Our Lady Mary

(as discovered by Bridge To the Paranormal members Marc and Kevin)

Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ, commonly called "The Virgin Mary"  has  reportedly been seen by visionaries over many centuries.   But nobody knows for sure what she really looked like.   However, a photo taken at Garabandal, Spain in 1962 may very well reveal how Mary looked at the age of 18 over 2000 years ago.  Below is the real photo,  the story behind it, and how Marc and Kevin discovered it! 

Garabandal is a small village in an isolated valley in the Cantabrian Mountains of Northwest Spain. In 1961, when the apparitions of The Virgin Mary and St. Michael the Archangel began, the village had no electricity, no telephones, no technology, and the villagers, especially the children, had no knowledge of how anything like that worked.

  As the apparitions became famous, people from all over Europe and the United States flooded the village, taking photographs, 8mm recordings, and audio recordings of the four visionaries while they were in the ecstatic state that overtook them when Our Lady or St. Michael appeared.  On one occasion in September, 1962, a Jesuit priest was talking to Mari Loli in the kitchen of Conchita's house. Loli was expecting an apparition because she had received the last of three interior calls that told them Our Lady was coming.  Since the apparition began within a minute or less after the final call, the priest moved quickly. He handed his camera to Mari Loli, but before he could say anything at all, the visionary fell to her knees in ecstasy, thus rendering her incommunicado with anyone outside the rapture state.

In the course of the apparition, Mari Loli told the Blessed Virgin Mary that she wanted to take Her picture, but she didn't know how. Since the cameras at that time required many steps before taking an actual photo, what followed completely astonished the priest and the other onlookers.  The Blessed Virgin told the girl that she first had to open the bellows, then she had to advance the roll of film, make another adjustment, then look at Her through the eyepiece, and press the photo button. To those watching the girl, they saw her ask the Virgin (whom they couldn't of course see) her first question, then look at the camera and then glanced back and forth from camera to Mary, because it was obvious to the onlookers that the girl was receiving detailed instructions, including where to find the the objects on the camera that she needed to control.

After the picture was taken, the apparition continued, and when it was over, Loli handed the camera back to Father (N.). The priest was amazed at what he saw, although he never once considered that Our Lady would be in the developed photograph simply because Loli was photographing something that was invisible to the camera.

When the film was developed, Father brought the "Virgin's Photograph" with him the next time he went to Garabandal, and he showed it to Mari Loli. All he and the visionary could see was the ceiling in Conchita's kitchen. But when Loli had an apparition of the Virgin later that day, she showed Her the photograph and asked Her if She was in the picture.  The Virgin showed the girl the way to hold the photo, and then indicated where She could be found on the photograph. Mari Loli complained that Mary could not be seen very well. The Virgin smiled and said that She had been well photographed, and even if Her image came out completely clear, it would not have made Father believe any more in the apparitions than he already did.

THE ANALYSIS OF OUR LADY'S PHOTOGRAPH

This first photo shows the normal orientation that the picture was taken. The ceiling and beams in Conchita's kitchen can be seen, as well as some of the vegetables and spices hanging down from them. Part of a window can be  seen in the bottom left hand portion.

The Blessed Virgin, however, told Mari Loli to turn the photo vertically, and then showed her where She could be found.  Below is the correct orientation as shown to Mary Loli:

The main clues in finding Her were the following:

#1. Mari Loli complained that Our Lady couldn't be seen "clearly"

#2. Our Lady assured Loli that nonetheless, She had indeed been "well-photographed."

#3. The correct orientation of the photo completely distorts what the eye first sees in this new orientation; there is nothing but various chaotic shades of grey and nothing obvious.

#4. We had a very precise physical description of Our Lady's face, as given by the four visionaries, particularly Conchita, in her now-famous Diary. So we knew what Our Lady would look like if we found Her.

