{"it":{"id":"NX-T36","name":"Stralsund 1665 flying ships","kind":"text","sub":"German (17th c.)","place":"Stralsund, Germany","lat":null,"lon":null,"date":"1665","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: 1665 celestial phenomenon over Stralsund","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1665_celestial_phenomenon_over_Stralsund"},{"t":"Wikidata Q131309854","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q131309854"},{"t":"Staatliche Museen zu Berlin exhibition page","u":"https://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/a-ufo-in-1665/"},{"t":"Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, exhibition \"A UFO in 1665\"","u":"https://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/a-ufo-in-1665/"}],"tags":[],"nfacts":4,"coord_basis":"none available (left null)","loc":"not specified","sum":"At 2 pm on 8 April 1665, six herring fishermen near Stralsund saw a flock of birds turn into warships fighting in the air. At dusk, a flat, round shape like a plate appeared above St. Nicholas Church. The account was printed and illustrated in its own time.\n\nIn 2023 the Kunstbibliothek of the Berlin state museums gave the story an exhibition under the title 'A UFO in 1665', which ran from 5 May to 3 September. The curators set the reports beside the ideas of the period, such as Francesco Lana Terzi's design for an airship, and noted that lightning struck the same church on 19 June 1670.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is how six men could agree on such a detailed sight, with an hour, a place and a sequence of events.\n\nThe modern title invites one question: was this an early sighting of a craft? The museum answers it directly. The fishermen probably saw an atmospheric reflection, a mirage of a sea battle beyond the horizon, which people of the time read as a prodigium, a warning sign from God. It also states that no seventeenth-century sources mention extraterrestrials. The plate over the church was a sign to be interpreted, not a craft to be identified (single source).\n\nThe open question is what the fishermen actually saw in the air, and how much of every sky report is shaped by what its witnesses expect.","nsrc":4,"new":1,"qs":["Six fishermen in 1665 gave a date, an hour and a description. Could they have seen the same thing people report today?","Did the 'saucer with a dome' come from 1665, or from us? How much do modern eyes rewrite old sky reports?","A state museum titled its exhibition 'A UFO in 1665'. Should museums frame history that way, or is it fair to ask the question?"],"why":"A well-dated seventeenth-century sky report, and a museum that put the modern word UFO in its title only to answer it.","yt":"Read the original pamphlet.","rel":["UFO-ARN"],"hook":"Six fishermen, an air battle of ships, then a plate-like shape over a church. A Berlin museum asks why."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"NX-T36","qs":["Six fishermen in 1665 gave a date, an hour and a description. Could a mirage explain so detailed a sight?","Did the plate over the church come from 1665, or from us? How much do modern eyes rewrite old sky reports?","A state museum titled its exhibition 'A UFO in 1665'. Should museums frame history that way, or is it fair to ask the question?"],"gal":[],"ms":[{"a":"Colour","v":"dark grey / 'rising Moon'","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikipedia: 1665 celestial phenomenon over Stralsund","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1665_celestial_phenomenon_over_Stralsund"},{"a":"Date & time (SMB)","v":"8 April 1665, 2 pm","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, exhibition \"A UFO in 1665\"","url":"https://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/a-ufo-in-1665/"},{"a":"Witnesses (SMB)","v":"six herring fishermen","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Staatliche Museen zu Berlin exhibition page","url":"https://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/a-ufo-in-1665/"},{"a":"Exhibition (SMB)","v":"Kunstbibliothek Berlin, 05.05-03.09.2023","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Staatliche Museen zu Berlin exhibition page","url":"https://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/a-ufo-in-1665/"}],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: 1665 celestial phenomenon over Stralsund","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1665_celestial_phenomenon_over_Stralsund"},{"t":"Wikidata Q131309854","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q131309854"},{"t":"Staatliche Museen zu Berlin exhibition page","u":"https://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/a-ufo-in-1665/"},{"t":"Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, exhibition \"A UFO in 1665\"","u":"https://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/a-ufo-in-1665/"}],"sum":"At two in the afternoon on 8 April 1665, six men were fishing for herring off the coast of Stralsund, on the Baltic. Above them, according to the accounts that followed, great flocks of birds began to change shape. The birds became warships, and the warships fought, a thunderous battle in the air, their decks crowded with ghostly figures. The fishermen watched until dusk. Then a flat, round shape \"like a plate\" appeared above St. Nicholas Church, high over the middle of the town, and the six men fled. The next day, the story goes, they were trembling all over and complained of pain.\n\nStralsund was then a port of Swedish Pomerania, now part of Germany, and the church of St. Nicholas stood near the Baltic shore. The thing over it was described as dark grey, or as having a colour like \"that of the rising Moon.