In 1561 at Nuremberg, Germany a fantastic sight was seen in the skies. Globes, balls and disks were seen seemingly fighting each other. Also crosses and a large arrow were seen. This site (although I have problems with their lack of partiality when it comes to UFO’s), describes the event in a little more detail.
So what exactly were the warring globes at Nuremberg? And if I may get the discussion going, I do not think they were extraterrestrials. My reasons for doubting this are simple: if an advanced alien race had perfected the way of going all the way to earth, they would have gotten all the kinks worked out of the technology. Thus they would not have made the mistake of being sighted by earthmen. On the other hand, if they wanted to be discovered by earthmen and women, they would have come forward by now and shown themselves more directly to us, don’t you think? And the whole idea of ET’s coming all the way to earth just to fight also seems rather unlikely to me.
Yeah, I’m going to have to go with not enough information to do more than speculate wildly. That being said, I think they were time-traveling hamburgers and french fries become sentient fighting for the dominant control of their limited ketchup resources.
Just a wild guess, but my thought is that the phenomenon may have been some type of mammatus cloud formation. I don’t know how likely such storms are to occur over Nuremberg, but if they’re reasonably uncommon, something like this might lend itself to a religious description. One can sort of see where the description of “spheres” and “globes” might come from. Obviously the effect is difficult for even meteorologists to describe clearly, if the best name they could come up with was “mammatus.” Either that, or meteorologists are total perverts. Yeah, that looks just like a woman’s breasts, you deviants.
As to the “crosses,” I myself have seen such a cloud formation with multiple regular, distinct four-lobed whorls (although they appeared not so much “crosses” as “clovers”). But there was a very distinct and persistent cruciform pattern.
Since both events supposedly took place at sunrise, this could account for the various reported colors (since clouds appear more reddish at sunrise and sunset, and blue and black are not too unusual colors for storm clouds).
It’s certainly possible to get interesting ice crystal formations, which certainly can form crosses centered on the sun, and muliple suns (under the right conditions you can reportedly get five “mock suns”, and numerous “sub-parhelia” as well), not to mention halos of various sizes.
But these would not go moving and sailing rapidly about., so they wouldn’t meet the description as given.
So, if ice crystal scattering is responsible for the reported effect, it’s been greatly exagerrated, or incorrectly recalled, or simply used as a basis for a made-up account.
Or it could be time-travelling Van Daniken Extraterrestrials. You never know.
