Wonders in the Sky (32 page)

1494, Apulia, Italy: Three suns at night

“Upon the coming of the little King Charles the VIIIth in Naples…in Apulia during the night three suns appeared in the middle of the sky which was all around covered with clouds, accompanied by many lightnings and horrible thunders.”

 

Source: Francesco Guicciardini,
Storia d'Italia
(Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1971).

160.

20 September 1498, Japan, location unknown
Umbrella-shaped object

A bright object resembling an umbrella crossed the sky with a rumbling sound.

 

Source: Brothers I,1, Dainihonjisinsiriyo Nihon-jisinsiriyo; Takao Ikeda,
UFOs over Japan
.

161.

1499, South Atlantic, off Africa
The slow-moving light seen by Pedro Cabral

A phenomenon difficult to explain as a meteor occurred when Pedro Alvares Cabral left Portugal on an expedition of 13 vessels and a crew of 1,200 men. The expedition was plagued with incidents. However, had it not been for one such near-disaster they would never have headed west and gone down in history as the first men to reach Brazil in the year 1500. As they were sailing around Africa they saw a luminous object in the southern sky. It only remained in sight for 8 minutes, moving slowly towards the Cape of Good Hope. Shortly after, a hurricane arose. Six ships sank or ran aground. The remaining seven went on to the Americas. These vessels made it back to Lisbon bringing with them a fortune in spices and news about the discovery of Brazil and Madagascar.

 

Source: W. B. Greenlee, ed.,
The Voyage of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1937).

By the close of the 15
^th
century the use of printing had changed everything in terms of the generation and distribution of knowledge. German inventor Johann Gutenberg (1397-1468), who may have been aware of earlier Chinese and Korean printing methods, had developed molds that allowed for the mass production of individual pieces of metal type. Printing presses soon began to appear all over Europe.

Books were scarce, copied by monks or (after the 13th century) in commercial scriptoria, written by hand. While it might take someone a year or more to hand copy a Bible, with the Gutenberg press it was possible to create several hundred copies a year. Printed works were not immediately popular: some nobles refused to keep printed books in their libraries, fearing that would depreciate their valuable manuscripts. Much of the Islamic world, where calligraphic traditions were extremely important, also resisted. In spite of this, Gutenberg's printing press spread rapidly. Within thirty years of its invention in 1453, towns across Europe had the equipment.

For the purposes of our study, it is important to note that printing, which made an impact only comparable in modern times to that of the Internet, led to information spreading more quickly, within a more literate citizenry, so that more reports of unusual events survived. On the negative side, it also spread disinformation and misinformation, just as the Internet does today. Publishers shamelessly exploited people's fears by trumpeting strange events, while stories of portents and signs in the sky were cynically invented to support political or religious objectives.

Printing was expensive. It became a source of significant profits, two facts that combined to spread sensational news broadsheets of dubious validity, creating incentives to compile information about unusual incidents. Chroniclers correlated such visions with current affairs and future predictions. As we study the records of unusual sightings in the sixteenth century and beyond, increasingly sharp analysis is required to take these social distortion effects into consideration.

Another important factor appears in the late fifteenth century with European scholars' novel obsession with witchcraft, putting the topic of unusual phenomena (and ordinary folks' interaction with them) in a new and dangerous light. The most authoritative and influential treatise on the subject of witchcraft was indisputably the
Malleus Maleficarum
, or “The Witch's Hammer,” written in 1486 by two erudite Dominican friars. It served as the official witch-hunter's handbook for nearly two centuries, the maximum authority used by inquisitors, magistrates and priests to justify the brutal torture and execution of alleged witches in every European country. The text was reprinted at least sixteen times in German, eleven times in French, twice in Italian and went through more than half a dozen editions in English. It became the principal source of inspiration for every work published after it.

The authors of the
Malleus Maleficarum
, Jacob Sprenger (1436-95), Dean of the Theology Faculty at the University of Cologne, and the prior Heinrich Kramer (1430-1505), divided their treatise into three parts. The first part discussed the need for governing authorities to comprehend the true diabolical nature of witchcraft in all its aspects: the threat posed to Catholicism, pacts with the Devil, problems caused by lascivious demons, and so on. The second part deals with the three kinds of
maleficia
(dark magic) and how they may be “successfully annulled and dissolved.” The third part considers methods to hold a witchcraft trial and the punishment that best suits each crime. Here we can find advice on what punishment should be given “in the Case of one Accused upon a Light Suspicion” and about “the Method of passing Sentence upon one who has been Accused by another Witch, who has been or is to be Burned at the Stake.”

Of particular interest to us is the issue of physical contact with beings assumed to be demons, a form of interaction the two scholars call “transvection”. Of all the issues dealt with in the
Malleus Maleficarum
, the most prominent were (1) whether humans could feasibly procreate with demons and bear their children, and (2) whether people were taken physically by demonic beings and transported to secret locations, or if it was all in the mind.

