Between May and October 1917, three children, Lucia dos Santos, Francisco Marto and Jacinta Marto, reported six meetings with a figure they identified as the Virgin Mary at Cova da Iria, a field outside the Portuguese village of Fatima. At the fifth meeting, Lucia said the figure promised a miracle in October so that everyone would believe. Word spread through the surrounding countryside, and estimates of the crowd that gathered on 13 October range from about thirty thousand to as many as one hundred thousand, assembled in steady rain.
What happened next is reported with unusual breadth for an event of this kind. Witnesses, including people with no stake in the apparitions, described the clouds parting and the sun appearing as a spinning disc that threw off colored light and seemed to zigzag toward the crowd before returning to its place. The Lisbon newspaper O Seculo, edited by an anticlerical journalist, Avelino de Almeida, ran an account describing the sun dancing in the sky, which mattered to later defenders of the event because the paper had no interest in supporting a Catholic claim. Ground and clothing soaked by the morning rain were reported dry afterward by some witnesses. Not everyone present described the same details, and a number of people in the crowd reported seeing nothing unusual at all, a variation later investigators on both sides have had to account for.