Buchmann explained that on the day he disappeared he carried money to pay Hans Schürmann, the owner of the Romerswil inn, to whom he owed sixteen florins. Schürmann was not at home so he decided to go to Sempach on other business matters. There he stayed until dawn, drinking something but very little, and then set off for home. As he was passing through the forest he suddenly heard a strange noise. At first he thought it was the buzz of a swarm of bees, but then he realized it sounded more like music. He felt afraid, and was no longer sure where he was nor what was happening. He unsheathed his sword and swiped at the air around him, losing his hat, gloves and coat in the process. Before losing consciousness he could feel that he was being lifted up into the air. He was taken to another country. He was disoriented and confused, with no idea where he was. He felt pain and swellings in his face and around his head.
Two weeks after his abduction he found himself in Milan, with no idea how he had got there. He was weak because he had not eaten or drunk anything in days, but he was determined to find his way home. Hans Buchmann neither knew the city nor spoke the language, and had no way of communicating his situation to anyone until he came across a guard of German origin who took pity on him.
Source: Cysat, who knew Buchmann personally, was sure the man had been kidnapped by a fairy of some kind. In his Collectanea Chronica und Denkwürdige Sachen pro Chronica Lucernensi et Helvetiae, where the story is described in detail, he mentions several other cases of fairy abduction.
203.
29 January 1574, Japan, exact location unknown
Flying umbrella
A large object shaped like an umbrella flew over, illuminating the sky and the ground. It was seen twice.
Source: Brothers I, 1. We lack any earlier reference.
204.
21 December 1576, Mount Kasuga, Japan
Wheel in the sky
A wheel-shaped object flew for an hour over the castle on Mount Kasuga. No historical source is given for this tantalizing case, which would deserve further study by researchers familiar with Japanese chronicles.
Source: Brothers magazine, again with no reference.
205.
5 December 1577, near Tübingen, Germany
Flying black hats
“Numerous black clouds appeared around the Sun, similar to those we see during major storms; shortly thereafter, other clouds of blood and fire emerged from the Sun, and yet others yellow as saffron.
“From these clouds came luminous effects like big, high and broad hats, and the earth itself appeared yellow, bloody, and covered with high and broad hats that took various colors such as red, blue, green, and most of them black.
“Everyone can easily understand the meaning of this miracle, and know that God wants men to repent and make penance. May the all-powerful God help all men to recognize Him. Amen”.
Source: Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires Prodigieuses (2nd edition, 1594). Also described in a German broadsheet printed in early 1578: Schröckliche Newe Zeitung / von dem Wunderzeichen / welches den kurtzverschinenen fünfften deß Christmonats / zu Alttorff inn dem Land Würtenberg ist gesehen worden (Strassburg: Bernhard Jobin, 1578), ZB PAS II 15/1. This belongs to J.J. Wick’s collection (Wickiana).
206.
21 December 1578, Geneva, Switzerland
Signs and prodigies
“Marvellous and terrifying discourse of the signs and prodigies that appeared over the city of Geneva the 21st day of December 1578” is the title of a brochure published by G. Stadius, mathematician of the Duke of Savoy and noted astronomer. It describes strange phenomena, including “a comet surmounted by a small cross.”
Source: Discours merveilleux et espouventable des signes et prodiges qui sont apparuz au ciel sur la ville de Genefve le XXI. jour de décembre mil V. cens LXXVIII [par B. Du Coudre, avec réponse de G. Stadius] (Paris: J. Pinart, 1579), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, BN MP-3321.
207.
18 February 1579, Paris, France: Flying intruder
A “great and wondrous flying serpent or dragon” appeared, according to a leaflet (“canard”) of the time.
It was seen by many over Paris from two o’clock in the afternoon until evening.
Source: A leaflet at the Library of Amiens entitled Du serpent ou dragon volant, grand et merveilleux, apparu et veu par un chacun sur la ville de Paris, le mercredi XVIII febvrier 1579, depuis deux heures après midi, jusques au soir (1579).
208.
7 February 1580, Straits of Magellan
Red, fiery flying shield
In Viajes al Estrecho de Magallanes by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (ca. 1530-1592) we read of this navigator’s travels to the Strait of Magellan in 1579 and 1581. On Thursday, February 7th 1580 at 1:00 A.M., he wrote that towards the south-southeast:
“We saw a round thing appear, red like fire, like a shield, that rose up on the air or on the wind. It became longer as it went over a mountain and, in the form of a lance high above the mount, its shape became like a half-moon between red and white in color.”
The three simple shapes accompanying the text are a circle, an oval and a half-moon.
Sarmiento de Gamboa compares the object to an “adarga.” This was a round, oval or heart-shaped shield used in the time of Don Quijote.
209.
1586, Grangemuir, Scotland: Healer abducted by fairies
A woman named Alison Pearson confessed that she had met with the “Good Neighbors,” who had given her a salve that could cure every disease. She had seen a man clad in green, who was accompanied by many men and women making merry with good cheer and music, and she was carried away by them. She was tried and put to death in 1586, although she had treated the Archbishop of Saint Andrews, who stated he had received benefit from it.