In other words, five hundred years ago they were debating the exact same issues as ufologists today. It may seem a horrid, unfair thought, but it is difficult to read ancient books such as the
Malleus Maleficarum
or Rémy's later
De Demonolatriae
(1595) without coming away with the impression that today's leading abduction researchers, who abuse witnesses with dubious hypnotic techniques to extract information, would have enjoyed a successful collaboration with the chief inquisitors of yore.

The sixteenth century is marked, first and foremost, by extraordinary expansion of the knowledge of the world, thanks to numerous expeditions to the Americas. In 1519 Magellan leaves for the first voyage around the world; he sails into the Pacific Ocean, previously unknown to Europeans. As a result, the commercial prominence of Mediterranean cities decreases, to the advantage of ports like Lisbon and the premier colonial empires, Portugal and Spain. In Mexico and Peru, explorers find thriving civilizations and many opportunities for enrichment that help transform European society.

Parallel to the expansion of geographic knowledge, navigation, and trade, the world undergoes a deep transformation of ideas under the influence of the humanist philosophy that feeds the Renaissance, blending with mystical notions that refuse to disappear, while early scientists like Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo (1564-1642) use critical observation and the experimental method to build new theories of the world that conflict with traditional teachings.

It is the time of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael in art, and of Martin Luther in religion. In 1520 the Reformation shakes the foundations of the Catholic church, which reacts with renewed commitment to its mystical basis: When Ignatius of Loyola founds the Jesuit Order in 1534, first as a tool against the Moslem religion, and eventually against Protestantism, he is said to have been threatened by an assassin, who fled when an angel came down from the sky and confronted him!

Fig. 11: Ignatius of Loyola saved by an angel

Thus reports of unusual phenomena gradually become caught between increasing rational interest in all natural effects and lingering temptation to attribute them to celestial powers, in the phraseology of traditional religion– a polarity that has survived to the present day.

162.

1501, between Urbino and Gubbio, central Italy
Abortions caused by a horrible object in the sky

Professor Carlo Pedretti, specialist of Leonardo da Vinci Studies at the University of California, has published an article about relations between the “monstrous” and the Renaissance. He stated that the Florentine physician Antonio Benivieni (1443-1502), who was interested in monsters from the pathological point of view, mentions a wonder that took place between Urbino and Gubbio in 1501: “a horrible appearance in the stormy sky that caused many abortions – what we today call the appearance of a UFO.”

 

Source: Antonio Benivieni,
De abditis nonnullis ac mirandis morborum et sanationem causis
, G. Weber, ed., in
Academia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Columbaria,”
142 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994), 190; Carlo Pedretti,
La Nazione
, 28 July 1979.

163.

29 September 1504, Tirano, Val Poschiavo, Italy
Abducted by a lady of light

At dawn a man named Mario Omodei, who had gone into his garden, was suddenly surrounded by a dazzling light and heard a voice that called him by name. At the same time he felt lifted from the ground and found himself carried away to a land owned by a man named Alojsio Quadrio. Here, in an even more dazzling vision, an apparition he took to be Mary instructed him to make public the fact that she wanted a temple dedicated to her. Indeed it was completed in 1513 and consecrated in 1528.

A priest named Simone Cabasso wrote in 1601 about the adventure of Omodei: “it seemed that the mountains (…) were illuminated by an unusual light (…) He clearly felt lifted from the earth, and transported to a garden, and was taken down to the ground.” The luminous apparition looked like a 14-year old girl.

 

Sources: Gamba, Marino.
Apparizioni mariane nel corso di due millenni.
Udine: Ediz. Il Segno (1999); and Cabasso, Simone,
Miracoli della Madonna di Tirano.
Vicenza: Ed. Pietro Gioannini (1601).

164.

19 March 1509, Villefranche-du-Rouergue Vehicle interference: Light beings free up a chariot

A man named Collongis (or Collonges) who was driving a cart across a ford in a shallow river tried in vain to free it when it became stuck. Having prayed fervently, he saw a being in a blinding light coming from the East, accompanied by twelve other figures. He took them to be the Virgin Mary and the Apostles. They stepped on thirteen stones local people used to cross the river and disappeared in the West. As they vanished, Collongis found that his cart was free from the mud. An investigation by the bishop of Rodez led to the founding of the Chapel of the Thirteen Stones on July 1
^st
, 1510.

 

Sources: Bernard, Gilles and Guy Cavagnac,
Villefranche-du-Rouergue, histoire et génie du lieu
, Ed. Privat (1991), 82, and Chiron, Yves.
Enquête sur les Apparitions de la Vierge.
Paris: Ed. Perrin (1955), 65-66. (Credit: Franck Marie)

165.

1513, Rome, Italy: Michelangelo's flying triangle

The celebrated sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) observed a triangular light with three tails of different colors. He painted a picture of it but this has not survived.

According to Benedictine chronicler Benedetto Lushino's book
Vulnera Diligentis
(second book, chapter XXII) Michelangelo saw a “triangular sign” one calm night.

Fig. 12: Michelangelo

It resembled a star with three tails, one silvery, the second one red, and the third fiery and bifurcated.

 

Source: Giovanni Papini,
La vita di Michelangiolo nella vita del suo tiempo
(Milano: Garzanti, 1949), 198-200.

166.