Estimates of the number of people present range from 30,000 and 40,000, by Avelino de Almeida writing for the Portuguese newspaper
O Século,
[15] to 100,000, estimated by lawyer José Almeida Garrett.
[16][17]
Various claims have been made as to what actually happened during the event. According to many witnesses, after a period of rain, the dark clouds broke and the Sun appeared as an opaque, spinning disc in the sky. It was said to be significantly duller than normal, and to cast multicolored lights across the landscape, the people, and the surrounding clouds. The Sun was then reported to have careened towards the Earth before zig-zagging back to its normal position.
[18][19] Witnesses reported that their previously wet clothes became "suddenly and completely dry, as well as the wet and muddy ground that had been previously soaked because of the rain that had been falling".
[20] Not all witnesses reported seeing the Sun "dance". Some people only saw the radiant colors. Several people saw nothing.
[8][21][22]
Skeptic
Brian Dunning commented on an image commonly mistaken for a photograph of the Sun taken at Fatima: "An old black and white photograph of the actual sun miracle event shows a lot of dark rain clouds behind some trees and the sun poking through. There is certainly nothing in the photograph that looks unusual, but of course a photograph is static. Whatever the crowd saw was not interesting enough to be noticeable in a photograph".
[9][10] The photograph, originally published in 1951 by
L'Osservatore Romano was subsequently determined to have been taken approximately eight years later in a different Portugal town of a different solar phenomenon. The misattributed image, however, continues to circulate on the internet.
[23]
en.wikipedia.org
aleteia.org
