As discussed in “Before Roswell“, “UFOs In The Bible” and the Sumerian “Enuma Elish“, UFOs have been visiting earth for many thousands of years. In fact, these events have been captured by artists, since the dawn of antiquity and show up in a number of paintings created by the renaissance masters.
You’ve probably seen a few of these images before, but we also managed to find a few that you may not have seen.
First up is this painting by Aert De Gelder, a pupil of the great Rembrandt. De Gelder created this painting sometime around 1710. Art historians claim that it depicts Jesus being baptized, but this claim is rather nonsensical for several reasons. Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River, which is located in a deep valley. This image depicts a hilltop high in the mountains. None of the details of Christ’s baptism as relayed in the gospels are present here. Moreover, there are no discernable features on any of the characters in the painting. The people are merely a backdrop for the strange metallic craft hovering overhead, and its multiple beams of bright light illuminating the ground.
The viewer is left with the strange sensation that De Gelder is showing us a representation of an event he personally witnessed in the 17th or 18th century, rather than some religious event that happened hundreds of years before his birth, and for which he didn’t bother matching up any of the actual details of the historical or traditional records.
The same can be said about the next three painting we shall examine. In each case, the supposed depictions of well-known biblical stories in no way match the biblical descriptions of said events.
Here is another supposed depiction of Jesus’ baptism, painted in the 15th century by Piero della Francesca. Again, the details of the painting are in no way reflective of the biblical account. Is that small puddle supposed to be the Jordan River? Why are all the clouds so eerily saucer-shaped?
Another biblical event is “the annunciation”, the event where a flying man tells Mary she will soon be pregnant. (You can read more about this suspicious event in my book “UFOs In The Bible“)
In this 1486 painting, Carlo Crivelli depicts Mary in graeco-roman baroque splendor, rather than as a simple peasant in a backwater Palestinian desert village. The star of the show in this depiction is a disc-shaped cloud enshrouded hovering object with a laser beam. This is a far cry from the story as presented in the gospel of Matthew, although it does bear a striking resemblance to many UFO encounters detailed in the books of Exodus, Ezekiel, Psalms, and in thousands of eyewitness reports dating from antiquity and on through history in a continuous chain up to the present day.
Another 15th century work by Domenico Ghirlandaio shows some unusual aerial phenomena in the form of … well, something rather unidentifiable. Look at the zoomed detail below. There appears to be a dark metal object behind her, and some kind of explosion (another craft perhaps) in front of her.
Speaking of the notion of multiple flying craft accompanied by explosions, there are numerous references in the Psalms of armies of such, in some cases said to number “ten thousand times ten thousand” flying vehicles which on more than one occasion engaged in battle.
An array of flying disc-shaped vehicles is seen is this circa 1430 work by Masolino da Panicale, complete with passengers as indicated in the Psalms.
This depiction is that of a contemporary event to the painting itself, rather than of biblical material. You can see the bishop using a hoe to lay out the floorplan for the new cathedral which is about to be built in Italy. Again, the painter just paints what he sees.
This depiction by Jacques Legrand is from the same year 1430. Although the drawing style is different, the clothing matches (it could almost be the exact same crowd!) and thought the bishop has been replaced by a woman with a weird machine, the one large object and array of smaller objects in the sky are strongly reminiscent of the previous image. Did the same fleet visit both Italy and France that year?
One thing we do know is that according to Hans Glaser, a 16th century Bavarian journalist, a similar fleet showed up over Nuremberg in 1561. He actually published an article about the event, complete with a full-color drawing.
An abridged paraphrase of his article follows:
In the morning of April 14, 1561, between 4 and 5 a.m., this was seen in Nuremberg by many men and women. At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, and on both sides of the sun other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone.
In between these globes there were red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.
These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun.
Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke.
After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west.