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 protect...