What happened
In 1953 Tiffany Thayer's Fortean magazine Doubt published what it called a translation of an Egyptian papyrus found among the papers of Alberto Tulli, a former director of the Egyptian department at the Vatican Museums. The supplier was Prince Boris de Rachewiltz. The text described 'circles of fire' appearing over Egypt in the 22nd year of Thutmose III. The scribes threw themselves on their bellies, the circles multiplied and outshone the sun, Pharaoh and his army watched them rise towards the south, and fish and birds fell from the sky. The story spread through flying-saucer books and became a staple of ancient-astronaut literature. No one has ever produced the papyrus. Rachewiltz later admitted he had never seen it. When the Condon Report's researchers cabled the Vatican in 1968, the Egyptian section replied that the papyrus was not Vatican property and was untraceable.
The official explanation
Several lines of evidence show the text is modern. Rachewiltz admitted to Gianfranco Nolli, Tulli's successor, that he had never seen the papyrus, and said he had worked from notes Tulli supposedly made in Cairo in 1934. Nolli suspected Tulli 'was taken in and that the papyrus is a fake'. In the Condon Report (1968), Samuel Rosenberg showed a dozen close parallels with the Book of Ezekiel. In 2006 Egyptologist Marcello Garbagnati found that every line of the hieroglyphic 'transcription' was copied from example sentences in Alan Gardiner's textbook Egyptian Grammar (1927). Vallee and Aubeck also rejected it.
The anomalous case
There is no credible anomalous case, and the archive says so. The best that defenders ever offered was second-hand. Rachewiltz said Tulli had copied a real papyrus seen briefly at a Cairo dealer's in 1934, and that the French Egyptologist Etienne Drioton had judged it genuine but thought it described a meteorite. Garbagnati's discovery that the hieroglyphic text is assembled from a 1927 grammar textbook removes even that. The case belongs in a UFO archive as a warning: Rosenberg used it to show how flying-saucer authors copied 'ancient sightings' from one another without checking original sources.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
How it has been read
A 20th-century fabrication. The 'transcription' is stitched together from sentences in Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar, its narrative closely echoes Ezekiel, and the papyrus itself never existed for inspection.
Long cited as an official Egyptian record of a flying saucer fleet under Thutmose III. Some proponents still repeat it, but no serious ancient-astronaut researcher now defends its authenticity.
Documents
- Condon Report, Sec. 5 Ch. 1, part 8: The 'Tulli Papyrus' report, files.ncas.org
Sources
- Tulli Papyrus Wikipedia
- Final Report of the Scientific Study of UFOs, Sec. 5 Ch. 1: UFOs in History (Samuel Rosenberg) University of Colorado / NCAS
- The Tulli Papyrus Larry Orcutt, Catchpenny Mysteries of Ancient Egypt
- Mystery of the 'Tulli Papyrus' revealed (trans. of M. Garbagnati, Egittologia.net, 2006) Neperos
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.