Stars, sieges, and contested saucers in Renaissance clouds — 15th-century high strangeness, 1400 to 1499 CE
Sighting by Date:
1400 – 1499 UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive
Renaissance UFO Paintings Fact-Checked, the Fall of Constantinople & the Vatican Canon’s Diary
The 15th century archive draws on an unusually wide range of source types — Italian civic chronicles, Byzantine siege accounts, Japanese astronomical records, and, distinctively for this century, Renaissance devotional paintings that ufological literature has long cited as depicting aerial craft. This page preserves those claims as documented interpretive positions, but with clear caveats where mainstream art history offers a well-established alternative reading (the mandorla, glory-cloud, and halo were standard devotional conventions of the period, not attempts to depict flying objects) — see the Researcher’s Notes below for the full context rather than repeating the caveat on every entry.
This is also the century of the Fall of Constantinople (1453) and the Fall of Angkor (1431) — two documented historical military events that appear in fringe UFO literature reframed with supernatural or extraterrestrial elements. Both are presented here with the documented historical record alongside the period-source claims.
Date: c. 1400 (exact date uncertain)
Location: Fundão, Portugal
Summary: A young girl reportedly disappeared for three days, later stating she had been taken by a “white lady” who offered her water to drink from a “bell.”
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: c. 1400 (probable duplicate of the 1330 Beaune tapestry entry in the 1300–1399 archive — see Researcher’s Notes)
Location: Basilica Notre-Dame, Beaune, Burgundy, France
Summary: “The Magnificat” tapestry, depicting the life of the Virgin Mary, has been cited in ufological literature as containing a disc- or hat-shaped object above the scene. This appears to be the same tapestry documented elsewhere in this archive under 1330; the two entries cite different dates for what is very likely the same object.
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: c. 1400 (see Researcher’s Notes on contested religious-art interpretations)
Location: Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Florence, Italy
Summary: A canvas by Masolino da Panicale (1383–1440), part of “The Miracle of the Snow” cycle, depicts flat, circular clouds beneath Jesus and Mary, cited in ufological literature as resembling a formation of lenticular craft.
Source: “The Miracle of the Snow” (Santa Maria Maggiore commission)
Date: c. 1000–1400
Location: Catamarca Province, Argentina
Note — poor source translation: the surviving text is a garbled machine translation from French. Retained pending a better source.
Summary: Rock art from Catamarca Province, dated broadly between 1000 and 1400 CE, depicts four figures associated with a “Rainbow God” motif, interpreted by some researchers as robed figures, others as robotic or helmeted figures connected to the ground.
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: June 14, 1403
Location: Russia
Summary: Three “sun-like” objects appeared, emitting blue, green, and crimson rays and forming an arc-like pattern. The last, cross-shaped and large, appeared to pulsate at the heart of the moon, hovering there for over an hour before disappearing.
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: Undated (rock art; conventionally cited as c. 1400 in ufological literature, but Native American rock art dating is typically imprecise and disputed)
Location: Myers Spring Canyon, Texas
Summary: Rock art at Myers Spring Canyon depicts a humanoid figure beside a disc-like shape, interpreted by some as a shaman standing beside a UFO. Archaeologists working on Texas rock art generally attribute such imagery to shamanic or cosmological symbolism rather than aerial craft.
Source: NUFORC
Date: 1404
Location: China
Note — poor source translation: fragmentary translation, retained pending improvement.
Summary: A Ming Dynasty record from the Yongle era describes a light-yellow star-like object observed in October 1404.
Source: Ming Dynasty chronicle records, Yongle era
Date: c. 1400 (fictional/legendary text)
Location: China
Summary: An illustration from the explicitly fictional Chinese compendium “Illustrated Survey of Weird Countries” (c. 1400) depicts the legendary “Ji Gung” people, said in the tale to build wind-driven flying cars capable of long-distance travel — a legend, not a documented sighting.
