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In the spring of 1561, many people in and around the German city of Nuremberg
witnessed a swarm of strange, flying objects appear to do battle in the sky.
A local publisher printed a broadsheet that recorded the event
and depicted it in a striking woodcut illustration.
This brief but intriguing account reminds us that UFOs have taken many forms throughout history,
and were not always attributed to extraterrestrials.
Like many UFO events, the sightings over Nuremberg were rich in symbolism, and played upon people’s
hopes and fears in a way that raises interesting questions about the nature of the UFO phenomenon.
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Hanns Glaser was a Lutheran printer and publisher in the Protestant city of Nuremberg,
a major commercial hub of the German-speaking world that had recently fallen into decline.
Glaser had an interest in signs and wonders,
and published accounts of several other sightings in his life.
He wrote in what we’d now call Early New High German,
the last iteration of the language before modern High German.
His broadsheet on the incident at Nuremberg is preserved in the Central Library of Zurich, Switzerland.
In their January 1976 issue, Official UFO magazine included an english translation
by the German Ufologist Ilse Von Jacobi that is now freely available on the internet.
According to Glaser’s account, the sighting over Nuremberg began
between 4 and 5 in the morning on April 14th, 1561.
It was just after sunrise when a number of people within and around the city
saw a “dreadful apparition” in the sky.
The sun turned blood red, and shone red in all directions.
At the same time or later, two blood-red semi-circular arcs like two quarter moons
with their tips pointed downwards appeared in the middle of the sun.
The illustration shows these arcs several times wider than the sun itself.
There were a large number of spherical objects scattered overtop of and around the sun.
Many were blood-red as well, but others were a “partly dull, partly black ferrous color,”
depicted in the image like rusty, blackened iron.
The woodcut shows other colors, too, not addressed in the description.
Many of the spheres were grouped three in a row, or four in a square,
though others were on their own.
Connecting some of these groups of four were blood-red crosses,
and though Glaser doesn’t mention any in the text,
his illustration also shows some crosses that aren’t attached to spheres.
Intermingled amongst all the spheres and crosses were blood-red “strips.”
These strips were all thinner at one end, where they waved in the air
like tall stalks of reed grass, by Glaser’s comparison.
In addition to the spheres, crosses, and strips, there were also “rods” or “tubes” of differing sizes:
Several smaller ones, and one large one on either side of the sun.
Within each of these rods, people saw three or more of the spherical UFOs.
In his 2011 book, Investigating the Impossible,
Ulrich Magin points out that although it is commonly translated as “pipe” today,
the word “rohr” that Glaser used to describe the rods was also used to refer to cannons at the time.
After a time, the various objects appeared to interact with one another
in a way that witnesses interpreted as a battle:
the spheres floating inside the sun flew out to join those on the sides,
while the spheres on the sides, and those inside the tubes, flew into the sun.
Meanwhile, the spheres around the sun flew back and forth amongst themselves,
as if they were fighting one another.
After more than an hour of this activity, it reached its maximum intensity,
and the objects fell out of the sky, “as if they all burned,”
or “as if everything were on fire,” depending on the translation.
It’s unclear if Glaser meant to indicate that they were actually producing flames or not.
Once the objects landed in the fields below, they slowly “wasted” or “faded” away,
producing an immense amount of smoke in the process.
Oddly, the woodcut appears to show the smoke being produced
from open pipe-ends sticking up from the earth.
The last thing that anyone saw in the sky that morning was a black, spear-shaped apparition,
described as being massive in size, and pointing to the west.
It’s unknown if Glaser saw the UFOs himself or not, but he seems to have spoken to those who did.
However, he devoted less than 400 words in the original German to describing the event,
and his account is short on details.
He never estimates the number of people that saw the aerial display, and he doesn’t name witnesses.
What any of them made of the event is uncertain,
as there is no other reference to it in the historical record.
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Without claiming to know in detail the meaning of the frenetic display over Nuremberg,
Glaser viewed it as a clear act of God:
one of many signs that He had sent in recent times to call people to repent for their sins.
