UFOs - Have They Always Been Here?

Show Transcript

With modern UFO cases, it's easy to say that they could be manmade. But what about the UFO sightings that predate the Wright brothers' first airplane back in 1903, or that predate the first hot air balloon in 1783? We'll be covering those exact cases. many of which I doubt you've ever heard of. Hello and welcome to this episode of Mysteries with a History. (00:37) We will be taken on a wild ride into the unknown, the strange, and the mysterious. Like you, I have questions, and like you, I want answers. And with each episode together, we will peel away the layers to look for the truth. This show is going to be really exciting just because we have a huge timeline of cases to cover, and I simply cannot do it alone. (00:59) So let me bring in my co-host, Jimmy Church of Faded Black Radio. Jimmy, happy Thursday. How you doing? Happy Thursday to you. Hello, everyone. What a great show coming up here. And I do have to ask, what brought this one on? It's such a fascinating subject, you know, to go back in time before, you know, modern technology. (01:27) But what's going on? What caused this week's show? The past is just as important as the present. And in modern times, with all the technology that we have, with the CGI that we have now, with the advancement of AI, it's very easy to brush off more modern UFO sightings as any of those. But it's more difficult to do that when we are looking... (01:51) towards history that go prior to 1903 and farther than that as well, just like with the hot air balloon in 1783. So it's really interesting to see what we can come across. And shockingly enough, there's a lot of cases, some of them that people are familiar with. But I think there's going to be a lot of cases today that people will say, what? I've never heard of that. (02:17) How come I've never heard of that? All I hear about is Roswell. Well, we're going to change that for you. Yes, exactly. The more that I look at the phenomenon itself, I am so interested in not only pre-1947, pre-Roswell, what was going on out there, pre-Kenneth Arnold, and when the word flying saucer entered into popular culture. (02:51) you back up before that and then, you know, no, push it back further before there was something artificial in the sky. You had birds, you had bees, right? You had things flying that were natural, but things that were described in an unnatural way that shouldn't be in the sky before 1903, before the Wright brothers, before hot air balloons and, and, and people, Jules Verne, and the stuff that was happening with science fiction. (03:23) Before that, that's where things get really, really interesting because there shouldn't have been anything in the sky unless it was hatched and had wings, right? That's it. well, flying squirrels. All right. Okay. All right. You got a couple of other, got a couple of other things out there, but yeah. And so when you push it back and the further that you go, now we have covered, uh, a couple of these, uh, And I want to say that not as in-depth as we are going to do today. (03:56) We have covered some of these in the past, and those are going to be there. But I've got a couple of very interesting cases that I don't think anybody has ever heard of, and so do you. We've got an interesting list. And we're going to go in chronological order, right? That would be ideal. AJ Raffles, funny enough, I am drinking British tea as we speak. (04:19) It's the best with milk and sugar. And W. Decker, thank you so much for that. I do appreciate it. If you're excited for the show, hit that like button right down below. So I'm going to start off with the first one, sharing my screen here. Because we're going to go to the First Punic War. I think that's a great place to start. (04:35) So we're going to pull this image up. of one of the historians. So back in 218 BC, during the First Punic War, Roman historian Levy documented unusual celestial phenomena, including a phantom ship and round shields, which I saw in the live chat. people mentioning, and it was gliding through the sky. And so these sightings were among several prodigies of uncommon events considered omens from the gods during this time frame that were reported in Rome during significant military conflicts. (05:16) And such phenomena were interpreted as divine signals reflecting the gods' favor or displeasure and often led to public rituals to appease these deities. This is important for two reasons. One, We have a UFO sighting predating 1903. That's going to be our new timeline for today, but more so on that. And I actually mentioned this on Tuesday's show and shows for a lot of shows to be fair. (05:43) And that is why do UFOs have an interest in war watching conflict between humans? For what reason? And here looking at the first Punic war based off of what Levy was able to collect and It's being shown here as well. And so his depiction of these round shields were moving through the sky in a ship-like manner and had... (06:08) his readers fully intrigued, fully engulfed in what these military officials were seeing. And so these ancient accounts are deeply rooted and were deeply rooted in the religious and cultural fabric of Rome, where divine intervention was a commonly accepted explanation for unexplained phenomena. And the thing is, With the more cases that we're going to cover as we get a little bit closer to modern time, that description will change just a