Two hours, hundreds of witnesses, one black coffin — England, 1659
THINK ABOUTIT UFO|UAP SIGHTINGS REPORT
1659: The Black Coffin of Leicester and Nottinghamshire | Two Hours Over England
For over two hours, “many hundreds of people” between Leicester and Nottingham watched an object in the perfect shape of a black coffin, a fiery dart flying back and forth at its head and a bloody sword accompanying it, until it finally broke apart in a burst of brilliance — an event thought significant enough to be formally communicated to members of Parliament.
Date: 1659 (a Sunday, “a fortnight” before the pamphlet’s publication)
Sighting Time: 1:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m.
Day/Night: Day
Location: Between Leicester and Nottingham, England
Urban or Rural: Rural — open sky visible across the route between two towns
No. of Entity(‘s): Not Applicable
Entity Type: Not Applicable
Entity Description: Not Applicable
Hynek Classification: DD (Daylight Disc/Object)
Duration: Approximately two hours and fifteen minutes (1:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m.)
No. of Object(s): Multiple — the main coffin-shaped object, accompanied by a fiery dart and a “bloody sword”
Description of the Object(s): An object “in the perfect figure and form of a black coffin,” with a fiery dart flying to and fro at its head, accompanied by a flaming arrow and a bloody sword casting forth fire
Shape of Object(s): Coffin-shaped, with accompanying dart/arrow and sword shapes
Size of Object(s): Not recorded
Color of Object(s): Black (coffin); fiery/flaming (dart and sword)
Distance to Object(s): Not recorded
Height & Speed: Not recorded; the dart is described moving back and forth at the head of the coffin shape
Number of Witnesses: “Many hundreds of people,” per the source
Special Features/Characteristics: The event was considered significant enough to be formally communicated to “divers honorable members of Parliament” by country gentlemen and ministers; the object broke up with great brilliance at the end of the sighting
Case Status: Unexplained
Source: The Five Strange Wonders, in the North and West of England…concerning the strange and prodigious flying in the air of a black coffin betwixt Leicester and Nottingham (London: W. Thomas, 1659)
Summary/Description: Starting at 1:00 p.m., people observed an object “in the perfect figure and form of a black coffin, with a fiery dart and a flaming sword flying to and again, backwards and forwards the head of the said coffin, which was with great wonder and admiration beheld by many hundreds of people.” This continued until 3:15 p.m., when the object broke up with great brilliance. The pamphlet recording the event was addressed to Parliament, describing itself as communicated “from several country gentlemen and ministers” — framing the sighting as one of five strange wonders reported in the north and west of England during the period.
Related Cases: Not Applicable
Detailed Report
The account survives in a 1659 London pamphlet explicitly framed as a communication to Parliament — a format that placed this sighting alongside other “strange wonders” considered politically or providentially significant enough to bring to the attention of the governing body during the unstable final year of the English Interregnum, shortly before the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. The pamphlet’s title identifies its sources as “country gentlemen and ministers,” a class of witnesses whose social and clerical standing was explicitly invoked to lend the report credibility, consistent with the broader documentary conventions of the Mirabilis Annus tradition that dominates this period’s English record.
The specificity of the timing — a precise two-hour-fifteen-minute window, from 1:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. — distinguishes this account from vaguer contemporary reports, and the described behavior (a stationary or slow-moving central form with a smaller fiery element moving rapidly back and forth at one end) does not correspond cleanly to any single common atmospheric phenomenon. The imagery itself — a coffin, a dart, a bloody sword — reflects the period’s strong tendency to interpret unusual aerial phenomena through an explicitly ominous, ready-made vocabulary of mortality and violence, unsurprising in a nation that had recently endured a civil war and regicide.
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
The Black Coffin — Leicester and Nottinghamshire 1659 and Two Hours Reported to Parliament
- Source chain assessment: The account is preserved in a contemporary printed pamphlet explicitly addressed to Parliament and attributed to named classes of credible witnesses (“country gentlemen and ministers”), giving it institutional weight typical of the period’s better-documented English sightings, though no individual witness is named in the surviving text.
- Pattern context / comparative cases: This sighting belongs to the broader English Mirabilis Annus documentary tradition of 1659–1662, which produced an unusually dense cluster of similarly formatted, multiply-witnessed aerial sightings across a short window — this account, predating the main 1660–1662 cluster by roughly a year, may represent an early instance of the same reporting pattern.
- Geographic or historical context: The sighting occurred during the final, politically unstable year of the Interregnum, shortly before the Restoration of Charles II — a period in which English pamphlet culture was especially attentive to omens and portents given the uncertain political transition underway.
- Classification issues / corrections: The precise duration and daylight visibility support a DD classification, though the described combination of a stationary dark form with an actively moving fiery element does not match a single standard natural phenomenon, leaving the case Unexplained.
The black coffin of 1659 stands as one of the better-attested pre-Restoration English sightings — a precisely timed, multiply-witnessed daylight event considered significant enough to formally reach Parliament, its ominous imagery a product of its turbulent political moment as much as of whatever was actually seen in the sky that Sunday afternoon.
“The perfect figure and form of a black coffin, with a fiery dart and a flaming sword flying to and again, backwards and forwards the head of the said coffin, which was with great wonder and admiration beheld by many hundreds of people.”
