The Sky Show That Never Was: Hans Glaser’s Nuremberg Cash Grab

At daybreak on 14 April 1561, somewhere between four and five in the morning, the citizens of Nuremberg looked up and watched the sky fight itself. Blood-red crescents appeared on either side of the sun. Then came the spheres — by some counts as many as seventy of them, arranged in tidy rows of three or squares of four, blood-red and blue-black, drifting and colliding above the rooftops. Cylinders hung in the air like artillery barrels, occasionally disgorging more spheres. Crosses appeared. A black rod the length of a long beam pushed through the formation. And presiding over the entire spectacle, a single enormous black object shaped like a spear, or possibly an arrow, hovered above the chaos as if directing it. After roughly an hour, several of the objects appeared to crash to the ground outside the city walls, trailing smoke. Nobody ever found the wreckage. What Nuremberg did find, almost immediately, was a tradesman willing to sell them a woodcut of the whole thing.

That tradesman was Hans Glaser, a Nuremberg printer and artist who, within weeks, produced a broadsheet titled — in the breathless run-on style the sixteenth century reserved for its biggest news — an account of the “dreadful apparition” witnessed “by many men and women” both within the city, before its gates, and out in the surrounding countryside. The broadsheet measures a modest 26.2 by 38 centimetres, small enough to pin to a tavern wall, and survives today in the Wickiana Collection at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, tucked into a manuscript folio alongside whatever else the library’s sixteenth-century acquisitions team considered worth filing under “miscellaneous wonders.” It remains the single source for everything anyone knows about that morning. There is no second eyewitness account, no council record, no competing pamphlet from a rival printer. Four hundred and sixty-five years of speculation about what happened over Nuremberg rests on one man’s woodcut and his own description of it.

The celestial phenomenon over the German city of Nuremberg on April 14, 1561. By Hanns Glaser (print) — Zentralbibliothek Zürich, http://opac.nebis.ch/F/?local_base=NEBIS&con_lng=GER&func=find-b&find_code=SYS&request=005289279, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12588223

This would be a more comfortable arrangement if Hans Glaser were, in some sense, a disinterested party — a bystander who happened to own a printing press. He was not. Glaser had, by 1561, already built something close to a specialist trade in exactly this kind of broadsheet. Seven years earlier, in 1554, he’d produced a near-identical “miracle sign” broadsheet describing an ominous apparition over Waldeck Castle near Kemnath, in the Upper Palatinate. The same year, he turned out another one covering a separate sky spectacle over the town of Plech. By the time Nuremberg’s own sky allegedly erupted into a seventy-object aerial battle in 1561, Hans Glaser was not a man encountering the wondrous-celestial-sign genre for the first time. He was a working professional with at least two prior commissions in the field, walking into his third. None of this proves the woodcut is fabricated — Glaser’s broadsheets were a recognised and respectable category of sixteenth-century news media, the Wunderzeichen tradition, produced by serious printers for an audience that took divine omens as seriously as any other current event. But it is worth knowing, before treating the Nuremberg woodcut as a uniquely credible first-hand record, that the man behind it had already made a small career out of illustrating exactly this sort of thing, and that his entire body of evidence for the most famous one is the broadsheet he sold.

The leading scientific explanation, for what it’s worth, is a sundog — technically a parhelion, the optical effect produced when sunlight refracts through hexagonal ice crystals suspended in high, cold cirrus cloud, throwing bright patches and arcs of light to either side of the sun that can, to an observer without the vocabulary for atmospheric optics, look very much like the sun has sprouted company. Sixteenth-century Nuremberg had no concept of ice-crystal refraction. What it had was the sun doing something visibly wrong at dawn, and a population primed by decades of Reformation-era anxiety to read any unusual sky as a message from God about the state of the world. The trouble, as more careful modern analysts have pointed out, is that a parhelion display — however dramatic — produces a small, fixed set of bright points that hold a constant angular relationship to the sun and do not move independently, let alone crash to earth trailing smoke. Glaser’s broadsheet describes roughly seventy distinct objects, behaving erratically, several of which fall out of the sky entirely. That is rather a lot of behaviour to extract from a phenomenon whose defining feature is that it stays exactly where the sun’s geometry puts it. The parhelion theory explains the glow. It has a harder time explaining the choreography.

Sun Dogs by Gopherboy6956 — Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5985196

A second, more delightfully period-appropriate theory holds that someone in Nuremberg had simply got their hands on fireworks. The year before the sighting, the Italian metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio had published De La Pirotechnia, Europe’s first dedicated treatise on the manufacture of rockets — for warfare, and, just as enthusiastically, for festival entertainment. It is not an unreasonable thought that a sufficiently keen and recently literate Nuremberger, fresh off reading a new Italian how-to guide, might have decided 14 April 1561 was an excellent morning to test a batch of homemade pyrotechnics over the rooftops of a city that had absolutely no framework for interpreting an unscheduled fireworks display except as a sign from the Almighty. Whether this happened is unverifiable.

That it could have is, frankly, a better story than most explanations on offer, since it would mean Nuremberg’s most famous UFO sighting was actually history’s earliest recorded case of a man getting carried away with a new hobby and accidentally terrifying an entire imperial city. For nearly four centuries after Glaser printed it, the broadsheet did almost nothing. It sat in the Wickiana Collection, occasionally cited by historians of Reformation print culture as a representative example of the Wunderzeichen genre, attracting roughly the level of public attention you’d expect for a regional doom pamphlet about a sky event nobody alive could verify. Then, in 1958, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung picked it up for an entirely different reason and gave it the second life it’s enjoyed ever since. Jung’s book that year, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, wasn’t really about whether UFOs were real. It was about why twentieth-century humanity, gripped by Cold War anxiety, had started collectively seeing circular objects in the sky — Jung’s argument being that the saucer was a modern mandala, a psychological archetype of wholeness that the anxious unconscious projects outward when the world feels like it’s coming apart. Glaser’s four-hundred-year-old broadsheet, with its crosses and spheres arranged in tidy geometric clusters, made for an irresistible historical exhibit: proof, to Jung’s mind, that humans had been projecting exactly this kind of orderly celestial anxiety onto a chaotic sky since long before anyone had coined the phrase “flying saucer.” It is entirely thanks to a psychoanalyst building a case about the human subconscious that Nuremberg’s sixteenth-century sky battle is famous at all today — which means the broadsheet’s modern reputation rests not on anyone establishing what actually happened over the city in 1561, but on what one Swiss doctor, four centuries later, decided it revealed about everybody else’s anxieties but Nuremberg’s.

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row, Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung. Back row, Abraham Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi. By Unknown author — Sigmund Freud’s 1909 Visit to Clark University, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=704548

What I find quietly funny about the whole affair is how little of its enduring fame has anything to do with Nuremberg itself. The single surviving witness is the man who sold the picture. The leading scientific theory struggles to explain most of the picture’s own detail. The best amateur theory involves an Italian firework manual and a hobbyist with poor judgement. And the reason any of us are still talking about it isn’t four hundred and sixty-five years of careful historical investigation — it’s that a psychoanalyst needed an old illustration to make a point about modern people’s collective nerves, found Hans Glaser’s seventy objects arranged in their neat little rows of three, and decided that was exactly the shape human anxiety has always taken. Nuremberg’s sky, whatever was actually up there that morning, has spent the last four centuries being far less interesting than what everyone since has needed it to mean.