Fátima
May–October 1917 · Cova da Iria, Fátima, Portugal
Three children report repeated apparitions. A crowd gathers expecting a sign. The cameras record the witnesses, not the reported motion of the sun.
Repeated apparition report and crowd event
Reports & discernment
Accounts of visions, apparitions, journeys, voices and encounters
Preserved here with their sources, the hands they passed through, and the questions nobody has settled. What each source says is kept separate from what was later said about it.
Montserrat
Traditional date 880; first text dated 1239 · Montserrat, Catalonia
A light descends from the sky. Music is heard. A cave is found. The statue now venerated there is some three centuries younger than the story.
Foundation and discovery legend
Life of Antony
4th century · Egypt
An Egyptian ascetic is besieged by things that change shape, make predictions, and lie - and is taught how to test them.
Hagiography
Questions across the collection
The collection does not say what caused anything. It can still notice when sources from far apart stop at the same place. These questions are open, none of them is answered here, and a shared question is not evidence of a shared cause.
01
Where was the body?
Paul reports a man caught up to the third heaven and says twice that he does not know whether it happened in the body or out of it. The tradition of the Miʿrāj argued over the same point for centuries and never reached agreement. Fursey, Dryhthelm and the knight of the Visio Tnugdali all lay ill or apparently dead, with other people in the room, while their accounts describe long journeys.
In each case the people who could see the body report that nothing happened to it. The sources leave open what kind of evidence could have settled the matter, and whether anyone at the time thought it could be settled.
In the collection · The ascent reported in 2 Corinthians 12The Miʿrāj - the night journey and ascentEcclesiastical History III.19 - the account of FurseyEcclesiastical History V.12 - the account of DryhthelmVisio Tnugdali - the vision of Tundale
02
Does certainty grow with distance?
Ezekiel's description of what he saw by the canal is built out of hedges: the appearance of, the likeness of, something like. Faxian stops at the end of one chapter to say that he never reached the place he has just described. Bede tells his reader exactly how far he is from Fursey. The Nuremberg sheet of 1561 says that a sight appeared, and a modern catalogue record for the same sheet adds a word the printer never used.
In several records the source closest to the event is the least sure of itself, and what follows it is more confident. We do not know whether that is a pattern or an accident of which sources survived. It could be tested against a much larger collection than this one.
In the collection · The opening vision of the book of EzekielA Record of Buddhistic KingdomsEcclesiastical History III.19 - the account of FurseyBroadsheet: the celestial appearance over Nuremberg, 14 April 1561
03
Did the pictures come first?
The Visio Tnugdali spread through illustrated manuscripts and cheap printed editions with woodcuts, and most people who met the story had probably seen the pictures before they read it. Hokusai's yūrei follow an iconography that any buyer in Edo already knew from the theatre. Almost every later image of Ezekiel's vision is more definite than the text it illustrates.
If someone later reported seeing a figure of one of these kinds, part of what they saw may have been drawn for them in advance. We would like to know how much, and whether any report in the collection can be shown to be older than the images of its own tradition.
In the collection · Visio Tnugdali - the vision of TundaleYūrei in the Japanese print traditionThe opening vision of the book of Ezekiel
04
What could the neighbours check?
Nobody could follow Fursey on his journey, but everyone could see the burn on his shoulder and jaw for the rest of his life. Dryhthelm's neighbours could not verify what he had seen. They could watch him stand in the Tweed among the ice. At Lough Derg the journey took place in a sealed cave, and what came out at dawn was a person, with or without an account.
In these records the part other people could witness is what the experience left behind in a body or a life. We are asking what an aftermath of that kind is evidence of, and whether the answer is different for a mark, a changed life and a story.
In the collection · Ecclesiastical History III.19 - the account of FurseyEcclesiastical History V.12 - the account of DryhthelmSt Patrick's Purgatory - the pit at Lough Derg
05
What did the record actually capture?
At Fátima there were photographers, and the cameras recorded the crowd. They did not record the sky the crowd described. The spirit photographs recorded exactly what was in front of the plate, and two fraud trials later established what that had been. The Project Blue Book record card gave each explanation three degrees, was, probably and possibly, and somebody had to choose one and initial it.
Each of these records was made by an apparatus or a procedure, and each captured something narrower than the event it is remembered for. The question is what it captured in each case, and who decided what it meant.
In the collection · FátimaSpirit photography: Mumler, Buguet and the plateProject Blue Book - the record cards
06
How were they tested at the time?
Antony questions the beings that visit him: who are you, where have you come from. The Life concludes that an accurate prediction does not show who is speaking. Théodore Flournoy spent five years on Hélène Smith's Martian language and found that its grammar was French. A Paris court in 1875 heard Buguet explain his double exposures.
Traditions that took these experiences seriously also built ways of distrusting them, often from the inside. We would like to know how old those procedures are, and whether they belong to the history of the reports themselves or only to their later correction.
In the collection · Life of AntonyHélène Smith and the Martian languageSpirit photography: Mumler, Buguet and the plate
07
Does the story carry the object, or the object the story?
