Historical UFOs

[Marat]

Modern UFO sightings are often explained away as being just the result of contemporary fears of technology, science, atomic warfare, or government conspiracies transforming ambiguous but insignificant meteorological observations into supposed visions of alien spacecraft. Many contemporary sightings are also no doubt induced by an hysterical public observation bias resulting from other supposed alien spaceship sightings.

 

But historical UFO sightings, of which there have been many, provide a way around some of these confounding variables to permit us to consider more carefully what is being seen. There was legislation in Paris in the 14th century punishing with a fine anyone who bothered the authorities with 'any further reports about ships flying in the sky,' so these sightings were obviously not produced by the same culturally induced misperceptions as are today operative, especially since these observers had no experience of even having seen aircraft.

 

Some interesting material on this topic I found while doing research in the British Library comes from an anonymous, unpaginated work which appeared in 1632 with no specification of publisher or place of publication, entitled "Vision einer vornehmen und Gottseeligen Patrioten" (Vision of a Prominent and Pious Patriot). The passage, presented in the text as a factual report, which I have translated from the original German, might be interpreted as a report of a UFO sighting by someone living in the profoundly religious world of the time but lacking the vocabulary to describe the technology he witnessed:

 

"I first saw the earth open up and a thick fog, smoke, and steam rise up, and over the princely city it became rather dark. Amidst the steam I saw a hellish black devil fly up together with many other devils. They had a large barrel of goods which they drove along with a strong wind above the city and over the municipal building, and then they knocked the bottom out of it. There next fell out of it all sorts of new-fangled clothing that could be imagined. Old and young, small and great, rich and poor, and even day laborers set to and took whatever seemed useful to them. But there were some ... who did not want to accept these extravagent things and instead looked on quite miserably. ... A lightning bolt struck and the earth shook where they sat, while a lovely child stepped in among those crying and held in his left hand a little cup in which he collected the tears from the old man and counted them, writing the number on the cup."

 

A UFO enthusiast might want to interpret this as some kind of rocket blasting off (fog and smoke rising up), jet-propelled astronauts moving about (flying devils amidst steam), and a jet-propelled craft (barrel moved by a strong wind) dropping alien-fashioned clothing to attract the people below to where they could be observed. The child emerging and passing among the people could be an alien astronaut conducting investigations such as are today often described in so-called 'alien obduction' cases, and the collection of tears in a cup, with the tears then being numbered, is the scientific recording of the phenomena of human physiology by an alien scientist.

 

I express no opinion on the passage, which could well just be an invented fable posing as the real report of an observed phenomenon, designed to teach people the evil of vanity in being attracted to fancy clothing. But the awkwardness of the tale as a fictional story, which fails to fit with so much of the conventional Christian story-telling of the age, seems to suggest that its author was actually struggling to find the proper words to describe something he saw, rather than fluenty and stereotypically recounting some conventional morality tale he had made up.

[Moontanman]

I have a few UFO threads here, have you checked them out?

 

UFOs in art is an interesting subject to me.

 

http://www.crystalinks.com/ufohistory.html

 

 

[Marat]

Thanks for that very interesting link. Some of those images and anecdotes can be explained away, in part because the predominant religion of modern times is a religion of what anthropologists call 'sky-gods,' so it is only natural to imagine that remarkable things will appear in the sky. But in many other cases interpreting the stories and images as something other than UFO sightings seems perverse. In saying this, however, I would put the emphasis on the 'unidentified' in 'UFO,' since just because people see something inexplicable in the sky doesn't necessarily have any implication of visits by beings from another planet.

 

By far the most interesting story is in the Old Testament, in Ezekial 1:1-28, where a bronze age witness is quite obviously struggling to explain the motion of mechanical robots that come from the sky. This makes such an inept image and the description is so strained and clumsy that it sounds more as if someone is trying to give an accurate report of something seen rather than making up something, since fiction always flows more smoothly. Given what we know now of the great difficulty in traversing the vast distances of space to other interesting planets while still providing life support on board for astronauts, the fact that the author of that book of the Bible describes robots coming from space reinforces its impression of being an actual report of an alien probe.

[Bignose]

By far the most interesting story is in the Old Testament, in Ezekial 1:1-28, where a bronze age witness is quite obviously struggling to explain the motion of mechanical robots that come from the sky.

