The UFO Sky Battle of 1665
Berlin Kunstbibliothek Museum Showcased Historic Stralsund Report; Nuremberg Letter-Painter Got the Big Scoop in 1561
Truth be told: The UFO phenomenon already was “old news'“ when Kenneth Arnold spotted a formation of supersonic craft stringing together on their courses like saucers skipping along the surface of a lake on June 24, 1947.
On April 8, 1665, a group of six fishermen reported observing an aerial spectacle over the Baltic Sea, near the city of Stralsund on Germany’s Baltic coast. Scribes recorded the events of the day on broadsheets, newspapers of the time. Artists chronicled the report through paintings and engravings.
To bring that remarkable time to the present day, the Kunstbibliothek of Berlin hosted “UFO 1665. The Air Battle of Stralsund” exhibition in 2023. The extraordinary program was curated by Moritz Wullen, Director of the Kunstbibliothek (Art Library).
The Kunstbibliothek exhibition UFO 1665 was based on contemporary reports from witnesses and records created in various media of the era. From broadsheets and illustrations based on eyewitness accounts, UFO 1665 examined the phenomenon from religious and cultural perspectives of the era, and its parallels to events seen in the skies over the centuries. The exhibit also put the Stralsund event into context with references to investigations in the present day.
Thanks to the good people who curated and preserved the fascinating exhibit, we can enjoy much from their program online. Details on the exhibit and its subject from the Kunstbibliothek:
In 1665, pamphlets and newspapers reported a bizarre event: on April 8, six fishermen reported observing an air battle over the Baltic Sea near Stralsund. Towards evening, they saw a dark gray disk above the center of the city. Using contemporary image and text sources, the exhibition reconstructs the media career of this sensational report. It reveals thought patterns and communication strategies that continue to shape reporting on “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs) to this day.
The exhibition is an expedition into a strange world of images hidden from the mass public of museums between the pages of old books or in archives. Anyone familiar with 17th-century art only from the great picture galleries will rub their eyes in surprise. One has the impression of entering a baroque parallel universe with strange symbols in the sky, airships, space rockets, and flying saucers. Everything revolves around one of the most bizarre media sensations of modern times: on April 8, 1665, at 2 p.m., according to contemporary reports, six fishermen fishing for herring off Stralsund observed flocks of birds in the sky transforming into warships engaged in thunderous aerial battles. The decks teem with ghostly figures. When, towards evening, they see “a flat, round shape like a plate” above St. Nicholas' Church, they flee. The next day, it is reported, they trembled all over and complained of pain.
The collective image of the air battle over Stralsund is not only shaped by the media, beliefs, designs, and myths of the Baroque era.
It also reveals things that were unimaginable at the time.
— Berlin Kunstbibliothek
Media transformation
The news spread like wildfire in the media. Leaflets and newspapers competed with each other, offering a wide variety of versions and interpretations. Religious beliefs, in particular, determined the media’s transformation of the event, as people believed that the world was ruled by a god who projected impending calamities into the sky. The air battle, too, was interpreted as such a “prodigium” (Latin for “omen”). No one considered that it could be a hoax or a natural phenomenon, such as an atmospheric reflection.
Not only the religious worldview, but also the visual design had a significant influence on the media transformation of the air battle. Futuristic visions of airships, which fascinated people in the 17th century, played a special role. More than 100 years before the first manned balloon flight, Francesco Lana Terzi (1631–1687) published the design of a flying boat supported by vacuum spheres, which caused a sensation throughout Europe. The fact that the project was never realized did not dampen the euphoria. People dreamed of conquering the skies.
The power of myths
Another theme of the exhibition is the power of myths: When lightning struck St. Nicholas’ Church on June 19, 1670, above which the disk had ominously appeared five years earlier, the celestial apparition was subsequently interpreted as a sign of God's wrath. Contemporary descriptions and depictions of the event conjured a mysterious connection with the destruction of Babylon by a gigantic millstone, as described in the Book of Revelation.
The collective image of the air battle over Stralsund is not only shaped by the media, beliefs, designs, and myths of the Baroque era. It also reveals things that were unimaginable at the time. For example, no 17th-century source mentions extraterrestrials in connection with unexplained celestial phenomena. Yet human imagination had long since advanced enough to imagine expeditions to inhabited planets and the corresponding propulsion systems. Why, nevertheless, no one ever considered that extraterrestrials might appear in our skies with flying machines is one of the many mysteries the exhibition attempts to solve.
Excursion into the present
At the end of this cultural and media-historical investigation, there follows an excursion into the present. The focus is on the videos and reports of sightings of mysterious “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAPs) by the US military that went viral in 2019 and even made the cover of an issue of “Der Spiegel” two years later. The range of interpretations discussed is insanely broad. Are these natural phenomena explainable by physics, superior high-tech drones made in China or Russia, aliens, or even visitors from the future? Even NASA and the Pentagon seem to have no clue. One thing is certain, however: the factors that shaped the media career of “UFO 1665” have lost none of their power to this day.
(Emphasis in the descriptions above and below are FJB’s. The images above and immediately below are from the Kunstbibliotheque.)
Like UFO witnesses today, the people of Stralsund in 1665 used the words they knew and the concepts with which they were familiar — and whatever the recording scribes of the day themselves knew or tossed in — to describe an extraordinary and completely unfamiliar phenomenon. There are hundreds of reports of unexplained aerial phenomena in the historic record.
For more on the subject, I most heartily recommend Dr. Jacques Vallee and his pioneering book, “Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers.” First published in 1969, the work is an excellent chronicle of historic UFO reports. Vallee and investigator Chris Aubeck expanded and updated the work in “Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times,” published in 2009.
As when visiting an exhibition at an art gallery, I tip my hat to good journalism, no matter the era or subject matter. Take the following by Hanns Glaser reporting on an extraordinary phenomenon witnessed by the good people of Nurnberg, today Nuremberg, the “Second City” of the German state of Bavaria — then a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire.
Appearance in the sky over Nuremberg on April 14, 1561
Celestial Phenomenon Looks Like Aerial Combat
by Hanns Glaser
FIC/HRE Broadsheet — Nurnberg, April 14th, 1561In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country – by many men and women. At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color. Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes. These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke (or “steam”). After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows. Although we have seen, shortly one after another, many kinds of signs on the heaven, which are sent to us by the almighty God, to bring us to repentance, we still are, unfortunately, so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and miracles of God. Or we speak of them with ridicule and discard them to the wind, in order that God may send us a frightening punishment on account of our ungratefulness. After all, the God-fearing will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful Father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God, that He may avert His wrath, including the well-deserved punishment, on us, so that we may temporarily here and perpetually there, live as his children. For it, may God grant us his help, Amen. By Hanns Glaser, letter-painter of Nurnberg.
The German journalist Hanns Glaser got the scoop on medieval UFO sky battles by more than a century. Furthermore, Herr Glaser scooped today’s mass and social media by 474 years.
Wish we had more “Letter-Painters” like him today. There might be much less confusion and a whole lot more learning going on about the phenomenon.