when North American newspapers reported on dozens of mysterious “flying — Since 1947
saucers” that had fallen into parks, backyards, and streams, there has existed an almost
morbid obsession with dead aliens and wrecked spacecraft. This, too, is a very old story. During our research, Chris Aubeck has come across numerous legends of artificially made objects falling from the sky, including swords, shields, books, jewels, and statues, plus the occasional meteorite bearing hieroglyphic inscriptions. Stories of this kind are being catalogued for a future study but have not been retained in the present work. We have also noted that a whole genre of stories about aerial travelers in trouble emerged in medieval times. Amusing tales were told of ships from the clouds that ran into technical difficulties over Great Britain, leaving behind such items as anchors. Though dated only approximately, they have been included for reference. Until we find evidence to the contrary, we must conclude that tales involving actual UFO crashes (as we understand the term today) materialized as “factual reports” in mid to late 19th century newspapers, but the earliest crash report was described in French science fiction as early as 1775. The special problem of “dragons” The accounts most closely resembling UFO crashes within the scope of our chronology come from Chinese lore and describe the fall of “dragons.” For example, we have mentioned the episode of 1169 AD, when dragons were seen battling in the sky during a thunderstorm and pearls like carriage wheels fell down on the ground, where they were found by herds’ boys. These pearls would constitute physical proof that a phenomenon had occurred but unfortunately nothing more is said about them. A similar situation occurred one night in the late Fourth Century AD when Lu Kwang, King of Liang, saw a black dragon in the sky: “Its glittering eyes illuminated the whole vicinity, so that the huge monster was visible till it was enveloped by clouds which gathered from all sides. The next morning traces of its scales were to be seen over a distance of five miles, but soon were wiped out by the heavy rains.” One of Kwang’s attendants told him that the omen foretold “a man’s rise to the position of a ruler,” adding that he would no doubt attain such a rank. Lu Kwang rejoiced when he heard this, and did actually become a ruler some time afterwards. More than a century later, in 1295, two dragons fell into a lake at I Hing. This was followed by a strong wind which raised the level of the water “more than a chang,” that is, some 10 feet. The fourteenth century chronicler of this incident, Cheu Mih, adds that he had personally seen the results of another ‘dragonfall’ himself. Seeing the scorched paddy fields of the Peachgarden of the Ts’ing, he interviewed one of the villagers about it. “Yesterday noon there was a big dragon that fell from the sky,” he was told. “Immediately he was burned by terrestrial fire and flew away. For what the dragons fear is fire.” This raises the question of exactly what the Chinese of that era understood by the words we now translate as “dragons,” obviously a term that covered a wide variety of aerial phenomena, rather than our simple contemporary image of a flying, fire-belching serpent with wings. In cases when the circumstances surrounding the dragon are clearly stated (storms, destruction, lightning strikes, objects lifted into the sky) it seems that the terrified witnesses were observing tornadoes, with funnel clouds in the shape of giant serpents whipping around in the sky and causing widespread disaster. Entities Anomalies involving interaction with entities similar to those often associated with aerial phenomena, pose a special challenge. A shining being stepping outside a ball of light and addressing the witness is a valid entry in the chronology, but what about the shining beifig by itself, entering a room or meeting the witness, without any other aerial phenomenon reported? We excluded most of these cases from our list, keeping only instances where the interaction had a special relevance to the overall phenomenon. This decision may be challenged by our readers. In defense, we were concerned that, the moment we added superhuman beings by themselves and suggested they communicated with humans (either to give warnings or advice or tools or instructions) every other case in our chronology would get tinged with a sense of deliberate purpose. There are anomalies and patterns here, but we should not lead the reader into believing that certain types of entities are necessarily behind the phenomena. There is an extraordinary abundance of entity sightings (angels, demons, gods, and ghosts) in ancient chronicles. To distinguish between fictional and factual accounts now is impossible, and to use any and all would mean lumping aerial phenomena with cryptozoological creatures willy-nilly. If we take folklore, mysticism, phantoms, fantasy, dreams, and omens as our source, entity-only sightings would easily outnumber sightings of aerial phenomena by a hundred to one, so an exhaustive catalogue containing both is not helpful. No known criteria helps us sort “ufonauts” from other kinds of creatures (such as a mermaid, or a sea serpent) when no aerial phenomenon is present. We prefer to inform the reader that accounts involving supernatural entities were contemporaneous with aerial phenomena reports throughout history, pointing out that such stories do corroborate some aspects of the enigma as testified by modern witnesses, but that may imply a relationship that is beyond the scope of our compilation. Our purpose in this book is to explore an unknown phenomenon, manifesting throughout history, possibly misinterpreted by every culture in terms of its own history or religion. We suspect that the data we have compiled in our Chronology indicates the presence of a previously unknown physical element. Biblical accounts Religious texts such as the Bible contain many references to flying objects that are assumed to represent divine manifestations. For example, Zachariah relates that he saw such an object: “I turned, and lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a flying roll. And he said unto me, ‘What seest thou?’ And I answered, T see a flying roll; the length thereof is twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof ten cubits’” (approximately 40 feet). Descriptions of celestial chariots, visions of the Throne of God (Merkhaba), or the Shekinah generally cannot be related to specifically dated phenomena, and belong in a general analysis of religious, symbolic or mythical imagery. Most Biblical references to UFO-like phenomena place them within a complex narrative in which divine entities intervene to assist a particular group of people for what can only be described as political and religious reasons. The difference between, say, Jane Lead’s mystical experiences in the 17th century and those of the Bible is that Lead was shown spectacular things that she later interpreted in bursts of guided inspiration, whereas “celestial intervention” in the Bible had a dramatic, strategic effect. Biblical accounts show divine entities intimately working for and alongside whole communities, whereas Lead’s experiences are personal and private, like those of contemporary abductees. This means that while the physical phenomena described in the Bible resembled aerial phenomena from other historical periods, their function had a far greater impact, biased towards an ultimate goal affecting a larger number of people. This makes them stand apart from other accounts we read, whether we believe in the scriptures or not. Given this background, the placement of the few biblical stories we quoted raised some important issues. The two authors have had many discussions and occasionally heated debates on this point. A case could be made to leave Ezekiel in the main chronology but to exclude other Biblical events. Accounts of pillars of fire and light, on the other hand, are suitable for the chronology because they don’t imply any effort on the part of the phenomena themselves to become intimate with the witnesses, any more than the North Star to a traveler. We dislike the idea of portraying aerial phenomena as having selectively aided one religious order or community above others. This has led the authors to debate what message the sightings conveyed to our readers: Is it wise, we asked ourselves, to transmit this message with its religious context when we wanted the book to be useful to a world of researchers working in different cultures? Yet the fact that certain communities, such as the Hebrews, the ancient Chinese or the followers of Clovis have interpreted unidentified aerial phenomena as divinely-ordained craft designed to help them cannot be ignored. The contemporary belief among many ufologists that America is secretly aided by crashed saucer technology from Roswell represents a similar pattern in our own century. We can only note these beliefs and move on. Fig. 66: The vision of Zacharias The correlation between many unexplained sightings and religious or historical events brings up three important observations about potential biases in our data: (1) Events that were received within a religious context were better preserved simply because witnesses, priests and monks generally could read and write. They had a tradition and techniques of preserving records. Furthermore, they thought the observation was important. (Similarly, UFOs seen over nuclear plants or missile silos are more likely to be watched and documented today.) (2) If people attach spiritual significance to what they see, it affects their behavior and is invested with more lasting reality than witnessing a passing light in the sky. (3) The fact that witnesses perceived transcendent images in the phenomena may be part of the mechanism of the phenomena. Hence our argument that cases coinciding with religious dates or historical events are not necessarily the imaginative or fanciful product of obsolete belief systems. Unusual events are more likely to be recorded for posterity when they occur in important places, or on important dates, or to important people. If some kind of UFO reality is accepted (however simplistic) in such circumstances, a purely folkloric interpretation is not necessarily the best theory. Aerial phenomena in classical art In ancient times, up till a couple of centuries ago, religious art was the most common form of artistic expression. For centuries, painters created tapestries and pictures representing the Virgin, Christ, the Nativity, and scenes from the Old Testament. During those centuries comets and meteorites, triple suns and moons were also very commonly chronicled and taken seriously. An excellent example of this problem arises in connection with the Annunciation of Carlo Crivelli displayed at the National Gallery of London because it seems to show a hovering disk-like object sending a precisely collimated beam of golden light to Mary, as she receives the message that she has been chosen to conceive the Son of God. A modern critic named Cuoghi sees nothing unusual in this painting because “there is a vast amount of Annunciations in which a ray descends from the sky reach-ing the Madonna. Furthermore, as far as the Crivelli painting is concerned, (…) the object in the sky is formed by a circle of clouds inside which there are two circles of small angels. It is a very common way of representing the divinity, visible in so many works of sacred art. The same particular in the Annunciation of Carlo Crivelli…” Fig. 67: Annunciation, detail One could point out that this argument actually brings water to the ufologist’s mill: If the origin of the message to Mary is represented as a bizarre hovering disk full of celestial beings, doesn’t that suggest that knowledgeable artists placed this event into the category of specific interaction between humans and intelligent forces influencing us from the sky? This case opens an interesting discussion about the representation of unusual phenomena in art when the painting is not contemporary with the events depicted. In this case the “disk” corresponds to nothing in the biblical narrative, any more than other objects in the building such as the expensive drapes or the birds. We can only say that the story of God’s selection of Mary as the mother of Christ evoked a connection in the artist’s mind to a complex artifact