IV – The Visitor

Human beings have been recording strange things overhead for a very long time.

Lights. Shapes. fiery objects. Apparitions. Armies. Crosses. Ships. Wheels. Stars that moved incorrectly. Things that appeared to fight each other. It is tempting to gather all these old accounts together, strip away the language of their time and announce that our ancestors were seeing UFOs. People have certainly done it before. Unfortunately, that tells us rather more about us than it does about them, because an unexplained thing in the sky does not arrive with a label attached. We supply that ourselves. And the label changes.

In 1178, five men reportedly watched the Moon do something impossible. The story survives because Gervase of Canterbury, a monk and chronicler at Christ Church Cathedral Priory, wrote it down. According to the account given to him, the men were watching a young crescent Moon when its upper horn appeared to split. Something resembling fire, sparks or burning material seemed to erupt from it. The Moon then appeared to twist or writhe. It is an extraordinary description.

Centuries later, scientists wondered whether the witnesses had seen something equally extraordinary: a huge meteorite striking the Moon. In 1976, geologist Jack Hartung proposed that the event might have created the Giordano Bruno crater on the Moon’s far side. It’s a great idea. There’s just one problem. Modern observations indicate that Giordano Bruno was not formed during recorded human history.

So what did those five men see?

A modern re-examination by Giles Gasper and Brian Tanner found something particularly interesting. Gervase’s other astronomical observations were sufficiently accurate that there was little reason simply to dismiss his account as medieval fantasy. The witnesses may really have seen the Moon apparently distort. The researchers proposed another possibility – hot air.

If the Moon were being viewed through turbulent heated air rising from a distant fire, its image could have distorted dramatically – splitting, flickering and apparently writhing in precisely the sort of way described. The witnesses needn’t have lied. Gervase needn’t have invented anything. Something genuinely strange may have happened. Just not on the Moon. ScienceDirect

That distinction is going to follow us for the next eight hundred years. Because seeing something strange and correctly identifying what caused it are two entirely different things. Jump forward to 1561.

On the morning of 14 April, something remarkable was reported over Nuremberg. We know about it because printer Hans Glaser produced a spectacular illustrated broadsheet showing the event. It has become one of the most reproduced images in UFO history. Look at it with modern eyes and it’s easy to understand why. The sky is filled with coloured spheres. There are crosses, cylindrical forms, long shapes apparently containing smaller objects. Things seem to collide. Something dark and spear-like dominates part of the sky. And beneath all of it sits Nuremberg.

Modern retellings frequently describe it as an aerial battle. Sometimes the language goes considerably further. Spaceships. UFO fleets. Alien warfare witnessed in Renaissance Germany. But that’s not what the surviving object actually tells us. The Zentralbibliothek Zürich catalogue classifies Glaser’s work among literature concerning celestial phenomena and portents. Glaser presented the extraordinary sight within a religious framework: whatever had appeared above Nuremberg was something humanity should take seriously as a warning from God. Graphikportal He wasn’t trying to identify extraterrestrial hardware. He was interpreting an extraordinary sky through the world he inhabited.

Five years later, the heavens misbehaved again, this time over Basel. During July and August 1566, residents reported a series of peculiar celestial events. There were extraordinary red skies. Then, on 7 August, numerous dark and fiery spherical objects reportedly appeared overhead. Some seemed to move towards one another. Others appeared to disintegrate. The event caused enough interest for printer Samuel Apiarius, assisted by Samuel Coccius, to produce another illustrated broadsheet. Once again, look at the picture through twenty-first-century eyes and it’s almost irresistible.

UFOs.

Except the people who created the broadsheet didn’t have that concept. Apiarius and Coccius weren’t themselves eyewitnesses; their representation drew on first- and second-hand reports. More importantly, the accompanying text tells us how the event was being understood. This was a world of religious upheaval, warfare, political uncertainty and fear. The objects in the sky were presented as a divine warning. Repent. Live properly. Pay attention. Something above humanity was sending a message. Swiss National Museum Blog

Whether anything genuinely unusual occurred over Basel is a separate question. The important thing is what happened afterwards. People saw something. Then culture supplied the explanation. And that is where The Visitor really begins. Because the sky changes very little. We do.

