A mass sighting of celestial phenomena or unidentified flying objects (UFO) occurred in 1561 above Nuremberg (then a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire). Ufologists have speculated that these phenomena may have been extraterrestrial spacecraft. Skeptics assert that the phenomenon was likely to have been another atmospheric phenomena, such as a sun dog,[1] although the print doesn't fit the usual classic description of the phenomena.[2] [3]
A broadsheet news article printed in April 1561 describes a mass sighting of celestial phenomena. The broadsheet, illustrated with a woodcut and text by Hans Glaser, measures 26.2cm (10.3inches) by 38cm (15inches). The document is archived in the prints and drawings collection at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich in Zürich, Switzerland.[4]
According to the broadsheet, around dawn on 14 April 1561, "many men and women" of Nuremberg saw what the broadsheet describes as an aerial battle "out of the sun", followed by the appearance of a large black triangular object and exhausted combattant spheres falling to earth in clouds of smoke. The broadsheet claims that witnesses observed hundreds of spheres, cylinders, and other odd-shaped objects that moved erratically overhead. The woodcut illustration depicts objects of various shapes, including crosses (with or without spheres on the arms), small spheres, two large crescents, a black spear, and cylindrical objects from which several small spheres emerged and darted around the sky at dawn.
The text of the broadsheet has been translated by Ilse Von Jacobi as follows:
According to author Jason Colavito, the woodcut broadsheet became known in modern culture after being published in Carl Jung's 1958 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, a book which analyzed the archetypal meaning of UFOs.[5] Jung expressed a view that the spectacle was most likely a natural phenomenon with religious and military interpretations overlying it. "If the UFOs were living organisms, one would think of a swarm of insects rising with the sun, not to fight one another but to mate and celebrate the marriage flight."[6]
A military interpretation would view the tubes as cannons and the spheres as cannonballs, emphasize the black spearhead at the bottom of the scene, and Glaser's own testimony that the globes fought vehemently until exhausted. A religious view would emphasize the crosses. Jung thinks the images of four globes coupled by lines suggested crossed marriage quaternities and forms the model for "the primitive cross cousin marriage". He also posited that it could also be an individuation symbol and that the association of sunrise suggests "the revelation of the light".[6]