At Montserrat the tradition, the cave and the image are all kept by one community. The first text that mentions any of it is three and a half centuries later than the year it describes, and the statue venerated there now is younger than the story. The comet of 44 BCE appeared in July, months after Caesar's death, and within a few years it was on the coinage as his soul. This project took its own name from a story about gold that comes through a window at night.
In each case a story is attached to something that can be seen or handled. We are asking which of the two keeps the other alive, and whether an object can carry a story on after the texts about it are lost.
In the collection · MontserratThe signs at Caesar's deathThe dowry narrative in the Nicholas tradition
08
Which list does it go on?
The cosmographies of the Islamic world describe jinn between the animals and the stars, in the same register and in the same hand. Charles Fort spent the better part of fifteen years copying out observations that scientific journals had noted and then set aside, and published them as a procession of the excluded. The Blue Book card had a box for Unknown.
A list decides in advance what kind of thing belongs on it. We are asking what each of these lists did to the things placed on it. That includes this collection, whose data model has no field for what anything is.
In the collection · Jinn in the cosmographical manuscriptsCharles Fort, The Book of the DamnedProject Blue Book - the record cards
The collection
These are shelf labels for finding things. They group sources by the tradition that produced them, not by any claim that their contents share a cause.
Sort
22 reports
22 reports, oldest first.
The opening vision of the book of Ezekiel
6th century BCE tradition · Babylonia
By a canal in Babylon, a deported priest describes wheels, faces and a moving structure - and keeps saying it only looked like something.
Scripture
The signs at Caesar's death
15 March – late 44 BCE · Rome and the Mediterranean
Dreams. Failed sacrifices. A darkened Sun. Three suns in the sky. Then, months later, a comet.
Mixed - poetry, history, biography and compilation
The ascent reported in 2 Corinthians 12
1st century · Eastern Mediterranean
A man caught up to the third heaven - and a writer who twice refuses to say whether the body went with him.
Scripture
The dowry narrative in the Nicholas tradition
Attached to a 4th-century figure; the narrative survives in later hagiography · Asia Minor; Latin European transmission
Gold arrives through a window at night, three times, before anyone thinks to watch for who is throwing it.
Hagiography
Life of Antony
4th century · Egypt
An Egyptian ascetic is besieged by things that change shape, make predictions, and lie - and is taught how to test them.
Hagiography
A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms
Travels ca. 399–414; English translation 1886 · China, Central Asia and South Asia
A monk walks to India and back over fifteen years, and marks which of his wonders he saw himself.
Pilgrimage account
The Paradise, or Garden, of the Holy Fathers
Sayings of the 4th–5th centuries; this compilation 1907 · Egypt and the Syriac transmission
Hundreds of short sayings from the Egyptian desert, carried through Syriac, and flattened into one typeface by a 1907 editor.
Editorial compilation
The Miʿrāj - the night journey and ascent
7th-century tradition; this manuscript 16th century · Arabia; the Islamic world
A journey by night and an ascent through the heavens, recounted in a tradition that argued for centuries about whether the body went.
Scripture
Ecclesiastical History III.19 - the account of Fursey
Event tradition 7th century; Bede writes early 8th century · Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England, the Frankish world
An Irish monk falls ill, is taken out of the body, is burned by something thrown at him - and carries the mark for life.
Monastic history
Ecclesiastical History V.12 - the account of Dryhthelm
7th–8th century tradition · Northumbria
A Northumbrian man is thought to have died, revives at dawn, and afterwards stands in a freezing river to pray.
Monastic history
Montserrat
Traditional date 880; first text dated 1239 · Montserrat, Catalonia
A light descends from the sky. Music is heard. A cave is found. The statue now venerated there is some three centuries younger than the story.
Foundation and discovery legend
Visio Tnugdali - the vision of Tundale
Event dated 1148; text written c. 1149 · Ireland; Latin Europe
An Irish knight collapses at dinner, is taken for dead for three days, and returns describing a country with a map.
Later retelling
St Patrick's Purgatory - the pit at Lough Derg
Accounts from the 12th century onward · Lough Derg, Donegal, Ireland
A cave on an island in Donegal where, for four centuries, pilgrims were locked in overnight and some came out with an account.
Pilgrimage account
Tadhkirat al-Awliyā
Medieval; Persian critical edition 1905–1907 · Persia and the Iranian cultural sphere
Persian lives of the friends of God - ecstatic speech, dreams, disciplines - held here without an English text.
Hagiography
Jinn in the cosmographical manuscripts
13th-century tradition; this manuscript c. 1601–1800 · The Islamic world; this manuscript from the Persian sphere
Illustrated catalogues of the world's contents, in which jinn are listed between the animals and the stars, in the same register.
Editorial compilation
Broadsheet: the celestial appearance over Nuremberg, 14 April 1561
Printed 1561 · Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire
At dawn on 14 April 1561, something frightening was seen at the sun over Nuremberg. A printer had it on sale within days.
Printed broadsheet report
Yūrei in the Japanese print tradition
c. 1831–32 · Japan
A commercial print series of ghost stories - where the returning dead have a fixed and recognisable iconography, sold by the sheet.
