Medieval UFO sightings
By: S Pats
Tags: Space, History, Medieval, UFO, Nonfiction

Medieval UFO Sightings

Fact or fiction?

UFOs have been around for thousands of years, but their explanations are always changing. Taken at face value, Unidentified Flying Object just means something that flies about which we can’t make any concrete statement on what it is.

In prehistoric times, a UFO would probably be explained as a bird. In the days of the ancient Greeks, a visit from Zeus. In medieval times, an omen from God, and in our modern age, advanced spacecraft from space.

While there is no hard evidence of extraterrestrial visitation on Earth, there are interesting records that would get even a skeptic interested. One such record of an extraordinary event is that of the 16th century celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg.

In 1561, a German broadsheet newspaper in the town of Nuremberg was released. An illustration covered the entire length of the paper, done by a local artist called Hanns Glaser. The contents? Judge for yourself:

While a little hard to read as english translated from gothic German, the news article reads:

‘In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country — by many men and women. At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the colour was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous colour. Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left. These all started to fight among themselves……..After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows.’

It is also mentioned in later articles from that period that some of the balls of light crashed in the neighboring fields, only to evaporate into smoke.

Certainly, something interesting happened over the skies of Germany that day.

As with all extraordinary phenomena, this one also has its detractors, as it should — it does sound like a great piece of medieval science-fiction.

Some say that this was an example of a sundog — where sunlight is reflected off ice crystals in the atmosphere to create the illusion of multiple points of light in the sky.

However, that theory fails to explain the erratic movements of the orbs or the black spear-shaped object.

A more likely explanation is given by the late great psychologist Carl Jung who believed that this was a case of mass delusion or, at the least, a natural occurrence with religious interpretations. For example, the orbs fighting could have the mating dances of birds/insects.