The Nuremberg Sky Battle of 1561: What Hans Glaser’s Famous ‘UFO’ Broadsheet Really Shows

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Between four and five o’clock on the morning of April 14, 1561, people in and around Nuremberg looked east at the rising sun and saw something that frightened them. A local printer named Hans Glaser turned their reports into a single-sheet news print: a hand-colored woodcut of the sky full of red and blue balls, crosses, long tubes and a huge black spear, over a block of text that describes a battle in the sky lasting "a good hour." Four and a half centuries later, that picture is a fixture of UFO websites and social media, usually captioned as proof of a dogfight between alien craft over Renaissance Germany.

The short answer: the most likely explanation is a bright halo display. Ice crystals in thin, high cloud bend and reflect the light of a low sun into extra "suns," arcs, rings and crosses, and the Nuremberg text reads like an unusually rich one, described and drawn by people who had no word for it except the language of omens and war. That isn’t the whole story, though. The sheet is also a piece of commercial religious news, printed to be sold, with a skyline, a burning church and a warning sermon that have nothing to do with what anyone saw. Below is the full text in a fresh English translation, a close look at the woodcut, what modern halo observers actually see, the similar Basel sightings of 1566 with an eyewitness’s own diary entry, and the Zürich clergyman whose scrapbook is the only reason any of this survives.

What the broadsheet actually says

Glaser’s sheet is in Early New High German, the German of Luther’s lifetime, set in black-letter type below the picture. Most English versions online repeat one translation, made by Ilse von Jacobi for the magazine Official UFO in 1976. The translation below is new, made for this article from the original wording as printed on the Zürich copies. Where a word is ambiguous, the original is given in brackets. It opens with the date, the time and the witnesses.

In the year 1561, on the 14th day of April, in the morning between "one toward day" and the Garaus, that is, in the morning between 4 and 5 by the small clock, a very frightening sight appeared at the sun as it was rising, and was seen in Nuremberg, in the city, before the gate and in the countryside, by many men and women. (Hans Glaser, broadsheet, Nuremberg, 1561; translated for aglena)

Then comes the description of the sky itself. Glaser starts with the sun and works outward.

First, the sun appeared with two blood-colored half-round streaks, shaped like the moon when it is waning, right through the middle of the sun. And in the sun, above, below and on both sides, stood round balls, blood-colored, some of them bluish or iron-colored, and also black. Likewise on both sides and in a ring-disc [ringscheyben] around the sun there stood such blood-red balls and others, many in number: some three in a row, sometimes four in a square, and some standing alone. (Hans Glaser, 1561)

And between these balls some blood-colored crosses were also seen, and between the crosses and balls there were blood-colored streaks, thick at the back and somewhat slimmer toward the front, like the barrels of hook-guns [hocken rhor], mixed in everywhere. Among them were two great tubes [rorn], one standing to the right and the other to the left, and in these small and large tubes there were three, four and more balls. (Hans Glaser, 1561)

A "hook-gun" (Hakenbüchse) was the arquebus, the long matchlock musket of the day. Glaser is comparing the streaks to gun barrels, and the woodcut draws them that way, as blue and red pipes with balls inside them like shot in a barrel. Then the text says everything began to move.

All of this began to fight with one another. The balls that had first been in the sun flew out at those standing on both sides, and those outside, together with the balls from the small and large tubes, flew into the sun. The tubes too flew among all the balls, and everything fought and struggled fiercely with each other for a good hour. And as the fight raged most fiercely to and fro, now into the sun and now back out, they wore each other out so much that all of it, as described above, fell from the sun, from the sky down onto the earth, as if it were all burning, and down on the earth it slowly passed away with a great vapor [dampff]. (Hans Glaser, 1561)

The last observation is the one in the middle of the picture.

After all this, something shaped like a black spear was also seen, the shaft toward the sunrise and the point toward the sunset, very thick and long. (Hans Glaser, 1561)

And then, as nearly every sheet of this kind did, it turns into a sermon.

