What Sceptics and Witnesses Themselves Disagree the Sun Actually Did

Contemporary reports of the October 1917 event later called the miracle of the sun are notably inconsistent with each other: some of the tens of thousands present described the sun visibly spinning, changing colour and appearing to plunge toward the earth, while other witnesses in the same crowd, including some reporters present specifically to investigate the promised sign, reported seeing nothing unusual at all, a documented divergence in eyewitness testimony that historians studying the event treat as significant in itself, whatever explanation is eventually preferred for what did or did not happen in the sky.

Sceptical explanations proposed by scientists and historians since include temporary retinal effects from a large crowd staring directly at the sun for an extended period, optical phenomena caused by thin cloud or atmospheric moisture, and a degree of mass suggestion among a crowd primed by weeks of publicity to expect a specific promised miracle at a specific time and place, while believers point to the sheer number of independent witnesses and the physical drying of ground that had been soaked by rain shortly beforehand as details a purely psychological explanation does not obviously account for; the church's own approval of the Fatima devotion has never required settling this specific empirical question, treating the broader apparitions and their message as the substance of the approved devotion rather than resting church approval on any particular physical account of the crowd's shared experience that day.