little bit. (06:42) But I think this is a really important place to start because our environment, our cultural background, our schools, shape the way that we view our world around us, our environment. And if we don't understand something, we're going to place it in a box where we can begin to. And so for them during this timeframe, it was, it's the gods, it's an omen, and we must do as we seem, as we deem fit. (07:11) This was a case that I had not heard of. I didn't know that UFOs were seen during the first Punic War in 218 BC. Jimmy, what do you think about this case starting off for today's show? The interest here, I think, for all of us, and you've got to go back to the religious context of all of this and the way that citizens were taught and told things and how news was shared. (07:51) Everything had a type of religious spin to it. And I was talking about this last night with Dr. Heather Lynn, and I talk about this subject a lot. It's very important to put everything into context. And it's very easy to say, well, angels could have been aliens. You know, what were the lights in the sky guiding Moses through the desert? What was seen above different battles and these weapons that were spoken about? We're talking about light rays and things that were toasting Roman fleets. (08:33) What was actually going on with all of that? Because they didn't have the reference that we have today, which is... Movies, books, science fiction, magazines, in addition to the stuff that we see in the sky, but we can think about aliens and the universe and planets and extraterrestrial life. We have a different way of framing it. (08:58) But back then, they did not. So when you see something strange in the sky, how are you going to make an account of it? How are you going to tell people about it? How is the news about this shared? Well, you're going to put another spin on it. It's the gods helping us win this battle. You can't say, well, it's flying saucers from Mars. (09:26) You can't do that. And that's the way that not only with this and many, many, many accounts that were B.C., How were they framed so that the populations, you know, the towns didn't freak out? You always had to put another spin on it. It's the spirits protecting us from losing this battle. It's instructions from heaven. (09:55) It's contact with angels. And that's why I find it very, very interesting because they were trained. seeing something in the skies. They were encountering beings that they couldn't put into words. They didn't have another way to do it. So yeah, that's why this account, not only from 200 BC, but so many others are very, very important. (10:21) I'm looking at the clock. We have so much to cover. I have another case that's immediately after this one. Well, it's 500 years later, but But that established a trend in Europe, and we're going to be covering big chunks of Europe this afternoon. And specifically, we're going to start off with Ireland. (10:46) And I have an account from 740 A.D. in Ireland. 740. Yeah, 740 A.D. And it's called, the case is called... The airship of Klamanoik. Now, Klamanoik. And for those of you that want to look it up, it's C-L-O-N-M-A-C-N-O-I-S-E. Now, it went through the media back then. It's part of history. It's part of a historical anecdote related to numerous medieval sources. (11:31) Though the original report in the Irish media simply mentioned an apparition of ships with their crews in the sky over Ireland in the 1740s. Later accounts through the Middle Ages progressively expanded on this with picturesque details. First, the ships were reduced to one ship over Telltown, f (12:00) rom which a crewman... Now, and what I'm about to say has been repeated repeatedly. in different locations around the world. It's very strange. All the way around Europe, the Middle East, and in the United States. Now, I want you to listen to what I have to say. Now, is it folklore? Is it mythology being repeated, right? Oral history and oral mythology and tales and stories? Could be. (12:27) Or is it that these were actual events and this was happening over and over again at different sites around the world? So here's what happened. First, the ships were reduced to one ship and a crewman threw and then recovered a fishing spear. from the ship, okay? The scene shifted to the Abbey of Clonmacnoy, and then later in Britain, the fishing spear was changed to an anchor, which snagged on some feature of the church. (13:05) The sailor, that's how he was described, the sailor who climbed down to release it was also said to be in danger of drowning, check this, in the thicker air of the lower world right now to have that that we're talking about 17 or 740 7 4 right after the dark ages and the thicker air on the ground the sailor was in danger of drowning where do these concepts come from This is a very, very strange case, which is going to take us t (13:49) o the... When you hear that, what goes through your mind? Honestly, honestly, I have no idea. This is a really just... It's one of those cases that stands out like a sore thumb. First, for the time period. Second, you're dealing with monks from this church called the Klonmach Noyes Church or Temple. And then they're able to recount this story. (14:10) And what's even more bizarre as it continues, at least allegedly, because it was later reported in different newspapers across Ireland during that time frame. And they had mentioned that when the monk was