I'll keep an open mind, and hopefully can get through the whole 22+ minutes, but just two minutes in, and this (any, really) skeptic is already having his eyebrows raised (from the transcript):
How did they come to 'realize' this was no ordinary woman? And that's a big leap from a “young woman" to the word spreading that this was
the Virgin Mary. Does anyone in 1968 *know* what the Virgin Mary looked like? No contemporaneous portraits exist, do they? Do the dots get connected in the following 20 minutes? Let's find out!
Another few seconds in, and here's what I'm thinking: so far, we've only heard that witnesses saw something. OK, but as we've seen on the disappearing Statue of Liberty video, witnesses saw something (well, nothing, I guess!) too. What I'm curious to see if they reveal, was any inspection made of the area where the light was coming from? This might have revealed a very mundane projection system, set up by someone who wanted attention.
Had anyone been allowed to inspect Copperfield's set-up, the trick would have been obvious. Yet, they interviewed people who were amazed, they believed that he somehow made it disappear from their view (which he did, but it was conceptually dead-simple, just very difficult to pull off). And are there any interviews of people who figured out what was going on, or were those just not included? So I'll watch some more, hoping for some real content, wish me luck!
And while they interview believers, did they interview any skeptics? And the way they frame things, make their words a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy (from transcript):
12:30 the most astonishing public
manifestations of the supernatural ever
to have occurred on Earth
you had a tremendous circumstance
because not just one or two or six or
seven seen the Virgin Mary
but hundreds of thousands ...
See what they did there? They didn't say that that many saw “something”, but that they saw
the Virgin Mary. How do they know that's what/who they saw? They made that leap, and they expect you to go along with it I guess. So, making this unsubstantiated leap, I expect other leaps as well. This is all sounding like that South park episode with the 'business plan' of “Collect Underpants,
?, profits!”. How do you get from point A to point B?
Then it goes on with more (poorly documented) 'miracles' (with video dramatizations). To me, that's just a distraction - tell me about this vision of the Virgin Mary, did anybody inspect for a physical source?
@ 17:20, they bring in a physicist, but I suspect that if this guy was legit, they carefully edited him. Fine, he says the witnesses saw the same thing, (some) photographs are consistent, and apparently not faked. They show something physical.
18:32
studying those photographs that I can't
see any inconsistencies so if that's
true
then that would argue that The
Apparition was able to generate
physical light that was able to go to a
camera go through the Optics record
itself on the photographic Emulsion of
the film as a photochemical reaction
and hence you have something physical
associated with the the apparitions
So it is physical, not 'spiritual' or 'mystic'? He didn't say (or it got edited out) if he had any evidence of what created this physical light. Just agreeing that it is light isn't enough to assign a cause, is it? And doesn't it seem strange, that after years of this, they don't mention that anyone went up there to inspect anything, to look for lights, a projection system, mirrors? Anything? For me, what they left out is more important than what they presented.
OK, they finally mention a search for projection devices at 20:30. But I'd like to hear a lot more about how this search was carried out, it says it was done by “the police”, and “No device was found within a radius of fifteen miles capable of projecting the image,”, so I question if they were technical enough to know what to look for, and did they get to examine the church itself, or just the surrounding area?. That 'radius' comment sounds like the surrounding area, maybe the church itself was off-limits for religious reasons?
On wiki, they say the only secular, English-language account of the events was provided by Cynthia Nelson, a professor of anthropology at the American University in Cairo. And those reports are weaker: “Despite reports of regular appearances of the Virgin Mary, Nelson did not see anything that could be identified clearly as such. Instead she only saw a few 'intermittent flashes of light' and later, a glow of ambiguous shape shining through palm trees.” Wiki goes on to speculate on some of the psychology at that time that could lead to people wanting to insert meaning to some vague lights. Another site mentioned that every time
any flashing light appeared, the crowd oohed and aahed , which just re-enforced something amazing happening to the rest of the crowd, many who
wanted to see the Virgin Mary, so they did.
-ERD50