Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: 1561 Celestial Event

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

An amazing case of an early modern mass sighting of UFOs came in Nuremberg, Germany in 1561. Except it wasn’t that at all.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. It's Black Business Month, and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in. I'm Will Lucas spotlighting black founders, investors, and innovators, building the future, one idea at a time. Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth. I had the skill and I had the talent. I didn't have the opportunity. Yeah.

We all know, right? Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not. To hear this and more on the power of Black Innovations. and ownership listen to black tech green money from the black effect podcast network on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts hey and welcome to the short stuff i'm josh and there's chuck and we're sitting in for jerry who would be sitting in for dave and if that's confusing it doesn't matter because that has

nothing to do with this episode on the 1561 celestial phenomenon of nuremberg that's right nuremberg germany of course on April 14th of that year, there were people, this is early morning, and there were a lot of people around, and this happened for over an hour where they looked up in the sky and saw what looked like an aerial battle

between airships of unknown origin, I guess is the best way you could say it. There were different colors, there were different shapes, there were squares and globes and crescents, and eventually the ships crashed outside of town and dissolved into smoke. And a lot of people saw this and a lot of people who weren't just like silly rubs.

Right. It wasn't like Rusty and Eugene who were out drinking that night who saw it and came back and told everybody. Regular people doing their thing in the morning. Exactly. And we don't know how many. We just know, quote, a lot of men and women. And then after all that, something like a black spear appeared in the sky, too. So this is a big deal, you can imagine.

And we know about it because there was a broad sheet that was published recording it or documenting it. There was a publisher named Hans Glazer. And he published in Einblatt-Druc. Did I say that right? Yeah. Okay. Which is a type of broad sheet that has a headline, an illustration, usually a woodcut, and then, you know, an account of what happened.

And so there's this famous Einblot-Druke of the 1561 celestial phenomenon in Nuremberg that Hans glazer made. And if you've even remotely heard of this, I'll bet you've seen his famous wood cut from it. It's quite lovely. Yeah, I love a wood cut. We both love woodcuts. Yeah. A good wood cut is something to behold. Agreed. So now we look back and say, like, hey, these people saw, this is like one of the first UFO encounters. They didn't talk of such things back then. So, of course, they didn't talk about it that way. But it was not, as it turns out, an isolated incident even at the time. There were apparently a lot of sort of sightings like this at the time where it looked like airship battles were going on. So if you lived around that area,

the Alpine sort of Scandinavian area at the time, between like a nine-year period or so, there were 400 of these broadsheets. So it was like a hot thing, a hot topic. Yeah. People were nuts for it, right? So this was during the time where Austria, Switzerland, Germany, some other countries, and Nuremberg is in Germany, of course. They were part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire was ruled by an emperor and the Pope, so therefore it was a pretty Catholic empire. And at the time of this event in Nuremberg, the Reformation is going on. So this is a really tumultuous time that was kicked off by Martin Luther. And during the Reformation era, there was a lot of religious fervor. There was a lot of emphasis on end times. So when people

saw things like these aerial battles in the sky, they're like, this is clearly a sign from God. We don't know what it means, but what it's ultimately telling us is that we're doomed unless we repent and mend our ways. That's right. So just to sort of reiterate, they did not call these UFOs. That's an us thing. Yeah. And maybe we'll take that break. And we will come back right after this and dig in once more. The Super Secret Bestie Club podcast season four is here. And we're locked in. That means more juicy cheesement. Terrible love advice.

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My name is Curley. And I'm Maya. In each episode, we'll talk about love, friendship, heartbreak, men, and of course, our favorite secrets. Listen to the Super Secret Bestie Club as a part of the Michael through a podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell

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Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, Chuck, so if, like you said, this 1561 celestial event over Nuremberg was one of hundreds in this era, this era of the trend of seeing aerial battle. in the sky, why is that the one we're talking about? And there's actually a really good explanation. Why? The reason why is because this was a forgotten event, because again, it just got mixed in with all the others. It was a forgotten event in history, largely, that was plucked out of obscurity to be used as an example in a book about flying saucers, or actually the mythology we create around things like flying saucers, by none other than psychoanalyst Carl Jung. And because this one event, was plucked from all the other ones that he could have used,

it came to seem to us, people living today, as a singular event, like nothing like this had ever happened before, right? Yeah. So it loses its context in that sense. And then eventually over time, since 1958 and that book came out, it was stripped further of its context that Carl Jung was using this as an example of people coming up with their own mythologies about something they didn't understand. like we do with UFOs.

