Wonders in the Sky (102 page)

This decision may be challenged by our readers. In defense, we were concerned that, the moment we added superhuman beings by themselves and suggested they communicated with humans (either to give warnings or advice or tools or instructions) every other case in our chronology would get tinged with a sense of deliberate purpose. There are anomalies and patterns here, but we should not lead the reader into believing that certain types of entities are necessarily behind the phenomena.

There is an extraordinary abundance of entity sightings (angels, demons, gods, and ghosts) in ancient chronicles. To distinguish between fictional and factual accounts now is impossible, and to use any and all would mean lumping aerial phenomena with crypto-zoological creatures willy-nilly. If we take folklore, mysticism, phantoms, fantasy, dreams, and omens as our source, entity-only sightings would easily outnumber sightings of aerial phenomena by a hundred to one, so an exhaustive catalogue containing both is not helpful.

No known criteria helps us sort “ufonauts” from other kinds of creatures (such as a mermaid, or a sea serpent) when no aerial phenomenon is present. We prefer to inform the reader that accounts involving supernatural entities were contemporaneous with aerial phenomena reports throughout history, pointing out that such stories do corroborate some aspects of the enigma as testified by modern witnesses,
but
that may imply a relationship that is beyond the scope of our compilation. Our purpose in this book is to explore an unknown phenomenon, manifesting throughout history, possibly misinterpreted by every culture in terms of its own history or religion. We suspect that the data we have compiled in our Chronology indicates the presence of a previously unknown physical element.

Biblical accounts

Religious texts such as the Bible contain many references to flying objects that are assumed to represent divine manifestations. For example, Zachariah relates that he saw such an object: “I turned, and lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a flying roll. And he said unto me, ‘What seest thou?' And I answered, ‘I see a flying roll; the length thereof is twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof ten cubits'” (approximately 40 feet).

Descriptions of celestial chariots, visions of the Throne of God (Merkhaba), or the Shekinah generally cannot be related to specifically dated phenomena, and belong in a general analysis of religious, symbolic or mythical imagery.

Most Biblical references to UFO-like phenomena place them within a complex narrative in which divine entities intervene to assist a particular group of people for what can only be described as political and religious reasons. The difference between, say, Jane Lead's mystical experiences in the 17th century and those of the Bible is that Lead was shown spectacular things that she later interpreted in bursts of guided inspiration, whereas “celestial intervention” in the Bible had a dramatic, strategic effect. Biblical accounts show divine entities intimately working for and alongside whole communities, whereas Lead's experiences are personal and private, like those of contemporary abductees.

This means that while the physical phenomena described in the Bible resembled aerial phenomena from other historical periods, their function had a far greater impact, biased towards an ultimate goal affecting a larger number of people. This makes them stand apart from other accounts we read, whether we believe in the scriptures or not.

Given this background, the placement of the few biblical stories we quoted raised some important issues. The two authors have had many discussions and occasionally heated debates on this point. A case could be made to leave Ezekiel in the main chronology but to exclude other Biblical events. Accounts of pillars of fire and light, on the other hand, are suitable for the chronology because they don't imply any effort on the part of the phenomena themselves to become intimate with the witnesses, any more than the North Star to a traveler.

We dislike the idea of portraying aerial phenomena as having selectively aided one religious order or community above others. This has led the authors to debate what message the sightings conveyed to our readers: Is it wise, we asked ourselves, to transmit this message with its religious context when we wanted the book to be useful to a world of researchers working in different cultures? Yet the fact that certain communities, such as the Hebrews, the ancient Chinese or the followers of Clovis have interpreted unidentified aerial phenomena as divinely-ordained craft designed to help them cannot be ignored.

The contemporary belief among many ufologists that America is secretly aided by crashed saucer technology from Roswell represents a similar pattern in our own century. We can only note these beliefs and move on.

Fig. 66: The vision of Zacharias

The correlation between many unexplained sightings and religious or historical events brings up three important observations about potential biases in our data:

(1) Events that were received within a religious context were better preserved simply because witnesses, priests and monks generally could read and write. They had a tradition and techniques of preserving records. Furthermore, they thought the observation was important. (Similarly, UFOs seen over nuclear plants or missile silos are more likely to be watched and documented today.)

