Nuremberg Celestial Phenomena of 1561: Mass Hallucination or Extraterrestrial Aerial Combat?

        In 1561 Nuremberg Germany is what we today would call a free city.  It is a Bavarian principality, located in the south of modern day Germany, largely under its own government.

For the time, the citizens of Nuremberg are mostly well-educated, cosmopolitan and fairly well off.  The Protestant verse Catholic calamity of the Thirty Years War, which will permanently scar the cities and landscape of central Europe, remains nearly six decades in the future, and the infamous Nazi Party rallies which will come to forever mark Nuremberg as synonymous with the pomp and circumstance surrounding evil and genocide in the twentieth century are nearly four hundred years distant.

For the time being, in the year 1561, Nuremberg is a picturesque, almost idyllic late-medieval Bavarian city.  It is filled with buildings of stately fairy tale-like architecture, surrounded by verdant and productive farmland and is walled in on all sides for protection like most large German principalities of the sixteenth century.

Just after dawn on the morning of April 14, 1561, the residents of Nuremberg awake to see something that appears other-worldy taking place in the skies above their heads.

On that morning the sky above Nuremberg is filled with glowing unidentified flying objects of all shapes and sizes.  In the skies above the city, darting in all directions, are saucer shaped objects, triangular shaped objects, wedge shaped objects, giant orbs and even large glowing crosses.  Other giant, burning lights seem to be shooting out of these UFOs like flaming missiles and heading in all directions.

This extraterrestrial aerial battle goes on nearly all morning above the city.  Thousands of residents stop and stare skyward.  Others cower in their homes out of fear of the thunderous noise produced by this other-worldly cannonade.  It seems, to the early-modern residents of Nuremberg, as if the angels of hell are about to rain fire itself down upon the city at any moment.

City of Nuremberg

Around noon there is a lull in the extraterrestrial aerial combat.  Then an enormous triangular, or some say spear shaped, object appears above the city.  It is so large that it all but blots out the sun itself over Nuremberg.  The citizens watch in amazement as the large triangle shaped craft drifts slowly over their heads.  Enormous crowds have gathered in the countryside as well, just beyond the city walls, to stare skyward with mouths agape at the giant triangular UFO.

The triangle shaped craft gains speed as it continues to pass above the city.  In a few moments a thunderous explosion is heard beyond the city walls that shakes Nuremberg like an earthquake.  And then just like that, in an instant, the skies are quiet.  The Nuremberg Celestial Phenomena of 1561 is over.

Firsthand information regarding the unprecedented mass UFO sighting above the city of Nuremberg Germany on April 14, 1561, comes to us today from one primary source.  This source is a broadsheet produced by Bavarian printer Hans Glaser, which today is housed in a museum in Zurich Switzerland. 

Broadsheets of the time were single large sheets of paper that are the predecessors to modern day newspapers.  This particular broadsheet of Glaser’s was produced less than a week after the Nuremberg Celestial Phenomena supposedly occurred and it measures ten and a half by fifteen inches, or roughly slightly larger than a legal sized piece of paper.  The broadsheet also contains a contemporary wood-cut illustration of the event as documented by eyewitness accounts of the time.

Hans Glaser's Original Broadsheet 1561

Hans Glaser reports that on the morning of April 14, 1561 in the sky above Nuremberg, 

“(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 a great many men and women.”  

He then goes on to describe the varied number of UFO’s seen in the sky over Nuremberg that day before stating, “these all started to fight among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour.”

Glaser then recounts the large triangular shaped object, sometimes referred to in his words as “spear” shaped and then the subsequent earth shaking explosion.  After his description of the events in the broadsheet Glaser then attributes the violent light show in the sky to a form of divine retribution or a message from God to the residents of Nuremberg warning them of what could happen if they continue their modern transgressions and remain ungrateful to the Lord.