What such signs mean, God alone knows. But since we have so many and varied signs in the sky in short succession, which Almighty God lets appear to us because of our sinful life, by which he would gladly stir and lure us to repentance, we are sadly so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and wonders of God, speak of them mockingly and cast them to the wind. It is to be feared that God will send us a terrible punishment for our ingratitude. (Hans Glaser, 1561)

The text ends with a prayer that God turn away his "just anger" and the imprint: Bey Hanns Glaser Brieffmaler/ zu Nürmberg, "at Hans Glaser’s, letter-painter, at Nuremberg."

Three details in that text matter for everything that follows. First, Glaser never says he saw it himself. He reports it as seen "by many men and women" in the city, outside the gate and in the countryside, and names none of them. Second, the whole thing is tied to the sun: it appears "at the sun as it was rising," the balls are "in the sun" and "around the sun," and they fly into and out of it. Third, it lasted about an hour and ended with everything falling and fading out "with a great vapor."

Who made it, and how it survived

A Briefmaler, or letter-painter, was a craftsman who colored and sold printed sheets: playing cards, saints’ pictures, calendars and news prints. Nuremberg was one of the great printing towns of the Holy Roman Empire, and broadsheets like this were the tabloid news of the sixteenth century, sold cheaply at markets and fairs. Glaser is documented in Nuremberg between 1540 and 1571, according to the German writer Ulrich Magin, who studied the sheet for the Journal für UFO-Forschung in 2010. Prodigies were part of his line. A 1554 sheet of his showing a "miracle sign" over Waldeck Castle near Kemnath in the Upper Palatinate is in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, and the Zürich library holds another of his sheets, a "wonderful vision of the moon" from March 2, 1561, six weeks before this one.

The two surviving copies of the April sheet are both in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Switzerland’s largest research library. Each is a hand-colored woodcut with letterpress text on a sheet about 26 by 38 centimeters, and each has been cut apart into picture and text and mounted on two backing sheets. One, catalogued as PAS II 12/60, has wormholes and was removed from volume F 24 of a manuscript collection. The other, PAS II 1/12 and 1/13, came from volume F 12. They were colored separately, by hand, and do not match: compare the copy at the top of this article with the one below. Both are digitized at full resolution on e-manuscripta, the Swiss platform for digitized manuscripts and prints.

Both copies survived because of one man. Johann Jakob Wick (1522–1588) was a Zürich clergyman, a minister at the Predigerkirche from 1552 and a canon of the Grossmünster from 1557, who spent almost thirty years collecting news. From about 1560 until his death he copied letters, reports and rumors into a chronicle arranged by date, illustrated it with colored drawings, and pasted in printed broadsheets as they came to Zürich. The result fills 24 folio volumes, known as the Wickiana. Comets, earthquakes, floods, monstrous births, executions, witch trials and signs in the sky crowd its pages. In 1925 the library took more than 400 printed broadsheets out of the bound volumes and moved them to its print collection, which is why the Nuremberg sheet has two shelf marks and a note about where it was cut from.

The Swiss National Museum’s blog has presented the collection as the birth of the tabloid media. Wick was not a skeptic, but he was a careful collector, and because he kept what came in rather than what he could verify, the Wickiana is now one of the best places to see how ordinary sixteenth-century Europeans got their news about the sky.

Five o’clock by which clock?

Glaser is unusually precise about the time, and it checks out. Nuremberg kept a peculiar double system of hours. Its "great clock" counted the hours of daylight starting at daybreak and the hours of darkness starting at nightfall, with a special peal called the Garaus rung at the changeover. The "small clock" was the ordinary count of twice twelve equal hours that we still use. Glaser gives the time in both systems: between the first hour "toward day" and the Garaus, which is to say about dawn, and between four and five by the small clock.

The date needs one more correction. Nuremberg was Lutheran, and Protestant territories of the Empire did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1700, so April 14, 1561 in the Julian calendar used on the sheet corresponds to April 24 on today’s calendar. Working out the sun’s position for Nuremberg on that date puts sunrise at about 4:50 a.m. local solar time. "Between 4 and 5," at the rising sun, is exactly right. That is the first clue that the sheet is reporting a real morning, not making up an event out of nothing.