attempting to help this fisherman, this salesman to the best of his ability to cut the rope or something. (14:31) this entity, we shouldn't call it an entity because we don't know what it is, cut the rope himself, left, and then went back to the ship, and then the ship just disappeared. Yeah. This is in the 740s. It's crazy. I don't want you to get away from what you just said. The accounts of which were numerous, there were lots of witnesses to this, all said the same thing. (15:00) The ships just returned to the sun. It's like, wait, wait, what? What are they seeing? Yeah, yeah, go ahead, continue. Here's something that I would like to mention, because it seems that historians, archaeologists and day to day people don't always give people from the past a bit more credibility. (15:27) And let me provide you an example. In today's world, in the 21st century, specifically, let's go from the year 2018 onward. We are so fixated on our phones that we're never looking around us. We're not as perceptive as we used to be. People during this time frame had to be in order to survive. (15:47) They had to know the weather. They had to know the basic constellations. Because if they didn't, there were consequences. Now everything is taken care of. We can just go to Walmart and there's no big deal. But the reason why I want to bring this up is because First of all, we would love to take what they have to say as credible, number one. (16:10) But number two, their mentality was a bit different. And I think here, because I've never spoken to anyone from that timeframe, but let's say I did, I would like to think that they are more perceptive than what we are today. So when they are saying this in a bit different, in this bizarre detail, I want to take that detail and obviously write it down and then revise it with them. (16:32) Let me provide you just one more example on this with people from the ancient times. You are able to tell them something. It could be a sentence. It could be a paragraph. And they could very nicely recite it back to you. This is practiced for the shamans and storytellers, Native American tribes. It was practiced for eunuchs during the different Chinese dynasties. (16:57) And today, you can't memorize one or two sentences. And if you can, you are amazing. But your average person cannot be able to do it precisely and recite it back to you during that time frame. And we can look, let's say, from the 1700s going backwards They were better at it than what we are today. So here I would like to, it doesn't really mean anything, but I'd like to get in the benefit of the doubt on this really bizarre case that just stands out compared to any other one. (17:29) It's such a great point. You know who knew how to write? Monks. the clergy. Those were the educated. Nobody knew how to write. You had scribes, but the scribes would write down the oral traditions that were handed down generation after generation. And they were told and remembered word for word. Now, yeah, it's like the game telephone. (18:00) What's going to happen at the end of the line? Is it going to be the same as what started? I understand that. But you have to think about the importance of remembering. Now, today, Christina, we have difficulty with all of the knowledge that we have. right, all of the Marvel movies that we can watch, Independence Day, all of that, with all of that knowledge, we still have difficulty in describing strange phenomena. (18:31) So now push that back 1,000 years. Push that back 2,000 years and try to describe that when you don't have Will Smith and the Men in Black to compare things to. You don't have that. We can repeat it. Well, it kind of looked like we could do that. It looked like the Imperial cruiser in Star Wars. We can do that. (18:59) But not back then. So we need to really honestly respect what they were trying to say and try to describe. Which takes us straight to, if we want to continue this strangeness, 1211 in Ireland. What happened there? Well, we're looking at the same case here. And the thing is that depending on where you look, you're going to get significantly different dates. (19:29) But this one, when it comes to the airship of Klon-McNoise, it did take place in the 740s. Now, however, here's what's really interesting. According to the JSTOR.org, which is a journal article, Website that provides pretty ancient articles when I'm saying ancient, I'm saying like a few decades to a few hundred years. (19:49) But it says here that based off of the investigations done on that particular case, the article dates range from nine from seven for the three seven forty four seven forty eight and seven forty nine. and this I want to bring this into account because first we're dealing with snail mail at the slowest level okay where you have to just kind of go to different districts and and and like provinces and towns on on a horse on a donkey or who knows what so probably getting it from point a to point b could take a few months could (20:24) take a year to get it documented and shared in that town like Cork in Dublin, for instance, right? So this could be a reason as to why these dates have varied and why that might be the case in some other stories and accounts that we might cover a little bit later on those variations. People say, oh, if there's a variation on a date, that means it can't be true. (20:46) That means it's a hoax and not necessarily. Number one, people's memory is not