Source: Illustrated Survey of Weird Countries (fictional compendium)
Date: 1400s (see Researcher’s Notes on contested religious-art interpretations)
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine
Summary: A 15th-century Kyivan fresco has been cited in ufological literature as depicting Jesus in a rocket-like device, with attendant figures wearing enclosed, helmet-like halos rather than conventional flat halos.
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: September 16, 1408
Location: Rome, Italy
Summary: Antonio di Pietro, a canon of the Vatican, records in his Diarium Romanum that shortly after sunset near the site of the ancient Basilica of St. Peter, he and companions “saw a beautiful star that, coming from the sky of Tarrione, headed towards Castel Sant’Angelo with two other small, splendid bright stars,” to their considerable surprise.
Source: Antonio di Pietro, Diarium Romanum (1404–1417), Archivio Capitolare Vaticano; published by L.A. Muratori in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. XXIV (1734)
Date: 1411
Location: Arras, France
Summary: Jacques du Clercq relates in his memoirs that a “steel rod” object was seen in the sky for an hour and a quarter.
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: October 25, 1415
Location: Agincourt, Pas-de-Calais, France
Summary: During the Battle of Agincourt, English archers reportedly credited part of their unlikely victory over a numerically superior French force to “fiery beings that moved through the air at high speed, throwing fire” onto the enemy — an account that cannot rule out contemporary battlefield use of gunpowder-based incendiary weapons, which were known and in limited use by this period.
Source: Michel Bougard, La Chronique des OVNI (Delarge, 1977), p. 73
Date: July 2, 1420
Location: Castel Godego, Treviso, Italy
Summary: A Hungarian merchant, Peter Tagliamento, lost while herding cattle near Castel Godego, reported seeing a great light followed by a young woman of great beauty who gave him directions and requested a chapel be built at the site, planting a cross as proof of her visit. The cross was later found, convincing the community, and a chapel was built that became a site of pilgrimage.
Source: Marino Gamba, Apparizioni Mariane nel Corso di Due Millenni (Udine: Ediz. Il Segno, 1999)
Date: 1420 (see Researcher’s Notes on contested religious-art interpretations)
Location: Church of San Francesco, Arezzo, Italy
Summary: A fresco at San Francesco in Arezzo contains cloud formations cited in ufological literature as lenticular in shape, interpreted by some as craft using cloud cover for concealment during atmospheric entry.
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: c. 1425 (see Researcher’s Notes on contested religious-art interpretations)
Location: Not specified
Summary: Fra Angelico’s Baptism of Christ (c. 1425) has been cited in ufological literature for background sky elements interpreted as anomalous.
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: March 3, 1428
Location: Forlì, Italy
Summary: City archives record that at half past one at night, “a very high flame-shaped tower… seemed to fire rising into the air” above the Friars Minor, witnessed by many including monks; a separate note records “a lamp of fire in the air” the same day, lasting from 3:00 a.m. until nightfall.
Source: Filippo Guarini, I Terremoti a Forlì (Croppi, Forlì, 1880), pp. 12–13, 143
Date: 1430: Strangeness in Jaén, Andalusia, Spain [Full case page — separate entry]
Date: 1431
Note — historical correction: the events of 1431 at Angkor are a well-documented historical military event, not a mysterious disappearance. The Ayutthaya Kingdom besieged and sacked Angkor after a roughly seven-month campaign, killing or enslaving a substantial portion of the population and prompting the Khmer court to relocate southeastward toward present-day Phnom Penh. Angkor itself was never fully abandoned — Theravada Buddhist monks maintained Angkor Wat as a pilgrimage site continuously afterward. No credible historical source associates the fall of Angkor with aerial craft.
Location: Angkor, Khmer Empire (present-day Cambodia)
Summary: Some ufological compilations describe the “entire population” of Angkor as having “mysteriously vanished” amid reported sightings of “large airships.” The documented historical record instead describes a military siege and sack by the Ayutthaya Kingdom, with survivors relocating to a new capital rather than vanishing.
