On the evening of April 2, 1968, two Muslim bus mechanics working across the street from a small Coptic church in Zeitoun, a suburb of Cairo, looked up and saw a woman in white standing on the dome of the church. One of them, Farouk Mohammed Atwa, shouted up to her not to jump.

She did not jump. She was not standing on the dome. She was, according to what hundreds of thousands of people would report over the next three years, hovering above it.

The figure appeared again on April 9. Then again. Then several times a week. Then for months. Then for years. The apparitions at St. Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church in Zeitoun continued, intermittently, from April 1968 to 1971. The witnesses included Christians, Muslims, Jews, and people of no religion at all. Conservative estimates place the three-year total at roughly 250,000.

The Egyptian police initially dismissed the sighting as a reflection from street lamps. The government ordered the streetlights disconnected. The figure continued to appear. The government then shut off all electricity within a fifteen-mile radius. The figure continued to appear.

President Nasser reportedly came to observe. Pope Kyrillos VI appointed a commission, and on May 4, 1968 issued a statement confirming the apparitions. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism validated the events and began printing pamphlets. A secular, majority-Muslim government had officially acknowledged an apparition of the Virgin Mary above a Coptic church in its capital.

The skeptical position is this. Sociologists classify the events as mass sociogenic illness, predisposed by religious culture and the national trauma of the 1967 defeat by Israel. Seismologists noted a tenfold increase in local earthquake activity and proposed earthquake lights, though no mechanism has been confirmed. The photographic evidence is weak. Most widely circulated images are acknowledged street-vendor composites, not authenticated photographs.

The figure was luminous. It appeared above a church built on a site where, according to Coptic tradition, the Holy Family rested during their flight into Egypt. It was seen by people of every faith and none. It was investigated by a government with no institutional interest in validating a Christian miracle, and that government said it was real. It lasted three years and then it stopped. Nobody has explained it to everyone's satisfaction.

The church is still there. The dome is still there. The figure is not.

Witnessed. Subscribe.