always the best. But number two, when you are dealing with that very slow transfer transportation of, information and mail and newspapers yeah it's going to take you a little bit of time and then on top of that you got to find someone who can read read and write I want to say reach which is like read and write in one word that should be a word but it's not but then you got to find that and that also takes time and money as (21:18) well so ireland has a pretty interesting history when it comes to ufos it's mainly known for its hauntings and all of its very ancient castles but but UFOs still want to be seen there too. Well, now, yes, except here, the two incidents are 550 years apart. That's a great length of time. It is. And there is some variance in the story too as well, but they also account for eyewitnesses of the time period. (21:59) So the case that I'm talking about, 1211 A.D., it's called the Gervase of Tilbury, that's the paper, recorded a strange event in the borough of Cloria in Ireland. During a Sunday mass at the church of St. Conru in the borough of Cloria, Clora, An anchor was seen to descend from the sky and hook on the church door. (22:27) The parishioners watched as a man seemed to swim down to the anchor from the skyship to try and release it. The local bishop stopped the people from capturing him, and he swam, and that's in quotes from the paper, by the way, he swam back up the to the ship, cut the rope, and the ship sailed away. The anchor is said to have been kept within the church. (22:54) Okay, the exact same story has been attributed to a number of other places, including Kent in the United Kingdom, Bristol, and Somerset of the same year. Now, back to your point. How long does it take for news to travel? Today, it's instant. Back then, to have these same incidents reported across the United Kingdom in the same year, is somebody riding around on horseback, right, and repeating this story? Is it being reported? delivered from a newspaper in Ireland, makes it over to the UK, and people are reading this tale, (23:42) and suddenly it spreads across the UK? Or is it what I had said earlier? Were these incidents happening at the same time? That it's not necessarily a story that you heard from the next island over or the next city over on the other side of the country and somehow it's come down to you and now all of a sudden it becomes an event locally for you. (24:07) Is it that or was it that there was a ship or ships? In the sky, that was lowering ropes and beings were coming down. Now, they were described as ropes, right? They don't know what an electric cable is. How about a hose to get water out of the ground, a pumping system, anything like that. Fiber optic cable going to, you know, they, they describe it as ropes and, and to have an anchor on the other side of it, uh, It could have been anything. (24:46) It could have been anything. But this is how they described it. So I'm not too fast to jump onto it's a tale that was repeated and spread across. No, it doesn't work that way. I'm going to give you one example. It's going to be really quick. You have a band. You're a poet. You're going to be doing live poetry at a club, and you're handing out flyers. (25:19) And you hand out 50, 100 flyers, 200 flyers. And you're thinking to yourself, yeah, I'm probably going to have 20, 30 people show up. Not 500 flyers. Man, we might, yeah, I get 100 people there. And nobody shows up. How long does it take for flyers for that? It's the same thing with newspapers back then and periodicals and things that were printed. (25:49) They didn't print up 10,000 or 100,000 things and pass them out and hope for the news to spread. It took a long time. It took a long time. And it just doesn't happen that way. And so if you can look at it in that frame of mind, you can hand out all the flyers you want. How long does it take the news to spread from person to person? It takes a long time. (26:15) So in these cases that are recorded in the historical record, is it from one event that happened in Ireland and it just spread across? Or is it that there were multiple ships doing the same thing at the same time? And I kind of give credit to everybody seeing what they saw. I'm with you on that one. And I just want to just mention something, kind of give people an idea and a timeline when it comes to newspapers. (26:50) The first newspaper was created in 59 BCE, just to kind of put a date out there for people to grasp a little bit better. We're just going to just move a few years later, and we're going to also move on over to Japan. In 1235, according to the Azuma Karami, which is a medieval Japanese text, it mentions that General Yuritsune and his troops were encamped for the night when they witnessed these very strange lights in the sky. (27:33) And so the display went on for hours. a good while they say about an hour or so with the lights encircling each other and moving through the sky in these very weird loops so obviously confused and shaken the general ordered his most intelligent men to look into the matter and report back to him. And interestingly enough, their findings were very simple to any kind of modern-day investigations. (28:04) They were observing it, they were writing it down, and then using their knowledge to provide an explanation. But their explanation wouldn't fly today. No, they debunked it. They debunked it. They were debunking in 1235, yeah. They did, and they gave a