Source: Not cited in original compilation; corrected against the documented Fall of Angkor historical record
Date: January 5, 1433
Location: Nice, France, and/or Ciudad Rodrigo, Salamanca, Spain
Summary: A luminous globe reportedly remained visible for many hours.
Source: G. Tarade, Soucoupes Volantes et Civilisations d’Outre-Espace (Paris: J’Ai Lu, 1969); Cielo e Terra, April 1972, p. 9; Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos investigation files
Date: June 1444
Location: Bibbiena, Arezzo, Italy
Summary: Over three months, multiple witnesses reported golden globes of light inside and outside a church. A Benedictine monk, Don Massimo, described a globe “as thick as a printing press”; another witness reported lights day and night around the church, leaving a smell of remarkable sweetness. Don Massimo notes that some who investigated saw nothing but did notice the smell.
Source: Don Massimo, manuscript, Moreno Frullani Collection No. 29, 56, Riccardiana Library, Florence
Date: August 1449
Location: China
Note — poor source translation: fragmentary translation, retained pending improvement.
Summary: A Ming Dynasty record from the Zhengtong era describes an astronomical observation in August 1449.
Source: Ming Dynasty chronicle records, Zhengtong era
Date: May 29, 1453
Note: this account describes events during the historically documented siege and fall of Constantinople to Ottoman forces under Sultan Mehmed II, a pivotal and extensively documented historical event marking the end of the Byzantine Empire.
Location: Constantinople
Summary: A Byzantine chronicle describes a nightly light descending from the sky and enveloping the besieged city, initially interpreted by defenders as a sign of God’s wrath and later, after early successes, as a sign of divine favor. On the night before a planned Ottoman withdrawal, the light reportedly did not envelop the city as before, appearing distant and scattering quickly — an event the chronicle links to renewed Ottoman resolve to press the siege, which succeeded shortly after.
Source: Makarios Melissenos, “Chronicle of the Siege of Constantinople,” in George Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 97–136
Date: 1455 (see Researcher’s Notes on contested religious-art interpretations)
Location: Not specified
Summary: Rogier van der Weyden’s Baptism of Christ (c. 1455) has been cited in ufological literature for background sky elements interpreted as anomalous.
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: Late December 1456
Location: Piacenza, Italy
Summary: The Annali Piacentini of Antonio da Ripalta records “four wonderful stars that proceeded directly from the east to the west and were positioned almost in the sign of a cross.”
Source: U. Dall’Olmo, “Meteors, Meteor Showers and Meteorites in the Middle Ages,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 9 (1978)
Date: March 17, 1458
Location: Kyoto, Japan
Summary: Five “stars” appeared, circled the moon, changed colors three times, then disappeared. Kyoto residents, distressed, fled and hid in expectation of disaster.
Source: The Taiheiki: A Chronicle of Medieval Japan, trans. Helen Craig McCullough (North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2004)
Date: c. 1460–1465 (see Researcher’s Notes on contested religious-art interpretations)
Location: Academy of Florence, Italy
Summary: “La Tebaide,” painted by Paolo Uccello, is cited in ufological literature for a reddish, disc-shaped background element near a depiction of Jesus, along with foreground tree patterns compared to lenticular cloud formations in similar religious works.
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: October 1461
Location: Metz, France
Summary: Between Saint Remy’s Day and All Saints’ Day, “numerous and marvelous signs like great firebrands the length of four fathoms” were seen twice in the air, each lasting roughly half of a quarter hour; some witnesses also reported hearing what sounded like a distant battle. October’s Draconid and Orionid meteor showers may explain the visual reports, though not the reported “uproar and noise.”
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: November 1, 1461
Location: Arras, France
Summary: A fiery object like an iron rod, roughly half the apparent size of the moon, was seen for less than a quarter hour, also described as ship-shaped with fire flowing from it.