For centuries, strange celestial phenomena could be interpreted as portents. Then science began explaining some of them. Comets stopped being warnings of catastrophe and became astronomical bodies. Halos became optical phenomena. Meteorites became rocks rather than messages from God. The heavens became increasingly understood. But they never became completely predictable. There was always room left for something strange. And when technology changed, the visitors changed with it.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, humanity had achieved something that would have sounded miraculous to most of the people who saw the skies over Basel. We could fly. Suddenly, an unexplained object overhead didn’t need to belong to God. It could belong to Germany.

In 1909, reports spread around Britain of mysterious aircraft moving through the night sky. Lights were seen. Dark shapes were reported. Engine noises were heard. And the sightings arrived at precisely the right moment to cause maximum anxiety. Powered flight was still astonishingly new. Zeppelins were real. Germany was increasingly regarded as a potential military threat. For perhaps the first time in British history, the old comfort provided by the sea was beginning to look unreliable. An enemy might simply fly over it. The strange lights acquired a name. Phantom airships.

Then, in late 1912 and early 1913, Britain did it again. People across the country reported mysterious airships at night. The explanation seemed obvious. German Zeppelins were secretly reconnoitring Britain. Except historian Brett Holman’s detailed study of the 1913 panic found that the supposed German airships weren’t there. What was there was almost a perfect cultural environment for seeing them. Fear of Germany. Fear of invasion. Espionage scares. Newspapers hungry for stories. Campaigners demanding greater investment in British air power. And a completely new technology that most people had little experience of seeing, particularly at night. Britain looked upward expecting German airships. And Britain found them. Rune

That doesn’t mean everyone lied. It doesn’t even necessarily mean everyone saw the same thing. Some may have seen stars or planets. Some may have seen balloons. Some may have seen aircraft. Some reports may have been jokes, rumours or inventions. Others may simply remain impossible to reconstruct more than a century later. But the pattern is fascinating. Because by 1913, the mysterious visitor from the sky was no longer necessarily supernatural. It had become technological. And once that door opened, it never really closed.

A few decades later, another transformation occurred. In June 1947, American businessman and pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine unusual objects while flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State. The press coverage that followed helped launch the modern flying saucer era. Suddenly there was another possibility available when something unexplained appeared overhead. Not God. Not an omen. Not necessarily Germany. Perhaps something from somewhere else entirely. The old visitor had acquired a spacecraft. And once again, reports followed the vocabulary. Discs, saucers, cigar-shaped craft, domes, structured objects, occupants. Close encounters.

By the time Britain reached December 1980, the cultural landscape surrounding strange things in the sky had changed beyond recognition. American military personnel stationed at RAF Woodbridge encountered unexplained lights in and around Rendlesham Forest. Whatever happened there – and that question deserves an article of its own – the witnesses were living in the UFO age. Nobody needed to invent the idea of visitors from elsewhere. It was already waiting.

Science fiction had spent decades imagining them. Newspapers reported them. Governments collected reports. Witnesses knew what a UFO was. And that matters, not because it proves the witnesses imagined anything. It matters because nobody experiences the unexplained without context. Neither did the witnesses at Canterbury. Neither did the citizens of Nuremberg. Neither did the people staring upwards in Basel. Neither did Edwardian Britons searching the darkness for German Zeppelins.

When something happens that we cannot immediately explain, the brain doesn’t simply leave a blank space. It searches for possibilities. And those possibilities come from the world around us. Which raises an awkward question. What would we call the Nuremberg phenomenon if it happened tonight?

Imagine the same event.

Hundreds of people look upwards. Spheres appear around the Sun. Long forms stretch across the sky. Shapes seem to move and collide. Something dark descends towards the horizon.

Phones come out.

Within minutes the footage is online. Someone slows it down and enhances it. Someone announces that the objects are clearly under intelligent control. Someone else identifies atmospheric optics. Someone finds military exercises nearby. Someone posts a photograph from an entirely different country and claims it was taken ten minutes earlier. Someone says the government knows. Someone says aliens. Someone says drones. Someone says AI. By lunchtime there are twelve explanations. By dinner there are forty. By tomorrow nobody can even agree which video is genuine.

Perhaps we are not so different from Hans Glaser after all.

