Lutheran Nuremberg; early printed news
Broadsheet: the celestial appearance over Nuremberg, 14 April 1561
Printed 1561 · Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire · Printed by Hanns Glaser
Hanns Glaser, news sheet printed at Nuremberg, 1561.
Source & rights
- What this is
- The source itself
- Object
- Title
- Himmelserscheinung über Nürnberg vom 14. April 1561
- Creator
- Hanns Glaser (print)
- Date
- 1561
- Held by
- Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Graphische Sammlung
- Licence
- Public domain
- This copy
- Hosted at the size published by the source; not altered.
- Retrieved
- 2026-08-28
A photograph of the text or object this record concerns.
The sheet itself, and everything anyone knows about the morning it describes reaches us through this printed surface. It is evidence of what a Nuremberg print shop cut into a block and sold, which is not the same as evidence of what was in the sky.
Between four and five in the morning on 14 April 1561, according to a sheet printed in Nuremberg shortly afterwards, a very frightful sight appeared at the sun. The sheet gives the date, the hour, the city and the printer's name, and illustrates the sky with a crowd of spheres, rods, discs and crosses.
It is the best-documented report in this collection - which means the report is well documented, not the event. And it is the clearest case here of an interpretation arriving centuries late: the sheet says a sight appeared, while a modern catalogue record for the same object describes the shapes, in one of its language fields, as “ovnis (?)”.
What the source is
A single-sheet woodcut news notice, printed in Nuremberg in 1561, reporting shapes seen in the sky above the city early on the morning of 14 April. The sheet gives a date, a time of day between four and five in the morning, a place, and a printer's name.
It survives in the Wickiana, a sixteenth-century collection of news sheets assembled by a Zurich clergyman, and is held at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
The report
Original
Anno M.D.LXI. An dem XIIII. tag Aprillis zu morgens zwischen Aim gehn tag und dem garauß / das ist zu morgens zwischen 4 und 5 auff der kleinen uhr / ist ein sehr erschröcklich gesicht an der Sonn wie sie im auffgang gewesen erschinnen / und zu Nürmberg in der Stat und vor dem …No English translation is published. None has been prepared and reviewed, and an unchecked rendering of the only text on this page would be the one thing this record cannot afford.
One phrase, closely
- Source
- ein sehr erschröcklich gesicht an der Sonn
- Literal
- a very frightful sight at the sun
- Rendered as
- Frequently given in modern accounts as an aerial battle or a fleet of craft
The opening does what good reports do and what most of this collection cannot: it fixes a date, a time to within an hour, and a place, before saying anything about what was seen. When it does describe, it describes a sight at the sun that frightened people. It does not say what the shapes were, and neither does this record.
Why it is in this archive
This is the best-documented report in the collection, and it is worth being clear about what that means. It does not mean the event is better attested. It means the *report* is: we know who printed it, where, in what year, in what medium, at what size, and through whose collecting it survived. Almost every other entry here would envy that.
It is also the clearest case in the archive of an ontology being supplied by a describer rather than by a source. The sheet says a sight appeared. The catalogue record from which this entry was compiled describes the shapes, in one of its language fields, as “ovnis (?)” - unidentified flying objects, with the cataloguer's own question mark attached. That interpolation is four hundred years younger than the woodcut and belongs to whoever wrote it.
Both statements are worth keeping. The sixteenth-century one is evidence about 1561. The twentieth-century one is evidence about the twentieth century. Neither is a fact about what was in the sky, and this archive assigns no classification to either.
A broadsheet was also a commercial object. It was printed to be sold, quickly, in competition with other sheets, and that is part of its source class rather than a slur on it - the same is true of most news, then and now.
The words the source uses
Given in the language they were written in, with a plain rendering. None is treated as equivalent to a term from another tradition.
- gesicht
- a sight; something seen
- Early New High German. The word covers both the faculty of sight and the thing seen, and it carries none of the modern English weight of “vision”. It is the sheet's own word for what happened, and it is markedly less committal than most of what has since been written about the sheet.
How close is the source?
Recorded by someone close to the witness or the event, but not dictation.
01 · Reported by
Unnamed inhabitants of Nuremberg
The sheet speaks of what was seen in and before the city. It names no witness.
02 · Printed by
Hanns Glaser, Nuremberg, 1561
A briefmaler: a maker and seller of printed sheets. He is the first identifiable person in the chain and he was not necessarily present.
03 · Collected into
The Wickiana, a 16th-century collection of news sheets
04 · Held by
Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Graphische Sammlung
05 · Catalogued in
A modern museum record, in several languages
Which is where the modern interpretation enters, and where this archive stops following.
Project Nikolaos annotation
Written by this project. Not part of the source, and not a translation of anything in it.
Four hundred years of people looking at the same woodcut and each seeing the furniture of their own century in it. The sheet says a sight appeared at the sun and that it frightened everyone. That is the whole of what it says, and it is more than most sources manage.
Details, provenance and rights
- Experiencer state
- Awake
- Reported agency
- Unidentified agency
- Locomotion claim
- None
- Physical trace
- None reported
- Witness or speaker
- Inhabitants of the city, collectively and unnamed. No individual witness is identified.
- Recorder / translator
- Hanns Glaser, briefmaler and printer, Nuremberg
- Edition
- Single-sheet woodcut, 38 × 26.2 cm (image), Nuremberg, 1561
- Rights
- Rights not yet verified
- Cultural sensitivity
- Ordinary historical context
Provenance notes
- This project has not examined the sheet, a facsimile, or a high-resolution scan of the text. Everything here rests on a public catalogue record.
- The modern catalogue's own interpretive gloss is quoted on this page as an example of later interpretation. It is not adopted, and it is not this archive's description.
- Nothing here is offered in support of any claim about aerial phenomena, historical or contemporary. The record is about how a report was made, printed, collected and later described.
The 1561 sheet is long out of copyright and the image used here is public domain. The transcription is quoted from the source record and has not been checked against the sheet, which is stated wherever it appears.
From the same shelf
Grouped by the tradition that produced them. Nothing here claims they share a cause.
Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned
Compiled c. 1905–1919; published 1919 · New York and London
A New York writer spent years copying anomalies out of scientific journals, and published them as a procession of the excluded.
Editorial compilation
Project Blue Book - the record cards
1952–1969 · United States
For seventeen years an air force printed a form for reports it could not explain, with the degree of confidence built into the checkboxes.
Official investigation file
The signs at Caesar's death
15 March – late 44 BCE · Rome and the Mediterranean
Dreams. Failed sacrifices. A darkened Sun. Three suns in the sky. Then, months later, a comet.
Mixed - poetry, history, biography and compilation