Source: Jacques Vallée, Anatomy of a Phenomenon, p. 9; Harold T. Wilkins, Flying Saucers on the Attack, pp. 187–188
Date: February 19, 1465
Location: Italy
Summary: Angelo de Tummulillis records in the Notabilia Temporum that “a kind of great flaming ship” appeared at daybreak on the 19th, and again on the 20th and 21st at different hours.
Source: U. Dall’Olmo, “Meteors, Meteor Showers and Meteorites in the Middle Ages”
Date: March 8, 1468
Location: Mt. Kasuga, Japan
Summary: A dark object, making a “sound like a wheel,” flew from Mt. Kasuga toward the west at midnight, its estimated size roughly 9 by 6 feet.
Source: Brothers magazine, I
Date: September 27, 1477
Location: Japan (exact location unrecorded)
Summary: A luminous object crossed the sky, after which a cotton-like substance fell for approximately six hours.
Source: Brothers magazine, I
Date: 1478
Location: Milan, Italy
Summary: Two unexplained objects were reportedly observed during a battle, illustrated by an accompanying woodcut in Lycosthenes’s chronicle; such woodcuts were commonly reused across period publications, so its illustrative accuracy is uncertain.
Source: Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon (Basel, 1557)
Date: 1478
Location: Switzerland
Summary: Fireballs were reported flying over Switzerland.
Source: Michel Bougard, La Chronique des OVNI (Delarge, 1977)
Date: 1479
Location: Arabia (as depicted; original observation location not independently verified)
Summary: A woodcut in Conrad Lycosthenes’s 1557 Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon depicts a ship-like object said to have been sighted over Arabia in 1479. As with other Lycosthenes woodcuts, the image’s reliability as a firsthand illustration is uncertain given the era’s practice of recycling stock imagery.
Source: Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon
Date: October 18, 1482
Location: Albisola, Savona Province, Italy
Summary: During a territorial clash between the villages of Albisola and Stella, a small, intensely bright white cloud reportedly appeared from the east under a clear sky. Fighters, dazzled, heard a clear voice repeat the word “peace” three times before the cloud vanished; all present abandoned their weapons in astonishment.
Source: Giovanni Bernardo Poggi, manuscript memoirs
Date: August 1487
Location: Forlì, Italy
Summary: A large star-like object resembling a flying butterfly, later also described by other witnesses as a huge “cartwheel,” was seen moving from the mountains toward Ravenna two hours before dawn, witnessed by the historian and multiple peasants and travelers; it lasted only a short time.
Source: Leone Cobelli, Cronache Forlivesi dalla Fondazione della Città all’Anno 1498 (Bologna, 1874)
Date: 1490
Location: Ireland
Summary: A silvery disc-shaped object was reportedly seen over a church during morning mass, flying over several times; a church bell was dislodged and cattle reportedly burned.
Source: Ted R. Phillips investigation files
Date: c. 1490 (see Researcher’s Notes on contested religious-art interpretations)
Location: Artist unknown
Summary: “The Assumption of the Virgin,” by an unknown artist, is cited in ufological literature for numerous disc- or saucer-shaped cloud forms in its background.
Source: Not cited in original compilation
Date: 1491
Location: Vladimir, Russia
Summary: A chronicle records “an awe-inspiring apparition” over the stone church housing the remains of Saint Prince Alexander Nevsky: a light cloud or thin smoke, white and bright as the sun, from which the likeness of the Holy Prince on a white horse was seen rising toward the sky, terrifying witnesses into tolling bells across the city.
Source: Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1971)
Date: 1491: Fazio Cardano Sighting in Milan [Full case page — separate entry]
Date: October 11, 1492
Location: Atlantic Ocean, near Guanahaní, Bahamas
Summary: Roughly two hours before midnight, Christopher Columbus, standing on the quarterdeck, saw a light moving up and down; he called two crew members to confirm the sighting, one of whom (Pero Gutiérrez) also saw it, while a third (Rodrigo Sánchez) could not from his position. Columbus took this, alongside the sighting of land hours later by lookout Rodrigo de Triana, as an early indication of approaching land.
