In this post I will primarily recount a supernatural incident known as the apparitions of “Our Lady of Fátima” and detail a conspiracy theory surrounding the handling of information regarding the primary events. The term “Our Lady of Fátima” refers to the biblical person Mary, the mother of God, as she was claimed to have appeared in Fátima, Portugal, and how this event is commonly venerated or at least known of by many Catholics today. I also wish to briefly elaborate on another report of a much lesser known event occurring in Akita, Japan, and tie it into the theory in this post.Whether or not you find the claims of these following occurrences convincing, I think that they are interesting unexplained phenomenon cases nonetheless, all the more so because of how many witnesses were present.
Account of three children
Fátima, Portugal, 1916. Three shepherd children, Lúcia dos Santos (aged 9) and her cousins Francisco (aged 8) and Jacinta Marto (aged 6) experience three separate instances of what they described to be an "angel" appear to them. It's my understanding that they did not report these experiences until later in the timeline of events. Then in 1917, while tending to sheep, the children experience the first of seven apparitions they would report of a girl who appeared "more brilliant than the sun." Through these apparitions the children claimed that this vision who identified itself as Mary, the mother of God, instructed them, among other things, to pray every day for the end of the ongoing world war, and to bring peace to the world. Strangely, the apparition was reported by Lúcia to have given a prediction of her cousins' early deaths, which turned out to later be accurate. The apparition also showed the children a vision of hell, and divulged to the children three secrets which were not to be revealed until a later date.
Lúcia had suggested to her cousins that they keep these experience private. However, Jacinta eventually told her family about seeing these apparition. Jacinta's mother did not believe her though, and thinking it a funny story, told others in the community in a lighthearted manner. From here the rest of the village knew about these children's claims of seeing apparitions of who they thought was Mary. Over the next few months, thousands of people were intrigued and brought to the area due to reports of miracles and visions, despite many staying critical of the children's claims.
Eventually, feeling that this commotion was politically motivated, the provincial administrator intervened and had the children jailed, interrogated, and threatened to divulge the contents of the supposed secrets. Lúcia's mother at this point had hoped that this move would intimidate the children enough to admit that they had fabricated their claims. However, the children never admitted that they had lied about any of it. And they stayed quiet about what the secrets they claimed to have received were, but offered to ask the apparition permission to divulge the secrets to them.
The Miracle of the Sun
The next time the children saw the apparition of the girl, she told them that there would be a miracle performed the following month on October 13 "so that everyone may believe." Multiple newspapers decided to report on this claim, and it ended up bringing a crowd of an estimated 70,000 people to Fátima for the day this supposed miracle was going to take place. This crowd was made up of journalists, photographers, skeptics, and those simply curious, who all traveled to this location and waited in the rain for a chance to experience a miracle, or perhaps to put to rest these silly rumors.Whatever occurred on that day became known as the Miracle of the Sun. There are multiple differing accounts of what exactly that crowd of tens of thousands gathered there experienced. But I believe this event witnessed by so many is what elevated these children's mystical accounts into the public's eye and gave their claims some credibility to many.
Many of the witness reports of this event describe some kind of miraculous solar phenomenon. Although it's my understanding that not every person there claimed to have the exact same experience, many of the accounts seem to align with each other. The most common being that the sun was seen as a spinning disk, casting multicolored lights across the landscape, moving through the sky in zigzag patterns, and finally returning back to it's normal position. People also reported that their previously wet clothes due to waiting in the rain had become suddenly and completely dry.In addition to these accounts, the three children reported seeing an entire panorama of visions during the event, including one of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph blessing the crowd.
The Three Secrets of Fátima
Lúcia was the only one of the three children that survived into adulthood, and she had not yet revealed the three secrets that she claimed the apparitions gave them until 24 years later in 1941. It was at the request of the Bishop of Leiria-Fátima to assist in the publication of a book on Jacinta that Lúcia revealed the first two of the secrets in a document. The first and second secret had to do with a vision of hell that her and her cousins were given, devotion to prayer, and the devotion to the conversion of Russia at the time. However, when later asked to also reveal the final secret, Lúcia was hesitant, stating that she was "not yet convinced that God had clearly authorized her to act."
After having an internal struggle as to if she should reveal the secret or not even as she fell seriously ill with influenza and pleurisy, she eventually received a direct order from the Bishop that she must record the secret. So she wrote down and sealed the third secret in an envelope that she asked not to be opened until 1960, because she believed it wasn't yet time for it to be revealed. However, she claimed that she was only able to overcome her struggle on this matter after receiving another apparition of Mary, who instructed her to "write that which they command you, but not that which is given to you to understand of its meaning."
