The day the sun danced at Fatima

On Saturday, October 13, 1917, the weather in Fatima, a small village about a hundred kilometres north of Lisbon, Portugal, was gloomy: the sky was completely overcast and it had been raining continuously since early morning. Despite the unpleasant conditions, at the Cova da Iria, a field four kilometres from the village, a huge crowd of around 70,000 people had gathered, waiting for several hours to see a promised miracle, whose form they had no idea about, announced three months in advance by three young shepherds who claimed to have seen the Blessed Virgin several times in the same place. During the morning, nothing happened: the crowd waited, standing still and soaking wet. Finally, at around 1.30 p.m., when the sun reached its peak that day, everyone present witnessed an exceptional phenomenon: for ten minutes or so, they saw the sun spin on itself, throwing out rays of light of all colours, then zigzagging towards the earth, looking as if it was going to crush it.

This cosmic-size phenomenon, defying all the laws of nature, has been recorded only three times in history before Fatima: the biblical Flood, the sun stopping its course during Joshua's battle against the Amorites at Gabaon, and the full darkness of Good Friday.

Crowds watching the Fatima Sun Dance / © CC0/wikimedia

Reasons to believe:

The place, date and time of the miracle were announced three months in advance, on July 13, 1917, by three children.
On the spot, the extraordinary solar phenomenon was seen by around 70,000 people, at least a third of whom had initially come to mock religion, convinced that nothing would happen. However, after the miracle, it was impossible to find a single person who claimed not to have seen anything.
The photos clearly show that all the witnesses were looking at the same point high in the sky. Strangely enough, they were able to stare at the sun for around ten minutes without being blinded.

This cannot be a collective hallucination or a trick:

It's hard to see how it would be possible to set up a hoax of this magnitude The authorities have never been able to prove that it was a hoax, through the vast system of investigation they had: the police, the courts, the press, etc.
No one, neither the visionaries nor their family members, profited from the occurrence, and we can see no reason why they would have fabricated this story.

This cannot be a collective hallucination:

A simultaneous collective hallucination involving thousands of people has never been observed.
A collective hallucination presupposes a long period of conditionning and inducement to stress, which was not the case in Fatima. The photos show a calm and peaceful crowd, looking in the same direction, and not caught up in hysteria.
A third of the people there, who were unbelievers, were convinced that they would not see anything miraculous, but they saw the sun dance against their will and expectation: so the phenomenon was not the result of self-persuasion.
In any case, no one was expecting anything to do with the sun: they thought the purported miracle would be an event of a different kind (the end of the war, for example) and many, seeing that it was past midday, were convinced that nothing would happen.
After the sun danced, the 70,000 people, soaked to the skin, found that their clothes were completely dry - something that cannot be the product of a hallucination.
Many people, several dozen kilometres away from Fatima, observed the same phenomenon, a fact that undermines both the hypothesis of a collective hallucination and that of a deception.

It couldn't have been a natural meteorological phenomenon:

A meteorological phenomenon can create a display of unusual light, as in a rainbow or northern lights, but it cannot cause the sun itself to move in a disorderly and random fashion for 10 minutes, or produce uniform colour changes across the entire sky.
The Miracle of the Sun was a very local phenomenon, which makes its precise prediction three months in advance highly improbable, if not impossible.

It couldn't have been a physiological phenomenon:

Some people wanted to explain the phenomenon by phosphenism (retinal persistence of an image occurring after the fixation of a point source of light). But there had been no exposure to the sun before the phenomenon, as the sky had remained overcast all morning, and no one was looking up and staring at the sun until the moment it happened.
A phosphenism phenomenon would not have triggered the exact same reactions in thousands of people at exactly the same moment, some of them several kilometres away.

This historically unprecedented miracle of the sun, has never happened before or since. It was not a natural or human caused phenomenon. Everything points to a divine action, as foretold by the apparition of the Blessed Virgin to the three shepherds.

Summary:

The historical context.

Following the assassination of King Dom Carlos I of Portugal in 1908, and the overthrow of his successor Manuel II in 1910, a secularist and intensely anti-clerical republican regime was installed, which immediately undertook a series of anti-Catholic laws and decrees.

On May 13, 1917, three young shepherds, Lucia dos Santos (aged ten), Francisco Marto (aged nine) and his sister Jacinta (aged seven), told their parents that they had seen the Virgin Mary above a small holm oak at the Cova da Iria field, adding that the apparition had promised to return on the 13th day of the next five months. After the apparition on July 13, the three children visionaries announced that the Blessed Virgin would perform a miracle on October 13 at midday, in the same place, and that everyone would be able to see it. They confirmed this after the apparitions of August 19 and September 13.

