The New Murrey and Blue blog

I have used the above illustration as an example of the sorts of shapes that seemed to appear to humankind in centuries ago. According to the picture’s blurb here it is a “…Color enhancement of a 16th century woodcut called Nuremberg UFO by Hans Glaser. At sunrise on the April 14, 1561, the citizens of Nuremberg beheld ‘A very frightful spectacle.’ The sky appeared to fill with cylindrical objects from which red, black, orange, and blue white disks and globes emerged. Crosses and tubes resembling cannon barrels also appeared whereupon the objects promptly ‘began to fight one another’. After about an hour of battle, the objects seemed to catch fire and fell to Earth, where they turned to steam. The witnesses took this display as a divine warning. This report is unique in the annals of Ufology, in that it has never been repeated. There is no record of such ‘objects’ in either local or German national folklore. The surviving Town records from the period, give no indication of any unrest either civil or external. Given the uniqueness of the incident, it appears that something supernatural or paranormal took place….”

Now, events in Nuremberg seem to have been particularly astonishing, and if such things really did appear then I can well understand the awe and alarm of the citizens. These wondrous things were viewed as miracles…or terrible portents of horrors to come. Today, of course, we wonder if they’re signs of life elsewhere in the vastness of outer space.

But there were similar such events elsewhere in Europe, and it was one of these that caught my attention, if only because it happened in 1394, a year about which I happen to be researching.

In England in the winter of 1394 (I don’t know if it was 1393/4 or 1394/5) a wheel-shaped object was seen in the heavens. According to Raphael Holinshed’s chronicle of British history, a wheel- or barrel-shaped object was seen in several areas of England. “….A certain thing appeared in the likeness of fire…every night. This fiery apparition, oftentimes when anybody went alone, it would go with him, and would stand still when he stood still….To some it appeared in the likeness of a turning wheel burning; to others as round in the likeness of a barrel, flashing out flames of fire at the head; to others in the likeness of a long burning lance….” Whatever it was doesn’t seem to have been meteoritic in nature.

Right. The fact that it seemed to halt when travellers halted suggests to me that it might have been some variety of will-o’-the-wisp, although I don’t think I’ve every heard of that ever appearing in the heavens, more down low over marshes, etc. So what could this 1394 thing have been?

I love reading about these mysterious events, and always squirrel them away in a file in the hope of one day introducing them into a story. But I have yet to find a book that deals solely with such phenomena. The best sources I have on my own shelves are Martyn Whittock’s A Brief History of Life in the Middle Ages, which is very interesting for the weird and wonderful works of nature. And Chris Given-Wilson’s Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England, which sometimes compares different accounts of the same event.

Does anyone know of any others? If so, I’d love to hear.