Short Stuff: 1561 Celestial Event

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Hey, and welcome to the short stuff.

I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we're sitting in for Jerry, who would be sitting in for Dave.

And if that's confusing, it doesn't matter because that has nothing to do with this episode on the 1561 celestial phenomenon of Nuremberg.

That's right.

Nuremberg, Germany, of course, on April 14th of that year, there were people, this is early morning, and there were a lot of people around.

And this happened for over an hour where they looked up in the sky and saw what looked like an aerial battle between airships.

of unknown origin, I guess is the best way you could say it.

There were different colors, there were different shapes, there were squares and globes and crescents, and eventually the ships crashed outside of town and dissolved into smoke.

And a lot of people saw this and a lot of people who weren't just like

silly rubes.

Right.

It wasn't like Rusty and Eugene who were out drinking that night who saw it and came back and told everybody.

Read other people doing their thing in the morning.

Exactly.

And we don't know how many.

We just know, quote, a lot of men and women.

And then after all that,

something like a black spear appeared in the sky, too.

So this was a big deal, you can imagine.

And we know about it because there was was a broadsheet that was published recording it or documenting it.

There's a publisher named Hans Glaser, and he published an Einblat Druk.

Did I say that right?

Yeah.

Okay.

Which is a type of broadsheet that has a headline, an illustration, usually a wood cut, and then, you know, an account of what happened.

And so there's this famous Einblattdruck of the 1561 celestial phenomenon in Nuremberg that Hans Glaser made.

And if you've even remotely heard of this, I'll bet you've seen his famous woodcut from it.

It's quite lovely.

Yeah, I love a woodcut.

We both love woodcuts.

Yeah.

A good woodcut is something to behold.

Agreed.

So

now we look back and say like, hey, these people saw, this is like one of the first UFO encounters.

They didn't talk of such things back then.

So of course they didn't talk about it that way.

But it was not, as it turns out, an isolated incident even at the time.

There were apparently a lot of sort of sightings like this at the time where it looked like airship battles were going on.

So if you lived around that area, the Alpine sort of Scandinavian area at the time, between like a nine-year period or so, there were 400 of these broadsheets.

So

it was like a hot thing, a hot topic.

Yeah, people were nuts for it, right?

So

this was during the time where Austria, Switzerland, Germany, some other countries, and Nuremberg is in Germany, of course, they were part of the Holy Roman Empire.

And the Holy Roman Empire was ruled by an emperor and the Pope.

So, therefore, it was a pretty Catholic empire.

And at the time of this event in Nuremberg,

the Reformation's going on.

So, this is a really tumultuous time that was kicked off by Martin Luther.

And during the Reformation era, there was a lot of religious fervor.

There was a lot of emphasis on end times.

So, when people saw things like these aerial battles in the sky, they're like, this is clearly a sign from God.

We don't know what it means, but what it's ultimately telling us is that we're doomed unless we repent and mend our ways.

That's right.

So, just to sort of reiterate, they did not call these UFOs, that's an us thing.

And maybe we'll take that break and we will come back right after this and dig in once more.

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Okay, Chuck, so if, like you said,

this 1561 celestial event over Nuremberg was one of hundreds in this era, this era of the trend of seeing aerial battles in the sky, why is that the one we're talking about?

And there's actually a really good explanation why.

The reason why is because this was a forgotten event, because again, it just got mixed in with all the others.

It was a forgotten event in history, largely, that was plucked out of obscurity to be used as an example in a book about flying saucers, or actually the mythology we create around things like flying saucers, by none other than psychoanalyst Carl Jung.

And because this one event was plucked from all the other ones that he could have used, it came to seem to us, people living today, as a singular event, like nothing like this had ever happened before, right?

Yeah.

So it loses its context in that sense.

And then eventually, over time, since 1958 and that book came out, it was stripped further of its context that Carl Jung was using this as an example of people coming up with their own mythologies about something they didn't understand, like we do with UFOs.

And so, this one event that happened in Nuremberg in 1561 that Carl Jung put in his book about flying saucers is a UFO, he's talking about a UFO sighting.

