Throughout our history, many people have claimed to have seen strange things in the sky. Much of what was described was nothing more than natural phenomena or astronomical events such as meteor showers or comets, clouds of unusual shapes that were mistaken for flying saucers. But what happened in the dawn sky over Nuremberg in medieval Germany still baffles scientists, even four hundred years later. This happened in the early morning of April 14, 1561, somewhere between four and five o'clock. The sky sparkled with hundreds of bright lights that emitted beams of light in different directions.
Panic began to build up among the townspeople, and frightened people ran out into the streets. Eyewitnesses described the lights in the sky as a war between different forms of heavenly bodies. People claimed to have seen spears, cylinders, pillars, crosses, and plates flying in the predawn sky. Witnesses said that this heavenly battle lasted about an hour. Unidentified flying objects emerged from huge cylinders. After the "battle," several "plates" fell to the ground, and the giant cylinders disappeared. An extensive account of this event was made in a newspaper of the time by Hans Wolf Glazer, who published this article in 1573. He literally wrote the following: “On the morning of April 14, 1561, at dawn, between 4 and 5 o'clock, a terrible phenomenon occurred on the Sun. Then this phenomenon was noticed in Nuremberg by many men and women. First, two blood-red semicircular arcs appeared in the center of the sun, similar to the moon in its last quarter. And from all sides a bloody light emanated from him. Nearby lay blood-red balls of various sizes, and there were a lot of them. Between these balls were crosses and stripes, also blood-red.
These stripes looked like reed grass. All these strange figures were fighting among themselves. The balloons also flew back and forth and fought fiercely for at least an hour. And when the conflict inside and near the Sun became extremely intense, they seemed so tired that they simply fell from the Sun to the ground, as if they had all been burned. They emitted puffs of black smoke. After all this, something like a Black Spear appeared, very long and fat.
With a blunt end, she pointed to the east, and with a sharp end, to the west. What these signs mean, only God knows. Although we have seen so many different signs in heaven that Almighty God sends us to bring us to repentance, we are sadly so ungrateful that we despise such lofty signs and wonders of God. Or we mock them and reject them. God has sent us a terrible punishment for our ingratitude. After all, a God-fearing person will never reject these signs. He will take it to heart as a warning from a merciful Heavenly Father, correct his life, and sincerely ask God to turn away his anger. God will turn away the punishment we deserve so that we can temporarily live here and then in heaven as his children.
For centuries, historians have tried to interpret what actually happened. What is true in the description of Glazer, and what is fiction. What lies on the surface is an undeniable religious connotation, especially noticeable in the last lines. It directly states that this phenomenon is in fact God's call to repentance. This led many scholars to believe that Hans Glaser had heavily embellished a present rare astronomical phenomenon and used it as a form of religious propaganda. But here's what's interesting: the event at Nuremberg was not unique. Five years later, it happened in the sky over the Swiss city of Basel. A pamphlet published in 1566 describes nearly identical sightings of the Nuremberg witnesses. Trying to understand the secrets of these incidents, scientists first studied the biography of Hans Glazer and what he wrote about. It turned out that Hans was a publisher with a very dubious reputation.
Many of his prints, as it turned out, belonged to other authors who worked in Nuremberg. In 1558, Glazer even received a warning from the city council for illegal activities. Subsequently, he was even banned from publishing. Glazer loved sensational stories and had a penchant for exaggeration. Many of his engravings mention very strange atmospheric phenomena such as bloody rain or bearded grapes. However, there is some truth in his messages. There are quite understandable scientific explanations for everything he described. Blood rain was documented as early as Homer's Iliad. Raindrops sometimes appear blood red due to the presence of dust particles or algae spores, as was the case in India in 2015.
Bearded grapes are a phenomenon that causes mold that feeds on from the constantly wet conditions during harvest. Of course, it is unfair to single out Hans Glazer as a sensation. Many medieval images depict incredible celestial events that are interpreted as a sign of God. Many of these events are completely natural atmospheric phenomena. But this does not at all deny their divine origin. Scientists clearly associate the unusual sky battle in the skies over Nuremberg in 1561 with the fact that it is a rare weather event. These include meteor showers, circular horizontal arcs, solar columns, and halos.
If the conditions are right, you can see it all in the sky at the same time, as evidenced by this extraordinary photo taken on January 9, 2015 in Red River, New Mexico. Making the final conclusion, one can say with certainty only one thing: what happened in Nuremberg in 1561 was not a battle of an alien spacecraft, but a series of unusual weather events. Hans Glazer gave them a religious tone and made a splash out of it. However, do not forget that his version has all the rights to exist.
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