director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at Oxford University, Fr Andrew Pinsent, states that "a scientific perspective does not rule out miracles, and the event at Fatima is, in the view of many, particularly credible." He states that a usual prejudice involves a lack of understanding of the scope of scientific laws, which merely describe how natural systems behave isolated from free agents. Concluding that the event is "a public miracle of the most extraordinary kind and credibility", he sees the year of the event, as connected to significant historical milestones that call for Fatima's message of repentance: Protestantism in 1517, Freemasonry in 1717 and Atheistic Communism in 1917.[33]

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That was Oxford, but there is a lot of Wikipedia text on critical views of the event.I feel that it is foolish to laugh at an event that had so many witnesses, and also keeping in mind that it was really a modern era documented phenomenon. Full of interviews of witnesses, media reports, university attention, skeptical investigations and the like.There is an investigation.All agree that the children told people that October 13 would be a special date, and long before the actual day.There is an ongoing investigation.And the issue hasn't been settled.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

Then Phat said that "supernatural (or UFO) experiences are limited to speculation "The child later known as "Sister Lucia " lived till 2005 . (If you accept the imposter theory, then she still lived at least 40 years after 1917 I think )She was the devout Christian medium that heard and saw the "Mary" entity.She alone talked to "Mary "We have the witness of one.The Mary entity told her that October 13,1917 would be a date that she would appear again to Lucia and it would be accompanied with a miracle that all would witness.70,000 people showed up.Little Lucia couldn't have planned on some optical trick brought about by eyes staring too long at the sun, could she?The spontaneous nature of the events of that day are very hard to deny. Agreed? Do we all agree?People might think that humans can see what they want to see, but there is a difference between suddenly and temporarily seeing something unexpected verses long held artifacts being studied for long periods of time by staring eyes.Little Lucia was talking to Mary for hours, then on her own (without Mary mentioning the sun ) said, "the sun", in a moment of noticing a shinning disc move around below the sun. Witnesses said it moved all around for about a minute or so. Then it stopped.The brief fleeting moment became known as "The Miracle of the Sun ".Lucia planned that?Really?

Faith.So you don't question that something abnormal happened on October 13 in Fatima?I feel like I have to clarify the UFO miracle from the solar miracle theory.I feel that the UFO was misidentified as the sun.This might not be the best illustration, but I will use this unrelated May 4 2017 New York Post article to try to make my point. It is about the Battle of Coral Sea in World War II, and the journalist is Ruth Brown.

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The Japanese planes roared in like summer thunderstorms, raining brief but brutal bullets and bombs into the sticky South Pacific air and onto the US and Australian warships below.

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The dive bombers looked as if they were coming "right out of the sun" says Roger Spooner, who was just a 19-year-old farm boy from Georgia...

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Now, the optical perspective among the folks at Fatima seems to indicate that a very bright circular object took a overwhelmingly dominate position in the respective witnesses field of vision. The object appears to have started (intentionally?) its attention-getting phase by superimposing itself over the (much dimmer ) sun, which itself was only previously seen behind cloud cover. The UFO was so bright that the sun couldn't be seen at all, and that was apparently still true even after the misidentified "solar" object started to move around away from the superimposed eclipse position of the actual sun. The big, bright UFO was simply all that the witnesses could see, and they thought that it was indeed the sun.The fact that little Lucia called attention to "The Sun " just as the object started its decent - as it revealed itself - only guaranteed the confusion of the UFO with the sun would be made right from the start, when it might have been possible to distinguish the two totally separate objects before the optics would have totally prevented such a distinction.Hence the name of the October 13 ,1917 event was described as The Miracle of The Sun, and the idea is that the Sun actually did all the moving around that day.My hypothesis (admittedly not original, but still a little heard minority view among those who feel the event was truly abnormal and not some imagined and confused non-event ) assumes that UFOs have genuine manifestations ( surely a strike against the theory ),but it has the advantage of taking the witnesses' statements as far as their testimony truly deserves. It also includes the advantage of taking the three little kids as honest as well.I figured out that I might as well just let the best possible hypothesis be the best (for now ) conclusion that we should cautiously take.

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The true Fatima account has nothing whatsoever to do with Little Green Men flying around in UFOs

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The leading UFO scientific journal (over 50 years old now ) , Flying Saucer Review, has long considered the evidence to indicate support for the innerdimensional hypothesis. They could possibly be indigenous to earth.The extra terrestrial biological entity ( EBE) hypothesis assumes that the UFO crafts are probably technology of beings that live in our space dimension but outside the earth.Even supporters of the extraterrestrial hypothesis consider the "green man " to be complete fiction and actually see it as a smear tactic brought by government agents ( disinformation , which average people fall for, typically skeptical folk who think UFO researchers believe in such "little green men").No UFO researchers have ever seen evidence of little green men and never said so.Now the hue or shade issue :There is a certain type of entity that has been reported from every corner of the world (at least after the middle 20th century ) and that creature made it into the Stephen Spielberg movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.They were presented as "good guys" in the movie, but Hynek and Vallee, who Spielberg consulted as researchers, didn't like seeing these shady beings presented as saviors.I will leave it to you to tell me the hue of these entities.Consider it a homework assignment.

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no one had even heard of UFOs in 1917!

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The fact that almost nobody heard of flying disc type UFOs in 1917 is what makes the description of "The Sun" such powerful evidence that people weren't seeing something that they were conditioned to see. This wasn't part of any UFO flap and wasn't something someone read about in a novel. No radio or movies were around back then either.I then was quoted :

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The kids were threatened... with death by boiling oil if they didn't recant their story

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Your response was a single word : "nonsense"That causes me to assume that you are saying that you are very well read on this topic.You must have done alot of research if you can instantly dismiss one of the details just like you did.Please tell me about the details of the half year of interviews from May 13 till October 13 , and then the interrogation after.

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none of the apparitions accepted by the Catholic Church contain UFOlogy in any way, shape or form

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But there is the Miracle of the Sun.Is that an apparition or the Sun?Was it an optical image of Mary?Or.Was it the actual Sun?OrWas it a flying shinning disc? Say from a dimension other than our own, perhaps? Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.