L. A. Marzulli Claims "Groundbreaking" New Documentary Has "Smoking Gun" Proving Fatima Apparition Came from Satan

​Yesterday, Nephilim theorist L. A. Marzulli announced that he had discovered the smoking gun proving that the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Fatima in 1917 was actually the work of Satan as part of a carefully orchestrated plot involving the Catholic Church, UFOs, and demons. The announcement coincides with the beginning of his publicity campaign for Fatima 2: Electric Boogaloo, er, Fatima 2: Strange Phenomenon, a new documentary he is selling to evangelical Christians. 

​I don’t really have the energy to give this story a massive and suggestive buildup before undercutting the argument. Suffice it to say that in May 1917 three Portuguese children claimed to see a female figure that they called the Lady of the Rosary, who imparted to them supposed secrets. Five months later, thousands gathered to see a miracle performed by the Lady. Many, but not all, of those gathered claimed to have seen something happen to the sun, though few agreed as to what they saw. Marzulli goes back to that first apparition on May 13, 1917 and believes he can prove Satan was behind it.
 
Although Marzulli calls his film “groundbreaking” and only hints in a roundabout way that this information came from elsewhere, it is not original to him, nor is it new. He is adapting claims made by Joaquim Fernandes and Fina D'Armada in their book Celestial Secrets, which is an ancient astronaut text (it was endorsed by Jim Marrs, who wrote the foreword) claiming Fatima as a UFO event. As always, there is less than meets the eye. Let’s look at a couple of the claims.
 
First, let’s examine the claim from Marzulli that psychics in league with Satan announced the Fatima miracles before they occurred:

Remember too that a group of mediums had received a message using the occult means of automatic writing stating that something wondrous would happen in Portugal on May 13. They published this in several papers!
 
Automatic writing is a technique used by occultist to contact entities. However, this is forbidden to do as the entities who are contacted are fallen angels or demons. They lie and do so habitually.
 
What is astonishing is the entity that was channeled through the mediums identified itself as The Bright Morning Star. Need I say more?

​Well… The story isn’t quite as clear as all that. On May 10, 1917, an occult group ran a classified add bearing the code 135917 and stating “Do not forget the happy day when our martyrdom shall end. The war they bring us shall conclude.” This appears to be a “prophecy” of the supped imminent end of the Great War. The numerical code is interpreted as referring to 13 May 1917, though this is not necessarily the case. Either way, the war did not end then but continued until November 11, 1918. A second notice, from a different occult group, took the form of a letter to the editor from a pseudonymous “Antonio” and ran on May 13 under the heading “The War and Spiritualism.” It read, in my translation:

---

Porto, 11 May 1917.

​Dear Editors:
 
It was imparted by the Spirits, to various Spiritualist groups, that on the thirteenth day of the current month something will occur regarding the war that will impress all the people.
 
I have the honor to sign my name to this. A Spiritualist and dedicated propagandist of truth.--Antonio.

​This was one of dozens or even hundreds of predictions about the war that were published in European papers of the era, of note only because it mentions the same day as the Fatima apparition, even though on the surface if has little relationship to it.
 
The argument is that the Portuguese kids couldn’t have known about these newspaper ads because they couldn’t read and therefore couldn’t have chosen the date for their apparition based on what their friends and family were already expecting to happen. That’s a stretch. The Portuguese authors also dismiss the idea that the two newspaper pieces are related by alleging that the two psychic groups were unrelated. But does that really mean that the two groups of Spiritualists in the same city never communicated with one another? That’s another stretch, especially since the letter of Antonio mentions the date being shared by various​ Spiritualist groups. And there is also the even more probable solution that the date is merely a coincidence.
 
To this is added a 1974 claim that automatic writing produced by Carlos Calderon in one of these spiritualist groups stands behind the claim and are its source. The relevant lines of the message read this way in the translation in common circulation:

The day 13th of May shall be a day of great joy for all the good spirits of the world. Have faith and be good. Ego Sum Charitas. Thou shall always have thy friends at thy side, who will guide thee and help thee on thy work. Ego Sum Charitas. The brilliant light of the Morning Star shall light thy way.

​So, basically, some guy generates an “automatic” message, the psychic friends network in Portugal starts spreading it around, and whether by intention or coincidence the kids claim to see an entity on the appointed day and time. There are plenty of non-supernatural ways to parse that order of events.
 
But it’s interesting to note that “the brilliant light of the Morning Star” shades into something different by the time we get to apparition time. Marzulli makes much of the so-called “fourth witness” of Fatima, who saw a blond androgynous child running about and flying in the air. “There’s another important fact to consider and it is this; there are no blond-haired children in Portugal,” Marzulli said. Leaving aside the fact that it was 1917 when international travel wasn’t exactly unheard of, about one in five Portuguese is a natural blond. It’s kind of racists to stereotype a whole country as swarthy dark Latins.
 
Anyway, Marzulli goes on: “We also discovered that only one day before the May 13th apparition in Fatima another entity appeared to a shepherd-boy telling the boy not to be afraid. This entity identified itself as The Bright Morning Star. We are told in scripture who this refers to and it’s another name for Lucifer.” According to Celestial Secrets, there were actually many different sightings in the area in 1916 and 1917 of blond angels, including one without a head (!) and one around whom rocks fell from the sky. You could read this as build up to Mary’s appearance, but more likely it points to a cultural expectation of angelic appearance that created the conditions for many different people to fantasize similar religious apparitions. Interestingly, the earliest version has the figure as a person in a white sheet, and only later does it become an angel in glowing robes as different people remix the story for “new” sightings.
 
But on to the Morning Star. Note that the Spiritualists didn’t say that they were communicating with Lucifer, the Latin name of the Morning Star. Indeed, the Scriptures don’t really call Satan the Morning Star. That’s a gloss on the prophecy of Isaiah (14:12), which wasn’t originally written of Satan, and doesn’t actually use the Hebrew word for Venus as the morning star. It literally says “shining one.” Instead, the Scriptures do tell us who the Morning Star will be in the End of Days: “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star” (Rev. 22:16, NIV). Notice the exact wording used by the Spiritualists and by the apparition. The angels in general are also called morning stars in Job 38:6-7.
 
So, a plain reading of the text pretty much shows that there isn’t anything Satanic going on here, but rather the people who were imagining encounters with angels knew their Bible better than Marzulli. During World War I, people thought they were living through the End of Days. It is no surprise that some started to see Revelation enacted around them.