The 1917 Fatima Marian apparitions were a series of reported Marian apparitions — appearances of the Virgin Mary1 — near the pasture of Cova da Iria2, outside the small Portuguese town of Fatima3, beginning on 1917-05-134 and recurring, by the children’s own account, six times in total.5 According to American Cosmic, the children were nine-year-old Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Jacinta Marto and Francisco Marto, who had reported seeing an angel that spring, months before the first apparition of the lady.6 Jacques Vallée instead dates the start of the sequence some two years earlier, to a series of angelic apparitions to Lucia dos Santos that he characterises as a classical sequence of UFO sightings — the 1915-1916 Lucia dos Santos angelic apparitions, Fatima.7
Each apparition drew a larger crowd than the last, growing according to one account from three witnesses at the first encounter to seventy thousand at the last: 3, 50, 4,500, 18,000, 30,000, and 70,000.8 At the second apparition, on 1917-06-13, some fifty people watched the children kneel and appear transfigured, as though transported into another world;9 Lucia dos Santos, then ten years old, addressed an unseen entity whose replies were not audible to the others present,10 and at the close of the exchange the crowd heard an explosion and saw a small cloud rise near a tree that became the focal point of later manifestations.11 By the third apparition, on 1917-07-13, the crowd had grown to some four and a half thousand,12 who reported a buzzing or humming sound, a dimming of the sun’s heat and glow, a small whitish cloud about the tree, and a loud noise as the apparition departed.13 On this occasion the children said they were shown a vision of hell that terrified them,14 and received a prophecy stating that the ongoing war would end, but that a worse war would begin during the reign of Pope Pius XI if people did not stop offending God, with an unknown light seen at night to be a sign of coming punishment;15 the message also asked for the consecration of Russia, warning that its errors would spread throughout the world unless heeded.16
On 1917-08-13 an estimated eighteen thousand people gathered at Cova da Iria, but the children themselves were absent, having been detained by a local official who sought to end the phenomenon.17 In their absence the crowd heard a clap of thunder and a bright flash, and watched a small whitish cloud form around the tree, hover, and dissipate,18 while the sky’s clouds turned crimson, then pink, yellow, and blue.19 Witnesses also reported ‘falling flowers’ — the ‘angel hair’ phenomenon also described after UFO sightings and sometimes attributed to an ionisation effect.20 Manuel Pedro Marto testified under oath to the canonical enquiry that he had seen a luminous globe spinning through the clouds that day.21 After their release, on 1917-08-19 the children were tending sheep near Aljustrel when the temperature suddenly dropped and the sun turned yellowish as rainbow colours spread across the countryside, visible to nearby adults;22 a glowing light then settled near a tree, and an entity clothed in white and gold asked the children to make sacrifices for sinners before departing eastward after ten minutes with a roaring sound.23 At the fifth apparition, on 1917-09-13, the crowd of thirty thousand included two priests wearing the Roman collar who had come specifically to establish the falsity of the reported miracles.24 At noon the sun dimmed without cloud cover and a globe of light was seen by all advancing down the valley before coming to rest on the tree,25 while a white cloud formed and shiny white ‘petals’ fell from the empty sky, appearing to shrink as they approached observers and melting away when caught.26 The promise of an October miracle was repeated to Lucia dos Santos before the globe rose and disappeared into the sun.27 According to The Invisible College, one of the two skeptical priests present, asked afterwards what he thought the globe was, said it was a heavenly vehicle that had carried the Mother of God from her throne above to this ‘forbidden wasteland’;28 Vallée has noted that the idea of the earth as a ‘forbidden wasteland’ recurs among those exposed to phenomena of this kind.29
The final apparition, on 1917-10-13 — remembered as the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima — drew a crowd of seventy thousand.30 It was preceded by a flash of light at noon and a sweet, strange fragrance; the crowd, unable to see the lady themselves, observed a dramatic change come over the children’s faces.31 The rain that had been falling then stopped and the clouds parted to reveal the sun as a disc of brilliant silver, rotating rapidly on its own axis and casting off successive beams of red, violet, blue and yellow light.32 Reports describe it as a flat disc rather than a sphere, which stopped spinning and plunged toward the earth in a zigzag, falling-leaf motion before reversing course and disappearing back into the sun.33 Afterwards the crowd found their clothes, the trees, and the ground — soaked minutes before — perfectly dry.34 José Maria de Almeida Garrett recorded a thin, bluish column of smoke rising a few seconds above the spot where the children stood before it evaporated;35 he watched the crowd turn from the apparition site to the sun, which appeared as a sharp-edged disc that could be stared at without discomfort,36 spinning in what he called a ‘mad whirl’ rather than remaining still or twinkling,37 while everything he looked at took on an amethyst colour38 before the sun turned blood red and seemed to advance threateningly toward the earth, prompting a cry of anguish from the crowd.39 He said he had never, before or since, observed similar atmospheric or solar phenomena.40
