Tens of thousands of people gathered at Fatima in Portugal on October 13, 1917, and many of them reported seeing the sun appear to spin, change colour and rush toward the earth before returning to its place. It had been raining. The crowd stood in mud. The accounts, set down afterwards by secular newspapers as well as by the church, agree on the outline of what was seen, and disagree on everything else.
The date had been promised. Three shepherd children, Lucia Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, said they had been seeing visions of the Virgin Mary since May that year, and that a sign would be given on October 13. The story had spread through a country that was then a republic and officially hostile to the church, and the crowd that came was put at between 30,000 and 100,000, with no two sources matching.
What happened at the moment of the sign has never been settled. The sun dance was seen by people kilometres apart, and some reported it, and some reported nothing, and the crowds that came expecting a sign saw one. The church held its own inquiry for years and declared in 1930 that the visions were worthy of belief, and the three children's accounts of the secrets the lady told them, including one kept sealed until 2000, became a subject of its own.
The two younger children died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 to 1919 and were canonised in 2017, and Lucia lived to be a nun and died in 2005. Fatima has since become one of the largest pilgrimage sites in the Catholic world, and the anniversary of October 13 draws a crowd every year, with the same question, what was actually seen, left to whoever wants to answer it.