The day of 13 October

Since the day before, 70,000 people, from all walks of life and social classes, believers and non-believers alike, had been converging on the Cova da Iria. Among them were journalists and a photographer. Many had come, absolutely convinced that nothing would happen, but curious to see how the hoax would end. It was a record attendance in the history of apparitions, and all the more exceptional given that, at the time, means of communication and transportation were far less developed than they are today.

Since early morning, the sky had been overcast and it had rained continuously. Everyone was soaked to the skin. At around 1pm, as nothing had happened, curiosity began to wane and the anti-clericals cried foul. Shortly afterwards, the little visionaries saw the Blessed Virgin. At the end of the apparition, Lucia exclaimed: "She's leaving", then: "Look at the sun!" It was around 1:30 p.m., which corresponds to midday solar time, i.e. the time when the sun peaks (legal time is two hours ahead - Portugal having adopted the time in force in Europe). Based on the unanimous statements of all the witnesses interviewed, here's what happened next:

The sun dances

The rain suddenly stopped. The clouds parted and the sun began to break through the thick cloud cover. The sky cleared almost completely, taking on a pearl-grey hue, the sun standing out against a perfectly clear sky. The remaining clouds seemed to pass behind the sun without obscuring it, giving the impression that it was now as close as the clouds.

The sun took on a colour similar to that of dull silver, but lighter and richer, with nuances similar to a pearl. It looked like a disc cut from mother-of-pearl, with a very clear outline. Anyone could stare at it without being blinded. Its light did not hurt the eyes. It seemed to have faded as if behind a veil. But there was no haze, and the silver disc did not appear veiled or blurred. Despite this, it remained luminous and one could see everything very clearly, unlike during an eclipse.

After a few moments, the sun began to spin at dizzying speed, projecting sprays of lightof all colours in all directions, like a firework wheel. At one point, it stopped for a few moments, then resumed its dance of light in an even more dazzling fashion. It stopped again to start its fantastic fireworks display for a third time, a feat that no fireworks expert could have imagined.

Throughout the whole phenomenon, everything successively took on the same colours as the sun, as if its light were coming through the stained glass windows of an immense cathedral. The firmament, the clouds, the earth, the trees, the rocks, the faces, the clothes of the little seers and the silent crowd appeared successively tinted blue, yellow, red, purple, etc... Everything had the same colour, no matter which way you looked. When the light turned yellow, people looked ugly and ungainly, as if suffering from jaundice. This coloured light spread perfectly and evenly as far as the eye could see, over the holm oaks, the rocks, and over all the surrounding countryside.

Suddenly, while maintaining its rapid rotation, the sun seemed to detach itself from the sky and, like a wheel of fire, zigzagged down towards the earth, emitting a strong heat, as if it were going to fall on the crowd and crush it. A cry of fright came from every throat. Finally, after dancing and shaking for a few moments, the sun returned to its normal place in the sky. The phenomenon had lasted ten minutes.

Inexplicable facts

All the witnesses described the phenomenon in exactly the same way, and it was impossible to find a single person who claimed not to have seen anything. The phenomenon was also seen by many people within a radius of around forty kilometres of Fatima, in particular the inhabitants of the village of Albiturel, about ten kilometres away, as well as the poet Alfonso Lopez Vieira, who was at his residence in São Pedro de Muel, a beach community on Atlantic coastline forty kilometres away. In the days that followed, many newspapers reported the event.

Another surprising fact: right after the sun danced, all the witnesses noticed that their clothes were completely dry!

So far, no natural explanation has been found. What's more, the phenomenon is historically unprecedented. It has never happened before or since.

The mark of divine intervention

So there is no scientific explanation for this dance of the sun. How could three uneducated shepherds have predicted three months in advance the place, date and time of such a phenomenon, which is not only unique in history, but defies the laws of nature? Some have suggested that the phenomenon was due to "spirits" who warned the children. But why 'spirits', and for what purpose? The only real explanation is that a celestial person, endowed with considerable power, told the children in advance and, on the day in question, triggered the phenomenon. This person was the Blessed Virgin, who proved that her apparitions were true by working an extraordinary miracle. No apparition has ever been authenticated in such an extraordinary way. This exceptional miracle is not only the irrefutable proof of divine intervention, but also a sign of the importance of the message delivered by Our Lady: God wants to establish devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary throughout the world.

Yves de Lassus, coordinator of the Cap Fatima website and chairman of Action Familiale et Scolaire

Going further:

Meet the Witnesses of the Miracle of the Sun by John M. Haffert, The American Society for the Defense of Tradition Family and Property (January 1, 2006)

More information:

Fatima in Lucia's Own Words by Sister Lucia, Secretariado dos Pastorinhos (January 1, 2000)
The Miracle and the Message: 100 Years of Fatima by John C. Preiss, Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. (September 26, 2017)