Fatima and the UFO Phenomenon

Interview with Professor Joaquim Fernandes, PhD in History, at the University Fernando Pessoa, Porto, Portugal

1.What led you to the research of the Fatima Apparitions?

From long time the Fatima Apparitions story was considered controversial and a lot of authors and thinkers thought that they were supported more by political than religious reasons and motivations. Then, we wanted questioned what really had happen there by accessing the original archives and documents.

2. What kind of difficulties and obstacles did you find during the research?

The main obstacle was to access to the Fatima sanctuary documents, namely the so-called Formigao archive, that were classified until the end of the 1970’s when we proposed to study them. Following having the chance to read them, one of the authors (Fina d’Armada) was badly punished in her professional career.

3. Did you find any kind of surprises there?

The main surprise was that the extraordinary events could not gave been invented. In our opinion they occurred in fact. But more the original documents were emerging to our eyes more the events mimetic the ufological ground. Another surprise was the certification that Canon Formigao had modified the first historical description of the Fatima “Lady”: from a little girl with a skirt by the knees he changed to a adult lady with a long and shining skirt. We also discovered that the image that the people can see today ay the Sanctuary  was inspired by an old image of a previous cult of Senhora da Lapa Lady. But, more surprisingly was finding witnesses that described the so-called “Sun Miracle” as an “disk-like metal object” with equidistant lights in the periphery, like the classical hard daylight UFO cases.

4. How reacted the Catholic believers and the religious authorities?

As a lot of us act grounded in “belief systems” and have a deep supernatural dependence many believers did not read our books. Others links their supernatural needs directly and exclusively with Fatima and are happy with their simplistic faith and badly knows the details of Fatima events. Others yet having read the books with critical mind or react with perplexity or deny all in the name of their faith. Then, a lot of members of the Catholic Church hierarchy avoid to discuss our views since they also need Fatima to keep on as a major financial source.

5. Do you plan continue looking for new clues to the Fatima events?

We keep always in our minds the urgency to rethink the religious personal experiences, like the “Marian apparitions” as a syndrome that calls for a deeper and deeper interest and research to find its origins and ways of expressions as a part of the Extraordinary Human Experiences in its totality. So, the different scientific disciplines and other cultural paranormal approaches must give attention to this aspect of the popular religion. Also, we urge the experimental and theoretical experts to look at these rich documents that we think can be a good exercise to discover and understand how our brain and spirit can be stimulated to surpass the ordinary limits of human perception, “tuning” new extensions of the consciousness.                      

Anomalist Books

A BLOG ON NEW RELEASES, REVIEWS, AND OTHER NEWS

Now Available: “Heavenly Lights” and “Celestial Secrets”

June 22, 2007

We are pleased to announce that we have returned into print two highly praised books previously published by EcceNova Editions, a Canadian publisher that closed its doors in December of 2006. The two books are part of a planned Fátima Trilogy authored by Joaquim Fernandes & Fina D’ Armada. The books have been translated from Portuguese by Eva M. Thompson and Alexandra Bruce, and edited by Andrew D. Basiago. Heavenly Lights: The Apparitions of Fátima and the UFO Phenomenon argues convincingly that the famed Fátima incident of 1917 did not involve “Marian apparitions,” as is commonly believed, but actually dealt with a series of close encounters with alien beings.

Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fátima Incident reveals the story of the “cover-up” by the Catholic church that has both shaped our modern view of the Fátima incident and obscured its true significance as the first major close encounter case of the 20th century. When they first appeared, both books were well-reviewed in Fortean Times by Bob Rickard, who called Heavenly Lights “priceless” and Celestial Secrets “an important archive.” The third volume in the trilogy — Fátima Revisited: The Apparition Phenomena in Myth, Religion, and Science — is due out at the end of the year and contains contributions by 20 Ufologists and academics.

The “Buzzing” sounds in Fatima Apparitions 1917

(excerpt from the book  Heavenly lights. The Fatima Apparitions and the UFO Phenomenon, by Fina d' Armada and Joaquim Fernandes, translated from Portuguese and edited by Andrew D. Basiago and Eva M. Thompson, published by Anomalist Books, 2007

All the rights reserved, 2007.

Joaquim Fernandes*

“The buzzing of bees”

And the Being spoke.  To Lúcia, it was not strange at all.  They understood each other in Portuguese, as if Mary, the Mother of Jesus, had become a polyglot, or as if two thousand years of history had not altered the language of the people.  The news spread throughout the village, and on June 13^th, part of the neighborhood came to the site of the Apparitions.

