Nuremberg
LocationCityNuremberg
LocationCityNuremberg is a city in Franconia, northern Bavaria, and an early center of German printing whose place in UFO history rests on Hans Glaser's 1561 broadsheet of globes, crosses and tubes seen in the sunrise sky.
Nuremberg is a city in Franconia, northern Bavaria, and an early center of German printing whose place in UFO history rests on Hans Glaser's 1561 broadsheet of globes, crosses and tubes seen in the sunrise sky.
Nuremberg, the second-largest city in Bavaria and the largest in Franconia, was a center of art, publishing and scientific work in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Nuremberg Chronicle, a world history published there by Anton Koberger in 1493, contains what the art historian Roberta Olson and the astronomer Jay Pasachoff call the first widely distributed printed comet images. They trace a line from its woodcuts to the single-sheet broadsides on comets and other sky signs that Nuremberg and Augsburg printers sold in the following century, which they compare to the tabloids of the time.
The city's lasting place in UFO history comes from one of those sheets. In April 1561 the Nuremberg woodcutter and printer Hans Glaser published a broadsheet reporting that at sunrise on April 14 many men and women of the city had seen red, blue and black globes, crosses and tubes near the sun appear to fight, with a large black spear below them, the account now known as the 1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg. It reached a wide audience in 1958, when Carl Jung reproduced the woodcut in his book on flying saucers. Ufologists and ancient-astronaut writers have since cited it as evidence of visitors, while skeptics read it as a halo display rendered in the religious imagery of the time.
In UFO discussion the city's name still mostly means 1561. Reddit threads in 2026 set Glaser's sheet beside the 1566 broadsheet from Basel and the 1665 Stralsund account, and in October users compared its black spear with a 2023 video of a spearhead-shaped object over Karlsruhe. That month a former Defense Department official, in a post he labeled speculation, linked its "blood red" spheres to modern reports of glowing orbs.
The city has a recent report of its own. Early on October 13, 2026, three pilots at Nuremberg's Albrecht Dürer Airport independently reported a suspicious object, possibly a drone, while taking off or landing. The border police station at the airport began a search with the airport and the air navigation service DFS, and a police helicopter swept the airspace but found no drone; six flights were delayed and two arrivals diverted to Cologne and Prague. Later that day an emergency code from a flight from Corfu briefly closed the airport and brought Eurofighter escorts before police gave the all-clear, and reports said it was unclear whether the two incidents were connected.
Spearhead-shaped object caught on camera by [u/kopperxl](u/kopperxl) over Karlsruhe, Germany on Oct 1, 2023 at 7pm local time. The video from 00:12 to 00:16 shows the object staying in one place and rotating around a vertical axis. An impossible maneuver for a delta-winged drone with rear propulsion. It also seems unlikely that the object is a balloon or a kite. It reminds me of a similar dark, pointed object depicted in Hans Glaser’s famous 1561 Nuremberg woodcut.
I’ve seen people bring up the 1561 Nuremberg event for years and talk about how fascinating it is, especially in UFO discussions, so I finally decided to actually read into it for myself. From what I can tell, the main source we have is Hans Glaser’s 1561 broadsheet. A broadsheet was basically a large one page news flyer. The picture on it was made with a woodcut, which means an image was carved into a block of wood, covered with ink, and pressed onto the paper. The written part was printed u...
In 1566 people in Basel, Switzerland reported seeing strange objects and phenomena in the sky around sunrise. Witnesses described dark spheres or balls appearing in large numbers moving rapidly across the sky along with unusual black and reddish objects. Some people said the objects seemed to fight or collide with one another before disappearing. The event was recorded in contemporary broadsheets news making it one of the most famous unexplained sky phenomena of the 16th century submitted by...
I thought it’d be interesting to digitally create the drawings and written accounts of the Nuremberg UFO incident
An alien game using spaceships (UFOs) or what? The black spear reminds me of the Black Knight satellite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Knight_satellite_conspiracy_theory What could it have been really? I don't really think this is a biblical exaggeration or natural phenomena misinterpreted as something as a ominous warning sign. The objects seen in this print (made by Hans Glaser) look too futuristic to me. What were those orbs, crosses and arrows really?
- On April 14, 1561, residents of Nuremberg reported witnessing a remarkable aerial phenomenon at dawn. - The event was recorded by printer and artist Hans Glaser in a broadsheet published shortly afterward. - According to Glaser's account, witnesses observed: - Spheres or globes in red, black, blue, and white - Cylindrical or tube-shaped objects - Cross-shaped and crescent-like forms - Objects moving rapidly across the sky, seemingly engaging in a battle with one another - A large black sp...