(2) If people attach spiritual significance to what they see, it affects their behavior and is invested with more lasting reality than witnessing a passing light in the sky.

(3) The fact that witnesses perceived transcendent images in the phenomena may be part of the mechanism of the phenomena.

Hence our argument that cases coinciding with religious dates or historical events are not necessarily the imaginative or fanciful product of obsolete belief systems. Unusual events are more likely to be recorded for posterity when they occur in important places, or on important dates, or to important people. If some kind of UFO reality is accepted (however simplistic) in such circumstances, a purely folkloric interpretation is not necessarily the best theory.

Aerial phenomena in classical art

In ancient times, up till a couple of centuries ago, religious art was the most common form of artistic expression. For centuries, painters created tapestries and pictures representing the Virgin, Christ, the Nativity, and scenes from the Old Testament. During those centuries comets and meteorites, triple suns and moons were also very commonly chronicled and taken seriously.

An excellent example of this problem arises in connection with the
Annunciation
of Carlo Crivelli displayed at the National Gallery of London because it seems to show a hovering disk-like object sending a precisely collimated beam of golden light to Mary, as she receives the message that she has been chosen to conceive the Son of God.

A modern critic named Cuoghi sees nothing unusual in this painting because “there is a vast amount of Annunciations in which a ray descends from the sky reach-ing the Madonna. Furthermore, as far as the Crivelli painting is concerned, (…) the object in the sky is formed by a circle of clouds inside which there are two circles of small angels. It is a very common way of representing the divinity, visible in so many works of sacred art. The same particular in the Annunciation of Carlo Crivelli….”

Fig. 67: Annunciation, detail

One could point out that this argument actually brings water to the ufologist's mill: If the origin of the message to Mary is represented as a bizarre hovering disk full of celestial beings, doesn't that suggest that knowledgeable artists placed this event into the category of specific interaction between humans and intelligent forces influencing us from the sky?

This case opens an interesting discussion about the representation of unusual phenomena in art when the painting is not contemporary with the events depicted. In this case the “disk” corresponds to nothing in the biblical narrative, any more than other objects in the building such as the expensive drapes or the birds. We can only say that the story of God's selection of Mary as the mother of Christ evoked a connection in the artist's mind to a complex artifact hovering in the sky, which served as the source of a golden beam. While this connection is interesting, it tells us nothing new about Mary's actual experience.

Paintings do not offer valid evidence about the periods they represent. An image of the Virgin Mary with a disk-shaped object flying in the background, if painted centuries after the event, tells us nothing of the period in which Mary lived. However it does tell us how the event is being interpreted by the society surrounding the artist, which is valuable in itself and should be noted.

Fig. 68: “Annunciation,” by Carlo Crivelli

Fig. 69: Dialogue about Flight

This 1723 work by Pier Jacopo Martello, entitled
Del Volo Dialogo: Mattina Prima
(Bologna: Lelio dalla Volpe) is the first scientific poem, along with Antonio Conti's
Globo di Venere
, written in the eighteenth century.

 

We decided our best solution was to recount the history of ancient art in ufology, point out its pros and cons, and give a few examples either way. Omens have been seen in the sky for millennia, and interpreted as divine warnings, so it is not surprising to see them reflected in ancient art. This does not mean that any example of it represents an actual sighting. Sometimes the resemblance to phenomena reported today is stunning, but in the case of UFOs, as in the case of virtually any human preoccupation, art reveals more about the painter, his (or her) patron and the audience than about the subject itself.

The next engraving is a case in point. It represents an old man with a book (“Democritus ridet”) at his feet. It has extraordinary importance for it foreshadows modern aeronautics with amazing insight. The old man points to two ships floating in the air. The first ship is merely a wooden boat but the second one, of more interest, represents a bird-like structure upside down with feather-wings and a small awning above. From tail to head stretches a sail; the tail acts as rudder. A figure stands inside watching another one falling through the air. On the ground lies the ruin of another ship while behind stretches an undulating landscape with bridge and tower and rows of poplars.