1561 Celestial Phenomenon over Nuremberg

This is one of those classic UFO lore documents. The German Wikipage is much more expansive in context, here's a short translated part that should tell you all you need to know about this one:

> Magin concludes by pointing out that reports of supposed “battles in the sky” were already very popular in antiquity and especially in the Middle Ages and were written down in astonishingly large numbers and distributed on leaflets and woodcuts. At this time, the Christian religion had a great influence on the everyday lives and world view of ordinary people and interpreted celestial phenomena of all kinds as “divine miraculous signs” or “warning signs from God”. Accordingly, the illustrations are littered with Christian symbols. Pious people saw themselves “admonished by God” through such leaflets and miracle reports to confess and remain faithful to him. A report such as Glaser's would therefore come as no surprise, as the people of his time would have known how to interpret the leaflet correctly.

What do they mean by "fight"? The original text is very vague about it. How did they fight? Is there any other independent record of such a large scale event? Any resulting discussion or acknowledgement from official authorities at the time?

If not, then this is likely unreliable and likely as good as fiction.

I can't be the only one who immediately thought "Star Destroyer" regarding the "black spear".

Maybe it was a glitch in space-time and they were witnessing scenes from WW3.

Something else, from Japan, 18xx: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utsuro-bune

Just a drone swarm ? ;-)

Even assuming that this is an accurate recounting of what people believe they saw, we can dismiss out of hand that this is describing UFOs or any kind of space battle. It would have been visible all over Europe and there were astronomers all over Europe that were actively looking at the skies who would have been _extremely_ interested in an event like this. It wouldn't haven't been a notice in a small broadsheet in the middle of nowhere.

There's not really enough information presented to know if this is even a faithful recounting of what witnesses say they saw, though. We don't know if the publisher was more like the NY Times or more like the Weekly World News. Did it regular publish fanciful accounts of the supernatural? I suspect that it did. This was right at the birth of the modern era when modern science was just getting started, but also while witch trials were going on, and this reads just like the fanciful accusations of sorcery and witchcraft against people that were common at the time. And also in the middle of the Reformation, when religious conflicts were at the forefront of people's minds. A war in the heavens would have reflected the war of faith on earth that was going on at the same time.

This is one of those niche topics that Wikipedia is just awful at because the only people interested in editing it are going to be people who have a particular interpretation of it. This is interesting psychologically and historically because it tells us something about how people used symbolism and interpreted "signs" in the sky, but it tells us absolutely _nothing_ of value about what anybody migh have seen or not seen on that day.

Edit: Also -- keep in mind that the early days of the printing press had a similar impact at the time to social media today. An absolute deluge of bullshit, fraud and scams unleashed on a naive population who trusted everything they saw in print and didn't have the tools to distinguish truth from falsehood. You'd think after 500 years people would be better at it.

That was just me, got lost a little due to hiccups in the neural interface of my temporal spacionics. Had to reboot in flight. With a hammer, against my helmet!

Singing Ghost Riders in the Sky, Yippie, Yah, Haa...