And so this one event that happened in Nuremberg in 1561 that Carl Jung put in his book about flying saucers is a UFO sighting. That's where we landed today when we think about the 1561 celestial phenomenon being a UFO sighting. Yeah, aliens, basically. Exactly.

But, you know, I think I said in the first part that, you know, these weren't rubs. They were just regular people. It was 1561, but, like, science was around a little bit there in some former fashion. Like, less than a decade after this, they figured out, like, what comets were, that they were space-faring natural objects. So they weren't people sitting around looking at the sky saying it was like a dragon or something like that. No, yeah. Yes.

And when you take that into account that these weren't just dummies, you can't just be like, yeah, it was a comet, obviously, or maybe even a couple shootings. stars, who knows. If you take that kind of easy explanation out of your toolbox, as they put it in HR, it becomes much harder to explain what exactly they saw. You also have to take into account these people had eons of collective awareness and memory of an experience with natural phenomenon. So again, it's not going to be a comet. It's not going to be a rainbow. It's not going to be something like that. Over time, basically three main explanations have been proffered, and it's sun dogs, fireworks, and embellishment. Yeah, a sun dog is, it's not something you see every day, but it's not like super, super uncommon. Apparently, like, they're as common or more common

than rainbows, so it's a kind of thing that happens with some frequency. But that's when the sun's reflected by these low-angled ice crystals up in the air. And it triples it, basically, where you have two suns on either side. And it fits that it's morning because it happens, the sun dogs happen when the sun is low on the horizon. So that would sort of make sense that it was daybreak. Yeah. The one thing, though, is that this happens a lot. So if this is kind of thing that, or not a lot, but with enough frequency that people wouldn't be like, oh, my God, let's make a woodcut about this. Right. One other thing that actually is a mark in the sun dogs' favors and explanations. They typically last between 15 and 30 minutes, but as recently as

2023, one in northern China was witnessed that lasted a couple hours. So if this thing lasted an hour, it's not like a sun dog is ruled out because of the length of time. That was one. Yeah. Another one is that in 1540, full 20 plus years before this event, a man named Venokio Berenguccio published De La Pyrotechnia, which is the first book from Europe, at least, on how to prepare rockets, including using rockets and festivals, what we would call fireworks. So the question is, like, was there somebody in Nuremberg who had gotten a hold of this book and was putting on a fireworks display without telling anybody? And there's actually, some of the details are like, yeah, that would make sense that these

things fell out of the sky and fizzled out into smoke when they were on the ground. I mean, it sounds silly at first, but that one makes a little more sense. to me than even sun dogs as far as like maybe creating weird shapes and the fizzling out part like you've talked about like uh but then then you're just sort of making a theory about some some rogue uh you know german that got this book but hey that's that's not unbelievable right like on its face it seems unlikely but when you dig in it's like it gets a little meatier for sure i mean like this is something that they probably wouldn't have seen before you know so at least it checks that box and then there's embellishment too right Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the obvious one that maybe, I don't know, something happened.

Maybe it was a sun dog gone wild in a great series of videos in the 80s. A sun dog gone wild in the account and then the wood cutting on that broad sheet. Maybe that's what happened because even it wasn't like the heyday of yellow journalism and tabloids, but even very early on in publishing, they were kind of doing some more. sort of salacious stuff to get readers because there was competition going on. Exactly. So it makes a lot of sense that they might have been embellishing. No matter

what it is, that doesn't explain what it is, but that explains probably the account of it, right? Yeah, agreed. So, I mean, I guess that's it. It was a one of multiple stories of something that happened at the time plucked out of obscurity by Carl Young,

stripped of context, turned into a UFO sighting that had nothing to do with that by us. I want to also thank our listener, James Calamara, who's written in multiple times to ask for us to do this one. As far back as 2021, which is 460 years after the Nuremberg event exactly. Pretty spooky. Short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app.

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