Virgin Mary at Medjugorje, the “Supernatural,” and What it Means for UFOlogy (Part 3)

Daniel Maria Klimek, Medjugorje and the Supernatural: Science, Mysticism, and Extraordinary Religious Experience.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

So what’s the takeaway from all this, for us UFOlogists?

By “all this,” I’m referring to the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to a group of teenagers in the mountain village of Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, starting in 1981 and continuing (apparently) to the present.  In the two previous installments of this post (click here and here to read them), I blogged on the problems of these apparitions–scientific but also moral, since the young people’s experiences involved Hell-visions of troubling cruelty.

The first thing that strikes me is Medjugorje’s relevance to the problem of multiple witnesses to the same anomaly, whether it be a UFO or something else that, by the standard scientific reckoning, ought not to exist.

In a brief article in the November 2016 issue of Fortean Times (title: “There will be dragons”), my old friend Jerry Clark related the incident of a sea serpent sighted on a summer afternoon in Pickerel Lake, South Dakota.  The witnesses were his son, his ex-wife, and his former mother-in-law.  As Jerry points out, the likelihood of a population of prehistoric monsters inhabiting a South Dakota lake is close to nil.  Yet three people all saw it, in the same way in the same place at the same time.

How can this be?

These are what Jerry calls “experience anomalies,” things that don’t seem to exist within consensus reality yet can’t be dismissed as hallucinations: “encounters with the fantastic occur routinely to more than one person at a time.”  UFOlogists will easily come up with cases that belong in this category–for example, the aerial craft and their human-like pilots famously seen in Papua, New Guinea, by the Reverend William Booth Gill and some 25 of his congregants in June of 1959.

“They’re pseudo-events,” Jerry writes in another article about experience anomalies, this time focusing on reports of the 1897 airship (“Mr Wilson and the aeronauts of 1897,” Fortean Times, January 2018).  “They have in common the vividness of the observed ordinary, and they are not hallucinations confined by definition to a single percipient.  The perceptions, in fact, are often shared, which is what makes them so confounding.”

But what are they?  Jerry admits he doesn’t know.  By their very nature, he suggests, they’re inexplicable.  Confronted by them, we’re “fated to know nothing except that experience anomalies can indeed be experienced.”

Now Medjugorje.  On pp. 186-187 of his book, Daniel Klimek reviews the evidence for and against the figure of the Virgin, seen by the teenagers, having objective reality.  Put some kind of screen between the visionaries–shall we call them “witnesses”?–and the being that they (and no one else present) can see, and they go right on seeing Her.  This suggests pretty strongly that She’s real to their minds, not their eyes.  But on the other hand …

“First, what is significant during the apparition is the convergence of the gaze of the visionaries’ eyes that is directed toward a spot above their heads, as if all were perceiving a nonvisible entity that is externally (and thus objectively) present.  Second, the electro-oculograph testing showing simultaneity of the cessation of eyeball movements points to an objective experience, as it shows that the visionaries are experiencing the same phenomenon at the same moment, instead of having intersubjective or personal experiences.  Third, [René] Laurentin points to the ‘simultaneous raising of their eyes and hands as the apparition disappears upwards’ as a final sign of objectivity, again evidence that signifies behavior responding to an external (and, therefore, corporal, or objective) vision or presence.”

Unlike the sea serpent of Pickerel Lake, which won’t stay around long enough for anyone to examine the witnesses as they watch it, the Virgin has been for more than 35 years a regular visitor to Medjugorje.  Her manifestations are still a mystery, at least if Klimek is any guide.  If mental telepathy were an established fact, we might use it explain the simultaneity: She’s a hallucination, all right, but one that the witnesses communicate among themselves by means undetectable to the scientists or their equipment.  But as things stand, that’s explaining one unknown by another.

Or are they somehow signaling one another, presumably unconsciously–since it seems very difficult to question their good faith–in a way that a magician might detect but not a scientist or a theologian?  I can only shrug.  Like the label “experience anomaly,” the Medjugorje parallel helps to define the question of the multiply witnessed UFOs.  It provides no answer.

We might say the same for another feature of Medjugorje, the silence of the birds at the time of the Lady’s visitations.  I’ve remarked on this in the first installment of this post, comparing it to the “Oz factor” noted by the UFOlogists, in which the UFO’s irruption into what ought to be an ordinary setting has the effect of turning the surroundings themselves eerily unfamiliar.  I also raised the question of why only one of the visitors to Medjugorje seemed to have noticed so striking a phenomenon.