\" Some versions gave it a dome, like the crown of a hat. Others called it saucer-shaped. Some accounts claim such shapes were seen many times over the church, hovering there until evening, and that ships of different sizes were seen battling over the Baltic. People at the time took it as an omen from God.\n\nWhat makes the case unusual is not the strangeness of the vision, since early modern Europe was full of signs in the sky, but how precisely it was pinned down. There is a date, an hour, a number of witnesses, their trade, the place they were working, a sequence of events, and a named building. Six men agreed, or were said to have agreed, on a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.\n\nIn 2023 the Kunstbibliothek, the art library of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Berlin state museums, gave this event an exhibition of its own, \"A UFO in 1665: The Air Battle of Stralsund,\" which ran from 5 May to 3 September. It was curated by the library's director, Moritz Wullen, and the museum described it as the first exhibition of its kind to focus on this historical sighting. The title borrowed a modern word on purpose. The aim, the museum said, was to rebuild from the images and texts of the time how the event was carried by the media, and to show habits of reporting that still shape how we talk about what are now called unidentified aerial phenomena.\n\nThe story of 1665 is in large part a story of print. News of the sighting spread fast, and the publishers of leaflets and newspapers competed to produce the most colourful versions and interpretations. Religion, the curators argue, did most to shape the tale. Their own explanation is plain: what the fishermen saw was an atmospheric reflection, a mirage of a real sea battle being fought just beyond the horizon. The public of 1665 could not have known that. They believed in a God able to project visions of coming disaster into the sky, and so they read the air battle as a prodigium, the Latin word for an omen or portent.\n\nThe images of the age mattered too. Seventeenth-century Europeans were fascinated by the idea of flying machines. More than a hundred years before the first manned hot air balloon, Francesco Lana Terzi, who lived from 1631 to 1687, published a design for a flying boat to be lifted by spheres emptied of air. It could never have worked, but it caused a sensation across Europe. The exhibition hung pictures from that world: a ship sailing through the air from Eberhard Werner Happel's book of curiosities, printed in Hamburg in 1689; a \"design of a floating saucer\" from Gaspar Schott's Technica Curiosa, printed at Nuremberg and Würzburg in 1664, the year before the sighting; a fireball in the sky from a copperplate engraving of 1697. A modern visitor walking in, the museum suggested, might feel they had entered a baroque parallel universe of strange signs, airships, rockets and flying saucers.\n\nThen came a second event that sealed the story's meaning. On 19 June 1670, lightning struck St. Nicholas Church, the same building over which the grey disc had hung five years before. The earlier vision was now read as a sign of God's anger, and writers of the day linked it to the fall of Babylon in the Book of Revelation, destroyed by a great millstone.\n\nThis is the mainstream account, and it is a strong one. A real battle beyond the horizon, bent into view by the air; frightened witnesses; a press hungry for wonders; a culture that saw God's hand in the sky; a lightning strike that seemed to confirm it all.\n\nYet the museum itself put a puzzle at the centre of its show. It states that no seventeenth-century source mentions beings from other worlds in connection with these aerial sights. The people of the time could already imagine voyages to other inhabited planets, and the kinds of machines that would carry them there. Still, as far as the surviving record shows, no one in 1665 thought that the plate over the church might be such a machine, arriving from elsewhere. Why that thought never occurred to anyone, the curators wrote, is one of the mysteries their exhibition set out to solve.\n\nThe question runs both ways. If the people of 1665 could not see a visiting craft because their world had no place for one, then a modern reader may see one too readily because ours does. The exhibition ended in the present, with the US military videos of unidentified aerial phenomena that spread around the world in 2019, and observed that the forces which made the 1665 story a media success have lost none of their power. Every sky report is filtered through the minds of its witnesses and the people who print it. What is harder to say is what is left once the filters are taken away: the mirage, the omen, or something the fishermen described faithfully and no one, then or now, has fully explained.\n\nPicture the water off Stralsund at dusk that April evening: six men turning for shore, and above the roof of St. Nicholas a dark disc, the colour of a rising moon, hanging still over the town."},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/NX-T36-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Stralsund 1665 flying ships, Stralsund, Germany — Flugsschrift \"Von dem wunderbarlichen Stralsundischen Lufft-Kriege und Schiff-streite\"","by":"Unknown authorUnknown author","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:23_676358D_001.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":null,"hs":{}}