It was about three centuries before the first weather balloon, so we can’t be blaming the mass UFO sighting on that. But UFO stands for “unidentified flying object.” It doesn’t mean “fucking aliens are totally here, man.” It just means we don’t know dafuq it is. And in Nuremberg on the early morning of April 14, 1561 there was a big-ass sighting of unknown shit in the sky, and people didn’t think it was little green men from Mars. They figured God was up to something.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 14, 1561--
It was a celestial event, but probably the astronomical definition of celestial as relating to the sky, not the “belonging to heaven” version. It began around 4 a.m., and here is part of the written description of what went down: “a dreadful apparition occurred on the sun . . . two blood-red semi-circular arcs . . . other balls in large number . . . three in a line and four in a square . . . blood-red crosses . . . blood-red strips.” The phrase “blood-red” got used a lot. They talked about rods and globes and how these things “all started to fight among themselves” and then they “fell from the sun down upon the earth,” and “wasted away on the earth with immense smoke,” so they probably thought some serious battle between good and evil was going on and maybe we should pray or kiss our asses goodbye or something. The latter part of the description makes reference to “God” seven times, because it’s not like these folks knew fuck-all about astrophysics.
Carl Jung wrote about the event in 1958 in a book titled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, but he was all about the psychoanalysis of those who viewed the phenomenon. Jung’s work doesn’t hold up well under modern examination so forget that part. And while we’re at it, fuck Jordan Peterson. Jung did say it was probably a natural phenomenon and not “God did it.”
Many others, the types who would love to storm Area 51, consider it a massive space battle that just happened to take place over a German city. But something did happen, and what was seen was immortalized in a woodcut by Hans Glaser, who was a real person living at that time and was known for doing woodcuts. So yeah, they saw crazy shit, but probably not Martians and Venusians meeting at the halfway point to make war upon each other. Far more likely it was a sun dog (known by its more scientific name as a parhelion), which is an “atmospheric optical phenomenon” that is created by a bunch of ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. And science types say Nuremberg had the right conditions for this to occur at that time. No E.T. No gods. Just ice.
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Sounds like the observers hella imagination. Then again, they had to interpret something they had never seen before in terms that they could understand. They must have been a spectacular set(?) of sundogs and this weather observer wishes that he could have seen them.