We’ve simply got faster printing presses.

And this is why historical sky phenomena have to be handled carefully. The old accounts are fascinating. They deserve investigation. But translating every celestial wonder into modern UFO language destroys the very thing that makes them valuable. A sixteenth-century chronicler who described a fiery wheel did not report a disc-shaped spacecraft. He reported a fiery wheel. Those aren’t interchangeable statements. The first belongs to him. The second belongs to us.

And yet we shouldn’t make the opposite mistake either. It would be equally foolish to assume that because old societies interpreted unusual events through religion, folklore or contemporary technology, nothing unusual was actually seen. Sometimes we can identify the culprit. Atmospheric optics. Astronomical events. Meteorites. Weather. Human technology.

Sometimes the original account is too poor or too distant for any confident explanation. And sometimes something remains genuinely puzzling. That’s allowed. Unexplained does not mean extraterrestrial. But it doesn’t mean imaginary either.

There is a rather beautiful continuity running through all of this.

For as long as people have been recording the world around them, they have occasionally stopped what they were doing and looked upwards. Something was wrong. A light moved strangely. The Moon behaved impossibly. Objects appeared where there should have been empty sky. And somebody said:

What the hell is that?

The words that came afterwards changed. Portent. Miracle. Airship. Flying saucer. UFO. UAP.

Perhaps tomorrow we’ll invent another one. But underneath all of them lies the oldest description of all.

Something was in the sky.

And we didn’t know what it was.

---

The Card’s Meaning

The Visitor is the card of intrusion, possibility and the arrival of something that does not fit your understanding of the world.

It appears when the familiar suddenly becomes uncertain.

But The Visitor carries a warning.

We rarely meet the unknown empty-handed. We bring expectations, fears, beliefs and stories with us – and sometimes we mistake those things for evidence.

The card doesn’t ask you to reject the extraordinary.

It asks you to leave enough room for it to remain unknown.

Upright: wonder · possibility · revelation · curiosity · disruption · looking beyond the familiar

In shadow: assumption · projection · fear of the unknown · forcing an explanation · seeing what you expect to see

The question: If you didn’t already have a name for what you were seeing, what would you say you saw?

Tomorrow, another card turns. 👁️✨

Sources & Further Reading

Gasper, Giles E. M. & Tanner, Brian K. “‘The Moon Quivered Like a Snake’: A Medieval Chronicler, Lunar Explosions, and a Puzzle for Modern Interpretation.” Endeavour, Vol. 44, 2020. – Re-examination of Gervase of Canterbury’s 1178 lunar account, including the proposed Giordano Bruno impact and alternative explanations for what the witnesses observed. ScienceDirect

Glaser, Hans. Himmelserscheinung über Nürnberg vom 14. April 1561. Nuremberg, 1561. Zentralbibliothek Zürich. – Surviving illustrated broadsheet depicting the famous Nuremberg celestial phenomenon. The catalogue identifies it as Prodigienliteratur -literature of portents – and notes that the accompanying text relates the phenomenon to divine power. Graphikportal

Swiss National Museum. “The Celestial Event over Basel in 1566.” – Historical examination of the Apiarius/Coccius broadsheet, the reported red skies and spherical phenomena over Basel, and the religious and political context in which they were interpreted as divine warning rather than extraterrestrial visitation. Swiss National Museum Blog

The Meteoritical Society. Meteoritical Bulletin Database: Hatford. – Scientific catalogue entry confirming the Hatford meteorite as an observed English fall in 1628, with a recorded mass of approximately 29 kg. LPI

Holman, Brett. “The Phantom Airship Panic of 1913: Imagining Aerial Warfare in Britain before the Great War.” Journal of British Studies, Vol. 55, 2016, pp. 99–119. – Scholarly study of Britain’s 1912–13 phantom-airship scare and the way reports became entangled with contemporary fears of German espionage, invasion and aerial warfare. Cambridge University Press

The National Archives. UFO research material and guides relating to the Rendlesham Forest incident. – Identifies Lt Col Charles Halt’s January 1981 “Unexplained Lights” memorandum and the subsequent Ministry of Defence files and enquiries concerning the December 1980 sightings near RAF Woodbridge. National Archives

Sources accessed September 2026.