himmelsspektakel

During the pre-dawn hours of this morning in 1561, there was a mass sighting of an unexplained celestial phenomenon involving what was perceived to be the aerial battle of hundreds of unidentified flying objects in the skies above Nürnberg.
Though widely dismissed as hysteria reinforced by the contemporaneous publication, documentation of the event in the city’s broadsheet for circulation by printer Hans Wolff Glaßer and explained away as the convergence of otherwise mundane atmospheric phenomena, aspects of the reported skirmish by witnesses of darting bright spheres, tubes globes, crescents and cylinders followed by the appearance of a large black triangular object that occulted the rising sun before crashing in the countryside is pretty tantalising and is a textbook close-encounter of the second kind. A similar sighting occurred five years later in the skies over Basel on three occasions in late July and early August.