They were not many.  “I counted the people and saw that only 40 were present,” wrote Inácio António Marques. [1] And those people anxiously waited in that deserted place for the veritable Queen of Heaven to descend to the oak tree, in the hopes of contemplating her serene face, one popularly imagined being young, soft, and extraordinarily beautiful.

Stella [2], through the voice of writer Maria de Freitas (who behind the scenes wrote a great part of the book about Fátima attributed to Father João de Marchi), captured forever the impressions of that first day in which onlookers participated.  Among them was Maria Carreira, who, in the language of a simple countrywoman, later described for the journalist her memories of the event:

At the same instant, Lúcia jumped up and exclaimed, ‘O, Jacinta, there she comes already, there was the lightning,” and then ran to kneel at the foot of the oak.’

“And you did not see anything?,” de Freitas asked.

“Me?  No, ma’am.  And no one boasted about having seen the lightning.  We would follow the children and kneel in the middle of the field.  Lúcia would raise her hands and say, “You bade me come here, what do you wish of me?” And then could be heard a buzzing that seemed to be that of a bee.  I took care to discern whether it was the Lady speaking.”

“And everyone heard it?,” the reporter asked.

“Well, it could be heard very well!,” Carreira answered.

The buzzing of a bee – here is the voice attributed to Our Lady of Fátima by the miracle’s greatest publicist.  She, and the other onlookers, did not hear a voice speaking Hebrew, Aramaic, or even Portuguese, but a voice like that of an insect.

This same witness recounted this same episode to Father João de Marchi.  In his work, entitled Era uma Senhora Mais Brilhante que o Sol [It was a Lady More Brilliant than the Sun], we read [3]:

I had been sick, and was feeling very weak.  It must have been around midday, when Lúcia was asked:  “Will Our Lady be long delayed?”

“No, ma’am, she will not be long,” she responded.

The tiny child was watching for the signs.

We prayed the Rosary and, when the girl from Boleiros was going to begin the Litany, Lúcia interrupted her, saying that there was no longer sufficient time.  She immediately rose to her feet and shouted:

“Jacinta, there comes Our Lady, the lightning has struck.”

All three children ran to the oak, as we ran behind them.  We knelt upon the thickets and shrubs.  Lúcia lifted her hands, as in prayer, and I heard her say:

“You bade me to come here, please tell me what you want.”

Then we began to hear something like this, in the manner of a very fine voice, but what it said could not be comprehended or put into words, for it was like the buzzing of a bee!

But that buzzing did not disturb the silence of the mountain only in June.  The following month, word spread throughout the entire region and nearly four to five thousand people found their way to Cova da Iria. [4]  Jacinto de Almeida Lopes, proprietor of the site of the Shrine later established by the parish of Fátima, was among them.  He would be one of the eyewitnesses chosen by the parish priest to testify during the Inquiry.  The parish priest, writing in the third person, related the evidence given by Lopes:

“Then what is it that you want of me?”

After this question, she waited in silence for a short period of time, the time of a brief response. And during this silence, he heard, as if coming from the oak tree, a faint voice, similar, he says, to the humming of a bee, but without distinguishing a single word.

In July, Manuel Marto, the father of Jacinta and Francisco, made his way to the site for the first time.  Questioned as to what he experienced [5], he told João de Marchi:

“I heard a sound, a din, such as a great fly makes inside an empty water pot,” and wondered whether it was “far off or close by.”

Manuel Marto helped himself to odd comparisons.  When interrogated about the same matter by the Italian priest Humberto Pasquale [6], he affirmed:  “I heard something like the buzzing of a fly inside an empty barrel, but without articulation of words.” For his part, Pasquale added: “Mr. Manuel Marto explained to us that, during the entire duration of the appearance, those present heard an indefinable sound, like that which is heard next to a hive, but altogether more harmonious, even though words were not heard.”

