The Fatima Message 207Not that it was an easy task, because at the time I was
doing this, the Peruvian newspapers had been taken
over by the government. Finding these answers meant
so much to me that I did my research, while entire city
blocks where the news buildings were located were
surrounded by police with tear gas and machine guns.
I picked up a smattering of knowledge this way, at
least enough to prevent me from bugging Rama with
questions and comments that could be obtained through
other available sources.
What I discovered was very shocking to me. I found it
difficult to believe what I read.
I promised myself I would recheck everything as soon
as I arrived back in the United States. And, indeed, all my
findings concerning Fatima have been authenticated by
further research. The material was very available,
despite what Rama had said about the effort being made
by a certain church to keep the Fatima incident under
wraps.
The Fatima story began on May 13, 1917, when three
shepherd children, Lucia dos Santos and her two cou
sins, Francisco and Jacinta, claimed to have seen a lady,
brighter than the sun, standing on a cloud in an
evergreen tree near Fatima, Portugal. This lady asked
the children to return to the same place on the thir
teenth day of each month, until October, 1917 , when
she would disclose her identity and reveal why she had
come.
The children returned as promised and, in spite of
local skepticism, were joined by a crowd of spectators
that increased from fifty in June to one thousand in July,
from eighteen thousand in August, to thirty thousand in
September, and finally, in October, the number had
reached almost seventy thousand.