Did Ancient Civilizations Report UFO Sightings? (Photo Credit: Aaron Foster via Getty Images)
Occasionally, UFO sightings go viral and even become the subject of serious research. However, humans have been watching the skies for thousands of years, and reports of such sightings go back a long way. So what was the first documented UFO sighting, and did it happen before the mid-20th century, when UFO reports became more common?
Unfortunately, the answer is not clear-cut, at least when looking at examples from prehistoric times.
“There’s no consensus on what exactly is the first recorded UFO sighting in history,” Chris Aubeck, an independent researcher and director of the Magonia Exchange, an international UFO history archival project with members from 15 countries, told Live Science. The debate isn’t due to a lack of evidence; many artifacts depict mysterious celestial objects.
“There's no doubt that people have been depicting, reporting, or recording events involving unusual, anomalous phenomena in the sky since ancient times,” Greg Eghigian, a professor of history and bioethics at Pennsylvania State University, told Live Science.
Rather, the context and form of these reports make it difficult to pinpoint what can accurately be described as the first recorded UFO sighting. For example, according to Obeck, ancient texts such as Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets, including the Šumma ālu series and other oracle texts from the second and first millennia BCE, contain the first known records of possible UFO sightings, although they are interpreted as omens. These reports describe changing shapes in the sky and black meteors, which were then considered religious omens. However, these texts lack visual images or illustrations.
The Shumma alu cuneiform tablets, dating back to the first millennium BC, contain the first known records of possible UFO sightings.
“I can’t attach much weight to these stories because they are completely removed from the context of the society in which they were created,” Egigian said. The stories may not be evidence of alien visitation, but rather religious texts or oral traditions. In such cases, it’s hard to separate cultural traditions from an individual’s attempt to describe a spectacle they couldn’t explain, from comets to lenticular clouds.
In one example, residents of Nuremberg, Germany, reported a strange aerial battle on April 14, 1561. They described seeing balls, crosses, cylinders, and a huge, mysterious black, arrow-shaped object that crash-landed in the distance. According to Hans Glaser, a local artist who created the
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