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Professor Almeida Garrett, a distinguished scientist from Coimbra University, was in the crowd at F&tima and reported: ‘‘It was raining hard... suddenly the sun shone through the dense cloud which covered it; everybody looked in its direction.... It looked like a disk, of very definite contour; it was not dazzling. I don’t think it could be compared to a dull silver disk, as someone said later at Fatima. No. It rather possessed a clear, changing brightness, which one could compare to a pearl... It looked like a polished wheel.... This is not poetry; my eyes have seen it.... This clear-shaped disk suddenly began turning. It rotated with increasing speed.... Suddenly, the crowd began crying with anguish. The ‘sun,’ revolving all the time, began falling toward the earth, [now] reddish and bloody, threatening to crush everybody under its fiery weight...” A wave of heat swept over the crowd, drying their rain-soaked clothes instantly. We might speculate that this same wave of heat may have affected the miraculous healings that reportedly took place among some of the sick people in the crowd, just as the heat from that purple glob in Texas seemed to heal Officer Goode’s infected finger. Here we had an event of major importance with 70,000 witnesses, many of them priests, scientists and journalists. It came at a time when Europe was shuddering with the violence of the First World War and religious faith was being strained by the inanity of sudden death. It would become one of the most thoroughly investigated UFO-type incidents of the period. Innumerable books were written about it, yet none of these books contained photos of the actual object. There were plenty of pictures of the crowds, many of whom were pointing cameras skyward. But what happened to all of the pictures they must have taken? What happened to all of the movie footage? I have tried to locate some of these photographs without success. I can only assume that they were collected by somebody and locked away in some secret archive. Because there was no U.S. Air Force and no CIA to blame this on, who did confiscate those pictures? In the initial reports of the phenomenon, all the witnesses agreed that the object was white and seemingly metallic, and that it changed color as the speed of rotation increased. Later, myth and mysticism replaced fact. The disk became ‘‘the sun,’’ even though observatories around the world assured the press that the sun remained in its usual place during the miracle. As the years passed, the miracle of ‘‘the sun’’ was gradually played down, and emphasis was shifted to the saintliness of the three children. The silvery angel hair is now described as ‘‘rose petals’’ in most current literature. 232 / Operation Trojan Horse