really interesting explanation. They said... Look, General, there's nothing to worry about. (28:25) It's very natural. It's simply, and here's the simple explanation, the simple answer that you are demanding from us, and it's the wind that's making the stars sway. Yeah, the wind is blowing the stars around in the sky. Sounds like Project Blue Book. Sounds like swamp gas, leather balloons. Yeah, yeah, swamp gas. (28:47) Here we go, right? They were doing that in 1235. And the general, like you said, he's camping with his army, and they see these lights in the sky swirling to the southwest. It's an army. This is 1235. They're writing this down. They're documenting this. And they went on all night into the early morning, and he kept his troops and lookouts, right? You have spies. (29:18) You have guys out there doing their thing, watching these and observing. Is it the enemy with the secret weapon? All of these things come to mind, and that's what happened here. And when nothing ultimately happened and they weren't attacked, yes, he goes to his smart guys, his consultants, his military consultants, and says, okay, go and speak to everybody. (29:46) Come back to me with a report. And for them to say, general, it's completely normal, dude. Dude, imagine being your general dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude, it's natural. It's natural. It's only the wind making the stars sway. And that's a quote from the report, by the way. And yeah, it does remind you of the way things are debunked today. (30:18) And what we don't have in this account is the general's response, right? Are you kidding me? Is that the best you can do? Are you trying to, you know, are they trying to influence the general and what he saw like swamp gas, right? It's a weather balloon trying to alter what people know, what they saw. (30:43) And so they have to go back and second guess themselves. And in this case, the general is expected to believe that the wind is blowing the stars around. And isn't that in of itself, Christina, isn't that an interesting explanation? It is, and it displays that people have always attempted to explain away things to the best of their ability with the foundation that they have on knowledge, which demonstrates that, number one, to know all is to know nothing, to admit that you know nothing, because while we might (31:24) think we have the foundation today, understanding the physics that we know, beginning to understand quantum entanglement, In 10, 20 years, we might say, oh, my God, people in 2024 were stupid. They knew nothing about physics or quantum entanglement just because our understanding, our research, and maybe even our equipment will change and has changed since then. (31:50) And so when people display themselves as, oh, I know everything, it's like, okay, buddy, go sit down and have some ice cream or something. That's exactly it. I keep going, but you make such great points. That is exactly it. Now, today, the same type of, right, swamp gas, if we go out and we see something, and today we're hearing... (32:16) different descriptions, a way of describing phenomena in the sky that it's the best that we can do with our knowledge of where we are today in science and technology. And one of the words that keeps being used a lot, and I do it too, is interdimensional. Because we're talking about portals, the knowledge of wormholes, faster-than-light travel, and the possibility of other dimensions and things coming in and out of our dimension. (32:50) So what do we say? Interdimensional. That explains a lot what we would see in the sky. If something just appears and then disappears. Is it interdimensional, coming from one place and going to another? We see it for a moment here in the here and now. But that also applies to the phenomena going back hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. (33:14) The descriptions are the same. They're having difficulty describing. How do you, in today's world, when you see something like that, and I have, how do you explain that to somebody that doesn't know or have a reference point? Well, man, it was a light. It just appeared in the sky and went across, and then it just disappeared. (33:39) You know, I don't know. It was like it was interdimensional or something. And trying to describe that as crazy as it sounds, it's the same way that people tried to describe things hundreds, if not millennia years ago. I'm with you on that one. Right now, we have 391 people watching this live. If you're enjoying the show so far, or if we've covered a case that you have not heard of yet, hit that like button right down below. (34:09) Let's get to 300 likes. The next one I'm pretty excited to cover, and it has to do with Christopher Columbus. So back in 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue- he also had a UFO sighting. And this is something that's usually passed when people talk about Christopher Columbus, that he discovered and found the Americus, when we now know that's not entirely true or the case. (34:36) But what I like about this particular story, and Jimmy, it's only going to enhance your point about attempting to describe something when you don't have the vocabulary to do so, because in his story, which was later published and it's called The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, he documented that on October 11th, 1492 at 10 p.m. (35:00) , he saw this really strange light bobbing in and out of