About this collection

In 1917 three shepherd children in Fátima, Portugal, said a Lady appeared to them on the 13th of each month from May to October. On 13 October a crowd of tens of thousands reported that the sun spun, changed colour and seemed to fall towards the earth. Thousands of documents about these events were later gathered and published by the Sanctuary of Fátima as theDocumentação Crítica de Fátima (DCF), a critical edition in 15 tomes (1992–2013), entirely in Portuguese.

This site collects every first- and second-hand witness account of the 1917 events found in the volumes we have: the passages where someone describes what they themselves saw or heard (first-hand), or relays what a specific, identifiable person told them (second-hand). That includes the three seers themselves, Lúcia, Francisco and Jacinta, whose words come to us through interrogations and later writings. Vague rumour ("they say that…") is left out.

Sources

• DCF III. Das aparições ao processo canónico diocesano, tomes 1 (1917–18), 2 (1918–20) and 3 (1920–22). These hold almost every letter, newspaper report and testimony from the year of the apparitions.
• DCF V/4 (Jan–Apr 1930).
• DCF, Seleção de documentos (1917–1930) (2013), which reprints key documents from the other volumes, including the 1917 sworn depositions and interrogations of DCF vol. I and the canonical process of vol. II.

Not yet included: the full DCF vols. I, II, IV and V/1–3, 5–6. Accounts that appear only there will be added as those volumes are scanned.

Method

1. Scanning and text recognition. The printed volumes were scanned and converted to text with OCR, keeping the editors' archaic spelling, footnotes and page breaks.
2. Splitting into documents. The text was split into the editors' numbered documents (letters, articles, depositions…), each tied to its scanned pages.
3. Finding the witnesses. Every document was read by an AI model with written criteria for what counts as first- or second-hand, which event it concerns, and where the passage starts and ends. A second, dedicated pass collected the seers' own statements (interrogations, Lúcia's writings, and words relayed by their families and visitors). Each passage is cut out of the source verbatim by a script, so the Portuguese you see is exactly the editors' transcription.
4. Verification. A separate model re-read every document with passages to correct attributions, events and passage boundaries and to add anything missed, and a recall check compared the result against an earlier independent survey of the volumes.
5. Who they are. Each witness is classified (seers, their families, local villagers, clergy, journalists, aristocracy, professionals, scientists and academics, officials, students, pilgrims, groups) with where they came from and, where the sources say so, whether they arrived as believers or sceptics. Short biographies come from the DCF editors' footnotes.
6. Removing duplicates. The same letter or report often appears several times (a letter later printed in a newspaper, an article reprinted elsewhere, a document reproduced in the Seleção). Near-identical passages are merged into one, and the other printings are listed under “also in”. Different statements by the same person stay separate but share one witness page.
7. Translation. Each passage, and each full document containing one, was translated into English paragraph by paragraph, so the two languages line up side by side. The translation is machine-assisted. Where precision matters, read the Portuguese and the scan.

Images

The gallery shows every photograph and holy card printed in the volumes, straightened and cropped, alongside AI-restored and AI-colourised versions made with an AI image model. These are interpretations of low-resolution book scans, not historical records: faces, textures and colours are reconstructed and may be wrong. The unaltered scan is always one click away.

Classifications such as “saw it / saw nothing”, the phenomenon tags and the distances are reading aids, not verdicts. Every passage links to the full document and to the page scans, so you can check them yourself.

Credits

The documents were collected, transcribed and annotated by the editors of the Documentação Crítica de Fátima (Santuário de Fátima; scientific direction of the Centro de Estudos de História Religiosa, Universidade Católica Portuguesa). This project was prompted by Scott Alexander's “The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know”.

Data last built 2026-10-01: 469 passages, 167 witnesses, 169 documents.