What happened
Julius Obsequens, a Roman writer of the late 4th or early 5th century AD, compiled a year-by-year catalogue of the portents reported to the Roman state between 249 and 12 BC, taken mostly from Livy. Alongside talking cattle and rains of milk are the sky entries UFO writers quote most. In 104 BC, celestial armies were seen fighting from east and west, with the western host losing. In 100 BC, around sunset, an orb like a shield was carried across the sky from west to east, the same event Pliny records. Most cited of all is 91 BC, at the outbreak of the Social War. At Spoletium a gold-coloured ball of fire rolled down to the earth, grew larger, then was seen to rise from the ground and travel east, appearing big enough to blot out the sun. The same year a fireball flashed out of the northern sky at sunrise with a great noise. The book was first printed in 1508, and Conrad Lycosthenes' 1552 edition added woodcuts.
The official explanation
Obsequens wrote some four centuries after the latest events he lists, and his source Livy was not an eyewitness to most of them, so these are third-hand records of omens. Their purpose was religious, not meteorological. Modern readers usually explain the sky entries as bolides and fireballs (the golden globe, the shield), aurora or cloud formations read as battling armies, and sun dogs (the 'three suns' entries). After the Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947, writers such as Harold T. Wilkins began reading Obsequens as an archive of UFOs.
The anomalous case
The Spoletium globe of 91 BC does not behave like a falling meteor. In the translated text, the gold-coloured fireball comes down to the earth, swells in size, and is then seen carried from the land towards the east, large enough to cover the sun. That is a descent, a stop at ground level, and a departure, not a single streak to impact. Obsequens' compilers drew on official annual prodigy records, which listed reports town by town, so the entry comes from a state archive rather than literary invention. The same book separates ordinary 'torches' and 'beams' from the shield-like orb of 100 BC, which Pliny also records independently. It also preserves repeated reports of armies fighting in the sky, an image that recurs in the Nuremberg (1561) and Basel (1566) broadsheets. Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck included Roman prodigies in Wonders in the Sky (2010), while filtering out many entries they judged to be meteors.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Julius Obsequens, Book of Prodigies (trans. Alex Nice) report, attalus.org
Sources
- Julius Obsequens: Book of Prodigies (trans. Alex Nice) attalus.org
- Julius Obsequens Wikipedia
- List of reported UFO sightings Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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