However, Glaser felt that the “ungrateful” of his time, or those who dismissed the reality of wonders,
and scoffed at the idea of miracles, would not recognize God’s work.
This kind of ingratitude would undoubtedly provoke God to send a “frightening punishment” on humankind,
unless people immediately repented for their sins.
There were in fact a great number of UFO sightings in the German-speaking countries before 1561,
and afterwards as well.
On June 13th, 1554, residents of the town of Jena, roughly 168 km, or 104 miles north of Nuremberg
saw many large spheres and disk-shaped objects in the sky.
As they flew overhead, they performed drastic changes in speed and turned red in color.
In 1566, the Swiss city of Basel had its own aerial display.
At sunrise, numerous large black spheres appeared in the air, and repeatedly flew into the sun,
and darted towards one another as if they were fighting.
Many of these spheres turned “red and fiery,” and were “consumed” in the air.
As in the sighting over Nuremberg, witnesses described the event as a battle.
As these cases suggest, claims of signs and wonders were not exactly uncommon in early modern Europe.
Historians have unearthed thousands of reports of such anomalies as rains of food, blood, or animals,
and elaborate scenes played out in the sky.
In 16th-century Germany, these events were called Wunderzeichen or “wonder-signs.”
A large number of wonder-signs could just as easily be categorized as UFOs,
and involved objects similar to those seen in the 20th century.
No doubt many of these sightings were due to people misidentifying natural phenomena
such as comets, eclipses, and aurora borealis.
Others, however, are more difficult to explain.
In his 2014 book, Celestial Wonders in Reformation Germany,
Ken Kurihara confirms that sightings involved all manner of objects and apparitions.
A large number of signs were ominous:
many people saw funeral processions, armies of soldiers, and great battles in the sky,
either between soldiers, ships, or more ambiguous forms, like the spheres over Nuremberg.
Kurihara notes that German churchmen discussed wonder-signs often,
and frequently interpreted them as signs of the End Times.
After all, Jesus had warned in the Bible that “there will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars”
preceding his return from heaven, before the Final Judgement.
Lutherans were particularly preoccupied with End Times predictions, and the perceived increase
in the number of celestial wonders confirmed their belief in an imminent apocalypse.
Like Glaser, nearly all churchmen who reported wonder-signs
included an admonishment to turn to God or face disaster.
It’s likely that those who saw the UFOs over Nuremberg interpreted them as a sign of troubled times ahead,
and an urgent call to repent.
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As in the case of countless other miracle claims in medieval and early modern Europe,
there is only one account of the event, and there is no way of ascertaining
what it was that people saw, if anything at all.
Because of the lack of corroborating evidence,
academics have generally avoided questions about what wonder-signs actually were
in terms of atmospheric or psychological phenomena, for example.
Instead, they have focused on the social, political, and spiritual meaning
ascribed to the events, and their role in human affairs.
Kurihara admits that many wonder-signs are very difficult to explain.
He suggests only that the more unusual ones were “collective illusions”
grounded in peoples’ “inner concerns” and precipitated by meteorological events.
No one seems to have attempted to provide a naturalistic explanation for the UFOs over Nuremberg
until Frank Johnson’s 2012 article for AncientAliensDebunked.com.
Johnson concluded that the apparitions were the result of a “sun dog” event,
also known as a “mock sun,” or a parhelion.
This optical phenomenon occurs when sunlight is refracted through ice crystals in the atmosphere,
causing viewers on the ground to see several arcs of light in the sky.
Glaser clearly details the presence of two large arcs across the sun,
which could very well be indicative of a sun dog event.
However, the same explanation cannot account for the battling spheres,
the waving strips, or the cylindrical UFOs.
Johnson posits that the objects that appeared to fall to the ground were actually “fallstreaks,”
which are caused when ice crystals form in clouds and fall to earth, leaving “punch-holes” in their place.
Ice crystals would likely be present in a sundog event, if in fact one had occurred,
but Glaser didn’t mention any clouds, let alone clouds with holes in them,
and fallstreaks would not have left anything substantial on the ground below, or produced any smoke.
Finally, Johnson argues that the black, spear-shaped UFO was a crepuscular ray, or sunbeam.
