Something About Mary
There is one place where religion meets ufology head-on and that is at Fatima in Portugal. The famous series of apparitions which occurred there in 1917, officially pronounced to be of the Blessed Virgin Mary by the Catholic Church, is both the greatest Marian miracle and the largest UFO sighting of all time.
Our Lady of Fatima, to which Pope John Paul II attributed his survival of an assassination attempt, appeared to three young shepherds, Lucia, Francis, and Jacinta, in rural Portugal beginning on May 13, 1917. In due course, the Roman Catholic hierarchy authenticated these apparitions as being of the Mother of God, and the site has become a world-famous place of pilgrimage, complete with a huge complex of buildings and a host of miraculous healings.
The first apparition was accompanied by a number of weird signs, including a sudden white flash in the heavens that announced her first appearance. The entity appeared to the startled children standing amid a glowing cloud over a small bush. She was later described as a veiled young woman in a golden-edged white gown, decorated with golden stars on the breast and hem.
Yet her true appearance, according to some Portuguese ufologists, was stranger, less human, and more like a Gray alien. They claimed there was considerable pressure from the Church to make the whole event seem much more like a traditional vision by suppressing everything that did not fit the mold. Their research indicated there were many other strange sightings around the time, and investigators discovered that there had even apparently been attempts by the entity to recruit other children previous to Lucia and her friends.
More visions followed on a monthly basis and others quickly became interested, including suspicious and hostile secular authorities. Only the children ever saw the Lady. However, during later apparitions, the sun dimmed noticeably, the branches of the tree bent as if supporting a weight, and a humming sound was heard by observers nearby. “A loud report like the explosion of a rocket was heard at the end of the apparition, and at the same time a beautiful white cloud was seen to rise from the tree and move towards the east.” (Emphasis added.)
The children were given other visions on these occasions and others, all thoroughly Catholic after being interpreted by the local clergy — the Sacred Heart, the baby Jesus, and so on. The kids were shown even Hell itself and in July, the Lady predicted the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second — the first two of the famous “secrets of Fatima.” She said that the next war would be heralded by “a night illumined by an unknown light” which Sister Lucia later thought referred to an extraordinary transcontinental display of the aurora borealis across Europe on the night of January 25-26, 1938.
Interestingly enough, a few months before the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, the Lady promised that if her requests for prayer and sacrifice were heard “Russia would be converted and there would be peace.”
Here is the account of the next encounter according to the great French UFO expert, Jacques Vallee:
The fifth meeting was September 13. There were a number of witnesses, and they could see the “sphere of fire” used by the entity to come to the place of the meeting. According to the very words of the Reverend General Vicar of Leiria, who was one of the witnesses the lady came in an “aeroplane of light,” an “immense globe, flying westwards, at moderate speed. It irradiated a very bright light.” Some other witnesses saw a white being coming out of the globe, which several minutes later took off, disappearing in the direction of the sun.
Some said a shower of strange flakes, like snow or rose petals, which vanished before they reached the ground or could be caught, followed this. But the best was yet to come.
The Lady had promised a grand miracle in October and she certainly delivered a spectacular show. Indeed, at the final encounter exactly one month later, a crowd of some 70,000 people, including both clergy and scientists, witnessed the famous “miracle of the sun.”
One of the latter, a Prof. Almeida Garrett of Coimbra University, later wrote:
It was raining hard, and the rain trickled down everyone’s clothes. Suddenly, the sun shone through the dense cloud which covered it: everybody looked in its direction. It looked like a disc, of a very definite contour. It was not dazzling. I don’t think that it could be compared to a dull silver disc, as someone said later in Fatima. No. It rather possessed a clear, changing, brightness, which one could compare to a pearl. This is not poetry. My eyes have seen it. This clear-shaped disc suddenly began turning. It rotated with increasing speed. Suddenly, the crowd began crying with anguish. The sun, revolving all the time, began falling towards the earth, reddish and bloody, threatening to crush everybody under its fiery weight. (Emphasis by Vallee.)
