A UAP Craze in Renaissance Europe

Thanks for tuning back into the BeX Files! Put on your time-travel protective gear because we are going back 500 years to the wild UAP craze that took place in Renaissance Europe.

Imagine that you were to wake up one day and witness the spectacular scene portrayed above. This vision of weapons, warfare, and blood spilled in the skies is what residents of Nuremberg, Germany, claim confronted them at dawn on April 14, 1561. 

It was recorded for posterity by the local woodcut illustrator Hans Glaser, whose phantasmagoric illustration accompanied a broadsheet with commentary about the event. You can read the full text here, but the upshot is that witnesses reported a series of shapes—crescents, crosses, and globes—emerging from the blood-red rising Sun and getting embroiled in a celestial battle that lasted more than an hour. When it was done, the combatants fell exhausted and went up in smoke. The apparition ended with the appearance of a huge black spear in the sky with its tip pointed west.   

Five years later, the residents of Basel, Switzerland, witnessed a similar phenomenon that occurred in the late summer of 1566. At sunset on July 27,  the Sun seemed to dim, shrink, and weep blood. On August 7, the town witnessed black spheres in the sky moving with great speed. As with the Nuremberg event, the shapes fell into battle, became exhausted, and were incinerated. Two Samuels (Apiarius and Coccius) teamed up to record the summer sightings in an illustrated leaflet, though neither had witnessed it firsthand, according to the Swiss National Museum. 

The celestial event over Basel on 7 August 1566. Pamphlet by Samuel Apiarius and Samuel Coccius.

The weird celestial sightings in Nuremberg and Basel were part of a broader phenomenon of sky omens reported throughout Europe during the 16th century. But they stand out because of their proximity in time and space—the two cities are only 200 miles apart—and the similarity of the sightings.

People have puzzled over the origin of this phenomena for centuries. Ufologists have suggested they could have been alien visitors, while others have attributed them to natural causes. For example, sunlight filtering through the atmosphere can produce “sundogs,” which are bright curved flares. The 1565 work “Vädersolstavlan” by painter Jacob Heinrich Elbfas depicts a radiant sun-dog sighting over Stockholm, Sweden, and expresses the otherworldly appearance of these natural events.  

“Vädersolstavlan.” Jacob Heinrich Elbfas 

My favorite hare-brained theory, floated in this article from Public Domain Review, links the 1540 publication of Vannoccio Biringuccio’s De La Pirotechnia, an early manual about how to launch rockets, to the strange sightings. Were these celestial apparitions just fireworks made by amateur DIY pyro pranksters? Probably not, but the hypothesis gets points for originality.

Ultimately, there is no satisfying modern explanation that fits well these strange visions from the past. But for the witnesses of the 1560s events, the message was clear.

“Although we have seen, shortly one after another, many kinds of signs in heaven, which are sent to us by the almighty God, to bring us to repentance, we still are, unfortunately, so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and miracles of God,” Hans Glaser wrote in the Nuremberg broadsheet. “After all, the God-fearing will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful Father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God, that He may avert His wrath, including the well-deserved punishment, on us, so that we may temporarily here and perpetually there, live as his children.”

The Basel leaflet includes similar warnings of an angry God that demands repentance. It goes to show that any interpretation of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) is bound to be warped by the cultural preoccupations of the witnesses. This is a big theme in First Contact and continues to be one of the most fascinating dynamics in our long-time obsession with aliens. 

And while we’re on the topic of hair-raising extraterrestrial phenomena, welcome to week 3 of the Search for ExtraTERRORestrial Life, my October bracket to discover the Scariest Alien (recap here). Our second alien-on-alien tournament left four aliens dead in the dust, and four winners ready to face the next challenger.

The Blob out-blobbed the Shimmer. The Martians from The War of the Worlds out-slurped the Killer Klowns from Outer Space. The Xenomorphs over-ran Jean Jacket. And the Reapers timed out the Mimics. It’s now the Blob versus the Xenomorphs and the Martians versus the Reapers. Who should advance to the final round? Email me at thebxfiles@gmail.com with your picks.

Thanks again for subscribing to the BeX Files! Meet you at the cosmic rest stop next Friday.