the water. And it says here, Christopher Columbus, while on deck of the Santa Maria, observed a light glimmering at a great distance. It vanished and reappeared several times during the night, moving up and down. And then suddenly it had these passing gleams and it was sighted four hours before land was sighted. (35:28) And what's even stranger is that he had continued with his journal entry, mentioning that it was like a candlelight was going in and out of the water. That was the best way he could describe it based off of his what he would classify as modern technology, his their modern inventions. And so I think that any point in time in history, we really need to evaluate their language, their previous inventions and their technology just to get an understanding from their point of view what they were really attempting to describe. (36:10) Okay. Now, don't shoot the messenger, okay? Don't do that. Don't do that to me, everybody. Because I am fascinated with this case. Except we've got a couple of issues that we have to work through. Let's hear it. Okay? There's two sightings that are attributed. Okay? There's two, not one. (36:37) There's two. The original captain's log... from Columbus has been lost to history. We cannot go back and see his handwriting or the writing of his scribe as it happened at that moment. We don't have that. What we do have is the oral rewriting of the captain's log that happened. And the author of that wasn't a part of Columbus's crew. (37:12) His uncle and his dad were, okay? And his uncle died before the book was published. They call it the DRO. Okay, so, but... His uncle and his dad recounted everything, and it was written down. That is what we have for Columbus, okay? So I want to be very clear with everybody. Now, the direct quotes from this are as follows. (37:50) The diario contains two entries regarding unusual lights observed by Columbus and his crew. The first occurred on Sunday, September 15th, 1492. And here is the quote. Quote, they sailed that day and night, 27 leagues and a few more on their route west. And on this night, at the beginning of it, they saw a marvelous branch of fire fall from the sky into the sea, distant from them four or five leagues. (38:27) End quote. That's the first sighting. That was strange. Now, Upon reading it today for myself, I'm thinking Meteor. Right? Not a shooting star because they say it was a ball of fire and it fell into the sea. Okay, so there's that. This first entry has been twisted around. Now, I've lifted the exact quote. (38:57) It has been twisted around over the years. Now, let's get to the second sighting, which I find much more interesting. The first one could have been a meteor, but the sighting happened. The second strange light event documented in the DREO occurred on Thursday, October 11th, by the way, the day after my birthday. (39:19) And this is what you had just mentioned here. Now, it was four hours before Columbus's ships encountered the first lands of America, islands of the Bahamas, but that's another story. But here is the entry, and this is the direct quote. the pinta remember there's three ships the pinta was a better sailor it was a faster ship and went ahead of columbus it found land and made the signals that the admiral columbus had ordered that's the direct journal entry That has been twisted around into some other things. (40:06) But what I find, like you had mentioned, I've read the same things. It was like candlelight. There was no journal entries. Columbus never wrote that down. No, no. We only have the diario and its writing, okay? But what is interesting here is that when Columbus, and it was later stated, he gets it. They didn't. (40:32) Signal anything. And we're talking about night in the Americas, and there's no electricity or anything else. What guided Columbus to the island? And it wasn't where the Pinta was. And so that's the part that, for me, gets really fascinating. What was illuminated in the sky? How were they, how was the Pinta illuminated? Going to fire flares up, right? You know, we think of that in the modern world, but back in 1492, and you're that far away, what is it that you were seeing? So I find that very, very, very, (41:21) very intriguing, right? Because it appears that Columbus got there and he's like, where is everybody? We found land. We followed the lights. Where's the Pinta? Right. And when he did apparently talk to the captain of the Pinta, he's like, man, where's Did you signal me? No. What are you talking about? That's why this part of the journal entry gets really, really interesting. (41:52) He was following lights, but they weren't from the Pinta. Okay. Now, there you go. These are the direct quotes. And yes, I find it very, very, very intriguing. And you also have his sighting of mermaids. I've always found that interesting, too, as well, and the way that that was written. But we don't have his original journals, and that's the part that all of this is coming from a second- and third-hand source. (42:21) The uncle, the dad, and the son. The son wrote everything down. So we're years away from the actual expedition. Good points, Jimmy. This is why we have these conversations because you bring in the goods that you can't just casually find. Gotta say, hey, you've been in this for a very long time. You know where to look. (42:43) When it comes to ancient sightings, stories, reported accounts, we have to. We have to cover this case. And