Chapter 1
The eternal either/or
At worst a fraud, at best a beachhead
In October 1997 UFO believers gathered in Brisbane for an
international convention, spiced, of course, with reports of encounters with
extra terrestrials. Few people gave credence to these reports. Curious how
the ETs have only developed their encounter technology since we began our
interest in space. Or does it go back to H. G. Wells and The War of the
Worlds? Interesting, too, how the secular world has overlooked the extra
terrestrial reports that have been coming through for centuries from the
Catholic Church. Well, perhaps not ETs – rather, BTs – beyond terrestrials.
According to the Church, Jesus, his mother and the saints have appeared to
favoured souls for the counsel and comfort of the faithful. Here is a
consistent tradition – and style – of beyond-natural appearances; and the
record extends over two thousand years. But only the visionaries see the
apparitions. Watchers – great crowds of them in some instances –
sometimes see a ‘sign’; if not, they may find visual and/or audio warranty in
the behaviour of the visionaries, as happened at Lourdes.
Frequently, a shrine and a cult quickly blossom in the wake of the
apparitions. Our Lady of Walsingham attracted pilgrims for centuries,
including King Henry VIII, until the King’s agents smashed it in 1538. Our
Lady of Guadalupe (dating to 1531) in Mexico is another great shrine, still
drawing pilgrims by the millions each year. But the greatest of all is the
shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes.
“Oh, yes,” people say, “but how can we be sure any of that stuff is
true? Over the centuries, you know, these things get worked up and
embellished.”
On that point, a key element of the Lourdes phenomena is the date:
1858 – comparatively recent times. An early beneficiary of a Lourdes
miracle, Justin Bouhohorts, aged two at the time of his cure (in 1858), was
alive in 1935, five years after I was born. Indeed, he was a sprightly
seventy-seven year-old in Rome when Bernadette was canonised in 1933.
So the Lourdes story is not sited in a distant past, where fact and fancy are
in danger of merging in the mists of legend.
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