 

What is "quite obvious" to one, may not be "quite obvious" to another... be careful with such loaded phrases. Almost the entirety of the Book of Revelations is full of colorful language, but they are not meant to be taken literally.

 

This makes such an inept image and the description is so strained and clumsy...

 

Unless you are going to claim to have translated this directly from the original texts, I would first suspect that a lot of this clumsiness can be attributed to translation errors or uncertainties.

Edited August 25, 2010 by Bignose

[Moontanman]

Possibly we should enlist mooey to see what the original Hebrew texts actually said? While historical accounts do have weight, and I admit i love that line of inquiry, the whole cover up/debunking effort of the US military, the out right lies and sneaky false claims, and over all the totally false claim that UFOs had been investigated and no substance was found to base any real scientific investigation on has kept UFOs from being realistically investigated since. J. Allen Hynek Came into the US military study as a debunker and come out believing something beyond our understanding was happening. He saw the farce the US military was perpetuating on the people and called them on it.

[Marat]

Bignose: The clumsiness, ineptness, and strained character of the Old Testament passage in Ezekiel has to do with the nature of the image described rather than with any specific language used in the description, so I would not attribute the awkwardness of the text to the quality of the translation. The author seems to be struggling to report all the details of what he has actually seen, since the image he gives is highly complex, technical, and aesthetically unimpressive, being burdened with too many details. It also has no specific connections to anything in the theology of the Ancient Hebrews, and there is nothing with links up with or adumbrates the Ark of the Covenant, the message of the Psalms, Passover, or anything else which figures prominently in the rest of Ancient Hebrew mythology. To get a flavor of the text, just consider the following excerpt:

 

"I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. ... Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting with a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went. .... When the living creatures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the living creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose."

 

While the detail here sounds nothing like the objects which the author of the passage would have encountered in his own life, it does suggest aspects of machines which are much more familiar to modern readers, such as perhaps a mobile probe with four sides, each having features a Bronze-age observer would interpret as a face, supported by a imbricated system of wheels (familiar from tank tracks), which had limited turning mobility and so could only move in one of the four major compass directions at a time.

[Moontanman]

I've heard that interpreted many ways, most of the time as some sort of helicopter type craft, I'm not sure i follow the tank treads but I agree it was something outside his religious experience for sure....

[Bignose]

Bignose: The clumsiness, ineptness, and strained character of the Old Testament passage in Ezekiel has to do with the nature of the image described rather than with any specific language used in the description, so I would not attribute the awkwardness of the text to the quality of the translation. The author seems to be struggling to report all the details of what he has actually seen, since the image he gives is highly complex, technical, and aesthetically unimpressive, being burdened with too many details. It also has no specific connections to anything in the theology of the Ancient Hebrews, and there is nothing with links up with or adumbrates the Ark of the Covenant, the message of the Psalms, Passover, or anything else which figures prominently in the rest of Ancient Hebrew mythology. To get a flavor of the text, just consider the following excerpt:

 

"I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. ... Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting with a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went. .... When the living creatures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the living creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose."

 

While the detail here sounds nothing like the objects which the author of the passage would have encountered in his own life, it does suggest aspects of machines which are much more familiar to modern readers, such as perhaps a mobile probe with four sides, each having features a Bronze-age observer would interpret as a face, supported by a imbricated system of wheels (familiar from tank tracks), which had limited turning mobility and so could only move in one of the four major compass directions at a time.

 

Or it is someone with a good imagination -- just as one example, Jules Verne imagined a lot of things that we're possible in his time. Michelangelo as well. It is fine to speculate, but using words like "fact" or "quite obviously" without more definitive evidence is a little over the top, don't you think?

Edited August 25, 2010 by Bignose

[Marat]

The thing that inclines me away from interpreting this passage as evidence of an anachronistically lucky imaginative construct by an early Jules Verne is that so many different elements of this tale seem to fit the hypothesis that it is the honest report of some hi-tech, robotic device seen by a Bronze Age witness.

