A Long History of Visitations

 

From dragons to saucers, people always describe aerial visitations in terms that suit the period they live in

 

Strange things in the sky have been with us for a long time. The earliest recorded sighting was during the reign of Pharaoh Thutmose III, about 1450 BC. According to a papyrus, "scribes found a circle of fire in the sky…It had no head, the breath of its mouth had a foul odour." Over the next few days, "they became more numerous in the sky". There were plenty of witnesses: "the army of the Pharaoh looked on with him in their midst". The Pharaoh would have attributed the display to an unpropitiated god.

Ufologists have gone almost as far back to find close encounters in the Old Testament. The pillars of cloud and fire that led Moses to the promised land, Elijah’s chariot of fire and the visions of Ezekiel have all been explained as alien liaisons.

Roman writers left only their own "evidence". The historian Livy described an "altar" floating in the sky, surrounded by "men in white clothing". Unfortunately, the incident occurred about two centuries before Livy wrote it down. Pliny the Elder describes a "spark" that fell from a star to earth, becoming as large as the moon before returning skywards. But this was almost a century before his birth. More intriguingly, Pliny also wrote of lights in the sky called "night suns".

But the most exciting Roman UFO stories are from the pen of one Julius Obsequens, who wrote in the 4th century about "ships in the sky over Italy". Alas, these allegedly took place 500 years before.

Medieval Europe is a rich source for ufologists. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 793 tells of "terrible portents" in Northumbria with "fiery dragons flying through the air". On 9 March 1170, Ralph Niger described a close encounter of the second kind when "a wonderfully large dragon was seen…The air was kindled into fire and burnt a house."

The historian Matthew Paris writes of strange lights in the sky, and describes how on New Year’s Day 1254 over St Albans "there suddenly appeared in the sky a kind of large ship, well-equipped and of marvellous colour". Well-equipped? Did that mean stout masts and rigging? He could hardly have meant a Mk XV Gravitronic Drive.

Most medieval sightings were recorded as dragons because they fitted the contemporary mind-set. Unless, of course, people really did see dragons. Some research matches medieval aerial phenomena with unusual geology. Light in the sky may be electrical discharges caused by tectonic strain.

In the 18th century, folk were too sophisticated to report fire-snorting beasts. They saw "Meteors" - a term that meant little, but sounded scientific. In 1731 a Sheffield man saw something that "emitted intense beams of light…It became so hot that I could take off my shirt."

Until the first balloon in 1783, any flying object that wasn’t a bird, a bat or a missile was affront to the natural order.

By the time of the first airship in 1900, magazines had gone airship mad. A rash of sightings in the 1890s were described in those terms. A Kansas farmer accused the "airships" of cattle theft, and a newspaper claimed a crashing airship had left a dead Martian in a ruined Texas windmill. Many account were the work of bored journalists. But the strange things in the sky had at last been given a technological explanation - and the link was made with alien intelligence.