Source: Personal Narrative of the First Voyage of Columbus to America, trans. Samuel Kettell (Boston: T.B. Wait and Son, 1827), pp. 32–33
Date: 1492
Location: Fiesole, Italy
Summary: Burning torches reportedly ran up for three consecutive nights from the hills of Fiesole toward the church holding the Medici family tombs, sparkling before vanishing.
Source: Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon
Date: 1494
Location: Apulia, Italy
Summary: Around the time of King Charles VIII’s arrival in Naples, three “suns” reportedly appeared at night in the clouded Apulian sky, accompanied by heavy lightning and thunder.
Source: Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1971)
Date: September 20, 1498
Location: Japan
Summary: A bright, umbrella-shaped object crossed the sky with a rumbling sound.
Source: Brothers magazine, I; Takao Ikeda, UFOs Over Japan
Date: 1499
Location: South Atlantic, off Africa
Summary: During Pedro Álvares Cabral’s expedition, crew reported a luminous object in the southern sky, visible for about eight minutes and moving slowly toward the Cape of Good Hope, shortly before a hurricane struck that sank or grounded six of the fleet’s thirteen ships. The remaining seven continued to the Americas, contributing to the expedition’s eventual role in the European discovery of Brazil in 1500.
Source: W.B. Greenlee, ed., The Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral to Brazil and India (London: Hakluyt Society, 1937)
Date: 1406–1469 attribution range (see Researcher’s Notes on contested religious-art interpretations)
Location: Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy
Summary: “The Madonna with Saint Giovannino,” attributed to the school of Filippo Lippi or Domenico Ghirlandaio, held at the Palazzo Vecchio, is cited in ufological literature for a dark, ray-emitting disc-shaped object above Mary’s shoulder, with a man and dog depicted looking up at it. Separately, Carlo Crivelli’s 1496 “The Annunciation” (National Gallery, London) has been cited for a disc-shaped light beam replacing a conventional depiction of the Archangel Gabriel, and his 1486 “Saint Emidius” painting for a luminous disc with figures described as visible within it under magnification.
Source: Not cited in original compilation
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
Stars, Sieges, and Saucers in the Clouds — 1400 to 1499
- Contested religious-art interpretations, addressed once: this century’s archive contains an unusually high number of Renaissance devotional paintings cited in ufological literature as depicting craft (Masolino, San Francesco di Arezzo, Fra Angelico, Rogier van der Weyden, Paolo Uccello, the anonymous “Assumption,” the “Madonna with Saint Giovannino,” and Carlo Crivelli’s works). Mainstream art history attributes these disc- and lens-shaped forms to standard period conventions — the mandorla (almond-shaped glory), stylized glory-clouds, and circular halos — rather than attempts to depict aerial craft. Each entry is retained with the claim as documented, without repeating this caveat individually on every entry.
- Angkor Wat 1431 corrected: the prior entry framed 1431 Angkor as a mysterious population disappearance connected to “airships.” This is a documented military event — the Ayutthaya Kingdom’s sack of Angkor — corrected in place with the historical record.
- Beaune tapestry cross-referenced: the “Magnificat” tapestry entry here (dated c. 1400) very likely refers to the same object documented under 1330 in the 1300–1399 archive. Both are retained with the connection noted rather than merged.
- Fragmentary Chinese translations flagged: several entries rest on garbled translations retained for completeness pending better source material.
The strongest entries on this page remain its institutional chronicle accounts — the Vatican canon’s diary of three stars over Rome, Byzantine records from the siege of Constantinople, and Japanese astronomical chronicles — sources with clear provenance and named authorship, distinct from the century’s more contested visual-art claims.
“Suddenly after sunset… we saw… a beautiful star that, coming from the sky of Tarrione, headed towards Castel Sant’Angelo with two other small, splendid bright stars. And we were all very surprised by that spectacle.”
Antonio di Pietro, canon of the Vatican, Diarium Romanum, September 16, 1408