The disk, described as spinning and shooting off colors “like a Catherine’s wheel” firework, plunged at the Earth three times, according to some witnesses, before retreating back behind the clouds. Newspaper photos of the crowd showed the mass of people cringing in fear and astonishment from something seemingly sunwards above them. The radiation apparently dried many people’s clothes. But despite appearing much like the sun, the disk was something else entirely.
Yet the spectacle, seen by some observers miles away, served to completely validate the children’s claims. The Lady’s wishes for specific prayers and devotions to her that she expressed to them were widely broadcast — and obeyed by everybody but the pope.
Lucia, the sole one of the visionaries to survive into adulthood, became a cloistered nun and received many private revelations. During World War II, she wrote down the three secret messages from the Virgin and sent them to her local bishop, who passed them on to the pope to be revealed in 1960. It was not – nor was this the only thing the pope failed to do as told.
The mysterious Third Secret of Fatima, however, supposedly contained such awful revelations of the End Times that it was suppressed, making the popes who read it turn white. It has become the subject of much fierce speculation by believers. What was finally released bore little resemblance to what was known of the original. For instance, that text contained a description of a man in white leading a procession over dead religious, and finally being shot and pierced with arrows – which John Paul II thought referred to his attempted assassination which happened on the very anniversary of one of Mary’s appearances. It was not present in the released text.
Whether coincidence or not, the whole question of the Lady’s instructions and prophecies in this context is highly peculiar. If these were purely spiritual events, why did they look and sound so much like UFOs? If the entity were a masquerading alien trying to communicate to some primitives in the guise of a god, why would it care about prayer, self-sacrifice and Russia’s religion?
Why was the secret not released? Most speculation is that it predicted dire apocalyptic events including the fall of the Church that the authorities could not prevent and so decided on the mercy of silence.
Could that just be a cover for some other agenda? Those Protestant Evangelicals who think saucers are demonic are confident that it was not Jesus’ mom that the kids saw. Yet none have really been able to come up with a way in which Fatima served Satan’s agenda other than promoting Marian devotions, which is hardly sinister.
Or was it truly providential? Could all those prayers for Russia have somehow prevented planetary nuclear immolation? Looking back on the Cold War and how close East and West came to mutually assured destruction at times, one can only wonder if events at Fatima were carefully arranged to miraculously avert it. But why did the popes not do what they were told when they were supposed to?
It should also be noted that the brutal Spanish conquistadors came as Catholics and fought under the Virgin’s banner. A decade after their triumph over the Aztecs, putting down that gory civilization based on human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism, she made a dramatic appearance to Juan Diego, an Indian and now a saint, as the Virgin of Guadalupe, who bears a strong resemblance to an Aztec goddess.
Her veneration quickly supplanted the now-discredited native religion and became the most widely-popular devotion in the New World. It is chiefly because of her lasting influence that Mexico is still known as such a Catholic country. Mary, it seems, may have an even more complex agenda than world peace. The supernatural and the supertechnological may be intimately related in ways that defy understanding. Neither religion nor history nor science, together or separately, seems anywhere nearly enough to untangle the mysteries of the signs in the skies.
About the only things that we can be sure of about First Contact is that it will change everything and that the powers-that-be will desperately try to prevent public panic and retain control of the narrative. They will likely fail. But in so doing, the world could willingly fall victim to any number of mistakes or misconceptions, for the lies will not cease as long as they serve anyone’s agenda, but their conflict with only increase confusion.
So our doom may be inevitable as the conquest of the New World. The mysterious facts of divine and/or extraterrestrial visitation exceed our spirituality as much as they do our technology. If the Landing finally takes place and Jesus steps off the mothership, what then? Could it really be Him?
What if He denies He’s the Son of God like the Muslims believe He will do when He returns? Or simply looks far different than what we were told?
[Note: Otherwise unattributed quotes in this section are from Our Lady of Fatima: Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, published by the Benedictine Convent of Perpetual Adoration, Clyde, Missouri, 1950. Also, Jacques Vallee, UFO’s in Space: Anatomy of a Phenomenon, Ballantine Books, New York, 1965.]