Wonders in the Sky (33 page)

8 November 1517, Moldavia, Romania
An object resembling a face

According to the 17
^th
century Moldavian chronicler, Grigore Ureche (ca. 1590-1617), “a great blue sign shining like the face of a man” appeared in the sky. After some time without moving, it “hid itself in the sky again.”

 

Source: Grigore Ureche,
Letopisetul Tarii Moldovei
. As published by E. Picot,
Chronique de Moldavie depuis le milieu du XIVe Siècle jusqu'à l'an 1594
(Paris: E. Leroux, 1878).

167.

April 1518, Yucatán, Mexico: A “star” with rays of light

Spanish conquistador Juan de Grijalva (ca.1489-1527) wrote: “On this day, in the evening, we witnessed a big miracle, and it was that there appeared a star above the ship after sunset, and it moved away, emitting rays of light continuously until it was above the town or large village, and it left a trace in the air that lasted for three long hours, and we also saw other very clear signs, by which we understood that God wanted us to populate that land…” The village was Coatzalcoalco.

 

Source: “Itinerario de la armada del rey catolico a la isla de Yucatàn, en la India, el año 1518, en la que fue por Comandante y Capitàn General Juan de Grijalva. Escrito para su Alteza por el Capitàn mayor de la dicha armada.” In Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta,
Colleccion de documentos para la historia de México
, Volume 1. México (Libraria de J. M. Andrade, Portal de Agustinos N. 3, 1858), 302.

168.

1520, Hereford, England: Fiery circle flies up

A case with thermal effects was recorded by Lycosthenes in his
Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon
:

“In 1520 AD in England, at Hereford, a colossal beam of fire was seen in the sky. Approaching the earth, it burned many things with its heat. After this, it ascended into the sky again and was seen to change its shape into a circle of fire.”

 

Source: Lycosthenes, op. cit., 527.

169.

1521, Cuenca, Spain: Contact with a flying Alien

Dr. Eugenio Torralba was in contact with “Zekiel,” a being who taught him many secrets, and flew him to Rome. Torralba received such fame by virtue of his new-found knowledge and medicines that even Cervantes mentioned him in Don Quijote: “Remember the true story of Dr. Torralba,” says Quijote, “who was taken by the devils through the air…and in twelve hours arrived in Rome…” In 1525 he became the personal doctor of the widowed queen of Portugal, Leonor.

Zekiel (or “Zequiel”), however, proved to be Torralba's curse as well as a blessing. The Inquisition didn't take long to find out about the good doctor's dealings with the entity, and it was soon revealed that Torralba had been physically transported to faraway places by magical means. Torralba was arrested in 1528 and cruelly tortured, despite his insistence that he had never entered into a pact with the creature nor gone against the Catholic faith at any time. He was sentenced to prison on March 6th 1531, but was soon released and allowed to continue his medical practices on the condition that he never again had any contact with Zekiel.

 

Source: Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo,
Historia de los Heterodoxos Espanoles
(Madrid: La Editorial Católica, 1978).

170.

1523, Changsu, Jiangsu Province, China
Flying ships, carrying men

The Chinese book
Stories in a Summerhouse of Flowers
, written by Qiu Fuzuo, includes an account of an encounter that took place in 1523, in the second year of Emperor Jianjing's reign. At this time there lived a teacher called Lü Yu in the village of Yujiu.

“One day when it was raining without stopping the teacher observed two ships sailing over the woolly clouds above the ruins, in front of his house. On these two ships that measured more than ten fathoms [over sixty feet], two tall men were busying themselves, each one twelve feet tall and wearing a red hat and multicoloured clothes. They held a pole in their hands. The ships moved very quickly.

“In the home of the teacher Lü Yu that day there happened to be a score of scholars who, alerted by Lü Yu, came out of the house and stood next to him to observe the phenomenon. Then, the men in multicolored clothing passed their hand over the scholars' mouths; their mouths at once became black and as a result none of them could speak. At that moment, they saw a man, escorted like a mandarin, dressed like an old scholar, emerge on one of the ships accompanied by a bonze. A long time after this, the ships flew away, as if carried by the clouds, and descended again a kilometer away, in a cemetery. The ships set off again; the scholars felt their mouths return to normal. But five days later, Ju Lu died, though nobody knows why.”

 

Source: Shi Bo,
La Chine et les Extraterrestres
, op.cit., 42.

171.

1526, Rome, Italy: Demonic transportation

The Italian inquisitor Paulus Grillandus, whose
Tractatus de Hereticis et Sortilegiis
had almost as much impact as the
Malleus Maleficarum
, wrote that a countryman in Rome saw his wife take all her clothes off and go out of the house.

The next morning he asked his wife where she had been all night. At first she refused to tell him, but when he started to become more aggressive she told him she went to a witch gathering. He demanded that she take him with her the next time, and not long after this they were both “transported” by two he-goats. However, she warned her husband not to pronounce the word “God” during his time with the demons, to which he agreed. The man saw many famous people at the meeting, all of whom declared their devotion to the Devil in a ceremony. There was a dance and a banquet. The man noticed that the food on the table lacked salt. Of course, salt has purifying qualities associated with warding off evil spirits and was therefore shunned by demons and fairies alike. The man was unaware of this fact, much to his misfortune. He asked for the salt and, when he thought he had it in his hand, exclaimed, “Thank God, the salt has come!”

Suddenly, everything disappeared before his eyes. Men, women, tables and dishes evaporated and everything went dark. He found himself naked in the countryside, in the cold night. At dawn he met some shepherds who informed him he was near Benevento, some 100 miles from Rome. They gave him something to eat and clothes to wear, and eventually he found his way home, begging for money on the way. When he reached Rome, starving and exhausted, the first thing he did was to report his wife, who was forced to confess and promptly burnt at the stake.

Medieval demonologists, similar to today's abductionists, could be divided into two broad groups: the skeptics and the “true believers.” The sceptics regarded the whole subject of transvection as a mental illusion that gave a person the
sensation
of being lifted bodily by devils and taken through the sky. There was no need or precedent for complex psychological theories as such illusions were generally attributed to dark Satanic forces. In fact, it was heretical to think otherwise: “The act of riding abroad may be merely illusory, since the devil has extraordinary power over the minds of those who have given themselves up to him, so that what they do in pure imagination, they believe they have actually and really done in the body.”

Some researchers have speculated on the possibility that some, if not all, abductions and encounters occur in altered states of consciousness and not in the physical world as we know it.

 

Source:
Malleus Maleficarum: The Classic Study of Witchcraft
, Part I, Question I, 7, trans. Montague Summers (London: Bracken Books, 1996).

172.