In 1917, three children in Fatima, Portugal claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. They promised she would perform a miracle on a certain day in October. Nearly 100,000 pilgrims arrived, hoping to see whatever happened, and nearly all report that the sun turned pale, changed color, and spun around.

Many other writers have investigated the children and their visions, but I was fixated on this sun miracle. Despite popular discussion of "mass hallucinations", this is AFAICT the only example of tens thousands of people all saying they witnessed the same impossible thing, at the same time. I got kind of obsessed with this; you can read my preliminary investigations in this, this, and this post.

One of the first things I found was that there were many other sun miracles - at least ten! - similar to Fatima. Most were associated with Marian apparitions, but one was at a Buddhist temple. Bigfoot only gets sighted by lone hikers; ghosts are only ever in the corner of your eye; UFOs are just blurs in the sky. Of all the countries and outposts in the vast empire of the unexplained, it's only this one phenomenon - the spinning, multicolored sun - that regularly gets seen by thousands of people at once, in broad daylight.

Speaking of "regularly", there's one spot where it continues even today. Fifty years ago, the Virgin Mary appeared to six children in Medjugorje, Bosnia. Now those children are well past middle-age, but she continues to come. Three of them report that she's appeared less frequently as the years go by, but the others still see her every day at 6:40 sharp. Travelers to Medjugorje, especially those passing through around 6:40, report a slew of miracles, including the spinning sun. Certainly this is true of those whose hearts are pure. But even the atheists get lucky sometimes.

I was shocked never to have heard about this before. There's a place you can just go, and have a decent chance of seeing a real miracle? People take vacations to the Bahamas for the beaches, when they could go instead to Medjugorje and see the natural law of the universe get violated in real time? Seems crazy!

So in early April, I and my extremely-accommodating, long-suffering wife flew to Dubrovnik, rented a car, and drove down a series of windy mountain roads toward the Bosnian border, hoping for a miracle.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/waiting-for-the-miracle