Source: James Grant, The Mysteries of all Nations: Rise and Progress of Superstition, laws against and trials of witches, ancient and modern delusions (Edinburgh: Reid & Son, 1880), 517.
210.
1586, Beauvais sous Matha near Tors, France Flying Hat-shaped object
A brown “hat” with horrible red colors was observed flying close to the steeple shortly before sunset.
Fig. 18: Agrippa d’Aubigné
The witnesses were the great French poet Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné (1552-1630) and the Marquis de Tors.
“The Marquis, lord of that place, took his guest to a garden, shortly before sunset, and they saw a round cloud come down over the hamlet of Beauvais-sous-Matha, with a color that was horrid to see, for which one is forced to use a Latin word: subfusca (dark brown).
“This cloud resembled a hat with an ear in the middle, the color of the throat of an Indian rooster (…) This hat with its sinister sign came into the steeple and melted there.”
Source: Agrippa d’Aubigné, Histoire Universelle (1626), III, iv, ch. 3.
211.
12 January 1589, Saint-Denis, France
Sky phenomena
A text published in French around 1599 makes the following report:
“We have seen at night two large clouds between Paris and St. Denis, which radiated great light, and they moved towards one another, joined and then separated again, and a large number of sagettes (arrows) and spears of fire came out, which lasted a long time in combat, then after having been fighting well, they retreated, then began to travel, and passed over the City of Paris, and went straight on southwards.
“Then on Friday 13th of the month of January, we have also seen in the Sky a great Crescent and one Star above it, like a Comet, which was bright all day, and people were amazed. Christians prayed for God to save us from the menace. Amen”
Source: Anon., Signes merveilleux aparuz sur la ville & Chasteau de Bloys, en la presence du Roy: & l’assistance du peuple. Ensemble les signes & Comete aparuz pres Paris, le douziesme de Janvier, 1589 comme voyez par ce present portraict (1599?), Bibliothèque Municipale de Blois, n° Inv.: LI 13.
212.
1590, Scotland, location unknown
Tubular
object
In 1590 Scottish peasants informed the shire reeve (the king’s representative) that a large tubular object had been seen hovering over their town. It hung motionless in the sky for several minutes before it vanished.
Despite abundant references online and in print, an original source has not been located.
213.
1592, Pinner, Middlesex, England
Transported away!
Farm worker Richard Burt was confronted by a being he described as “a large black cat” and was transported magically to Harrow.
Source: A Most Wicked Work of a Wretched Witch (1593).
214.
15 October 1595, Targoviste, Wallachia, Romania Hovering object
When prince Michel the Brave besieged the city of Targoviste, the capital of Wallachia, temporarily occupied by Turks, “a large comet appeared” above the military camp and rested for two hours (according to an Italian report of the facts, redacted in Prague). After three days the Turks were defeated. No such comet is mentioned in astronomical records.
Source: Calin N. Turcu, Enciclopedia observatiilor O.Z.N. din Romania (1517-1994) (Bucharest: Ed. Emanuel, 1994), 3.
Epilogue to Part I-C
The end of the sixteenth century finds France devastated by fanaticism and a religious civil war between Catholics and Protestants, only resolved in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, through which King Henry IV establishes for the first time the dual principles of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion. Spain and France are both exhausted, while England dominates the seas and becomes a great commercial and industrial power, extending its colonial empire to America with the rise of Virginia.
It is the end of the Elizabethan period. Shakespeare and Cervantes reign over literature.
Science now progresses in great strides: in the last decade Galileo publishes his observations on falling bodies and (in 1593) invents the thermometer. Botanical gardens are established at the University of Montpellier, and the first manuals of veterinary science appear.
When 1600 comes around, astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler are working together in Prague, while Dutch opticians have invented the telescope, Kircher has built the first magic lantern and William Gilbert has published the first scientific treatise on magnetism and electricity; The Western world has entered a new era.
PART I-D
Seventeenth-Century Chronology
Spurred on by strategic and scientific interest in navigation, astronomy underwent unprecedented growth during the seventeenth century. Experimental and theoretical publications flourished under the pen of Galileo, Huygens, Cassini, and numerous observers of the Moon and planets using the newly-invented telescopes. Similar progress revolutionized physics, mathematics and medicine, often in spite of the dictates of the Church.
This movement towards better understanding of nature and man’s relationship to it, long repressed by religious ideology, found its expression in the “Invisible College” and culminated in the creation of the Royal Society in London in 1660, while Harvard College in the colony of Massachusetts was awarded its charter in 1650.
Similar forces were at play in Asia, where Chinese naturalist Chen Yuan-Lung published his treatise on “New Inventions,” and in Japan where Seki Kowa, “the Arithmetical Sage,” anticipated many of the discoveries of Western mathematics. He was the first person to study determinants in 1683, ten years before Leibniz used determinants to solve simultaneous equations.