There is a second small check. The moon that morning was new, passing between Earth and the sun later the same day. It was up, but lost in the glare a few degrees from the sun and invisible. Whatever the two "blood-colored half-round streaks, like the waning moon" were, they were not the moon.

What a halo display looks like

Halos are more common than rainbows, according to the Atmospheric Optics reference site. They form when sunlight passes through tiny hexagonal ice crystals, the six-sided plates and columns that make up thin, high cirrus and cirrostratus cloud. Each crystal acts as a prism or a mirror. Because the crystals’ angles are fixed, the light always comes out at the same angles, so instead of a random glow the sky fills with geometric shapes centered on the sun.

The commonest members of the family are easy to list. A ring about 22 degrees from the sun, roughly the span of an outstretched hand at arm’s length, is the 22° halo. On either side of the sun, at the same height and close to that ring, sit sundogs, also called parhelia or mock suns. The Royal Meteorological Society describes them as bright, often vividly colored spots with "red-to-orange inner edges facing the Sun and bluish-white outer tails," made by flat, six-sided plate crystals drifting with their faces horizontal. Reflections off the crystal faces can add a white line through the sun parallel to the horizon, the parhelic circle, which passes through the sundogs and sometimes runs right around the sky, and a vertical shaft of light, the sun pillar, seen most often at sunrise and sunset. Where a pillar crosses the parhelic circle, the sun sits in the middle of a cross. Above a low sun, other crystals make the upper tangent arc, a curved, wing-shaped arc touching the top of the 22° halo.

None of this is rare. The Atmospheric Optics site, a long-running reference on sky optics, says sundogs can be seen "on average twice a week" in Europe and North America by anyone who looks for them, and that they are most often seen when the sun is low. What is rare is a big display, with many of these pieces at once, bright and colored, at a low sun. That kind of sky can last for hours as a sheet of cirrus drifts across, and individual pieces brighten, fade, stretch and shift as the crystals and cloud change.

The ancient Greeks already knew the basic pattern. Aristotle wrote in his Meteorology, in the fourth century BC, that mock suns appear "by the side of the sun, not above or below it," and "either as it is rising or setting." He recorded one striking case.

They have scarcely ever appeared when the sun was on the meridian, though this once happened in Bosporus where two mock suns rose with the sun and followed it all through the day till sunset. (Aristotle, Meteorology, Book III, part 2, translated by E. W. Webster)

Modern witnesses still reach for the language of the uncanny. The Royal Meteorological Society’s own guide to haloes, published in October 2026, opens by saying a full display can be "so spectacular that you could be forgiven for thinking there was a touch of AI in the sky." And people still describe big displays the way Nuremberg did, as extra suns. In February 2020, people in the city of Chifeng in Inner Mongolia rushed outdoors to film what Channel 4 News reported as a "triple suns" display that lit up the city for two hours, and some residents reported seeing five. The forecaster Chang Xin of the Chifeng Meteorological Bureau gave the explanation.

The cause of such phenomenon lies in the existence of the stratocirrus consisting of ice crystals in the air, and sunlight is reflected by the crystals into such an illusion. (Chang Xin, Chifeng Meteorological Bureau, via Channel 4 News, 2020)

Matching the sky to the woodcut

Meteorologists have long read the Nuremberg sheet as an artist’s version of a halo display, and in 2012 the writer Frank Johnson made the case point by point on his site Ancient Aliens Debunked. The match isn’t perfect, and it can’t be, because the source is a printed picture and a secondhand text, not a photograph. But a surprising amount lines up.

