Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Aliens are a pretty interesting concept. Completely foreign, unknown, mysterious creatures from the depths of space whose culture and lives we know absolutely nothing about. What's even more interesting, to me, at least, is human culture's fascination with imagining potential situations where these said celestial organisms come down from the sky and cause some world altering events to take place. I guess adding some interesting plot points to our otherwise mundane existences.
[00:00:26] This fabrication of potential sky goblins wreaking havoc is a commonality with human culture in the present day. But it begs the question, has this sort of narrative ever been made way back when? I'm not talking about grandpa's random rantings about the time a quote unquote alien stole all his crops. Not at all. I'm talking about a colossal, city altering catastrophe. Real Independence Day type stuff. Has there ever been an instance in history where real aliens came down to earth and caused mass panic and hysteria to a town of people? I mean, I wouldn't be asking such specific questions if I hadn't already known the answer. But humor me. This answer is as interesting as a story itself. So kick back, relax, or don't, and listen to what happened in the skies above Nuremberg in 1561.
[00:01:14] Hey, I'm Angelo, the little voice speaking in your ear. And this is Rambler's history, my place to ramble on about tales and events that I find interesting from all throughout the world's existence. This story in particular takes place at sunrise. It's April 14 of the year 1561, nearly 500 years ago in the german city of Nuremberg. It was a regular day filled with regular people as they went about their regular lives in a regular city. I mean, I guess you could say it was pretty regular, right? Well, based off a broadsheet published in that same month, it was anything but regular. Well, okay, what is a broadsheet? First of all, you know those newspapers and tabloids you see in checkout lines at the supermarket? The ones that'll spout crazy stuff along the lines of Dick Cheney is a robot, or bat boy leads cops on a three state chase. Or maybe even such gems like severed leg hops to the hospital to find a new body. Well, I'm not talking about those kinds of tabloids. Essentially, a broadsheet is like a tabloid, but they tend to have a more serious tone. Notice how I emphasize tend. Because while modern broadsheets cover much more serious and less shocking topics, broadsheets from 500 years ago try to be serious, but the topics they wrote about still have that sensational nature that's common with tabloids so essentially it's like reading a report on the discovery of unicorns in the style of a national emergency broadcast. You get what I'm saying? As entertaining as that sounds right now, back then, no one was laughing. If you're a random dude in 1561 and you read the latest broadsheet proclaiming that the earth is going to explode because you're eating too much bread, you'd probably go nuts. So, getting back, right back on track. This broadsheet reported a mass sighting of celestial phenomena, or UFO's, in the skies above Nuremberg. According to the same broadsheet, around dawn of April 14, 1561, many men and women of Nuremberg Sawa was described as an aerial battle out of the sun. This was followed by the appearance of a large, black triangular object and exhausted combatant spheres falling to earth in clouds of smoke. The witness is claimed to have observed hundreds of spheres, cylinders and other odd shaped objects that moved erratically overhead.
[00:03:22] Now, the rest of it is pretty long. The rest of the broad sheet, I mean, it's pretty long. So you can check it out in your own time if you're interested, which I highly recommend. But for now, I'll just give you the meat and potatoes in my own simple, elegant words, of course.
[00:03:36] Alright, so at daybreak of an April morning, what was described as a quote unquote dreadful apparition appeared in the sun. This apparition in question at first showed up in the middle of the sun. It was two huge, blood red, semicircular arcs, kind of like how the moon looks in that one phase. It has. I can't remember for the life of me. Not only that, but there were also sightings of a round ball with a particularly black shading to it and a few rods in different arrangements. Okay, you might be saying that might be weird enough on its own, but listen, imagine dozens and dozens of them all around the sky. You thought that one black orb was enough? Well, guess what, sucker? I'm talking countless orbs floating around this way and that, each of them very varying in shades and blood red and dull black. Throw a few tubes in the mix, suddenly the orbs find their way inside said tubes, making this pattern of crosses, all of them with different varying sizes and thicknesses, moving around with the predictableness of a dice roll. I swear, the way they described it sounds like they got confused looking at a Wassily kandinsky painting. Now, as if that wasnt enough to swallow, they just had to shove down our throats that these floating sky marbles started fighting each other. I mean, I wish I was kidding. These moving splatter paint dots were fighting each other for over an hour, after which they got quote unquote tired. But wait, how did these things get tired? I mean, I wish I knew too, but apparently they did. So after tuckering themselves out, this circus act of flying orbicidal entities plummet to the ground and vanish away in a plume of smoke, some of them crashing on houses and fields. Wow. I mean, I guess that's, that's the end of all those shenanigans, right? Wrong. After all that ruckus, something that looks like a huge black spear made its presence known. Long and thick in stature, the shaft of this weapon like apparition pointed eastward while the tip pointed to the west, all across the sky. I'm looking at the picture they provided based off of it. It stretched for miles, practically splaying itself over the worn battle. The battle worn skydehe. Well, that's where the descriptions end. I mean, as abrupt as the battle itself, the brachi doesn't exactly include the aftermath of this whole ordeal. Although given human tendencies, I'm assuming that people were freaking out. That's just my thoughts, though. Take it or leave it. So, after such a detailed and in depth description of the events, the Brachi writer, whose name, by the way, is Hans Glaser, he goes on as to what could have caused this. So aside from the initial assumptions that it was aliens, of course.
