What happened
In April 1561 Hans Glaser, a Nuremberg 'letter-painter' and printer, published an illustrated broadsheet describing a terrifying spectacle around sunrise on 14 April. According to the text, many people in the city, at the gates and in the countryside saw two blood-red crescent arcs across the sun, with red, black and iron-coloured balls on and around it. Some were set three in a row or four in a square. There were blood-red crosses, red stripes, and large tubes or 'rods' containing three, four or more balls. Then everything began to fight. Globes flew in and out of the sun and back and forth for over an hour, until, as if exhausted, they fell to earth 'as if they all burned' and wasted away in thick smoke. Finally a long, thick black spear appeared, pointing west. Glaser's woodcut shows these shapes over the countryside. The sheet, now in the Wickiana collection at the Zentralbibliothek Zurich, reached a wide audience after Carl Jung reproduced it in 1958.
The original account
Anno M.D.LXI. An dem XIIII. tag Aprillis zu morgens ... zwischen 4 und 5 auff der kleinen uhr/ ist ein sehr erschröcklich gesicht an der Sonn wie sie im auffgang gewesen erschinnen/ und zu Nürmberg in der Stat und vor dem thor und auff dem Land von vielen manns und weybs personen gesehen worden.
Hans Glaser, broadsheet, Nuremberg, April 1561 (public domain); Zentralbibliothek Zurich
The official explanation
The usual scientific explanation is an unusually complex solar halo display, with sun dogs (parhelia), arcs and pillars at sunrise, described in the military and religious language of the time. Similar displays were recorded elsewhere, such as the Stockholm sun dogs of 1535 painted in the Vadersolstavlan. Historians such as Ulrich Magin and Wiebke Schwarte stress that broadsheets were sensational religious reading, more like tabloids than reports. Glaser's text ends with a call to repent. Jacques Vallee suspected a 'stock myth' format. Carl Jung read the imagery symbolically.
The anomalous case
The report describes motion and interaction, which static halo optics do not produce. Objects fly into and out of the sun, move between groups, 'fight' for more than an hour, then fall to the ground and give off smoke. The shapes are not only arcs but discrete spheres, crosses and tubes that release smaller spheres, and the display ends with a separate long dark object. Glaser stresses that many men and women saw it, in the city, at the gates and in the countryside, so the claim is a mass sighting, not one viewer's impression. Ufologists point out that tubes releasing smaller spheres resemble the modern 'mothership' and orb reports. The broadsheet is a dated, contemporary, local publication, printed in the same month, rather than a later legend.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Hans Glaser broadsheet, Nuremberg 1561 (Wikimedia Commons scan) newspaper, commons.wikimedia.org
Sources
- 1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg Wikipedia
- The Mysterious Sky Battle Over Nuremberg in 1561 Amusing Planet
- The celestial event over Basel in 1566 Swiss National Museum blog
- File:Himmelserscheinung uber Nurnberg vom 14. April 1561.jpg Wikimedia Commons
- Final Report of the Scientific Study of UFOs, Sec. 5 Ch. 1: UFOs in History (Samuel Rosenberg) University of Colorado / NCAS
Witness reports elsewhere
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