Political aspirations created turmoil in the background, particularly in England with the parliamentarian revolution led by Cromwell, the restoration of the Stuart monarchy and the further upheaval leading William of Orange to the throne. France fared better, dominating European culture and politics for most of the century, until the disastrous Revocation of the Edict of Nantes that forbade Protestantism and drove leading Huguenot families out of the country: hundreds of thousands fled to Switzerland, Germany, Holland and Great Britain, ruining entire provinces and decimating French industry at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Huguenots took the art of clock making to Geneva, the steamboat to England and paper making to Holland.
News of extraordinary phenomena was greeted with keen interest, either for their “philosophical” value or as omens of mystical importance. Antiquarians and Chroniclers collected such reports and compiled information from various countries, including North and South America. We even begin to find reports of unusual aerial sightings in the pages of the early scientific journals, like the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, often in terms that seem surprisingly open and free compared to the staid, self-censored, dogmatic, and often arrogant scientific literature of today.
215.
23 January 1603, Besançon, France
Self-propelled cloud
“In the year 1603, being in Besançon for the duties of my charge as Visitor to Sainte Claire monastery, it happened that on a Thursday, the 23th day of January, between 7 and 8 P.M., we were told that all the people were assembling in the streets, terrified. I went out, and like the others I saw a great light in the air over the cathedral, covering the whole of Mount Saint Etienne with a round-shaped, heavy cloud, reddish in color, while all the air was clear and the sky so devoid of fog that the stars were seen shining brilliantly.
“This light remained quasi-motionless over Mount Saint Etienne, and from there we saw it coming so low that it nearly touched the houses and lit up the nearby streets, but with a motion so slow that it was hardly noticeable, and it halted for at least a quarter of an hour over Saint Vincent Abbey, where some pieces of relics of two glorious Saints are kept. Then, escaping over the Grande place of Chammar to the Doubs river, it went away through the Grande rue that goes to the bridge, and straight to the cathedral where it vanished, but as we said before, with such a slow motion that its travel lasted until 9:30 at night, which is to say at least two hours.”
Source: Révérend Jacques Fodéré, Narration historique et topographique des convens de l’ordre de St-François (Lyon: Pierre Rigaud, 1619), 10-11.
216.
May 1606, Kyoto, near Nijo Castle, Japan
Hovering red wheel
Numerous witnesses, including Samurais, see balls of fire kept flying over Kyoto and one night, a red wheel had come over and hovered above Nijo castle. We have not located an original Japanese source for this interesting case.
Source: Michel Bougard, La chronique des OVNI (Paris: Delarge, 1977), 86.
217.
1608, between Angoulême and Cognac, France
Flying warriors
“The day was calm and clear, and in an instant a large number of small, thick clouds appeared. They came down to the ground and turned into warriors. Their number was estimated between 10,000 and 12,000, all handsome and tall, covered with blue armor, aligned behind deployed red and blue banners (…)
“This sight was such that peasants and even the nobility took alarm. They assembled in large number to observe these soldiers’ progress; they noticed that when they came near a thick wood, to maintain their good order, they rose above it, only touching the leaves of the trees with the bottom of their feet, eventually walking on the ground again to a forest where they disappeared.
“I have written this based on a manuscript report by the late M. Prévost, curate of Lussac les Eglises.”
Source: Chronique de Pierre Robert, cited by A. Catinat, Chartes, Chroniques et Mémoriaux (Lyon, 1874).
218.
1 August 1608, Genoa harbour, Italy
Fighting creatures from the sea
Two human figures holding what looked like flying snakes were seen fighting over the sea. Only their torso was visible above the waves. Their cries were so “horrible” some of the witnesses were sick with fear. They were seen repeatedly for a couple of weeks, and about 800 cannon shots failed to scare them away.
It should be noted that this event is often confused with a series of unrelated weather phenomena between Nice and Lambesc in France, where “blood
y rains” were reported.
Source: Anon., Discours au Vray des terribles et espouvantables signes… (Troyes: Odard Aulmont, 1608).
219.
15 August 1608, Genoa harbour, Italy Three coaches drawn by fiery creatures
“Over the sea off the harbor of Genoa, there appeared three coaches, each drawn by six fiery figures resembling dragons. With the said coaches were the aforesaid signs that still had their serpents and went on screaming their horrible cries and came close to Genoa, so that the spectators, or at least most of them, fled in fear of such a prodigy. However, when they had made three times a trip along the harbor and uttered such powerful screams that they resounded across the mountains around, they got lost over the sea and no news of them has been heard since.
Fig. 19: Discours Espouvantable…
“This caused great damage to the citizens of Genoa, as among them the son of Sr. Gasparino de Loro and also the brother of Sr. Anthonio Bagatello. Several women were also afflicted and had such fear that it caused their death.”
Source: Anon., Discours au Vray des terribles et espouvantables signes… (Troyes: Odard Aulmont, 1608).
220.
15 February 1609, Tiannin mountain, China
Blinding “eye” in the sky
Bright lights illuminated the temple walls: an object like a ship or an eye with blinding light was seen in the sky.
Source: Shi Bo, La Chine et les Extraterrestres, op.cit., 43, citing Feng Mengzhen, Collection of Stories from the Palace of Snow.
221.
3 July 1612, Switzerland: Battling sky armies
Wonders in the Sky Page 15