[HN Gopher] 1561 Celestial Phenomenon over Nuremberg
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1561 Celestial Phenomenon over Nuremberg
Author : handfuloflight
Score : 46 points
Date : 2025-02-19 02:16 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| tomohelix wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| The flyer is the only source on this specific event. (More
| realistically, it mixes descriptions of multiple events with
| religious and military themes of the time.) Such flyers about
| celestial phenomena and miracle signs were popular in that time
| period. The Wikipedia article links to two other similarly
| strange ones.
|
| Hardly anyone nowadays takes them at face value, but it's also
| not completely clear what exactly inspired them.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Same type of report from Basel in 1566:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1566_celestial_phenomenon_over...
| someuser54541 wrote:
| I can't be the only one who immediately thought "Star Destroyer"
| regarding the "black spear".
| Henchman21 wrote:
| May the Force be with you, someuser54541
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| 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.
| empath75 wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2025-02-22 23:00 UTC)