In this same month, we find other testimony, however, which demonstrated that the buzzing must have been heard quite well, which, as a matter of fact, Maria Carreira stated.  António Baptista, from Moita, in the parish of Fátima, was then 50 years old.  When interviewed by the Viscount of Montelo on November 13, 1917, he declared, “on July 13^th, I was at Cova da Iria.  She (Lúcia) knelt.  I thought I heard, at that moment, a little wind, a zoa-zoa sound.  While Lúcia was listening to a response, it seemed there was a buzzing sound like that of a cicada.” [7]

“Many people say that when the Apparition was speaking, it could be heard,” wrote J. de S. Bento, in a letter possibly penned on October 13^th of that year [8].  “But they could not distinguish what She was saying.”  And another witness also made reference to the sounds of the “speech” of the Being.  Manuel Gonçalves, Jr., a 30-year-old farmer from Montelo – the place name that the Canon Formigão adopted in his pseudonym [9] – also declared on October 11^th “some people have affirmed that they hear the sound of the answers.”

Herewith we arrive at 1978.  In July 18^th of that year, the authors interviewed the relatives of the seers and eyewitnesses then still living.  One of the people with whom we spoke was Lúcia’s sister, Maria dos Anjos.  Sitting in an armchair, beside the house where she was born, living out the rest of her days, smiling to the daily visitors, she narrated for us once again the story that had forever altered the life of her family:

“Did you know Maria Carreira?,” we asked on that hot summer afternoon.

“I knew her as well as I knew my own mother.”

“She said that when Our Lady would speak, she would hear something like the humming of a bee...

I also heard that little buzz.  I also got to hear it, but I know not what it was.”

“Was it as if there were many bees?,” we asked.

“No, only one,” she responded, categorically.”

“Do you recall what month that was?”

“At that time, I did not go there every month.  It seemed as if a bee was around there whenever Lúcia was listening. But I have no idea what it was!”

“I have no idea what it was!”  Her statement gives one pause to consider whether the event should have been given a Marian interpretation, if the sound that the Being made was not even understood.  In truth, who can explain why her voice was comparable to the buzzing of a bee?  Or yet to the buzz of a great fly inside a water pot, or of a fly inside an empty barrel?  Have these sounds been heard solely in Fátima?  Or have there been, in other parts of the world, other witnesses to identical sounds.

1. A Voz de Fátima, no. 3, December 13, 1922.
2. Stella, no. 77, special edition about Fátima, May 1943.
3. 8^th ed., Fátima, 1966, pp. 97-98.
4. Parish Inquiry.
5. Era uma Senhora Mais Brilhante que o Sol, ob. cit., p. 114.
6. Eu Vi Nascer Fátima, Porto, ed. Salesianas, 1966, p. 31.
7. In the original, we found the word “guitar.”  In light of the context, we think that could be an error, since it should mention the sound of an insect.  This is part of the Arquivos Formigão.
8. Arquivos Formigão.
9. When he went to Fátima, Canon Formigão was received by relatives of this witness, who live in Montelo.  MONTELO, Viscount of, As Grandes Maravilhas de Fátima, Lisbon, 1927, pp. 80-85.

13.  Experimental observations of the effects of microwaves

One working hypothesis, subject to experimental verification, attributes some of the physical phenomena occurring at the time of the Apparitions to the eventual effect of microwave radiation (that falling in the electromagnetic spectrum between 30 and 300,000 MHz.)  We refer, namely, to the following:

a) the declaration of the “fourth seer,” Carolina Carreira, when she alluded, in the course of contact with an “angelic being” of small height, to the non-auditory reception, inside her mind, of a repetitive order:  “Come and pray three Hail Mary’s… Come and pray three Hail Mary’s…”;

b) the various indications by witnesses near to the site of the “contact” by the three young shepherds with a communicating “being,” who heard a “humming of bees,” which is, as we have seen, one of the characteristics of modern Ufological phenomenology that appears with some frequency;

a) the properties of microwave radiation, discussed by McCampbell [1], among others, and [which] would justify the triple effect registered by the testifying masses of Fátima during the solar phenomenon of October 13, 1917:  intense heat, rapid drying of clothes, physiological effects.

The most suggestive fact to retain is furnished to us by the witnesses when they refer that the “buzzing of bees” cited was always produced when the “luminous lady” spoke with the three seers, “but without moving her lips.”

Since McCampbell, other labs have reproduced the experiences that confer a coherent principle to the totality of witnesses in regard to this question of “communication/reception of messages,” and, particularly, as regards the hearing of sounds identified as the “buzzing of bees.”

We refer, for example, to the experiences of investigators from the Canadian Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, specifically, to the works of James C. Lin, Sergio Sales-Cunha, Joseph Battocletti and Anthony Sances, published under the title, “The Auditory Microwave Phenomenon” [2].  These investigations could prove to be promising for the gradual comprehension of this problem and, in a general way, for the elaboration of explicative models of certain secondary effects, of a physical and physiological nature, registered in human beings and lesser animals, in the presence of unidentified aerospace phenomena.