What the 1561 sheet describes	Likely halo feature	How good is the match
Everything is centered on the sun, at sunrise, for about an hour	Halos always center on the sun, are often most vivid at a low sun and can last for hours	Strong
Two blood-red half-round streaks like a waning moon "through the middle of the sun"	Arcs of the 22° halo and the curved upper tangent arc, which hugs the halo above a low sun	Good
Red, bluish and dark balls on both sides of the sun and in a "ring-disc" around it	Sundogs (red on the side toward the sun) and other mock suns on the parhelic circle	Good
Blood-red crosses among the balls	Sun pillar crossing the parhelic circle, or where arcs intersect	Plausible
Streaks "thick at the back, slimmer toward the front," like gun barrels	The bluish-white tails sundogs can show, pointing away from the sun, or pieces of the parhelic circle	Plausible
Balls flying in and out of the sun, fighting	Pieces of the display brightening and fading as cirrus drifts; eyes dazzled by the low sun	Interpretation
Everything falls, "as if burning," and vanishes in vapor	The display dying as the cloud thickens or thins and the sun climbs	Interpretation
A huge black spear, shaft east, point west	Unclear: possibly a dark band of cloud or a shadow ray. No confident match	Weak

The "fighting" is where interpretation takes over. A big halo display is not static. Sundogs brighten and dim within minutes, arcs come and go, and patches of brighter cloud slide across the pattern, so pieces seem to move toward and away from the sun. Anyone staring toward a rising sun for an hour also sees afterimages, dark or colored blots that drift as the eyes move, which may have added "black balls" of their own. To an observer who already believed the sky could carry warnings of war, who had seen pictures of armies in the clouds on earlier broadsheets, a slowly changing ring of colored lights around the sun would read as a battle.

The Basel sightings five years later, below, show that this happens even with a trained observer in the crowd. They also show something else: when a better witness writes in private, the battle language drops away.

The spear is the piece with no good optical explanation, and it should be admitted that it may not be optical at all. Johnson suggested crepuscular rays, the shafts of light and shadow that fan out from a low sun past clouds. A dark cloud bank on the eastern horizon is just as possible. It is also possible that the spear is the artist’s, not the witnesses’.

What the woodcut adds that the text doesn’t

The woodcut is not a diagram of the sky. It is a composed picture, and some of it is clearly the workshop’s own. At the lower right, a church and village burn, balls rain down on the roof, a cannon pokes out of a building and two thick columns of smoke rise. The text says nothing about any fire on the ground, any cannon or anything striking a building. German-language accounts identify the burning church as St. Leonhard, then a separate village just southwest of the city walls. Magin pointed out that St. Leonhard’s church had been destroyed by fire in 1508 and rebuilt only around 1560, an event Glaser, who lived in the city, must have known about. To Magin, that and other mismatches suggest the sheet blends several events from different times with a natural sky display. He also argued that Glaser was updating an old motif: where earlier sky-battle sheets showed horsemen and swords, Glaser drew modern artillery, cannon barrels loaded with and firing balls, floating in the air to show that the sign came from heaven.

The city on the left is also less exact than it looks. Magin noted that the skyline lacks the Kaiserburg, the imperial castle on its sandstone ridge that dominates every real view of Nuremberg, while it does show twin-towered churches of the kind that marked the city. And the view is aimed east, toward the sunrise, which puts the viewer west of the city. That fits the text’s "before the gate and in the countryside," but the skyline itself is closer to a generic sign for "Nuremberg" than a sketch from life.

This matters because the image has gone viral on its own. Most online versions crop off the text, sharpen the colors and show only the woodcut, which is the most fanciful part of the sheet. Read with its text, it is a report of a dawn sky full of lights around the sun, framed by a sermon, decorated by a print shop.

Nuremberg’s season of signs

Glaser’s sermon says "we have so many and varied signs in the sky in short succession." He was not exaggerating, at least about what was being reported and printed. In the months before April 1561, the presses of his own city had been busy with sky prodigies.

On December 28, 1560, people at Eggolsheim, near Forchheim, about 35 kilometers north of Nuremberg, saw a red glow so bright they rang the alarm bells for fire. A Nuremberg printer, Georg Merckel, put it on a sheet in 1561, and Wick pasted a copy into his chronicle. The Zürich catalog describes it as an aurora.

