It was exactly ten minutes after seven on
Thursday evening, June 12, that Mrs. Lela Bass, 73, stood combing her
long gray hair in the backyard of her white frame house in Port Neches,
Texas. Casually she turned and saw for the first time an eerie outline
etched in the plastic of her backdoor screen: a bearded, long-haired
man with a halo, looking east toward a fig tree in the yard. It was,
she was certain, Jesus Christ. Neighbors spread the word, and since
then, more than 50,000 curious visitors have descended on the Bass home
to share her vision. Port Neches is a bleak Gulf Coast industrial town that is also intensely
religious. On Sundays, most of its 10,000 inhabitants troop loyally to
one or another of the town's 35 churches; some have so much
fundamentalist fear of the Lord that they respectfully refer to Jesus
as “Mr. Christ.” The shared excitement over the phenomenon has brought
blacks and whites together in a proximity unusual for Port Neches; but
the two races sometimes differ on what they see. One white farmer, who
claims that he has taken some 25 photographs showing images of “the
Christ Child, the Virgin Mary, the Three Wise Men, and angels,” scoffed
at Negro viewers. “These niggers come away saying they've seen Martin
Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and J.F.K. Boy, those people sure have an
imagination.” No Tampering. The tide of visitors keeps a constant daily crowd of 300
to 500 people on hand from dawn until late evening, reducing the Bass's
backyard to dust and littering it with Polaroid film waste. Mrs. Bass,
though, rejoices that the vision has brought her 78-year-old husband
back to churchgoing. She is undisturbed by the variety of reported
visions and by the relic hunters
who tore her fig tree apart for souvenirs and crushed what was left of
it. According to TIME Correspondent David De Voss, “There is an image on the
screen—a profile view of a man that looks like the picture of Christ
we all know. There appears to have been no tampering with the screen.”
The most likely rational explanation is that the screen acquired the
image by the effects of normal weathering and its juxtaposition over an
inner screen. But for Mrs. Bass the image is a true “sign from God.”
She believes now that it explains a mysterious “revelation” she had
some 35 years ago, when, one day in prayer, she saw “hundreds of saved
people coming toward me.” Saved or not, at week's end they were still
coming.