Scientific exploration of the auditory “phenomenon” of microwaves may help to explain, in a rational and coherent way, what type of reception/communication is involved in cases of “contact with messages,” whether they occur in a secular context (i.e., UFO’s) or a religious one (i.e., “Marian apparitions”.)  This may be especially true in situations like Fátima, where the contact includes altered states of consciousness.

The Canadian case cited above gives an account of the effects of small discharges of microwave radiation reverberating in the crania of human subjects.  The heads of the individuals subjected to these emissions were placed outside the reach of a conical antenna.  The experiments took place in an appropriate compartment.  The perceptions that resulted consisted of a combination of audible sounds.

The studies showed that the individuals perceived buzzing types of noises or pops within the head, when subjected to microwave radiation between 200 and 300 MHz.

Generally, these sounds were perceived as something produced in the interior of the head or in the posterior part of the cranium.  Remember, once again, that the “fourth seer” of Fátima would hear the commanding words of the “little angel” inside her head…

A new contribution, virtually contemporaneous with the cited experiments, was communicated to us by Petit, director of research at the French CNRS, and Assistant Director of the Calculus Center of the University of Provence, which came to reinforce the plausibility of this working hypothesis.  Certainly, according to Petit, in the course of the experiments carried out in 1979, in the ambient area of the Department of Microwave Studies and Investigations annexed to the National Center for Space Studies of Toulouse, its director, Professor Thourel, personally confirmed accidental reception by non-auditory means of modulated, low frequency microwaves when exposed to the active rays of a transmitter. [3]

Returning to the Fátima case, we verify that the “buzzing” or “humming” was not exclusive to the three small seers.  In fact, others who were in the vicinity of the “contact” site gave various accounts of those impressions.  They underscored that they were “clearly hearing” that noise when the “Lady” was speaking with Lúcia “without moving her lips.”

This detail comfortably sustains the notion, maintained by the accounts, that the “buzzing” or “humming” phenomenon would be audible within a determined area around the three children and would come from a source external to the onlookers.  In our working hypothesis, the means of communication between the “luminous lady” and the principal “message” receptor was the previously described beam of focused light.

Naturally, new cross-trials will be necessary and desirable, given their potential to provide controllable and statistically representative data, with a view to the study of psycho-physiological reactions and human (as well as animal) behaviors at those levels of radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum.  We cannot even speak to the immense field of analysis which is openly anticipated, having as its target the structure of the discourse of the religious and para-religious “messages” and their semantic content within the phenomenology of the “unidentified” processes involved [4].

Lastly, let us address the hypothesis set forth by Claude Rifat, when he confronted the apparent distortions and anachronisms of content, i.e., the obvious unreality and irrationality of the UFO-type experiences and the “Marian apparitions.”  In the magazine UFO Phenomena, Rifat emphasized the function carried out in these situations by the Locus Coeruleus, an important region in the mammalian brain.  And it is there, according to Rifat, that the phenomenon of dreams is induced.  Maybe, then, the source of Radiation “X” (flying saucer, “luminous being,” what have you) might interfere in the normal functioning of the brain via the emission of microwave radiation.  The distortion or alteration of the “message” (beyond the eventually suggested “images,” i.e., those of “Hell” [5]) could be one resulting from the interference of that radiation at the level of Locus Coeruleus, while our unconscious would act as a rectifying “filter,” actualizing and adapting the information according to the surrounding cultural context and time [6].

e-mail: j.fernan@clix.pt;  or  jfernan@ufp.pt

1. McCAMPBELL, James, Ufology, Belmont, Jaymac Company, 1973.
2. Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 68, no. 1, January 1980.
3. PETIT, Jean Pierre, personal communications, 1983.
4. RIFAT, Claude, “The induced dream hypothesis,” UFO Phenomena, Bologna, vol. 2, 1977.
5. The images of “Hell” were presented in July 1917 to the seers of Fátima.  They comprise part of the “secret,” which was already divulged by Lúcia in her Memórias, but not developed in this work.
6. Ibid.  “A theoretical framework for the problem of non-contact between an advanced extraterrestrial civilization and mankind; symbolic sequential communication versus symbolic non-sequential communication, UFO Phenomenon, Bologna, vol. 3, 1978-79.

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