That's where we landed today when we think about the 1561 celestial phenomenon being a UFO sighting.

Yeah, aliens, basically.

Exactly.

But, you know, I think I said in the first part that, you know, these weren't rubes.

They were just regular people.

It was 1561, but like science was around a little bit there in some form or fashion.

Like less than a decade after this,

they figured out like what comets were, that they were space-faring natural objects.

So

they weren't people sitting around looking at the sky saying it was like a dragon or something like that.

No.

Yeah.

They, yes.

And when you take that into account, that these weren't just dummies, you can't just be like, yeah, it was a comet, obviously, or maybe even a couple shooting stars.

Who knows?

If you take that kind of easy explanation out of your toolbox, as they put it in HR,

it becomes much harder to explain what exactly they saw.

You also have to take into account these people had eons of collective awareness and memory of an experience with natural phenomenon.

So, again, it's not going to be a comet, it's not going to be a rainbow, it's not going to be something like that.

Over time, basically, three main explanations have been proffered.

And that's sun dogs, fireworks, and embellishment.

Yeah,

A sundog is

it's not something you see every day, but it's not like super, super uncommon.

Apparently, like they're as common or more common than rainbows.

So it's the kind of thing that happens with some frequency, but that's when the sun's reflected by these low-angled ice crystals up in the air.

And it triples it, basically, where you have two suns on either side.

And it fits that it's morning because it happens, the sun dogs happen when the sun is low on the horizon.

So that would sort of make sense that it was daybreak.

Yeah.

The one thing, though, is that this happens a lot.

So if this is the kind of thing that, or not a lot, but with enough frequency that people wouldn't be like, oh my God, let's make a woodcut about this.

Right.

One other thing that actually is a mark in the sundogs favor is an explanation.

They typically last between 15 and 30 minutes.

But as recently as 2023, one in northern China was witnessed that lasted a couple hours.

So

if this thing lasted an hour,

it's not like a sundog is ruled out because of the length of time.

That was one.

Another one is that in 1540, full 20 plus years before this event, a man named Venocchio Beringuccio published De la Pyrotecnia, which is the first book from Europe at least on how to prepare rockets, including using rockets in festivals, what we would call fireworks.

So the question is, like, was there somebody in Nuremberg who had gotten a hold of this book and was putting on a fireworks display without telling anybody?

And there's actually some of the details are like, yeah, that would make sense that these things fell out of the sky and fizzled out into smoke when they were on the ground.

I mean, it sounds silly at first, but that one makes a little more sense to me than even sun dogs as far as like maybe creating weird shapes and the fizzling out part, like you've talked about.

Like, but then you're just sort of making a theory about some rogue

German that got this book.

But hey,

that's not unbelievable.

Right.

Like, on its face, it seems unlikely, but when you dig in, it's like, it gets a little meatier for sure.

I mean, like, this is something that they probably wouldn't have seen before, you know, so at least

that box.

And then there's embellishment, too, right?

Yeah.

I mean, that's kind of the obvious one that

maybe, I don't know, something happened.

Maybe it was a sundog

gone wild in.

It's a great series of videos in the 80s.

A sun dog gone wild in the account and then the wood cutting on that broadsheet.

Maybe that's what happened because even it wasn't like the heyday of yellow journalism and tabloids, but even very early on in publishing, they were kind of doing some more sort of salacious stuff to get readers because there was competition going on.

Exactly.

So it makes a lot of sense that they might have been embellishing, no matter what it is.

That doesn't explain what it is, but that explains probably the account of it, right?

Yeah, agreed.

So, I mean, I guess that's it.

It was

one of multiple stories of something that happened at the time, plucked out of obscurity by Carl Jung, stripped of context, turned into a UFO sighting that had nothing to do with that.

By us,

I want to also thank our listener, James Calamera, who's written in multiple times to ask for us to do this one as far back as 2021, which is 460 years after the Nuremberg event.

Exactly.

Pretty spooky.

Short stuff is out.

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