However, crepuscular rays only appear when the sun is obscured by clouds, or hidden below the horizon,
and Glaser made it clear that the spear appeared over an hour after sunrise.
Kurihara notes that people saw sun dogs often in the sixteenth century, but depictions of these events
were not nearly as elaborate as Glaser’s account of the incident at Nuremberg.
It doesn’t seem that Glaser was in the habit of exaggerating stories, either.
He documented many other remarkable occurrences in his publishing career,
including an incidence of blood-red rain that occurred southwest of Nuremberg on May 26th, 1554,
and three more celestial events near the city in the next twelve years.
The images that he made of these events contain only minor, stylistic embellishments,
like the addition of faces to the suns.
True to the artistic conventions of the time, the Nuremberg broadsheet clearly shows
an amalgam of events that actually occurred in succession,
but the appearance of the objects is generally true to the written description.
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After its initial circulation, the broadsheet was mostly forgotten about until Swiss Psychoanalyst
Carl Jung revisited it in the context of the contemporary discussion of UFOs, or “flying saucers.”
He also made reference to the incident in Basel,
and brought it to the attention of contemporary ufologists.
Jung took a keen interest in the post-war UFO phenomenon,
and struggled to reconcile the clear signs of psychological projection evident in many sightings
with the incontrovertible evidence of the UFOs’ physical reality.
In his 1958 book, translated into English as
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies,
Jung provided a brief analysis of Glaser’s broadsheet.
He felt that the incident had clear analogies to contemporary “saucer stories,”
and speculated that 20th-century witnesses might have interpreted the same little spheres as UFOs,
and the tubes as “mother-ships.”
Glaser’s account sounds different largely because he was describing the event
within his own frame of reference, seeing 16th-century military technologies like cannons and cannonballs
in the same way that modern westerners see alien flying machines.
Jung believed that beneath these culture-bound assumptions was a deeper,
more universal truth, encoded in the same symbolic language as our dreams.
He felt that the huge black spear and the pointed “strips” represented masculinity,
for example, and suggested that the crosses signified a “union of opposites,” or a “union of the ‘four.’”
He likened the whole display over Nuremberg to a swarm of insects rising with the sun
and mating, while celebrating the “marriage flight.”
What any of this might have meant to 16th-century germans is uncertain.
Like Jung, Kurihara also sees a lot of symbolism in 16th-century wonder-signs,
and believes that witnesses were engaging in a certain amount of projection.
He argues that the popularity of wonder-signs was due to the fears that people had
regarding changing power structures, religious conflict, natural disasters, and the threat of foreign invasions.
In his 1982 book, Flying Saucers – Magic in the Skies, Psychiatrist and historian, Otto Billig,
also noted the similarities between early-modern and 20th-century UFOs,
and suggested a link to psychological factors.
Nuremberg was a prosperous city in the first half of the sixteenth century,
but it was caught up in the political fallout of a princes’ revolt against
King Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, and attacked by rebel forces in 1552.
The attack left much of the city destroyed, and disrupted critical trading networks,
which incited city authorities to impose burdensome taxation.
Billig proposed that the sightings were in some way a manifestation
of peoples’ collective fear and anxiety about their futures in Nuremberg.
The same link to trauma, anxiety, and collective suffering
has been proposed of modern UFOs and many other anomalous phenomena.
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In the history of early modern wonder-signs, the sightings over Nuremberg were not entirely unique,
but they involved an unusually large number of objects, and a great deal of activity.
Today, ufologists commonly reference this sighting as a way of establishing the long history of the phenomenon,
and highlighting some of the ways in which it’s been interpreted in different times and places.
In early Modern Europe, UFOs were nearly always interpreted in a religious framework,
and imagined to be supernatural phenomena, rather than strictly physical objects.
This had drastic implications for the ways in which sightings were recorded,
and it makes it difficult to compare events like the incident at Nuremberg to modern UFO reports.
However, if there is a link to the post-war phenomenon, it may lie in a common connection to times of trouble,
and experiences of collective suffering.
(Sources are listed in the video description.)
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