hovering in the sky, which served as the source of a golden beam. While this connection is interesting, it tells us nothing new about Mary’s actual experience. Paintings do not offer valid evidence about the periods they represent. An image of the Virgin Mary with a disk-shaped object flying in the background, if painted centuries after the event, tells us nothing of the period in which Mary lived. However it does tell how the event is being interpreted by the society surrounding the artist, which is valuable in itself and should be noted. Fig. 68: “Annunciation,” by Carlo Crivelli Fig. 69: Dialogue about Flight This 1723 work by Pier Jacopo Martello, entitled Del Volo Dialogo: Mattina Prima (Bologna: Lelio dalla Volpe) is the first scientific poem, along with Antonio Conti’s Globo di Venere, written in the eighteenth century. We decided our best solution was to recount the history of ancient art in ufology, point out its pros and cons, and give a few examples either way. Omens have been seen in the sky for millennia, and interpreted as divine warnings, so it is not surprising to see them reflected in ancient art. This does not mean that any example of it represents an actual sighting. Sometimes the resemblance to phenomena reported today is stunning, but in the case of UFOs, as in the case of virtually any human preoccupation, art reveals more about the painter, his (or her) patron and the audience than about the subject itself. The next engraving is a case in point. It represents an old man with a book (“Democritus ridet”) at his feet. It has extraordinary importance for it foreshadows modern aeronautics with amazing insight. The old man points to two ships floating in the air. The first ship is merely a wooden boat but the second one, of more interest, represents a bird-like structure upside down with feather-wings and a small awning above. From tail to head stretches a sail; the tail acts as rudder. A figure stands inside watching another one falling through the air. On the ground lies the ruin of another ship while behind stretches an undulating landscape with bridge and tower and rows of poplars. For further research… It is vital to recognize the magnitude of the progress that the opening up of archives online has made possible in this research. This fact also contributes to distorting the statistics about the data: since pre-1800 texts cannot easily be read by optical character recognition scanning software, the amount of information available to us after 1800 has become mountainous in comparison to older records. Those researchers who believe that the UF© phenomenon started manifesting on Earth around that time are simply misled by the fact that our information sources are far more abundant and more readily available after the eighteenth century. Pre-1800 often means important but damaged records, unreadable or unpredictable script, dirty or flaking paper, fewer surviving sources, and no keyword search possibilities. It also means, in consequence, that such material is of little interest commercially, so what is available online is much less than what exists in the real world. Oddly enough, Egyptian records three or four millennia old, which were carved in the stone of stelae, preserve a more complete story than some of our yellowing nineteenth century American newspapers. We know what Akhenaton saw and heard in 1378 BC, but we have serious uncertainties about the whereabouts of the Post Office building in Jay, Ohio after 1858. Anyone complaining that we should go out and search archives and libraries page by page has no idea how much time it takes, how hard on the eyes it is, and how hit-and-miss it can be. Some brave early researchers like Dr. Bullard have spent decades looking for old cases, compared to what the Internet-based Magoniax Project collected in just a few years. The digitizing of text has given us this gift. We can breathe new life into aerial phenomena research, just as the same sources can improve knowledge in other academic fields. As we complete the first edition of this book, we are painfully aware that many sources remain beyond our grasp or even beyond our knowledge, because they are still buried in faraway libraries, written in languages with which we are not familiar, or even undeciphered in the dusty backrooms of museums. We are especially lacking in reliable data from Japan, China, and India, all ancient civilizations where careful records were kept down through the ages. We hope that scholars in those countries will be inspired to teach us about the knowledge preserved in their libraries. Our fervent hope is that the present book may stimulate scholars to dig out such material and bring it to the light of modern review, to inform our search for meaning among phenomena that still puzzle our best scientists today. CONCLUSION First, a word of disclosure: as authors of this compilation, we have worked with the awareness that we could not escape projecting some of our own beliefs, and those of the rt Western society of the 21 century to which we belong, through the case selections we have made. The cement holding the reports together is based on two components: on the one hand, some selection and research criteria we have tried to disclose with clarity; and on the other, our faith that the majority of the sightings belong in the same group and are not fictional. This already carries a perceptible message: we believe that most of the witnesses we quote did in fact observe phenomena that have remained unexplained to this day. Twelve important questions At this point in our exploration of the mysteries of the past, the reader is entitled to ask: what have we learned from all this work, how significant are the findings, do they teach us anything new about the modern phenomena generally called “UFOs” and is there more yet to be discovered? We will examine these topics systematically, and present our analysis as a series of twelve specific questions. 