Alexander’s own historian described the craft as shining silvery shields with fire spitting from their rims. As Alexander watched in horror, the strange craft dove repeatedly at his men, to the point where they, their horses and his war elephants became so panicked, they refused to cross the river.
A similar if even more bizarre incident was said to have happened to Alexander during the siege of Tyre in 332 B.C. But this time the strange flying objects seemed sympathetic to Alexander’s cause.
Located on an island off of present-day Lebanon, the Persian-controlled city of Tyre had incredibly thick walls and well-designed defenses. These had stymied Alexander’s efforts to conquer it for months.
One day, the “flying shields” were back. Five of them suddenly appeared in the sky over Tyre. Once again, according to Edwards, after slowly circling the city and allowing soldiers on both sides to see them, one of the shields let out a lightning bolt that crumpled a large section of the wall protecting Tyre.
This breach was large enough for Alexander’s men to push through and eventually capture the city.
Even a casual reader of UFO literature has to be familiar with the term “cigar-shaped object.”
The “CSO” is among the most frequently reported of all UFO shapes, having been spotted with puzzling consistency throughout the centuries, and never more so than in times of war. Maybe it should be no surprise then that what’s considered the first-ever printed pictorial representation of a UFO was of the ubiquitous cigar-shaped object.
In his book, UFOs in Space: Anatomy of a Phenomenon, the great UFO writer and researcher Jacques Vallee tells the story of an early typeset book called Liber Chronicarum. Printed in 1493, and now preserved in a museum at Verdun, France, it describes within its pages an incident that occurred in 1034 in which a cigar-shaped object was seen flying through the early evening European sky. According to the text, the object was first spotted heading south to east. But then it was seen turning abruptly to the west and heading into the sunset.
The accompanying illustration shows the cigar-shaped object, flames around it, rocketing above the medieval countryside. The picture has baffled UFO researchers ever since. What could have inspired such a tale and such an illustration, if not an actual sighting?
Jacques Vallee also writes about an incident in 1235 that might well have been the first time humans decided to investigate a UFO sighting.
It happened in Japan. One night, a high officer named General Yoritsume and his army were settling down in their camp when they spotted mysterious lights in the sky. The general and his troops watched in astonishment as these lights performed amazing aerobatic maneuvers, such as circling endlessly and flying in loops.
Baffled by the bizarre aerial display, General Yoritsume ordered a scientific investigation of what he’d just witnessed.
Giving simple and even simplistic explanations for UFOs would become an art form hundreds of years later. Those who practice it these days would have been proud of Yoritsume’s scientists, for the explanation they gave the general oozed comfort and calm.
“The whole thing is completely natural,” Yoritsume was told about the mystery lights. “It is only the wind making the stars sway.”
Strangely, a half century before, a document detailing the sighting of another unusual object flashing across the night sky was written. According to Vallee, this time in his book, Passport to Magonia, the document describes the object as a “flying earthenware vessel.”
Or in other words, a “flying saucer.”
Things were bad in Western Europe during the years of 1347–50.
In this case, it wasn’t warfare that brought death and misery. Rather, these were the years of the fearsome Black Death, the bubonic plague that swept over the Continent, killing, by some counts, more than 100 million people and changing civilization’s cultural landscape for the next century and a half.
While conventional science tells us that the fierce pandemic was caused by bacteria carried by rat fleas, there were also persistent reports from the time of strange flying objects moving low through the sky, leaving a trail of suspicious vapor in their wake. Wherever and whenever these objects were seen, the plague would soon break out in that area.
Further reports from this horrible time describe mysterious figures, origins unknown, who dressed in black hoods and robes and used scythes to unexplainably kill livestock. These medieval “men in black” would later become associated with pending death. Today, they are better known as the Grim Reapers.
Other strange occurrences while the plague swept Europe included reports of “comets” flashing through the troubled night, strange animals washing up on European shores and many times, sounds like thunder being heard even when skies were clear.
On the night of October 12, 1492, a man named Pedro Gutierrez was serving as lookout on a three-masted ship nicknamed “the Galician.” The man beside him was named Christoffa Corombo. They were gazing out on the dark horizon of the Atlantic Ocean, intently looking for something.
What they saw was a light glimmering at a great distance. It continually appeared and disappeared during the night. When visible, the two men saw it moving up and down and flashing sudden explosions of light and intensity.
The light captivated the two men, keeping their attention on the horizon. The man named Corombo was captain of the Galician. We know him today as Christopher Columbus and his ship by its official name: the Santa Maria.
And four hours after the strange light was first seen acting mysteriously in the sky, Columbus spotted land.
At dawn on April 4, 1561, the citizens of Nuremberg, Germany, awoke to nothing less than a titanic air battle going on over their city.
Hundreds of witnesses saw a pair of large dark cylinders launching a variety of shapes variously described as black and blue spheres, red crosses and aerial disks. Then, once these objects were launched, they began fighting each other while hundreds watched — for more than an hour.
The incredible event was reported by the Nuremberg Gazette. Additionally, an artist named Hans Glaser did a woodcut of the scene depicting the frenzied battle.
As with the CSO depicted in the previously mentioned Liber Chronicarum, what could have spurred this newspaper story and woodcut if not a real event?
What might be the strangest UFO story in U.S. military history — and there are many — is that George Washington may have encountered extraterrestrials during the dark days at Valley Forge.
According to the website book-of-thoth.com, this story comes from a Scottish researcher named Quentin Burde, who claims that in the winter of 1777–78, a tribe of Native Americans that Washington befriended while his exhausted, demoralized army was camped at Valley Forge was actually a group of green-skinned ETs.
Springing from a reinterpretation of papers supposedly written by Washington’s military secretary, Burde says he found references to “hovering lodges” and a tribe called the Greenskins who lived in a glowing globe in the woods nearby, a globe that was “sometimes there and sometimes not.”
The Greenskins, Burde claims, provided the Continental Army with military intelligence and reconnaissance, and possibly advanced technology that helped turn the tide of the war.