>But I think the fact that both just happened to take place in atmospheres of religious fervor, with thousands of pilgrims massed at a holy site, rules that out.

Rules what out? That both solar phenomena were natural? Why?

>Not to mention, images of a Buddhist holy man in the sky would be hard to explain in meteorological terms.

True, but the best explanation for this is suggestion. (This is also probably the best explanation for the testimonies at Fatima to visions of the Holy Family, even from a Catholic perspective.) Notably, Wikipedia says that the meditation technique that the Buddhist temple in question is famous for propagating involves mentally picturing a crystal clear Buddha statue and/or a crystal orb centered in one’s abdomen: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D….

Most of the testimony I can find says that the attendees saw the miracle just after they had finished meditating. So, people claimed to see a crystal orb centered in the abdomen of a Buddha statue after they had just spent a very long time with their eyes closed mentally picturing crystal Buddha statues and crystal orbs centered in their abdomens. In light of this, the suggestion hypothesis is pretty plausible. (By the way, the Wikipedia page links to a scholarly anthology. I haven’t had a chance to read the relevant chapter yet, but if I can get access to it later, I’ll let you know.)

>Maybe. More meteorological data needed. But even in the evening, stating directly into the sun is rarely sustainable for long.

True – the cloud dimming hypothesis is more viable than in the case of Fatima, but it’s still not great.

>I’m more ready to say there was NO rapid drying. There may have been. But after all, when we’re asking if people’s close miraculously dried, we’re ALSO relying on their subjective testimony.

We have both testimonial and photographic confirmation of rapid drying in the case of Fatima, so it’s pretty secure. Convergence between eyewitness testimony and photographs is pretty unimpeachable.

>ehhhh part of the argument for Fatima is supposed to be that mass crowd hallucinations like this don’t happen, right? What would evidence that they DO happen look like if not something like this?

I don’t think that’s part of the best argument for Fatima. The biggest reasons I don’t think the Miracle of the Sun can be explained by crowd psychology are because (1) the same phenomenology was reported by distant witnesses who couldn’t have been affected by the crowd and (2) there was rapid drying, and crowd psychology can’t dry clothes.

>I think it’s kind of hard to come up with a supernaturalist hypothesis. If God exists but religious pluralism is true it’s weird for him to do miracles that seem to vindicate exclusive religious claims.

I think the best supernaturalistic hypothesis is that this is a counterfeit miracle. Incidentally, Catholic demonology predicts that there would be lots of these, and that they would mimic the most impressive Catholic miracles.