The 1561 Sky Battle Over Nuremberg: The Ancient Broadsheet That Still Divides Historians

A detail from the Glaser image shows the sun, red crosses, globes, cylinders and the dark spear over the city. Source: Zentralbibliothek Zürich via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain worldwide.

A sixteenth century print shows spheres, crosses, cylinders and a black spear above Nuremberg. It has become an icon of ancient UFO lore, but its own words tell a more complicated story.

Before the familiar language of flying saucers, there was a sunrise over Nuremberg. On the morning of 14 April 1561, a local letter painter named Hans Glaser published a printed account of an extraordinary sight said to have been seen in and around the city. In his image, the sky is crowded with red and dark spheres, crosses, long blue cylinders, arcs, and one immense black spear. Beneath them, a line of smoke rises from the ground beyond the city wall.

Glaser wrote that many men and women had watched the spectacle at daybreak. The objects seemed to rush at one another for more than an hour, then fall to earth “as if they all burned,” fading in a great cloud of smoke. It is easy to understand why the print later became one of the most frequently shared images in the history of UFO culture.

The Morning the Sky Went to War

According to Glaser, the event occurred between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. A red semicircular arc and two blood-red arcs were close to the sun, he wrote in his narrative. In the tale, Glaser writes of red crosses, balls of many colours arranged in rows and squares, rods/tubular objects that were long, and a very dark object, which he describes as “like a black spear.” The shaft of this dark object faced east, and its tip faced west. Glaser further explains that there were spheres moving from the sun toward the rods, fighting “furiously,” until they fell in wafts of smoke.