At dawn on April 14, 1561, the residents of Nuremberg, Germany, were surprised by a mysterious and impressive hour-long celestial phenomenon that left them downright terrified: mysterious objects hovering across the sky in the face of the sun, vehemently battling each other, giving the impression of a celestial battle taking place against the morning sky. Artist Hans Glaser documented the strange event at sunrise on April 14, 1561, for the Nuremberg Gazette.
In describing it, he referred to hundreds of crosses, tubes, wheels, multicolored objects, and balloons hovering over the city. Objects that disappeared in a puff of smoke, some crashing to the ground, leaving smoke visible for miles: “On the morning of April 14, 1561, at dawn, between 4 and 5 a.m., a terrible apparition occurred in the sun, and this was seen in the city of Nuremberg, at its gates and in the countryside, by many men and women. At first, two semicircular arches, blood-red, appeared in the middle of the sun, like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides the color was blood there was a round ball of ferrous color, partly opaque, partly black.
Similarly, on both sides and like a torus around the sun, there were blood-red spheres and other spheres in great numbers, some three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. Between these globes were seen crosses, between which were blood-red strips, becoming thicker at the back and malleable like the front.” reed poles, which were intertwined, between them two large rods, one on the right, the other on the left, and inside the small and large rods there were three, also four, and more balloons.” Glaser relates that “all these began to fight among themselves, so that the balloons that were first in the sun flew toward those on either side, then the balloons that were outside the sun, on the small and large rods, flew toward the sun.
Moreover, the balloons flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently for more than an hour. And when the conflict inside and outside the sun was most intense, they became so fatigued that they all, as previously stated, fell from the sun to the earth as if they were all burning and then were consumed on the earth with immense smoke. After all this, something like a black spear was sighted, very long and thick; the shaft pointed to the east, the point to the west. Whatever the meaning of such signs, only God knows.” A few years later, in 1566, another similar event would take place in Basel, Switzerland, but this time it involved black orbs engaged in a kind of skirmish over the city’s sky.
Another similar event occurred in 1697 in Hamburg, Germany, where the crowd observed two enormous glowing wheels flying over the local airspace. In an attempt to explain the unusual celestial phenomenon of Nuremberg in 1561, scientists have linked it to parhelion, an optical phenomenon associated with the reflection/refraction of light caused by a large number of ice particles in cirriform clouds. From the ufological perspective, meanwhile, it is considered a documented sighting of the UFO phenomenon in ancient times. This incident, in fact, has been interpreted by some modern UFO enthusiasts as an aerial battle of extraterrestrial origin that took place in broad daylight and in full view of thousands of witnesses.