Sunrise, Sunset

But a group of people in nineteen seventeen Portugal experienced something strange. The sun that used to sit in the sky every day suddenly began to dance. It all started with three shepherd children from the ten of Fatima. After a long day of tending sheep in the fields, they began their walk home. It wasn't long before a vision appeared before them. It was the spirits of the Virgin Mary, who told them that she would reveal herself on the thirteenth day of each month for the next six months.

There was just one catch. Only the oldest child, Luccia, would be able to see her. The young girl would then have to tell the others what she had witnessed. On the thirteenth of October, it happened again. News spread. Newspapers published stories about the vision and the prophecy, piquing the interest of people from all over the country. Thousands flocked to Fatima to hopefully witness these miracles themselves. Of course,

not everyone was sold on the children's story. Many, especially those in religious communities, looked down on them with raised eyebrows and a healthy dose of skepticism. But the church's dismissal of the prophecy did not stop seventy thousand people from showing up in the town on October thirteenth of nineteen seventeen. They had come to see for themselves whether it was all true. Now, the stories about what happened

that day vary depending on where you read them. There are witness statements that claim it rained for a while until the sun finally peeked out from behind a cluster of clouds. But the sun didn't look like the sun, at least not like the sun everyone had been used to seeing in the sky. It careened toward the ground, getting closer and closer until it bounced back to its starting point. Then it spun in place and flashed a series of lights in all different colors, like a disco

ball in the sky. According to one local science professor, objects around me, he said, the sky and the atmosphere were of the same color, Everything both near and far had changed, taking on the color of old yellow damask. He went on to remark how everyone around him looked jaundiced on accounts of the yellowish light shining down on them. Some even claimed that their rain soaked clothes and the

muddy ground beneath them had dried instantly. But the event was odd for more than just the obvious reasons of it having occurred in the first place. There was also the small issue of no one else on earth having seen the same thing. As far as anyone else knew, only those who were in Fatima at Portugal witnessed this miracle firsthand. It was such an important incident in the region's history it piqued the curiosity of one father, John Demarchi.

Demarchi was a Catholic priest from Italy who lived in Fatima from nineteen forty three until nineteen fifty, and while he was there, he looked into this so called miracle of the sun and spoke with a number of the eyewitnesses who had been on the ground at the time. He talked with the devout as well as the skeptic

and the non believers about what they had seen. And while some minor details about what exactly had transpired that day differ from one account to the next, not a single person in the tendance denied the sun changing colors and position in the sky. So what might have caused such a fina in the first place. Well. A Polish university professor by the name of Arthur Waerowski suggested the whole thing was just a trick of the light. According to his theory, the dancing colors were part of a

phenomenon known as a sun dog. It was created by ice crystals floating high in the atmosphere and bouncing the light all around. Others believe that it was the work of mass hysteria combined with people staring directly at the sun. You know, the thing that we were told never to do because it could damage your eyesight. The Sun's movements could have been a simple side effect of witnesses having their retinas burned after looking up at the sun for

too long. But the devout disagree to them. The Virgin Mary made a miracle happen right before everyone's eyes. I guess what they say is true. Seeing is believing, even if you might not see anything else ever again after it's over. It was a cool autumn morning when the armored truck pulled up outside a Belgian farm. The doors swung open, and four soldiers barreled out. Each of the men wore navy coveralls imprinted with military patches displaying the

acronym dovo. A farmer was waiting for them at the edge of his field. Dabbing anxiously at his sweaty brow, he waved the soldiers over, then pointed to his tractor. It stood unmoving at the center of a field amidst hills of upturned dirt and broken vegetables. The harvest was mere days away. Earlier that morning, the farmer had been hard at work, rushing to collect the last of his crops,

when something got stuck beneath the tractor. He stopped the engine and climbed down to investigate, expecting to find a large rock, But when he saw what was trapped beneath the tractor's blades, his blood ran cold. With his heart in his throat, he turned and race back to the farmhouse to contact the authorities, And of course Dovo had taken the call, dispatching the soldiers within the hour. So now the men approached the tractor with trained cautiousness, eyes

sweeping over the surrounding area. The leader reached the machine and crouched down, gaze immediately fixing on the object trap beneath. It didn't look like much, just a large cylinder of corroded metal, but the soldier knew better. You see the object, a six pound tube of iron, was an unexploded artillery shell left over from the Great War. The farmer was lucky even now. The bomb could easily have gone off, reducing his tractor and much of the field to a

blackened crater. Or worse, the shell might contain fostering or mustard gas, chemical weapons capable of causing horrific burns and excruciating death. Such gases were used extensively during World War One, when Belgium and its neighbors were subjected to constant bombardment

from German artillery. Roughly of the explosives launched during the war never actually exploded either because their fuses failed or the safety was accidentally triggered, and even all these years later, many of those bombs were still active, buried in the dirt in fields or forests. A small disturbance, like being run over by a tractor or dug up by a

curious child could set them off. The areas where the worst bombing had occurred were now designated as Red zones and were considered so dangerous that they were still off limits to civilians, but even the less dangerous yellow zones like this one were frequently turning up explosives. Whenever a device was discovered, the bomb disposal unit known as DOVO was called in to remove it. Each year since the war, they collected hundreds of tons of unexploded artillery shells, along

with chemical weapons, grenades, bullets, shrapnel, and barbed wire. The bombs were taken to a Dulgian military base where they were examined and destroyed. Some devices were too dangerous for transportation and had to be detonated on site through a controlled explosion. Autumn was always the busiest time of the year for this unit, since farmers were out working in their fields, turning up plenty of soil and exposing whatever was hidden beneath It had led some Dovo members to

affectionately call the season their iron harvest. But it wasn't all fun and games. The work was incredibly dangerous too. Accidents and deaths were not uncommon. The soldiers of the Dovo unit knew that when they put on their uniforms and laced up their boots, they were heading into battle, in a sense, fighting a war that had been over for one hundred years, yes, over a century, Because this particular collection it occurred in twenty twenty three in a

farm near Flanders, Belgium. DOVO is active to this day and still collects hundreds of tons of unexploded weapons every year, and based on the rate the bombs are still turning up, it's safe to assume the unit will be conducting their iron harvest for decades, perhaps even centuries to come. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about

the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.