Nuremberg celestial phenomenon of 1561

On the morning of April 14, 1561, at about dawn, many people in Nuremberg, a prosperous city in the Holy Roman Empire, reported a strange display in the sky. A woodcut broadsheet by the printer Hans Glaser says that there appeared a large number of dark red, blue-black and orange balls, as well as tubes and crosses, and that they seemed to fight each other for about an hour. The sheet adds that a large black spear shape was seen, and that afterward many of the objects fell to the ground in steam. It was printed within days and sold across Germany.¹

Contemporaries read such sights as signs from God, and the sheet urges readers to repent. A copy survives in the Wickiana, a collection of broadsheets and news compiled by the Zurich pastor Johann Jakob Wick. Many modern scientists think it was a solar halo display, with sun dogs, arcs and rings that people described in the language of battle. In 1958 the psychologist Carl Jung discussed the event in his book on flying saucers, treating it as a visionary tale. Writers since have claimed that it shows a battle of spacecraft, but there is no physical evidence for that.¹