1. How homogeneous is this Chronology of 500 cases? The Chronology is only homogeneous by virtue of the selection criteria the authors have applied after casting a very broad net over the literature, and throwing back the little fish, the crustaceans, and the rotten algae back into the sea. We kept approximately one case in five or ten, depending on the period and context. Our screening parameters, which demanded a search for original references, a date and location, served to enhance the quality of the data and promoted cases that came from reliable records over popular rumors. Having done this, we screened out the items where we could find no compelling reason to think the phenomena described were other than meteors, aurorae borealis, ball lightning, tornadoes or other unusual atmospheric effects. In spite of this effort, the Chronology remains biased across time. We have more information on 19 century incidents than medieval observations, as the following graph shows. th Fig. 70: Case distribution by period The historical statistics break down as follows: BC: 24 eases 13 century: 16 cases 0-250: 8 cases 14 century: 16 cases 250-500: 9 cases 15 century: 23 cases 500-750: 13 cases 16 century: 53 cases 750-1000: 23 cases 17 century: 97 cases 11th century: 15 cases 18 century: 62 cases 12 century: 16 cases 1800-1879: 127 cases th th th th th th th 2. Isn’t the Chronology biased by your own cultural backgrounds? Undoubtedly it is. As disclosed above, we know much more about France or England than about Japan or China. The two authors share a background in Western humanities and the tradition of scientific enquiry that represents a selection bias against unfamiliar Asian, African, Polynesian, or Native American sources, especially those embedded in the imagery and texts of pre-1900 societies. Most contemporary students of unidentified flying objects posit that the phenomenon is of recent origin and centers on the Anglo-Saxon world simply because it became popular in the American press after World War Two. While we have avoided this pitfall, we cannot claim expertise in using sources in cultures other than our own. Thus, given two fragmentary rumors about similar events in medieval France and in a remote part of Asia, we are more likely to invest time and effort in tracking down the more accessible French reference, because of its more familiar linguistic and historical context, than the Asian one. We are also more likely to view the Asian story through a skeptical filter because of possible mistakes in translation and an absence of cultural references. This bias could only be corrected by researchers from other cultures joining in this effort. Fig. 71: Case distribution by country The geographical statistics break down as follows: 3. Do these cases represent a global phenomenon? As one reads through the chronology from end to end, two things become clear: (a) no convenient natural phenomenon or combination of natural phenomena accounts for the collection of events we have selected, although some alternative explanations may be proposed for individual cases and (b) the same unexplained features occur again and again, often in the same words in the language of witnesses. The overwhelming fact is that we are dealing with a narrow range of anomalous objects in the atmosphere or in space, typically described as spheres, balls, or disks, capable of extraordinary trajectories, generally of significant duration, often in formation, described by multiple observers and viewed as important enough to be reported to authorities (religious, administrative, or scientific). These features do characterize the events in all countries and all periods. 4. Is this all there is? Certainly not! Even in regions such as Western Europe, which produced most of our current data, there must be much published (but unscanned) material we have not been able to reach, and there must be large amounts of reports buried in manuscript form in local archives, unpublished personal diaries and private correspondence. 5. Who are the witnesses? They represent a cross-section of the population, with a preponderance of scientists or enlightened amateurs of “natural philosophy” after 1750 or so. Not surprisingly, given the nature of medieval society, most of the cases involved multiple witnesses, often an entire village or two. Other cases involved the crews of ships, even groups of soldiers at war, and in a couple of sightings, a king with his retinue. Single-witness cases did happen, of course, and religious interpretations were common, but this does not detract from the major facts of the observations. 6. Could all this be simply delusionary? No, although delusions are a factor in the interpretation of the phenomena, as we have abundantly documented in Part II of this book. Psychological or anthropological explanations fail to account for most of the cases selected in the Chronology. In fact, the so-called “rational” explanations proposed by academic experts are often as delusionary as the most fanciful reports, and they fail to account for the observed facts in the same way. Given the preponderance of multiple-witness cases, and the many events attested by figures in authority such as astronomers, State or Church representatives, as well as the extensive investigations some of the events have triggered, it is not reasonable to claim that no physical phenomenon of an unusual nature was present. Fig. 72: Frequency of cases as a function of duration Furthermore, a review of the duration of the sightings (known to us in 106 cases) shows that most of the objects or phenomena were in sight for a considerable time, certainly long enough for the witnesses to have called other people, and to have ascertained the circumstances of the observation. The duration statistics (above chart) are as follows: Such a distribution is not typical of delusionary events or hallucinations. 7. Are there general patterns behind the sightings? We have only begun to study this body of data for possible patterns. In particular, the time of day is known or at least estimated with some precision (plus or minus one hour) for no less than 205 cases, or 40% of the total. The resulting distribution is consistent with the results of similar studies conducted on the basis of catalogues of contemporary UFO sightings (notably in the book The Edge of Reality by Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Dr. Jacques Vallee, Chicago: Contemporary Books,
Source: Case: W526