On the night of April 2, 1968, two Muslim mechanics working at a garage across the street from a Coptic church in Zeitoun, a district of Cairo, looked up and saw a woman in white standing on the church dome. They thought she was about to jump, and one of them ran to call the police.
Then she began to glow.
That was the first night. The apparitions over St. Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church continued for nearly three years. Sometimes a few minutes, sometimes hours. A luminous figure in flowing robes walking across the roof, kneeling before the cross, bowing to the crowd. Glowing shapes like doves circling the dome. Flashes of light that witnesses compared to sheet lightning.
The crowds grew to tens of thousands a night, Christians and Muslims standing shoulder to shoulder in the street. Egyptian police searched a fifteen mile radius for a projector and found nothing. President Nasser himself is reported to have come to see it. Newspaper photographers took pictures that still exist, showing a bright, human shaped light above the dome.
The Coptic Church investigated and formally recognized the apparitions. Very few events of this kind have ever been photographed. Fewer still were witnessed by people of two faiths at once, in a modern capital city, over hundreds of nights.
What if something was trying to be seen by everyone, not just the faithful.
Mass suggestion under a lit sky, or the Virgin Mary standing over Cairo?
What do you think about this? The Dropa Stones, 716 grooved stone discs said to be found in Chinese caves in 1938 beside small bodied skeletons, telling of a crash 12,000 years ago. The 1978 book that spread the story was admitted to be a hoax. Pure fiction, or a truth wrapped in lies?
What do you think about this? The Paiute of Nevada told of red haired giants they trapped in a cave and burned, written down in 1883. In 1911 miners near Lovelock opened a cave and found red haired mummies and a layer of ash. Legend that matched a cave, or memory of real enemies?
What do you think about this? In 1987 a Wisconsin family bought a used bunk bed. Within weeks their kids were sick, a radio changed stations by itself, and a chair rocked with no one in it. They fled in the night in 1988 and burned the bed. Old house, or something that came with it?
What do you think about this? In 1904 an American dredged the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá and pulled up gold disks, jade, wooden idols and the bones of more than 200 people, many of them children. The Maya called such wells doorways to the underworld. Prayers for rain, or an open door?
What do you think about this? Norse settlers lived in Greenland for nearly 500 years, with farms, a cathedral and a bishop. The last record is a wedding at Hvalsey church on Sept 16, 1408. Then nothing. The church still stands, roofless and empty. Starved out, or walked away?
What do you think about this? In 1615 a Spanish pearl ship is said to have sailed into an inland sea that then dried up. In 1870 a Los Angeles paper reported its hull found in the desert near the Salton Sea. Every searcher since has lost it to the sand. Mirage, or a galleon in the dunes?
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