There were a few inquiries made during this time as to what this unpublished third secret really said. One I know of being an interview with Cardinal Ratzinger that was published in 1984. Upon being questioned on his knowledge of the third secret and the reasoning for it not having been revealed yet, the Cardinal stated that the secret involved the importance of Christian eschatology and "dangers threatening the faith and the life of the Christian and therefore of the world," and further commented that "if it is not made public - at least for the time being - it is in order to prevent religious prophecy from being mistaken for a quest for the sensational."
And in another interview a few years prior in 1980, Pope John Paul II spoke about the third secret saying:
"Because of the seriousness of its contents, in order not to encourage the world wide power of Communism to carry out certain coups, my predecessors in the chair of Peter have diplomatically preferred to withhold its publication. On the other hand, it should be sufficient for all Christians to know this much: if there is a message in which it is said that the oceans will flood entire sections of the earth; that, from one moment to the other, millions of people will perish... there is no longer any point in really wanting to publish this secret message. Many want to know merely out of curiosity, or because of their taste for sensationalism, but they forget that 'to know' implies for them a responsibility. It is dangerous to want to satisfy one's curiosity only, if one is convinced that we can do nothing against a catastrophe that has been predicted."
The contents of the envelope had stayed a secret until finally on the 13th of May 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano announced that the third secret would at last be made known to the public. The official meaning of the third secret was revealed to have been primarily about the 20th century persecution of Christians that culminated in the already past assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.
Controversy and doubt
Following it's publication, many critics expressed suspicions that the document that the Vatican released was not indeed the real Third Secret recorded by Lúcia, or at least not the full document. These doubts are due to many reasons, including claims that the released document doesn't seem to fully add up given the context of it's secrecy, severity, and the few statements made about it's contents before its publication. Another reason seems to be the form that the document was released in. Sources prior to it's official publication (including Lúcia herself) stated that the original document was in the form of a signed, one-page letter. The official document released by the Vatican was instead four sheets of paper, not written in the form of a letter.
Strange broadcast over national TV, Japan
In 1973, TV Tokyo Channel 12 broadcasts a news segment of a seemingly unexplainable occurrence within a Christian church in Akita, Japan. What the station shows on this segment is a statue of Mary with what looks to be tears flowing down from its eyes. Multiple witnesses observe this strange event happening over 100 times, including the Bishop of Niigata, John Shojiro Ito, who had the liquid tested at a leading Japanese university, which proved the sample to be human tears.
Happening simultaneously to these events, a nun named Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa began experiencing and witnessing many strange things. This whole account of events is also quite interesting and has further supposed miracles and medical cures attributed to it. However, most relevant to this story are specifically the ominous messages that Sister Agnes claimed to receive from Mary, the mother of God at this time, one of which was reported to be this:
"As I told you, if men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never have seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead."
The messages that were claimed to have been received in Akita have been compared by some to the messages the three children reported in Fátima. I think the most striking piece of evidence linking these two occurrences together, as well as casting doubt upon the official Third Secret of Fátima document is a 1998 interview with the former Philippine ambassador to the Vatican, Howard Dee, which was published in the magazine Inside the Vatican. In this interview, Dee claimed that Cardinal Ratzinger had confirmed to him that the messages of Akita and the third secret of Fátima are "essentially the same." This interview of course took place a couple years before the official release of the secret document, so the fact that the essence of both are so different seems suspicious to some, and is why this is believed to be a good piece of evidence for the theory of the official Third Secret document being either incomplete or even completely fabricated in order to not publicize a doomsday prophesy, or for some other reason.
Extra notes
ourladyisgod.com (the funniest, weirdest, and creepiest anti-catholic schizo rabbit-hole I’ve come across) claims to have the real third secret that they forced the Illuminati to release to them, I guess. lol
There are (of course) theories revolving around the Miracle of the Sun specifically being caused by a UFO or otherwise aliens in some manner. It’s an interesting event to attribute to aliens, but the theories mostly just aren't very good I think.
It seems that the actual original reported appearance of the girl of the Fátima apparitions is almost completely unknown to even people familiar with the story, even though it was recorded. The earliest reported descriptions of this apparition by the three children state that she looked like a child of 12 to 15 years old dressed in (among other differences to her common depiction) a skirt to her knees or a little below. The image of this apparition that is venerated today is not based on these original descriptions, but instead inspired by an existing image of "Our Lady of Lapa." The length of the girl's skirt seems to be the primary reason that this more accurate description of the children's visions had been forgone when creating the depictions of her, as it would have been seen as scandalous at the time. The original description of this girl was described as not resembling any other current images of Mary.
