Not all regard this book as a good source but it gives food for thought.
The Virgin Mary allegedly appeared in the middle of six consecutive months to three young children, Jacinta born 1910, Lucia born 1907 and Francisco born 1908 in Fatima Portugal in 1917. The Virgin supposedly made people have a vision of the sun spinning at the end of the appearances.
The book we are referring to is Celestial Secrets. I absolutely loved this work. I couldn’t put it down. It argues that in relation to the apparitions of Mary to three children at Fatima in 1917 that the entity was not Mary at all but the Church made sure people would think it was. It explores evidence from the original accounts that the phenomena had too much in common with reports of visions of alien messengers and spaceships to be genuinely Catholic.
In the book we read that the Church took charge of the evidence and testimony in relation to the alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima and controlled Lucia the only surviving main witness to make sure anything that was said was what the Church wanted to be said (Foreword ii).
The book is based on the original records which the Church kept locked up for six decades (Introduction iv). Two authors of the book Ferndades and d’Armada spent 25 years researching diary entries and letters and other sources of information at the time of the apparitions to get at the true story.
Mary appeared at Fatima to the three children Lucia and Jacinta and Francisco in 1917 starting on May 13th.
The fact that there had been several apparitions reported of Mary over the centuries in the region of Fatima (page 38) lends support to the thought that the three witnesses of Fatima might have been influenced by them to wrongly interpret what they saw.
Jacinta told the parish priest in July 1917 during the apparitions, that the lady she saw wore a knee-length skirt and that when the lady left she raised her toes up with the heels pointing down and the body already disappeared. This is so bizarre that it beggars belief. It is no wonder Celestial Secrets surmises that the experiences are identical with the contactees who claimed to have encounters with aliens. The entity was not the Virgin Mary who wouldn’t behave so strangely.
Francisco said that the Virgin didn’t move her lips as she spoke and didn’t move as if she were some kind of doll (page 96). Lucia had a light within that made her understand the Virgin (page 97). With such a bizarre method of communication, it would be easy for Lucia to imagine communications from her Catholic conscious. Did she think the vision was putting thoughts in her head?
The vision made buzzing noises (page 249).
Canon Formagao had severe problems with the Virgin wearing a knee length skirt which even prostitutes of the time didn’t have the audacity to wear (page 151-153). This made him suspect that the vision was of the Devil but he deduced that it must have been really Mary for apparitions are authenticated not by the testimony of witnesses but by their popularity among pious people.
The earliest evidence about the 1917 apparitions is that the entity interpreted as Mary never said she was of the family of God or Christ or mentioned Jesus or God. Lucia and Jacinta says she wanted a chapel built but they were not sure if she said she was the lady of the rosary or if she meant she wanted a chapel for the lady of the rosary. Though lady of the rosary is a title of the Virgin Mary an entity carrying a rosary might call itself the lady of the rosary in another way: just the lady with the rosary.
Pro-Fatima booklet, What Happened at Fatima? by Martindale tells us that the vision said to Lucia that she must say the rosary every day in honour of Our Lady of the Rosary in order to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war “for only she can help you” (page 32). The booklet expresses puzzlement at the entity talking as if she is not Our Lady or Mary. Also, the “for only she can help you” implies that God won’t help unless Mary is invoked. This contradicts the Bible doctrine that Jesus Christ intercedes for sinners. This being was not the Mary of Christianity. We must not forget that Roman Catholicism is not a true form of Christianity.
It is certainly doubtful that the vision was really of Mary.
APPENDIX: FROM RECOMMENDED BOOK
CELESTIAL SECRETS
THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE FATIMA INCIDENT
Anomalist Books, San Antonio, New York, 2007
THE MIRACLE OF THE SUN
In October 1917, during the vision’s last visit to Fatima she allegedly made the sun spin and exude different colours before a crowd of 70,000 people.
If a crowd go to a vision site to see a promised miracle, where else is it going to be in the sky? The sun was out so what else would it be but a sun miracle? The religious claim that the crowd did not expect the sun miracle is itself the real miracle for a more ridiculous claim than this cannot be imagined. It is good practice to dismiss the credibility of miracles where the person was worked up to see it.
The complaint I would have to make about the book is the assumption that the miracle of the sun at Fatima was seen by 70,000 people (Foreword i). The fact is that only some of the crowd saw it and no two people saw the same thing and no proper investigation was conducted. Witnesses were not cross-examined. Very few reports from witnesses exist. Some reports about a silver disk where the sun was would suggest that a spaceship was appearing. Some said the sun seemed to be falling down and panicked so if they had been many in number there would have been a stampede. If it was a spaceship why didn’t everybody see it? But alien encounters and even alien abduction stories are full of similar problems. Not everybody is able to see the spaceships. The silver disc couldn’t possibly have any religious significance. It is a sign from aliens if anything.
Lucia had shouted at the crowd to look at the sun and later she said she did not remember doing so and there is evidence documented in the book of amnesia. Something was playing games with her brain. How can we trust her visions when we cannot trust her memory? The amnesia sounds like that reported in most apparitions involving aliens.
Curiously the book omits the fact that UFOs were seen in the month preceding the solar miracle. Two priests and a child saw a glowing globe slowly moving from east to west and it vanished in a flash of light. Others who saw it said it came down to the apparition site and said it looked like an airplane. During the same occasion, the lady made petals seem to fall – this is a mark of many UFO events (page 76, 77, The Evidence for Visions of the Virgin Mary, Kevin McClure, Aquarian Books, Northamptonshire, 1983). This can be taken as confirmation that the children were not seeing Mary but having experiences akin to what people having visions of spaceships and aliens experience. McClure says that Fatima does not match close encounters of the second kind in the sense that such encounters do not involve people changing colour which was reported by some who looked at the sun during the Miracle. These people still looked at something bright which could have tricked their eyes and besides most of those seeing the miracle did not speak of this colour changing.
Afonso Lopes Vieira and a group many kilometres away from Fatima saw something like a revolving globe of snow over Fatima that day (page 76, The Book of Miracles, Headline, London, 1996). Sounds like our spaceship again.
The vision of Gilberto Santos at Fatima in 1917 is interesting. He saw the crowd of pilgrims swathed in the darkness of night and their faces turned into sallow shapes little more than skulls and their faces were expressions of extreme torment (Celestial Secrets, page 229-230). Is this a sign from Heaven that the apparition was going to lead the people to Hell? Evangelical believers would say that Mary worshippers are in danger of Hell until they convert to faith in Christ alone. Santos did not take the vision to mean that but we can. Some would say that his not doing so indicates the authenticity of his vision. His is more convincing than that of the three children.
It is interesting that on the anniversary of the first Mary vision, May 13th, 1925 that the sun was seen at Alcacer do Sal behaving suspiciously like spaceships. Luis Antonio Carraca and his family and fifteen others saw the sun change shape and then glowing objects started to appear around it and started to turn into multicoloured lights that framed the sun (page 111, 112).
At Fatima in 1957, Father Anibal Coelho, the Postmaster General and others saw a UFO at Fatima. They could not make out the shape of the object they saw in the sky for it moved about at great speed. It did not make any sound nor did it emit light. The witnesses are certain that it was not an airplane or a shooting star.