The Messages of Fatima

1/28/2025

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Our Lady of Fatima is a Marian apparition seen in 1917, by three, illiterate shepherd children in Portugal. It wasn't until 1930 that the Catholic church declared the visitation worthy of belief. By then two of the three children had died. Over one hundred years later when compared to other similar, but secular experiences many wonder if the "solar dance" at Fatima was a UFO.

Lúcia Santos (left) with her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto, 1917

In 2017, Pope Francis canonized Jacinta and Francisco Marto, the two witnesses of the Fatima apparitions who died as children of the Spanish influenza. They were nine and ten years old. Many see the children's canonization as a final confirmation by the Church that the events that took place at Fatima was indeed divine in origin. Their older cousin Lucia Dos Santos (1907-2005), died at the age of 97 having spent most of her life in seclusion in a Carmelite convent. She was declared venerable by Pope Francis on June, 2023.

What few people know is that in the century that passed between the Fatima apparitions, and present day the Vatican used an arsenal of methods to "sanitize" the retelling of those events to what they believed the Mother of Christ would entrust to poor, illiterate children and to millions of Catholics by extension.

The Portuguese researchers Joaquim Fernandes and Fina d’Armada wrote a book about the apparitions of Fatima titled Heavenly Lights, and a sequel Celestial Secrets. In 1978, they were the first secular investigators to have access to the official testimonies collected by the Church, which are fiercely guarded to this day inside the Fátima sanctuary. They looked at those events in 1917, without the lens of religious dogma and found that there are many similarities to extraterrestrial close encounters reported by many people throughout the years.

A 1974 pamphlet by Filipe Furtado de Mendonca who described the activities of a Spiritualist group living in Lisbon during those years.

Since those who were alive then are dead now, none can remember a very interesting fact which is that only months before the children saw the "Lady", at least four Portuguese newspapers were writing stories about an important event that was to take place on the very day of the sighting. This date had been specified based on an automatic writing session done by a famous medium of the time named Carlos Calderon on February 7, 1917.

Most of it was produced with mirror writing. This information was found in a 1974 pamphlet by Filipe Furtado de Mendonca who described the activities of a Spiritualist group living in Lisbon during those years.

It read:

It is not thy place to be judges. He who is to judge thee would not favor thy prejudice. Have faith and be patient. It is not our custom to predict the future. The archanes of the future are impenetrable, although, on occasions, God does allow the corner of the veil cloaking it to be slightly displaced. Have confidence in our prophecy. The day 13th of May shall be a day of great joy for all the good spirits of the world. Have faith and be good. Ego Sum Charitas (I am Charity). Thou shall always have thy friends at thy side, who will guide thee and help thee on thy work. Ego Sum Charitas. The brilliant light of the Morning Star shall light thy way.

Ad published by the spiritualist group on March 10, 1917.

The last line of the cryptic message was not "inverted", but written in a normal way and with a slightly different handwriting, along with the signature of the ‘"entity" using Carlos Calderon as medium: Stella Matutina (Morning Star).

The letter "channeled" by Carlos was written mostly in Portuguese and signed by Stella Matutina, which has been associated with the planet Venus or the morning star. Other connections are to the Virgin Mary, Aphrodite, the Aztec/Mayan deity Quetzalcoatl/Kukulcan and even Lucifer the "Bringer of Light".

The Spiritualist group might not have understood precisely the meaning of the message, but they interpreted it as a sign that the Great War was due to end, and even went as far as to run a small ad in the classified section of a local newspaper on March 10, 1917.

They headed the ad with the numbers, '135197' a code referring to the "day of great joy" (13th May, 1917). May 13th arrived and the hoped for news of either a cease fire, or truce did not materialize.

The word of the Marian apparition gradually spread, including the message received by the spiritualist group.

Sketch of the Being of Fátima c.1917

The link to a message produced by spiritualists could account for the Church's extra slow acceptance of the events, especially as there was a second spiritualist group in the city of Oporto, who sent a letter to the country's most important newspapers referring to the event that would occur on May 13. It was signed by a psychic named Antonio, and dated May 11.