[00:06:02] And he tries to figure out why exactly this is happening. Given that it's the 16th century Europe, his options are pretty slim. I mean, it's either God was angry and he's warning us, or God is done with warnings and we're screwed. So he yaps for a bit about how we ridicule the signs of God and how we must mend our lives and faithfully beg God well deserved punishment. This lives as his children that. Anywho, he ends it off by basically saying, yo, we messed up. God's warning us. Let's all seek forgiveness and stop ignoring the signs.
[00:06:33] Okay, that's more or less what the broadsheet has to say about this crazy turn of events. But let's take a moment to like to just think about some of the modern interpretations of all this. I mean, surely modern day research and knowledge could lead to more answers than a few freaked out farmers fumbling to find a form of reason. Ooh, look at that alliteration. I mean, lucky for us, there are quite a few different takes for this. Carl Jung, who's a pretty famous guy, expresses what that people might not have seen a bunch of UFO's, but rather a natural phenomenon, which, I mean, he's not exactly. He's not exactly wrong, but what he follows that up with is kind of funny to me. He follows that up by saying that these orbs could have been living organisms. And no, he's not talking about actual living orb aliens, for crying out loud. He's more so suggesting that these orbs could instead be, quote, a swarm of insects rising with the sun, not to fight with one another, but to mate and celebrate the marriage flight, end quote.
[00:07:29] I mean, come on. I can't imagine a bunch of small, itty bitty bugs rising upwards towards the sun, being all happy and stuff, and then also simultaneously picture a bunch of horrified civilians at their feet, fearing for their lives, at the grandiosity power of like, of heavenly display that God himself is threatening them with.
[00:07:48] I guess, I mean, to be fair, it would make the perfect fake out if these people were just getting scared over a few flying bugs.
[00:07:55] But observing this from a military perspective, I mean, you could make the argument that this was an actual battle taking place just on the ground and people were kind of freaking out. The tubes could be cannons. The orbs that were fighting each other were cannonballs.
[00:08:09] This would also make the large spear shaped elephant in the room at least make some sense, you know, in a religious sense. All of this could make a bit more. A bit more sense out of, like, the cross shaped imagery. I mean, with the orbs forming crosses and different other shapes. Like that description of four globes conjoined together by lines bears a pretty good resemblance to an individuation symbol. That's a weird word, suggesting that, like, maybe there was a revelation of the light, you know, some sort of heavenly power coming down and showing them some truth of some sort.
[00:08:45] So that's what some see this as, whether it be military or religious. But there has to be some reason for why all the people that saw this thought the absolute worst of it, that the world was going to end and that God was going to punish them.
[00:08:59] Certainly a lot of similar broadcasts and reports exist in german and swiss archives.
[00:09:06] They all preach of the same world ending, cataclysmic events that take place. But here's what. Here's the kicker. Here's what I find most interesting in every single one of these broadcasts, in these archives. Nuremberg is a prime focus in a lot of them. So it's either that Nuremberg has been struggling with hardship and conflict, and thus that's why they're so pessimistic. And all doom and gloom and all that. Or there might be something far more nefarious and mysterious going on there than we imagined.
[00:09:34] Okay, enough beating around the bush. What in the world is this, really? Well, to put it simply, it's no nefarious purposes. It's no doom and gloom, it's no apocalyptic thing.