 

The 'vision' begins with flashing fire, clouds, and four apparently living creatures emerging from it. The author notes that "their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the soles of a calf's foot." The object "sparkles like burnished bronze," and its wheels shine "like the gleaming of beryl." There is also some structure (an observation light?) on top which consists of gleaming metal "like the appearance of fire enclosed all around." These apparently metallic, moving, humanoid objects glow like "burning coals of fire" and "out of the fire comes lightning," suggesting something like the leaking of an electric charge. The objects can rise into the sky, drawing their wheels up with them, and move very fast, darting to and fro "like the appearance of a flash of lightning." When it moves the author says it emits a (possibly mechanical whirring?) noise "like the tumult of an army."

 

What intrigues me about this passage is precisely because its imagery sounds so much like Jules Verne, i.e., like a 19th century imaginative author, with lots of electricity, clouds of smoke, burnished metal, glowing lights, whirring wheels, astonishing speeds, and flying machines, not like the invented story of someone living in a world of wood, canvas, camels, simple bronze tools, and the constant intrusion into every story of gods and moral lessons, with few things worth describing in detail unless they had some theological significance.

[Bignose]

So every myth involving something besides wood and camels is evidence of aliens or robots? There are many myths involving inanimate objects given life-like capabilities. Jewish golems to name one. The Japanese scroll Hyakki Yako Ten depicts inanimate objects like umbrellas and kitchen utensils taking on life each night. I am sure that there many more that I am unaware of.

 

How about instead of more of your personal interpretation of this passage, some additional evidence that supports robots or aliens in the age the text was first written?

[Marat]

I want to concede right away that my earlier statement that the Ezekiel passage 'obviously' shows a Bronze Age observer reacting to a robotic probe was a misstatement, as my other comments about that passage demonstrate. What I really meant was that that passage suggests that some observer was struggling to interpret something he saw rather than just making it up, in which case the story would have had more of the characteristics of the many invented tales of the age.

 

Derek Price, a professor of the history of science at the University of London, Cambridge University, and finally Yale University, did a lot of research on robotics in the Ancient world. In the writings of Socrates (ca. 300 BC) there is an account of robotic manniquins which moved spontaneously unless they were restrained. Since Socrates just mentions these in passing to illustrate some other point he is making, it is clear that he was referring to something he could expect his readers/listeners to be generally familiar with, so there must have been more than a few of these devices around. There is also the Greek legend of Talus, the giant being of metal who supposedly patrolled around Crete to keep robbers away. Price also interpreted some documents to support the theory that at Julius Caesar's famous funeral, there was a robotic display of Caesar's dead body, which rose out of its casket during Antony's funeral oration and horrified the crowd with fake blood being pumped out of his wounds by some mechanical device hidden within the catafalque. Heron of Alexandria also used his simple machines to perform religious stage tricks, but whether he fashioned anything like a humanoid robot is unknown. Stories of purportedly real robots don't reappear in the West until the reports of Albertus Magnus' robot ca. 1200 AD, which could supposedly perform chores around his apartment, but which was destroyed after his death by superstitious people who were afraid of it.

 

But although the scientific Greeks knew a lot about machines at least by 300 BC, I doubt that the then much less scientific tribe of Israelites would have had much ability to imagine robotic entities ca. 1400 BC when the Ezekiel story appeared.

[Moontanman]

Surely there are other ancient reports that sound like descriptions of technology?

[Marat]

In the British Museum there is an Ancient Babylonian object that has been hypothesized to have been an operating battery, in which case there must have been some experience with current electricity. But this interpretation has been disputed. However, if the Babylonians really did have batteries, then their imagination may have wandered into high-tech realms and included images of robotic creatures.

 

But the Ancient Hebrews, when they indulged in imaginative excursions, confined their speculations to the organic rather than venturing into the mechanical, which is what you would expect from their level of culture. This is why the Ezekiel story stands out for its detailed, technological character. The most unrestrainedly imaginative work by the Ancient Hebrews is the Book of Revelation, but every image in it is borrowed and developed from the natural, organic world of beasts, landscapes, and weather, with a modicum of conventional artifacts. We read there about dragons, lambs, archangels, a beast with seven heads and ten horns, the whore of Babylon, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, locusts, poisonous rivers, blood, earthquakes, and golden bowls, but nothing like the highly complex image of a machine that we find in Ezekiel.