A reader named Mary Uhrbrock was kind enough to post a response to my question, which deserves to be quoted in full:

“I visited Medjugorje in late June of 2012 and sat with about 50 visitors like myself in an open courtyard outside the chapel to witness an apparition by Marija. It was about 6:30 pm, and I was aware of the very noisy birds flitting around the courtyard. Marija entered the courtyard, said a few prayers aloud (in Croatian) and then became totally silent. Immediately the birds went silent. It was immediate and total silence and it lasted for the duration of Marija’s apparition. After the apparition, Marija stood up and walked away and the birds began a subdued chatter. Yes, that noisy bird chatter/sudden silence was a very obvious phenomenon. It impressed me deeply and I described it to my family and friends when I was home again. I might add, that silence was more than just quiet. It had a numinous quality.”

Which, again, underscores the problem rather than solving it.  But Freud remarks somewhere–I think in The Interpretation of Dreams–that problems are like nuts.  Take one in your hand, and you can’t squeeze it open.  But knock two together, and both shells may crack.  Are the “Oz factor” and the silence of the birds at Medjugorje two problems of this sort, which might yield their solutions when “knocked” together?

No success yet.  But a 21st-century UFOlogy–committed to understanding the UFO as a human phenomenon, even a religious phenomenon–will keep on trying.

And speaking of website comments: another reader, Avalina Kreska, shares a link to a fascinating post about what she and her husband experienced at Medjugorje when they visited in 1998.  “Several strange events happened on this pilgrimage,” she writes in her post.  One of these was a mini-“Miracle of the Sun,” echoing the extraordinary sky-borne event witnessed by a crowd of tens of thousands at Fátima, Portugal, on October 13, 1917.

“Suddenly, I was aware that something was happening in the sky,” Ms. Kreska writes. “I looked up and saw a round, white disc perfectly cover the sun so that you could look straight at it without hurting your eyes and then the sun started spinning! The most amazing colours started dancing around the spinning sun – purples, blues, greens, a full spectrum of colours leapt and danced, changing shape continually around the sun, as it spun around.

“My husband could see it too. We gazed spellbound until it stopped and then we had to look away because the white disc had disappeared and the sun shone brightly again. My husband, who wears glasses all the time, took them off because he couldn’t see with them on. All the while we stood in this vicinity he didn’t need his glasses. This effect gradually wore off as we descended down the hill.”

The UFOlogical relevance is clear.  Once again, there’s multiple witnessing: two people, not thousands as at Fátima.  But the problem is the same–here complicated by the fact that on another occasion it didn’t happen that way:

“We were browsing the trinket shops opposite the Church and a man rushed in, we recognised him, he was a member of our group, shouting, ‘The sun is spinning, the sun is spinning! Come and see!’ … As we stood outside, we looked at the sun but it was too bright and we had to turn away. The man was looking straight at it, exclaiming the very thing we had seen ourselves. So it seemed that the sun spinning only happened at certain times for certain people to see.”

Ms. Kreska adds that, like her, this man “had lost someone in his family, a son.”  (That same year, Ms. Kreska had lost both her father and a sister.)  “Not that that had anything to do with the sun spinning colours,” she says; and I have to say, I’m not so sure.  My conviction with regard to UFOs is that the witness is just as much part of the sighting as the thing witnessed.  I’d apply that here also.  All aspects of the witnesses’ psychic lives are of potential relevance to the phenomena experienced.

One more possible link of Medjugorje to the UFO–this one so speculative I’m not sure I can even formulate it coherently.

Klimek, page 181:  “The reflex of blinking, interestingly, was absent from the eyes during their apparitions when extremely strong lights were flashed in front of the visionaries, having no effect on them.  And yet reflexive blinking was present both before and after ecstasy in the face of dazzling lights.  ‘Examination of the inner eye indicated a normal state, identical before and after ecstasy.  The pupils contracted normally in the presence of light, but it was noted that while Marija and Ivanka blinked in the bright light before and after the apparitions, during it they did not blink even once.'”

My mind spins off to the unblinking eyes of the UFO aliens, described by abductees as far back as the 1980s and immortalized on the cover of Whitley Strieber’s Communion.  (Contrast the ETs in Steven Spielberg’s film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” sometimes suggested as models for the abductees: they blink so frequently, so demonstratively, that it’s hard to believe Spielberg wasn’t making a point with their blinking.)  Is it possible that their eyes are projections of the eyes of the experiencers, unblinking while in their state of trance?

Just as at Medjugorje.

by David Halperin
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