[00:09:43] Quite simply, it's just the sky playing a nasty trick on people. That's all it is, folks. But, okay, let me explain what's actually going on here. The whole thing is essentially a perfectly timed convergence of multiple atmospheric phenomenon, with the most notable one in this particular situation being known as a sundog or a parthelion. Now, I'm just going to call them sun dogs. Sundogs happen under the right conditions. When the ice in the upper part. Stay with me. Now, when the ice in the upper part of the earth's atmosphere starts acting like prisms, so, like in cirrus clouds and stuff like that, they reflect the sun and moon's light in different ways, leading to some pretty interesting visual spectacles. Now, here's the best part. Nuremberg has the perfect conditions for this to occur. What?
[00:10:30] Boom. Big reveal. You put two and two together and you start connecting more dots start connecting more dots than tubes above Nuremberg did. I'll give you my best to describe what these sundogs can look like, but I really encourage you to just look it up. It's really cool. Like, I've, like, the images of, like, actual sun dogs in real life, and the pictures they captured are really cool, but essentially these verbal explanations will do it justice. But I. I'll try my best. You know those lens flares that you get on your camera, if you took a picture in a sunny area from, like, a certain angle, like if, like, it's a sunrise and you take a picture, there's like some sort of, like, sun glare. It kind of looks like that, but even more awesome and extravagant. All right. And, hey, I mean, I can't blame those poor folks that day. If I saw that in real life, I'd probably be stupefied beyond belief. Back then, these types of natural occurrences were seen with, like, religious significance, and rightfully so. I suppose it's mainly due to the, the fact that there were kind of crosses visibly stretching out from the middle of the sun. This is, you can actually see this sort of cross shape in these, in these little, in these sundog pictures.
[00:11:35] Sundogs are also partly responsible for the appearance of the orbs, too. Like the orbs that were seen fighting. This is seen from the little patches of light here and there during the sundog event. And it's quite common based off the images that I've seen.
[00:11:48] But this still doesn't explain the large black spear in the sky. So what gives about that? Well, the answer comes in the form of a combination of sunrises, some things called fall streaks, and crepuscular rays. That's a lot of words, but let's start with a fall streak. What is a false streak? Well, these are often accompanied by cirrus clouds, and these are often accompanied by cirrus clouds made up of ice crystals.
[00:12:12] Hmm. Wait a second. So these are the same ice crystals that cause sundogs. Oh, and look at that. Cirrus clouds are one of the main contributors to sundog creation. Oh, yeah. It's all coming together now. Next up, crepuscular rays. These are, quite simply, shadows caused by false streaks. Wait a second. Crepuscular rays and false streaks are related. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Shadows are quite the dark color. One could say black, even. Huh. That's cool. The long spear in the sky was, you guessed it, black in color as the sunrise. As for sunrises, I mean, you know how they rise in the east and set in the west?
[00:12:50] Well, the shaft of the spear, aka the wide end of it, started way off in the east before tapering off and becoming a sharp tip that stretches across the sky over to the west. Essentially one big shadow. Now, remember how all this takes place in the sunrise hours of this April morning? It all comes together here. And now, the atmosphere. Listen. The atmosphere was perfectly icy and filled with cirrus clouds on this April sunrise morning, the sun was rising in the east, creating the false streak which created the crepuscular rays, thus creating the giant spear like image. At the same time, those prisms, cirrus clouds and sunrise decided to do a triple tag team combo and make the Sundog event take place, creating an absolutely bonkers light show of crosses, orbs, and tubes. All of these seemingly random and rare but completely natural atmospheric factors come together at the exact same time.
[00:13:53] Talk about perfect timing. Man. This combination of totally mystifying natural occurrences created a massive story that's captured the attention and fears of thousands back then, but has also captured the attention of millions today.
[00:14:07] And, I mean, there you have it. A wild story filled with mysterious aliens fighting over a peaceful city. Minus the aliens in fighting, of course. I mean, sure, it would have been cool if there were actual aliens that fought atop a town of innocent people, but, hey, trippy sky visuals work, too. I guess if theres anything ive learned from this. Its that the world works in mischievous ways and to start being skeptical of the sky and its mysterious nature.
[00:14:32] Anyhow, hope you got a kick out of this. I had a ton of fun researching for it, especially when all the dots were connecting. I kind of flipped out during that. Anyway, thank you for tuning in, and I hope to see you guys again very soon. Bye.
