be significantly duller than normal, and to cast multicolored lights across the landscape, the people, and the surrounding clouds. The Sun was then reported to have careened towards the Earth before zig-zagging back to its normal position. Witnesses reported that their previously wet clothes became "suddenly and completely dry, as well as the wet and muddy ground that had been previously soaked because of the rain that had been falling". Not all witnesses reported seeing the Sun "dance". Some people only saw the radiant colors, and others, including some believers, saw nothing at all. The only known picture of the Sun taken during the event does not show anything unusual. No unusual phenomenon of the Sun was observed by scientists at the time. Skeptics have offered alternative explanations that include psychological suggestibility of the witnesses, temporary retinal distortion caused by staring at the intense light of the Sun, and optical effects caused by natural meteorological phenomena. Controversy In De Marchi's account, he describes Manuel Formigao, the priest who interviewed the children during the apparitions, as alarmed by a discrepancy between a prophecy the children reported, and the current circumstances. According to the children, their apparition predicted that the First World War would end on 13 October 1917. "But listen Lúcia," De Marchi reports Formigao saying, "The war is still going on. The papers give news of battles after the 13th. How can you explain that if our Lady said the war would end that day?" Lúcia replied, "I don't know; I only know that I heard her say that the war would end on that day [...] I said exactly what our Lady had said." Jacinta, the youngest child, was interrogated separately and said the same: "She [Mary] said that we were to say the Rosary every day and that the war would end today." World War I ended a year later on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918. De Marchi documented that in the two years prior to the deaths of Francisco and Jacinta Marto in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the three children periodically refused food and water, or else drank dirty water such as from a laundry pond, as a penance; De Marchi noted that Jacinta's mother had forbidden drinking from the pond due to the risk of illness. De Marchi wrote, "In the scorching sun of the serra, when through the bright hours of the day the