re: Today is the 109th anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun...

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nor do I believe that the sun danced around the sky.

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Well, I don't know what to tell you, because I witnessed this very thing in Medjugorje.

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Jake88

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Thank you for bringing this information here. Looking at this more closely, there definitely weren’t all that many people (again considering that apparently 70,000 people witnessed this event) who were willing to provide testimony to what they saw.

Of course, I’m not shocked.

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actually being seen by tens of thousands of people

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Is perfectly compatible with a much lower number of recorded official statements.

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Well, for one, we don’t know the exact number of people interviewed. We know the exact number of written testimony that survives to the present day. Which is indeed around 150. However, the Church and secular authorities interviewed hundreds more. We don’t know the precise number but it is way more than 150.

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Ah, yes. The “just believe me”route. Ok. I’m sorry, I don’t.

I’ve been told 70,000 people saw this.

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Ah, yes. The “just believe me”route. Ok. I’m sorry, I don’t.

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All I'm saying is that something obviously happened there that was out of the ordinary.

Most claims of the miraculous are reported after the fact. Fatima was announced months ahead. The children said the miracle would come on October 13, and the date spread widely, which is exactly why such a large crowd showed up in pouring rain. A hoax announced in advance invites thousands of potential debunkers, and many came for that reason.

Portugal in 1917 was ruled by a fiercely anticlerical republic, and much of its press mocked the Church. Avelino de Almeida, a writer for the secular Lisbon daily O Século, came expecting to report a farce. His front-page story afterward described the crowd watching the sun "dance" and tremble. He did not endorse a miracle, but he plainly recorded that something unusual was seen.

These accounts were not built up over decades. Newspaper reports appeared within days, and testimonies were gathered soon after. Photographs show a huge crowd looking up at the sky. That separates Fatima from legends that only appear in writing generations later.

Mass hysteria is offered as an explanation, but hysteria rarely produces broadly similar reports from people who came in skeptical. Staring at the sun can produce afterimages and shimmering effects, but that doesn't explain the advance prediction, the reports from witnesses miles away, or the crowd's reaction all at once. Natural explanations such as a parhelion or dust in the atmosphere have been proposed, but none has been shown to match the full set of descriptions or the timing.

To sum up, the historical evidence firmly establishes that a large crowd, at a predicted time and place, reported a dramatic solar phenomenon. Whether that phenomenon was supernatural is a question of interpretation, not documentation.

Weren't people sent to death because of the testimony of children in Salem Massachusetts?

Because the evidence doesn’t firmly establish that a large crowd, at a predicted time and place, reported a dramatic solar phenomenon. It just doesn’t.