Henrique António Guedes de Oliveira the editor-in-chief of O Primeiro de Janeiro, the most circulated journal in the North of Portugal ran the ad on the front page. The other newspapers mocked the ad, and believed it would show that psychics were charlatans.

Page from Ilustração Portuguesa, 29 October 1917, showing the people looking at the Sun during the Fátima apparitions attributed to the Virgin Mary

The Miracle of the Sun

The apparitions reported by the three children have changed considerably over time versus how they were originally described. The eyewitnesses to the "Miracle of the Sun" never said it was the sun, only that it was a bright, oval object that glowed like a pearl.

The children when asked where the lady came from only pointed upward, but they did not specify it was heaven. They never saw her mouth moving, and Lucia Dos Santos who was considered the main witness was the only one able to hear her voice, which was accompanied by a buzzing sound.

When Lucia learned how to read and write she was able to record the words. "Another physical attribute that was changed by the Catholic Church was that the being was said to be less than three feet tall, and appeared to be bald. Over the course of interrogations and revisions, the children changed this appearance to that of a tall beautiful lady, more fitting to the Virgin Mary archetype of the church."

Across culture and time other mystics have claimed to receive communication in a similar fashion. Could it be that different deities described by different civilizations have the same source? Could these be the same messengers who appeared to the children in Fatima?

Sister Lúcia in the Chapel of the Apparitions next to the column marking the place where the apparitions of Our Lady are said to have taken place. The picture was taken during Lucia's visit to Cova da Iria on May 22, 1946

The Children's Encounter

The three young shepherds described being visited by an angel on different occasions. When the word spread of what they had seen thousands flocked to the area, as the lady promised a miracle on October 13 of the following year.

On October 13, 1917 over 80,000 people who had arrived to see the "miracle" described a bright disc-like object that emitted heat, spun through the sky and swoop over the crowds before returning to the clouds.

A small chapel called the Chapel of the Apparitions was built in April of 1919 by the local people. It was in the exact location where the Virgin Mary would visit every month on the 13th. In 1920, a statue of the Virgin Mary was then installed in the chapel by the local populace. This angered the Roman Catholic church and the government, as the miracle had not yet been confirmed by them. This original chapel was destroyed in March of 1922. However, the Chapel of the Apparitions was rebuilt and functioning as a place of local mass by 1923.

The area of Fatima, Portugal has a long history of pagan practice that include folklore about fairies, and other worldly beings. Portugal has a tradition of a race of supernatural women called the Moura Encantada who are said to be the guardians of doorway into other dimensions. They are said to be able to spin the sun, similar to what those at Fatima described seeing.

On July 13, 1917 the Lady was said to have imparted three secrets to the children. In the mid-1930s the Bishop of Leiria encouraged Lúcia to write her memoirs, so that she might reveal further details of the 1917 apparitions. Two of the secrets were revealed in 1941, however many point out that by then Lucia was exposed to information about communism having taken over Soviet Union.

Starting in 1932, the Portuguese lived under the rule of Antonio Salazar, a staunch Catholic who was opposed to Communism and believed its fall was inevitable. Therefore, this part of the second secret was a widely held belief and hope of many in Portugal.

The Bishop of Leira asked Lucia to disclose the third secret in 1943, however she did not believe the time was right. But in the fall of 1943 she contracted influenza and pleurisy which had killed her cousins. She feared she would die, so she put the third secret in writing, and sealed it in an envelope which was not to be opened until 1960.

The third secret was disclosed in 2000, and the Vatican described the vision as the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul in 1981.

There was anger in Portugal when the third secret was released. It seemed there was no reason to have kept the prophecy secret for 50 years, and many suspected the contents had been altered by the Vatican. It's been pointed out that Lucia wrote the third secret on one sheet of paper, however the version produced by the Vatican was four pages long. Many believe the contents of the third secret is some type of doomsday prophecy.

When Lucia's memoirs were published the events became widely known outside of Spain and Portugal. Between 1935 and 1993 she wrote six memoirs.

Whatever really happened on that secluded spot in Cova da Iria, over one hundred years ago, will probably take us a few more centuries to fully comprehend –if ever.