Ufo Encounters, Sightings, Visitations, and Investigations: EARLY UFOs
In A.D. 1211 Gervase of Tilbury, an English chronicler of historical events and curiosities, recorded this bizarre story:
There happened in the borough of Cloera, one Sunday, while the people were at Mass, a marvel. In this town is a church dedicated to St. Kinarus. It befell that an anchor was dropped from the sky, with a rope attached to it, and one of the flukes caught in the arch above the church door. The people rushed out of the church and saw in the sky a ship with men on board, floating before the anchor cable, and they saw a man leap overboard and jump down to the anchor, as if to release it. He looked as if he were swimming in water. The folk rushed up and tried to seize him; but the Bishop forbade the people to hold the man, for it might kill him, he said.
The man was freed, and hurried up to the ship, where the crew cut the rope and the ship sailed out of sight. But the anchor is in the church, and has been there ever since, as a testimony.
This tale—unrelated to any other British legend or supernatural tradition—is, according to folklorist Katharine Briggs, “one of those strange, unmotivated and therefore rather convincing tales that are scattered through the early chronicles.”
In a 9th-century Latin manuscript, Liber contra insulam vulgi opinionem, the Archbishop of Lyons complained about the French peasantry’s insistent belief in a “certain region called Magonia from whence come ships in the clouds.” The occupants of these vessels “carry back to that region those fruits of the earth which are destroyed by hail and tempests; the sailors paying rewards to the storm wizards and themselves receiving corn and other produce.” The archbishop said he had even witnessed the stoning to death of “three men and a woman who said they had fallen from these same ships.” Jakob Grimm, a 19th-century folklorist, speculated, “‘Magonia’ takes us to some region where Latin was spoken, if we may rely on it referring to Magus, i.e., a magic land.” Are these early references to UFOs and aliens? Possibly. But references of this sort are few and far between. Although ancient and medieval records are filled with stories of strange shapes and figures in the sky, little in these accounts elicits visions of UFOs as we understand them today. Many eerie aerial phenomena of an earlier time can now be identified as meteors, comets, and auroral displays.
Still other accounts of UFOs are rooted in culture, perhaps the result of visions or hallucinations. Just before sunset on April 16, 1651, two women in rural England supposedly with nessed a battle between armies. At the conclusion of the battle there appeared, according to a contemporary account, blue angels “about the bigness of a capon, having faces (as they thought) like owls.” Neither wars nor angels in the sky were uncommon “sights” from Roman times to the early modern era. In A.D. 793 the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle reported “fiery dragons . . . flying in the air,” and almost a thousand years later, in 1762, a “twisting serpent” supposedly cavorted over Devonshire.
Along with this aerial activity were speculations and reports in popular lore of humanoid creatures dwelling in caves, bodies of water, or invisible realms. These humanoids varied widely in appearance; height alone ranged from a few inches to many feet. They possessed supernatural powers and sometimes kidnapped adults and children. These creatures, unpredictable and easily offended, were so feared that it was considered unwise to even speak their name.
They were believed to be, according to one 17th-century account, “of a middle nature between man and angels.” To see these humanoids, a person usually had to be in “fai-erie,” meaning a state of enchantment. The traditional Anglo-Saxon name for these entities was “elves,” now supplanted by “fairies.” Since 1947 some writers, notably Jacques Vallee in Passport to Magonia, have tried to link fairies to modern UFO encounters with humanoids. But this connection is speculative at best. The reader must be willing to assume that fairies were “real” and then overlook many dissimilarities between fairies and UFO humanoids.
Fairy beliefs really have more in common with ghosts, monsters, and fabulous beasts than mod¬ ern accounts of encounters with UFOs.
Other writers, such as Desmond Leslie, George Hunt Williamson, M. K. Jessup, Yonah Fortner, and Brinsley le Poer Trench, also tried to find evidence of aliens visiting Earth before 1800, but their arguments are weak. Supposedly, extraterrestrials had been here for many thousands of years, leaving traces of their presence in legends and Biblical chapters as well as in such archaeological monuments as Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid, and Peru’s Nazca plains. These ideas were picked up and elaborated upon in the late 1960s and 1970s by a new school of writers (most famously Erich von Daniken of Switzerland), referring to “ancient astronauts.”
Serious UFO researchers—not to mention astronomers, archaeologists, and historians— rejected these speculations, which in their view grew out of ignorance and distortion. Critics charged that there was no evidence to support so radical a revision of history and that such speculations deliberately slighted the role of human intelligence. Still, von Daniken’s books had an enormous impact on impressionable readers.