Wonders in the Sky (45 page)

14 September 1641, Akhaltsike, Georgia
Blue wheel descending

Armenian chronicler Zacharia Sarcofag saw a strange phenomenon at sunset. The sky was not yet dark when suddenly “the ether on the eastern side was torn up and a big dark-blue light began to descend. Being wide and long, it came down approaching the Earth and it illuminated everything around, more brightly than the sun.”

The forward part of the light “revolved like a wheel, moving to the north, calmly and slowly emitting red and white light, and in front of the light, at a distance of an open hand, there was a star the size of Venus. The light was still visible until my father had sung, weeping, six
sharakans
, after which it moved away. Later we heard that people saw this miraculous light up to Akhaltsike.”

A
sharakan
is a brief prayer sung over two to three minutes, so the phenomenon would have lasted at least 15 minutes, according to researcher Mikhail Gershtein.

 

Source: Zacharia Sarcofag,
On the Fall of Light from the Sky
. Cited by M. B. Gershtein, “A Thousand Years of Russian UFOs,”
RIAP Bulletin
(Ukraine) 7, 4, October-December 2001.

240.

3 July 1642, Olesa de Montserrat, Catalonia, Spain
Globe, changing its appearance

Joseph Aguilera and others saw a globe changing to “three moons,” later an enormous light seen for one hour.

 

Source: Guijarro, Josep,
Guía de la Cataluña Mágica
(Barcelona: Ediciones Martínez Roca, 1999), 48.

241.

18 January 1644, Boston, Mass.: Luminous figures

Three men coming to Boston saw two “man-shaped lights” come out of the sea. About 8 P.M. several inhabitants of an area of Boston located near the sea saw a light the size of the full moon rise in the northeast. Shortly thereafter, another light appeared in the east. The witnesses observed a curious game of hide-and-seek between the two objects.

During this celestial ballet, several persons known to be sober and pious, who were aboard a boat between Dorchester and Boston, claimed they heard a voice in the sky uttering the following words in a most terrible voice: “Boy, boy, come away…” These calls were repeated about 20 times, coming from various directions.

 

Source: John Winthrop,
Winthrop's Journal
, “History of New England” (1630-1649) (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1959).

242.

25 January 1644, Boston, Massachusetts
A Voice from the light

Luminous objects were seen sparkling, emitting flames. Again, the aerial ballet of the previous week was observed and a voice calling out: “Boy, boy, come away.”

 

Source: John Winthrop,
Winthrop's Journal
, “History of New England” (1630-1649) (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1959).

243.

April 1645, Caudan, Brittany, France
A Procession of sky beings

A sixty-year old man named Jean Coachon, who lived in Calan, near Lanvodan and Vannes, stated that he had witnessed a procession of sky beings he called “angels,” circling above the church, with the Virgin among them. This was related by the Lord of Lestour, who collected such stories.

 

Source: Eric Lebec, ed.,
Miracles et Sabbats. Journal du Père Maunoir, missions en Bretagne (1631-1650)
(Paris: Les éditions de Paris, 1997), 85-86.

244.

11 November 1645, Location unknown
Unidentified planetoid near Venus

A body large enough to be a satellite was seen near Venus from Naples by the astronomer Francesco Fontana. He made further observations of the “satellite” on December 25th 1645 and January 22nd, 1646. Jean-Charles Houzeau, director of the Royal Observatory of Brussels, baptized the satellite with the name “Neith” in the 1880s.

 

Source: Francesco Fontana,
Novae coelestium terrestriumq[ue] rerum observationes…
(Naples, 1646).

245.

April 1646, St. Teath, Cornwall
Abductee becomes a healer

A woman named Anne Jefferies fell ill and claimed to have acquired healing powers after being abducted by six ‘small people'. Anne Jefferies was the daughter of a poor laborer who lived in the parish of St. Teath. She was born in 1626, and is said to have died in 1698.

When she was nineteen years old, Anne went to live as a servant in the family of Mr. Moses Pitt, where she suffered a sudden loss of consciousness. A letter from Moses Pitt to the Right Reverend Dr. Edward Fowler, the Bishop of Gloucester, dated May 1
^st
, 1696, explains how one day Jefferies had been knitting in an arbour in the garden when something so shocking happened to her “that she fell into a kind of Convulsion-fit.” Soon afterwards members of the family found her writhing on the ground and carried her indoors, where she was taken to her bedroom and allowed to rest. When she regained consciousness she startled everyone gathered at her bedside by crying out, “They are all just gone out of the Window; do you not see them?” This and similar outbursts were immediately “attributed to her Distemper,” her employers supposing she was suffering a bout of feverish ‘light-headedness.'

Anne Jefferies remained in an unstable condition for some time, unable even to “so much as stand on her Feet.” Gradually, however, she managed to recover from her sickness and by the following year was able to reassume her duties as a maid but she had not exactly become her old self again. Pitt writes that the first indication that Jefferies had acquired new skills came “one Afternoon, in the Harvest-time,” when his mother slipped and broke her leg on the way back from the mill. A servant was told to saddle a horse and fetch Mr. Hob, the surgeon, from a nearby town. “Anne Jefferies came into the room and saw Mrs. Pitt with her leg outstretched. She asked her to show her the wound, which the woman did after some persuasion, and to rest the leg on her lap. Stroking it with her hand, Anne asked whether the woman was feeling any better. My Mother confess'd to her she did. Upon this she desired my Mother to forbear sending for the Chyrurgeon, for she would, by the Blessing of God, cure her leg.”