Other witnesses described the disc’s edges as sharp and not blinding, although photographs of the crowd show many people shading their eyes, and some observers said the sky darkened enough for the moon and stars to become visible.41 Two witnesses who watched the disc through binoculars reported seeing a ladder and two entities.42 The phenomenon could not be captured directly with the photographic emulsions and shutter speeds available at the time,43 and a widely reproduced photograph later presented by newspapers as depicting the miracle is in fact an unrelated photograph of a solar eclipse.44 The Invisible College also records a number of more distant sightings and individual reactions: Guilhermina Lopes da Silva, sixteen miles away in Leiria and unable to travel to Fatima, is said to have seen a great red flash in the sky at noon;45 Afonso Lopes Vieira, his wife, and his mother-in-law reportedly saw the brilliance from thirty miles away at San Pedro de Muel;46 a twelve-year-old shepherd, Albano Barros, watching from a field near Minde, eight miles away, was said to be so struck by the falling disc of light that he could not afterwards recall what he did next;47 farmer Manuel Francisco went home weeping;48 a schoolboy witness at Alburitel, later interviewed by John Haffert in 1960, is reported to have said the experience led him to become a priest;49 and a lawyer, Mr. Mendes, reportedly told Haffert in the same 1960 interview that the event still affected his interior life and that he felt dominated by it.50 The same source also reports that engineer Mario Godinho travelled to Cova da Iria in August 1917 at his mother’s request, and that she was cured there of a longstanding eye tumour in a manner the attending doctors could not explain.51
The Catholic Church investigated the events for thirteen years; according to The Invisible College’s account of the resulting 1930 ruling, the Church held the solar phenomenon of 13 October 1917 not to be natural, since no astronomical observatory had registered it,52 and considered collective illusion ruled out because the phenomenon had been witnessed by people of all social classes, believers and unbelievers, and journalists of the principal Portuguese newspapers, including observers some miles away.53 The Church went on to approve the apparitions as worthy of belief under the category of private revelation, as distinct from public revelation, which Catholics are obliged to believe,54 and the cult of Our Lady of Fatima subsequently received the open devotion of several popes.55 The figure did not identify herself as the Virgin Mary, saying only that she was ‘from Heaven’, and instructed the children to return every month until October, when she said a public miracle would take place so that everyone might believe;56 a prophetic message delivered during the apparitions was transmitted by the children to the Church.57 One of the lady’s predictions — that Jacinta and Francisco Marto would die before reaching adulthood — proved true.58 Part of the message was kept sealed until 1960, when Pope John XXIII opened the envelope but did not publish its contents.59 According to American Cosmic, Pope John Paul II was doubtless aware that 13 May was also the date of the assassination attempt later made on his life.60 Jesse Mitchells has said that the Holy See confiscated a written prophecy from the children and believes it was more complex than the historical portrayal of a sun or Virgin Mary appearance.61
Writers on unidentified aerial phenomena have long read Fatima through that lens. Vallée has said that the flying disc or globe, falling-leaf trajectory, coloured light effects, thunderclaps, buzzing sounds, strange fragrance, dissolving ‘angel hair’, and accompanying heat wave reported on 13 October 1917 place the Fatima events squarely within the perspective of UFO phenomena,62 and that the technology involved is indistinguishable from that reported in UFO encounters generally.63 He compares the mixture of seriousness and absurdity in the Fatima prophecy to a pattern he notes in contactee accounts, observing that the same pattern recurs at the 1858 Lourdes Marian apparitions, where the entity instructed Bernadette Soubirous to perform seemingly meaningless actions.64 Recurring elements across apparition and UFO-contact cases generally include the arrival of a shining being in a small sphere, spinning aerial discs, humming noises, heat effects, and healing phenomena,65 together with messages that often seem absurd and carry an injunction to secrecy, as with the sealed Fatima prophecy.66 Vallée has said he deliberately sets aside second-order, evaluative interpretations of the Fatima entity as the Virgin Mary, taking the same approach to UFO events generally,67 and includes among the features of his Morphology of Miracles (Vallée framework) a psychic component — reported both by the Fatima children and by St. Teresa of Avila — experienced as a direct, unmediated knowledge of what the beings communicate.68 Diana Walsh Pasulka has written that, in Vallée’s view, the actual events at Fatima remain largely unknown and have been altered through media coverage over time, notwithstanding that the story is familiar to almost all Catholics and to millions of non-Catholics besides.69 The site continues to draw contemporary interest from UFO researchers; Jason Samosa has described visiting Fatima and touring the sites of the 1917 apparitions.70