In the 16 years Marc worked for the Mount Carmel Garabandal Center based in Lindenhurst, New York, under the leadership of Joey Lomangino (the "blind Apostle" of Garabandal), the photo had been seen by everybody there, and no one could ever show him where Mary was in the picture, including Barry Hanratty, who had complete access to all the photographic, video, audio, and written archives involving Garabandal, not to mention easy access to three of the visionaries whom he interviewed on several occasions: Conchita, Mari Loli, and Jacinta.

When Marc and Barry were examining the photo one afternoon in the archive room, the two of them searched the photo over, and came up with nothing. "Some people see a robe here, a shoulder there, but I really don't know what I see," Barry told him.

Over the years, Marc has studied the photograph and aside from seeing what was maybe a left eye, and lips, which were the only "obvious-looking" features, he could never "decode" the Virgin's Photograph, and put it aside with the thought that perhaps mankind would not see Our Lady clearly until after the Great Miracle when all the loose ends of the Garabandal events would be tied up.

However, on April 6, 2002 a breakthrough seemed to occur when Marc decided to show the photograph to Kevin, since the two of them had been studying alleged spirit photographs.  Marc brought the picture up on his computer, and showed Kevin the correct orientation needed to see Our Lady, according to Mari Loli. All of a sudden, it struck Marc like a bolt of lightning. He said to Kevin, "I know where She is!" and indicated the left eye and temple, and the lips, but explained that features of the ceiling in Conchita's house separated the two. Marc printed out the picture, grabbed some scissors, and cut the facial features he had seen and pasted them in the same orientation as in the picture, but having closed in the spaces between them that were being taken up by the ceiling beams. The partial face of a woman was undeniable.

 Marc and Kevin then proceeded to search the rest of the picture, realizing that it was a puzzle, and the remaining features of Our Lady were somewhere hidden in the rest of the picture.  Thus the first clue:

Our Lady could not been seen "clearly".

 That is because nobody thought of the photo as a puzzle; everyone expected to just see Her there if they just examined it long enough (similar to the hidden3D "Magic Eye" pictures that became available later in the early 1990's.)

The second clue was then fully understood by Kevin and Marc: Our Lady, to use Her own words had indeed been "well-photographed"; and if you wanted to see Her, then put the puzzle together!  A skeptic at this point would say: "Why would She play games like that?" Marc's answer is this: Since no one expected Her to come out in the photograph, since She was invisible at the time it was taken, the only way to show that Mari Loli had operated the camera properly, was to show the normal environment: Conchita's kitchen.

Thus clue #3 was the essential key: whereas Kevin and Marc couldn't help but turn the photo various ways to see if they could find the other features, Marc insisted that they could only be found in the orientation that Mari Loli had insisted on.

In less than fifteen minutes, Kevin and Marc found what they feel are the remaining features.

According to the four Garabandal visionaries, and as documented by Conchita in her Diary we know that:

1. Mary appeared to them as She was at the age of 18.

2. Mary has an oval-shaped face

3. Her dark brown hair is parted in the center

4. Her nose is long, but well-proportioned

5. She has "rather full lips"

The final interpretation of Our Lady in Her photograph show all of these features. The visionaries always insisted, no matter how dedicated artists were to paint Her exactly according to their descriptions, that no representation comes anywhere near the actual features and beauty of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

One thing that stood out was the part in the center of Mary's hair: the hair is not pressed down to follow the curve of the scalp as the currently-available paintings of Our Lady of Garabandal . The photo shows that Her hair is indeed parted perfectly in the center, but actually has "body" to it.

But there is ONE FEATURE not mentioned by the visionaries' descriptions of Our Lady's face, and has never been captured in any of the existing reproductions done by Garabandal artists, and was hitherto impossible to show:

THE UNDENIABLE JEWISH IDENTITY OF THE WOMAN IN THIS PHOTOGRAPH!!

For Marc and Kevin, this Semitic Identity is the one thing above all others that proves to them that they have identified the actual photograph of Our Lady taken at Garabandal in September, 1962, by visionary Mari Loli, in Conchita's kitchen. And Finally, we have a picture of Our Lady at Garabandal where She actually looks about the age of 18.

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