Glaser’s Godly explanation aside: what, if anything, did happen in the skies above Nuremberg Germany on the morning of April 14, 1561?

Before elaborating on any present day explanations for the Nuremberg Celestial Phenomena of 1561 let’s first take a look at Hans Glaser and reports of the time.

Glaser, based on other of his surviving broadsheets, was most definitely prone in his reporting to hyperbole and some exaggeration, though it should be noted that in none of his broadsheets, was he necessarily given to falsehood or outright lying.  In an attempt to gain readers it was natural for printers of the time to embellish their news stories, somewhat, because just like today, printers needed to sell copies to stay in business.

It is also worth noting that in the year 1566, less than five full years after the Nuremberg Celestial Phenomena occurred, a similar incident was reported in the skies above the city of Basel in Switzerland.  This event is called the 1566 Basel Celestial Incident and speaks of a large number of black and glowing spheres engaging in a battle above the city.  It was first reported in a Flugblatt, an early Swiss form of newspaper, similar to a broadsheet but only smaller in size and containing a greater number of pages.  

Given the recurrence of similar celestial incidents during the late-medieval and early modern periods of European history, and the fact that these occurrences were documented by news sources of the time, many UFO researchers and believers have pointed to the Nuremberg Celestial Phenomena of 1561 as being one of the first verifiable reports of extraterrestrial contact with earth in human history.

However, over the past hundred years, there have been other much more grounded explanations for the Nuremberg Celestial Phenomena of 1561.

No less a personage than the famed psychologist Carl Jung weighed in on the subject in his 1958 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.

Jung, who was a proponent of mass psychology, and perhaps the grandfather of the concept of mass hallucination, attributes the Nuremberg Celestial Phenomena of 1561 to a sort of mass delusion engaged in at the time by a devoutly Catholic population caught in the upheaval of the burgeoning Protestant reformation.  

Jung says that what the residents of Nuremberg saw when they looked to the heavens on the morning of April 14, 1561 was a natural phenomena such as an oddly shaped cloud formation, meteor shower, or even solar eclipse that their late-medieval mind’s collectively misinterpreted as an aerial battle between spiritual spacecraft.  

As proof of this theory Jung points to the shapes reported in Glaser’s broadsheet, crosses, globes, and spears, as being symbolically familiar and representative to residents of Nuremberg at the time and as fitting in nicely with the theory of Godly retribution as was advanced immediately after the incident occurred.

As a reflection of its time period, Jung’s theory of mass misinterpretation viewed through the lens of religiosity, works well and makes sense, but it still doesn’t account for one thing.

If we choose to believe Jung’s theory and attribute the Nuremberg Celestial Phenomena to a sort of mass hallucination induced by the misinterpretation of a natural occurrence, then we are left to wonder--what exactly was that natural occurrence in the sky witnessed by the residents of Nuremberg on the morning of April 14, 1561?

Modern scientists believe that what happened in the skies above Nuremberg on that morning was something called a sundog.  A sundog is sometimes called a mock sun, and simply put it is an optical illusion that makes it appear as if parts of the sun are breaking off to the left and to the right.  

The scientific meteorological term for a sundog is a parhelion.  Parhelions most often occur in the morning during wintertime or early spring when sunlight can be seen refracting through icy clouds just after dawn making it appear as if there are, in fact, multiple suns in the same sky.  Of course sundogs, or parhelions, were definitely something that the residents of Nuremberg in the year 1561 knew absolutely nothing about,

Perhaps, all that was seen above Nuremberg that day was sunlight reflecting off of ice crystals in various directions.  And then, maybe, the late medieval collective imagination of the residents of Nuremberg in the year 1561 took the odd event they saw in the sky above their heads and ran with it by turning it into an aerial battle of extraterrestrial proportions.  

Or, maybe, what Hans Glaser reported in his broadsheet wasn’t fake news at all, but rather, more true to fact than we may ever know. 

Photo of a sundog or parhelion