On the 28th day of Christmas-month in the year 1560, around Eggolsheim, a mile’s way from Forchheim, some three hours before day, a great, broad, long fire-flame let itself down from heaven near to the earth, so that everyone thought a great fire was under way, and it lasted about an hour, so that the alarm had to be rung. Afterwards it spread out toward Bamberg and ran off again. (Georg Merckel, broadsheet, Nuremberg, 1561; translated for aglena)

According to Magin, another Nuremberg printer, Georg Kreydlein, issued a sheet on an aurora over Eisleben on February 27, 1561, picturing smoke columns, a rod and a crucifix in the sky. Different cities read the same kind of event in different ways: Magin notes that one version saw "Muscovites and the Turk" in the lights, another a schism in the church. Glaser’s own moon vision followed on March 2. The April sunrise was the latest in a run, and a buyer in Nuremberg that spring had been taught by the previous sheets exactly how to see it.

Wick’s own volumes show the same habit at work in Switzerland. His chronicle includes a drawing of a cross seen in the sky over the Rhine valley in 1561, and, ten years later, a "wonder sign in the sky" on March 21, 1571, drawn as a sun with a human face inside a broad red ring. That second drawing could be a simple 22° halo seen by someone who expected to see a sign.

Older pictures of the same sky

Glaser’s way of drawing the sun, with a human face, surrounded by crescents, was not his invention. The Nuremberg Chronicle, the huge illustrated world history printed in the same city in 1493, already has woodcuts of portents with multiple suns and moons, including what looks like a sun marked with a cross between two crescent moons with faces. For a Nuremberg artist in 1561, that was the visual vocabulary for "something strange around the sun."

The best comparison is from Stockholm. On the morning of April 20, 1535, a spectacular halo display hung over the city for about two hours. The Lutheran reformer Olaus Petri commissioned a painting of it, now known as Vädersolstavlan, "the sundog painting." The original is lost, but a copy made by Jacob Heinrich Elbfas in 1636 hangs in Stockholm’s cathedral, Storkyrkan. Its cartouche says the signs were seen in the sky over Stockholm "from almost seven to nine in the forenoon." In the sky above the city it shows the sun, the 22° halo, a great parhelic circle running all the way around the sky, mock suns on it and crossing arcs above the sun.

Two things make Vädersolstavlan useful for reading Nuremberg. It is clearly a halo display, painted only 26 years earlier, and it is still not a realistic picture: like many early depictions of halos, it combines everything seen over several hours into one image and draws perfect circles where the real arcs would be ellipses. It also became political. King Gustav Vasa, already at odds with Olaus Petri, is said to have seen a conspiracy in the painting and the omen talk around it, and a few years later Petri was condemned to death for treason, a sentence the king commuted to a fine. A picture of an ice-crystal display had become a statement about the king.

The Basel sightings of 1566

Five years after Nuremberg, Basel had its own run of sky signs, and here, for once, there are two independent sources. The first is another broadsheet, also in the Wickiana: Seltzame gestalt, "Strange shapes seen in the sky three times in this year 1566, toward sunrise and sunset, at Basel on the 27th and 28th of July and then on the 7th of August." The text is signed by Samuel Coccius, a Basel student of "Holy Scripture and the liberal arts," and it was printed by Samuel Apiarius. Unlike the Nuremberg copies, the surviving copy was never colored. The woodcut shows the cathedral square, the Münsterplatz, with townsmen pointing up at a sky full of black balls.

Coccius describes three events. The first is a sunset.

On the 27th of July, after the sun (which Pliny well called the eye of the world) had shone pleasantly and warmly all day in bright, finely cleansed air, toward its setting, in the evening around 7 o’clock, it was suddenly changed and took on another form and color. For first it lost its rays and brightness; next it was no bigger than the circuit of the full moon; and third, it was as if it wept blood, in a black air and field behind it. So it was seen by all sorts of people here in the city and the countryside. (Samuel Coccius, broadsheet, Basel, 1566; translated for aglena)

The moon, he goes on, "which at that time was not far from full," stood "almost red and blood-colored" in the sky all night. That checks out too: on the evening of July 27, 1566 (Julian), the moon was about 84 percent lit and four days from full. The next morning, a Sunday, the sun rose around four o’clock looking the same, and lit "houses, streets and other things as if something were red and fiery and bloody." Then came the event the sheet is famous for.

