Nuremberg Sky Battle, 1561
In April 1561 Hans Glaser, a Nuremberg 'letter-painter' and printer, published an illustrated broadsheet describing a terrifying spectacle around sunrise on 14 April…
Gangwon Province Objects, Joseon Korea, 1609
The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty preserve an official dispatch from Yi Hyeong-uk, governor of Gangwon Province, entered in the Gwanghaegun Diary in the 9th lunar month of…
Winthrop's Light over the Muddy River, Massachusetts Bay, 1639
Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony kept a running journal of colony affairs, and among the entries for 1639 he set down a short, strange report. James…
Miracle of the Sun, Fátima, 1917
Through 1917, three shepherd children near the Portuguese village of Fátima, Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, said a radiant lady was…
Deception Island, Antarctica
In the dark of the Antarctic winter of 1965, men at the military research stations crowded onto Deception Island reported a lens-shaped light that refused to behave like…
Petrozavodsk Phenomenon
Around 4 a.m. on 20 September 1977, early-shift dockworkers, police officers and an ambulance crew in Petrozavodsk watched a brilliant 'star' rise from the north-east and…
Western China Spiral, 24 July 1981
On a clear, moonless summer night in 1981, people across China's western provinces looked up at something nobody had a name for. At around 10:40 p.m. a bright, star-like…
Norway Spiral
Before dawn on 9 December 2009, people across northern Norway saw something astonishing: a blue beam of light seemed to rise from behind the mountains, stop in mid-air…