Later retelling
Spirit photography: Mumler, Buguet and the plate
1860s–1920s · United States and France
Portraits sold with a second figure standing behind the sitter - and two fraud trials that showed how the second figure got there.
Near-contemporary report
Hélène Smith and the Martian language
Sittings from 1894; published 1900 · Geneva, Switzerland
A Geneva medium described Mars in detail, drew its landscapes, and wrote its language - which turned out to have French grammar.
Near-contemporary report
Fátima
May–October 1917 · Cova da Iria, Fátima, Portugal
Three children report repeated apparitions. A crowd gathers expecting a sign. The cameras record the witnesses, not the reported motion of the sun.
Repeated apparition report and crowd event
Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned
Compiled c. 1905–1919; published 1919 · New York and London
A New York writer spent years copying anomalies out of scientific journals, and published them as a procession of the excluded.
Editorial compilation
Project Blue Book - the record cards
1952–1969 · United States
For seventeen years an air force printed a form for reports it could not explain, with the degree of confidence built into the checkboxes.
Official investigation file
Why collect these?
This collection exists to serve a physical question, and it is worth being exact about how. Project Nikolaos asks whether long-lived resonant objects can supply any reproducible physical correlate to the kind of report collected here. Historical reports are how we identify where such objects might be: they name places, practices, seasons, circumstances and objects, and that is candidate-selection material.
The reports are not physical evidence, and nothing downstream of this collection treats them as such. A catalogued source tells us where somebody once claimed something happened. It does not tell us that anything happened, and it certainly does not tell us what.
What the collection records is therefore what a source says, how the report reached us, and what remains uncertain. It assigns no ontology to anything, and it has no field in which it could.
Description before classification
Every entry preserves the vocabulary of its own source. Where a term is given, it is given in the language it was written in, with a plain rendering beside it and no classification attached to either.
A record may therefore show a source term, a translation, and then the statement that no ontological classification has been assigned. That is not evasion and it is not a gap awaiting a later answer. It is the whole finding.
Source term · angelus
Rendered · angel
Classified as · nothing
How close is the source?
Each entry records the relationship between the surviving text and the reported experience: whether it presents itself as first-person, whether it was recorded by someone near the witness, whether it was carried within a literary tradition for centuries, whether it was compiled long afterwards, or whether an outside collector recorded, translated and published another community's account.
This is not a truth score, and it is deliberately not rendered as one. There are no stars, no percentages, and no ordering in which one value is better than another. A first-person account can be wrong and a compilation can preserve something exactly. The field describes a textual relationship and nothing else.
Why the corpus is cross-cultural
Not because we think different traditions were describing one thing. Close to the opposite.
If there were any physical or environmental correlate to find, the search for it should not depend on the religious vocabulary of whoever happens to be doing the searching. A physical hypothesis should not become more or less plausible because one witness used the word angel and another did not.
Theology matters a great deal to the meaning of a report. It should not decide the calibration of an instrument. The corpus is drawn from several traditions and regions so that candidate selection is not quietly restricted to the categories of one of them.
The denominator problem
An archive assembled only from extraordinary reports can make extraordinary reports appear more common than they were.
The traditions represented here produced overwhelmingly more material about discipline, administration, travel, food and dispute than about visions. A collection that takes only the strange pages from each of them will show that religious literature is strange, which is a fact about the collection.
At least one source in this archive is here because nothing happens in it. There will be more.
Places that sound
A few reports in this collection attach a sound to a place that still exists. Montserrat is the clearest: every version of its tradition, however much else they disagree on, has something heard among the rocks, and the rocks are where they were. Others put light in the sky and no sound at all, which is worth noticing in its own right, because it is the kind of detail a retelling tends to add rather than remove.
A sound at a fixed place is different from every other element of a report, for one reason: it is the only one a person can still stand there and check. Not the event, which is gone, but the acoustic environment the event was reported in, which is not. Wind over rock, water, a cave mouth, a chapel, the bells of a monastery down the hill, all of it is ordinary and all of it can be described, and until it has been, a reported sound at such a place is not unaccounted for. It is unexamined.
That is why the participation page asks for accounts of places and, where the site allows it, for recordings made on ordinary days with the conditions written down. Nothing about the collection changes when those arrive. The report stays a report, and no correlate is established by it.
Contribute a source
Primary texts, manuscript links, old photographs, published translations, historical reports in languages this collection cannot yet read. What is most useful is not a strange story but a source somebody else can check.
The sources catalogued here are real: real books, real editions, real people who wrote them down. Cataloguing one does not imply that any archive, library, religious body, scholar, source community, editor, institution or custodian participates in this work, endorses it, or has been approached about it. None has.
Keeping up
This site changes unevenly: sometimes several times in a month, sometimes not for weeks
Two ways to be told instead. Neither of them is a newsletter.
By feed
One entry per report, essay and log note, with its own link and its own date. Nothing is tracked, and this project is never told that you are reading.
By email
One message when something new is documented, nothing else.
There is also a third way, and it is the one this project would rather you took: send us something.