Further, on the 7th of August, at sunrise and a little before, many large black balls were seen in the air, which sped before the sun with great speed and swiftness, and turned against each other as if they were waging a fight; some of them became red and fiery, and afterwards were consumed and went out. (Samuel Coccius, 1566)

Coccius then does something Glaser didn’t: he offers a natural cause before the sermon. Such things "may well be produced by natural causes," he writes, by exhalations and vapors left by the past damp winter and summer, or by great heat that set in after long cold and rain, though their meaning still runs with God’s purposes, as with comets and eclipses that are also reckoned in advance. He closes with a call to repentance and a prayer for the Emperor and the Empire against the Ottoman Turks, who were at war with Emperor Maximilian II that summer.

An eyewitness diary

The second source makes Basel unusual. Christian Wurstisen, who had been professor of mathematics at the University of Basel since 1565 and later became the city’s historian, kept a private Latin diary. The autograph is in the University Library Basel, and it was published in 1902. His entry for the summer of 1566 is worth reading in full, because it is first-hand, not written for sale and short.

On July 27 the sun set blood-red in the evening, and that night the moon too had the color of blood. At daylight the next day, the 28th, the sun kept the same color, so that it seemed to tint everything with blood. But when it set again, Coelius Secundus Curio told me that he and his whole household had seen many large globes coming out of the sun and scattering through the whole sky. I believe him all the more readily because on August 7, in the morning, after the sun had risen, at the sixth hour, we saw the same thing at the Pfalz, as we were about to go to the morning sermon. (Christian Wurstisen, diary, 1566; Latin, translated for aglena)

Curio was a well-known Italian humanist and professor in Basel. "The Pfalz" (in Palatio) is the terrace behind Basel Minster above the Rhine, just off the square shown in the woodcut. Wurstisen’s note gives a time, a place and a named source, but no black color, no fighting, and no fiery globes being consumed. He saw "the same thing," globes coming from the direction of the sun, and he believed Curio because of it. When he wrote it up for his printed Bassler Chronick in 1580, the globes became "black," but he still put the sighting next to a run of blood-red sunsets and a red moon.

What could make a sun lose its rays, look no bigger than the moon and turn blood red, then do the same at the next sunrise, with a red moon between? Heavy smoke, dust or haze is the usual cause. A thick, dirty atmosphere dims the low sun enough to look at directly, which is when its disc seems small and sharp-edged, and scatters away the blue light so the sun, the moon and everything they light turn red. Modern wildfire smoke does exactly this. Wurstisen’s diary also records a huge Rhine flood that summer, and Coccius blamed vapors after a damp winter and summer, so the weather was certainly unusual. No one can now say what was in Basel’s air in late July 1566, and the black globes have no single convincing explanation. Staring at a dimmed sun for minutes on end is a reliable way to see dark, drifting afterimages, and that may be part of it. Carl Jung, notably, suggested the globes looked dark simply because they were seen against the rising sun.

Battles in the sky were a genre

Glaser’s battle language looks less strange alongside the rest of the Wickiana. Sky battles, with armies, weapons, crosses and flaming swords, were a stock theme of German broadsheets for most of the sixteenth century. A Strasbourg sheet printed by Theobald Berger reported that on June 11, 1554, at Plech, "five miles" (old German miles) from Nuremberg, people saw two armies of horsemen fighting in the sky near the sun, which was crossed by a horizontal streak. A horizontal streak through the sun is a fair description of a parhelic circle.

The writers of these sheets were not trying to describe atmospheric optics. They were telling readers what the signs meant, and they had a ready-made language for it: blood-red meant war, crosses and swords meant judgment, falling fire meant punishment. The Wickiana historian and the meteorologist end up agreeing. The French-American researcher Jacques Vallée, no skeptic of UFOs in general, concluded in Wonders in the Sky that the near-identical wording of so many of these reports pointed to a stock story and to propaganda, not to a fleet of spacecraft. The German scholar Wiebke Schwarte, in her study of aurora reports, warns against reading these sheets literally at all, since many were warning sermons first and news second.

