Witnesses on the ground gasp in awe, as a dazzling, spherical light moves silently across the sky. Mesmerizing, it shimmers as it rocks back and forth, descending like a falling leaf. Those watching below are frozen in place, unable to move – though if that’s due to sheer wonder or because of some strange paralytic effect of the object itself, no one is sure.

The object grows to be so bright that it seems to dim the very light of the noon-day sun, to the point where the moon and stars become visible in the background. A rushing wind is felt, though the trees do not appear to sway in its wake. And the temperature drops noticeably, almost as if the seasons have changed in a matter of minutes.

And then, almost as quickly as it began, it ends. The dazzling object fades to a single point in the sky, and then disappears altogether, replaced by the glaring light of the sun and the onrushing, stifling heat of midday. The witnesses soon regain their ability to move their limbs, though their wits will take much longer to recover.

The news eventually makes its way around the world, enrapturing the imagination of a curious public. And the question inevitably arises: What have these chosen observers just witnessed?

From one perspective this is clearly an event of miraculous wonder; a divine encounter; a sign from the heavens. A revelation from the Lord himself, intended as a warning of, quite literally, Biblical proportions.

From another point of view this event has all the hallmarks of another phenomenon altogether, one associated with vehicles hypothesized to be spacecraft originating from some far-flung star system, or from some mirror dimension, which have traversed the invisible gap between worlds in an instant, demonstrating the sophisticated nature of a technology that makes human engineering look like a play with sticks and stones.

The very same event; the very same dataset, leads one group of people to — wholeheartedly, without apparent reservation — assume one explanation is the only real possibility. While a different group comes to the other conclusion — with just as much as conviction and fervor.

But who’s right? And is it necessarily one or the other? Or could it perhaps be some blend of the two? An event that is as much spiritual in nature as it is technological – if such a thing was possible.

There are numerous events in human history — some buried deep in the past like relics covered in centuries of sediment, only reaching us as distorted echoes of long ago, and others more recent, perhaps even contemporaneous with this very discussion – that bear a striking resemblance to the event I just described.

The so-called “Miracle of the Sun” that occurred in the small village of Fatima, Portugal is perhaps the most famous of all of the recent events of this type and magnitude. The wonders observed at Fatima occurred over a period of months and years, in a rising tide of spectacle, that resulted in a crescendo that was witnessed by tens of thousands.

The Catholic Church ultimately declared these events to be miraculous: nothing less than a visitation of the historical Virgin Mary — the very “mother of God”, from their perspective — blessing the faithful with her heavenly presence, while calling the world to repent and turn to the one true God, in order to avoid eternal damnation.

But to ufologists, especially those particularly familiar with the historical data, the events of Fatima bear a striking resemblance to countless historical sightings of so-called unidentified flying objects, and to reported close encounters with non-human, alien intelligence.

How are we to make sense of these remarkable kinds of events, and of the vastly different ways human beings try to make sense of them? The events at Fatima, and the profoundly confounding questions that arise in their wake, are the topic of this, the 23rd episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.