Wonders in the Sky (41 page)

1590, Scotland, location unknown
Tubular object

In 1590 Scottish peasants informed the shire reeve (the king's representative) that a large tubular object had been seen hovering over their town. It hung motionless in the sky for several minutes before it vanished.

Despite abundant references online and in print, an original source has not been located.

213.

1592, Pinner, Middlesex, England
Transported away!

Farm worker Richard Burt was confronted by a being he described as “a large black cat” and was transported magically to Harrow.

 

Source:
A Most Wicked Work of a Wretched Witch
(1593).

214.

15 October 1595, Targoviste, Wallachia, Romania Hovering object

When prince Michel the Brave besieged the city of Targoviste, the capital of Wallachia, temporarily occupied by Turks, “a large comet appeared” above the military camp and rested for two hours (according to an Italian report of the facts, redacted in Prague). After three days the Turks were defeated. No such comet is mentioned in astronomical records.

 

Source: Calin N. Turcu,
Enciclopedia observatiilor O.Z.N. din Romania (1517-1994)
(Bucharest: Ed. Emanuel, 1994), 3.

The end of the sixteenth century finds France devastated by fanaticism and a religious civil war between Catholics and Protestants, only resolved in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, through which King Henry IV establishes for the first time the dual principles of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion. Spain and France are both exhausted, while England dominates the seas and becomes a great commercial and industrial power, extending its colonial empire to America with the rise of Virginia.

It is the end of the Elizabethan period. Shakespeare and Cervantes reign over literature.

Science now progresses in great strides: in the last decade Galileo publishes his observations on falling bodies and (in 1593) invents the thermometer. Botanical gardens are established at the University of Montpellier, and the first manuals of veterinary science appear.

When 1600 comes around, astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler are working together in Prague, while Dutch opticians have invented the telescope, Kircher has built the first magic lantern and William Gilbert has published the first scientific treatise on magnetism and electricity; The Western world has entered a new era.

Spurred on by strategic and scientific interest in navigation, astronomy underwent unprecedented growth during the seventeenth century. Experimental and theoretical publications flourished under the pen of Galileo, Huygens, Cassini, and numerous observers of the Moon and planets using the newly-invented telescopes. Similar progress revolutionized physics, mathematics and medicine, often in spite of the dictates of the Church.

This movement towards better understanding of nature and man's relationship to it, long repressed by religious ideology, found its expression in the “Invisible College” and culminated in the creation of the Royal Society in London in 1660, while Harvard College in the colony of Massachusetts was awarded its charter in 1650.

Similar forces were at play in Asia, where Chinese naturalist Chen Yuan-Lung published his treatise on “New Inventions,” and in Japan where Seki Kowa, “the Arithmetical Sage,” anticipated many of the discoveries of Western mathematics. He was the first person to study determinants in 1683, ten years before Leibniz used determinants to solve simultaneous equations.

Political aspirations created turmoil in the background, particularly in England with the parliamentarian revolution led by Cromwell, the restoration of the Stuart monarchy and the further upheaval leading William of Orange to the throne. France fared better, dominating European culture and politics for most of the century, until the disastrous Revocation of the Edict of Nantes that forbade Protestantism and drove leading Huguenot families out of the country: hundreds of thousands fled to Switzerland, Germany, Holland and Great Britain, ruining entire provinces and decimating French industry at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Huguenots took the art of clock making to Geneva, the steamboat to England and paper making to Holland.

News of extraordinary phenomena was greeted with keen interest, either for their “philosophical” value or as omens of mystical importance. Antiquarians and Chroniclers collected such reports and compiled information from various countries, including North and South America. We even begin to find reports of unusual aerial sightings in the pages of the early scientific journals, like the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society, often in terms that seem surprisingly open and free compared to the staid, self-censored, dogmatic, and often arrogant scientific literature of today.

215.

23 January 1603, Besançon, France
Self-propelled cloud

“In the year 1603, being in Besançon for the duties of my charge as Visitor to Sainte Claire monastery, it happened that on a Thursday, the 23th day of January, between 7 and 8 P.M., we were told that all the people were assembling in the streets, terrified. I went out, and like the others I saw a great light in the air over the cathedral, covering the whole of Mount Saint Etienne with a round-shaped, heavy cloud, reddish in color, while all the air was clear and the sky so devoid of fog that the stars were seen shining brilliantly.

“This light remained quasi-motionless over Mount Saint Etienne, and from there we saw it coming so low that it nearly touched the houses and lit up the nearby streets, but with a motion so slow that it was hardly noticeable, and it halted for at least a quarter of an hour over Saint Vincent Abbey, where some pieces of relics of two glorious Saints are kept. Then, escaping over the
Grande place
of Chammar to the Doubs river, it went away through the
Grande rue
that goes to the bridge, and straight to the cathedral where it vanished, but as we said before, with such a slow motion that its travel lasted until 9:30 at night, which is to say at least two hours.”

 

Source: Révérend Jacques Fodéré,
Narration historique et topographique des convens de l'ordre de St-François
(Lyon: Pierre Rigaud, 1619), 10-11.

216.

May 1606, Kyoto, near Nijo Castle, Japan
Hovering red wheel

Numerous witnesses, including Samurais, see balls of fire kept flying over Kyoto and one night, a red wheel had come over and hovered above Nijo castle. We have not located an original Japanese source for this interesting case.

 

Source: Michel Bougard,
La chronique des OVNI
(Paris: Delarge, 1977), 86.

217.

1608, between Angoulême and Cognac, France
Flying warriors

“The day was calm and clear, and in an instant a large number of small, thick clouds appeared. They came down to the ground and turned into warriors. Their number was estimated between 10,000 and 12,000, all handsome and tall, covered with blue armor, aligned behind deployed red and blue banners (…)

“This sight was such that peasants and even the nobility took alarm. They assembled in large number to observe these soldiers' progress; they noticed that when they came near a thick wood, to maintain their good order, they rose above it, only touching the leaves of the trees with the bottom of their feet, eventually walking on the ground again to a forest where they disappeared.

“I have written this based on a manuscript report by the late M. Prévost, curate of Lussac les Eglises.”

 

Source:
Chronique de Pierre Robert
, cited by A. Catinat,
Chartes, Chroniques et Mémoriaux
(Lyon, 1874).

218.

1 August 1608, Genoa harbour, Italy
Fighting creatures from the sea

Two human figures holding what looked like flying snakes were seen fighting over the sea. Only their torso was visible above the waves. Their cries were so “horrible” some of the witnesses were sick with fear. They were seen repeatedly for a couple of weeks, and about 800 cannon shots failed to scare them away.

It should be noted that this event is often confused with a series of unrelated weather phenomena between Nice and Lambesc in France, where “bloody rains” were reported.

 

Source: Anon.,
Discours au Vray des terribles et espouvantables signes…
(Troyes: Odard Aulmont, 1608).

219.

15 August 1608, Genoa harbour, Italy Three coaches drawn by fiery creatures

“Over the sea off the harbor of Genoa, there appeared three coaches, each drawn by six fiery figures resembling dragons. With the said coaches were the aforesaid signs that still had their serpents and went on screaming their horrible cries and came close to Genoa, so that the spectators, or at least most of them, fled in fear of such a prodigy. However, when they had made three times a trip along the harbor and uttered such powerful screams that they resounded across the mountains around, they got lost over the sea and no news of them has been heard since.