How the UFO story started

For nearly four centuries the Nuremberg sheet was a curiosity in a Zürich library. It reached a mass audience through the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, who reproduced it in his 1958 book Ein moderner Mythus, published in English the next year as Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Jung was interested in what people project onto the sky, not in proving visitors from space, and he treated the sheet as a natural event seen through religious and military images. He did enjoy the comparison, though, and wrote one of the most quoted lines about it.

If the UFOs were living organisms, one would think of a swarm of insects rising with the sun, not to fight one another but to mate and celebrate the marriage flight. (C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers, 1959)

From Jung’s book the image passed into UFO magazines. The 1976 Official UFO article that supplied the familiar English translation was one step, and books, documentaries and then social media did the rest. In the process the sheet lost its text, its sermon and its sister sheets, and the "tubes" came to be read as cylindrical motherships releasing smaller craft. Magin’s reply was blunt: the tubes are gun barrels, the text says so, and the balls inside them are shot.

When people finally explained the mock suns

The scientific turn came within a lifetime of Basel. In 1629 and again in 1630, complex halo displays over Rome were observed and described by the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner, and reports of the 1629 display reached René Descartes. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Descartes broke off his metaphysical work to explain the phenomenon, which led into his book on the natural world. His Meteorology of 1637 includes a chapter on the appearance of several suns.

The clearest sign of how much changed is in Gdańsk. On February 20, 1661, more than a thousand people there watched a huge display with seven "suns." The pastor Georg Fehlau still preached a sermon about it two weeks later, but he published it under a title that called the objects Nebensonnen, side-suns, mock suns. The astronomer Johannes Hevelius, who watched too, described it in a scientific book the following year, and one of its rare arcs is still called Hevel’s halo. A hundred years after Nuremberg, a Baltic city saw a sky full of extra suns and wrote down a halo.

What we can and can’t say

What is solid: the sheet is real and contemporary, printed in Nuremberg in 1561 and collected in Zürich soon after. The date and time are internally consistent and fit a real sunrise. Everything described is tied to the sun, lasts about an hour, and includes shapes, colors and positions that halo displays produce. Similar displays were seen and painted as omens elsewhere, including Stockholm in 1535.

What is likely: a large halo display at sunrise, seen by many people, described in the military and religious language of the day, and drawn by a print shop that added a city, a fire, and a moral.

What is unknown: who the witnesses were, how much of the description is Glaser’s, what the black spear was, and whether parts of the picture come from other events. No independent Nuremberg diary or chronicle entry for that morning has turned up in the sources cited here. Basel, which does have one, shows how a careful witness’s version is shorter and plainer than the printed one.

What is not supported: anything in the text that requires solid objects, machines or an aerial battle. The "tubes" are compared to gun barrels by the author himself, nothing is reported to have landed or left debris, and the whole event happened around the sun, which is the one place that real flying objects and halo optics would not be expected to coincide.

If you want to see it yourself

You don’t need to travel to Nuremberg. Sundogs and the 22° halo are visible somewhere in the temperate world most weeks, especially when a sheet of thin cirrus moves in ahead of a weather front. Look about a hand’s width at arm’s length to either side of a low sun. Block the sun itself behind a building, a tree or your hand, and never stare at it. The most complete displays tend to come with ice-crystal haze in very cold air, like the South Pole display above.

The sheets are easier still. The Zentralbibliothek Zürich has put the Wickiana broadsheets online through e-manuscripta, free and in high resolution. The Nuremberg sheet is there in both copies, and the Basel sheet, the Plech battle and the Eggolsheim aurora are a few clicks away. They are worth reading next to the woodcut, because they turn a famous picture back into what it was: a crowd at dawn, a sky they couldn’t explain, and a printer who knew they would buy the explanation.

Related on aglena: Fata Morgana Explained: Why Ships Float in the Sky and Phantom Lands Appear, Ball Lightning Explained: What Scientists Know About the Glowing Orbs of Thunderstorms (2026), The Nebra Sky Disc: The 3,600-Year-Old Star Map Rescued in a Police Sting

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