Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

interested in the social implications of such rumors, which are quite real whether the facts are trueor false.The power of these apparitions can best be seen in some of the major "miracles" of history. AtKnock, Ireland, in 1852, the witnesses beheld luminous beings, among them the Virgin:She held her hands extended apart and upward, in a position that none of the witnesses couldhave previously seen in any statue or picture.Three witnesses reported noticing her bare feet. One woman, Bridget Trench, was so carried awayby the sight that she fervently went to the apparitions to embrace the Virgin's feet. But her armsclosed on empty air.I felt nothing in the embrace but the wall, yet the figures appeared so full and so lifelike thatI could not understand it and wondered why my hands could not feel what was so plain anddistinct to my sight.Bridget also remarked how heavily the rain was then falling, but, she added:I felt the ground carefully with my hands, and it was perfectly dry. The wind was blowingfrom the south, right against the gable, but no rain fell on that portion of the gable where thefigures were.St. John was standing at an angle to the other figures. Dressed as a bishop, he held a large openbook in his left hand. The fingers of his right hand were raised in a gesture of teaching. One of thewitnesses, Patrick Hill, went close enough to see the lines and letters in the book.When the parish priest was told of the apparitions, he said it might be a reflection from the stainedglasswindows of the church and quietly spent the rest of the evening at home. The phenomenonlasted several hours. Their clothes soaked through, all the witnesses went home before midnight.The next morning nothing was left to be seen.Ten days after the incident, a deaf child was cured and a man born blind saw after his pilgrimage toKnock. Soon seven or eight cures a week were reported:A dying man, so ill that he vomited blood most of the way while being carried to Knock andrecieved the Last Sacraments from the Archdeacon on his arrival, was cured instantaneouslyafter drinking some water in which a scrap of cement from the gable wall had beendissolved.All this came at an unfortunate time for the Catholic Church in Ireland. Most of ArchdeaconCavanagh's fellow priests doubted and disapproved. The Knock church had been built only fiftyyears earlier, when Irish Catholics had emerged from hiding, and much as in Lourdes and Fatima,the clergy tried at first not to get involved in the pilgrimages. Local and national papers were askedby the clergy to refrain from giving the apparition publicity, while papers hostile to Catholicismprinted derisive articles about it.Attempts to explain the phenomenon by physical means were made. A science professor fromMaynooth performed tests for the official commission of inquiry appointed by the Archbishop ofTuam. He used a magic lantern to project photographic images on the gable wall in the presence oftwenty priests and testified that the tests ruled out the possibility that the apparition had been aproduct of a photographic hoax. A correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph made his own testsat a later date and reported that "however the reported apparitions were caused, they could not havebeen due to a magic lantern."Many features in this report are identical to those in UFO phenomena: the strange globe of light ofvarying intensity, the luminous entities within or close to the light, the absence of rain at the site of