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Every so often , title of UFO sighting go viral and evenspur serious research . But humans have been gaze at the sky for millenary , and reports of such sighting go way back . So what was the first put down UFO sighting , and did it predate the mid-20th C , when reports of flying saucer became more commonplace ?
regrettably , the answer is n’t clear - cut , at least when looking at pre - modern exemplar .
Did earlier civilizations report seeing UFOs?
" There is no consensus on what constitutes the first recorded UFO sighting in history,“Chris Aubeck , an independent researcher and director of the Magonia Exchange , an external UFO story archival undertaking with members in 15 countries , tell Live Science . This dispute is not due to a deficiency of accounts ; many artifacts portray perplex , celestial object .
" There ’s no interrogation that human beings have depicted or reported or chronicle things about strange , anomalous thing in the sky dating back to the ancient world,“Greg Eghigian , a prof of history and bioethics at Penn State , state Live Science .
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Did earlier civilizations report seeing UFOs?
Rather , the context and form of these bill make it hard to nail what can be definitively draw as the first record UFO sighting . For example , according to Aubeck , ancient school text like Sumerian andBabyloniancuneiform tablets , like those in the Šumma ālu series and other fortune telling texts from the 2d and first millennia B.C. , provide the first know recordings of possible UFO sightings , though these are rede as omens . These chronicle describe modify shapes in the sky and black meteors , which , at the time , were regarded as religious harbingers . However , these texts lack ocular depictions or illustrations .
" I ca n’t put a sight of stock in those account because they ’re completely decontextualized from the company in which they ’re made , " Eghigian said . These accounts may not be claims ofextraterrestrialsvisiting Earth , but rather religious scriptures or written tale . In these cases , it can be hard to separate cultural traditional knowledge from an someone ’s attempt to describe a sight they could not excuse , from comets tolenticular clouds .
In one example , resident of Nuremberg , Germany report a strange aery engagement on April 14 , 1561 . They write about seeingorbs , crosse , piston chamber , and a giant , deep mordant arrow - work object , which crash - land in the distance . According to Hans Glaser , a local creative person who made a woodcut depicting the event , the dissimilar objects in the sky " all started to oppose among themselves " until " they became fatigued … vanish from the sun down upon the earth ' as if they all sunburn ' and they then wasted forth on the earth with immense smoke . " However , he did n’t mention UFO , only writing that " Whatever such signaling mean , God alone knows . "
The Šumma ālu cuneiform tablets from the first millennium B.C. detail the first known recordings of potential UFO sightings.
Because their interpretation is n’t clear , these departed instance are n’t necessarily claims of a UFO sighting . What ’s more , although human race usually think in alien civilizations for centuries , " what was not unwashed was to say aliens were call us , " Eghigian said .
For Eghigian , the first definitive recorded " UFO sighting " was relatively recent . In June 1947 , amateur pilotKenneth Arnoldwas flying his woodworking plane around Mount Rainier in Washington in search of a crashed loading plane , when he saw nine object flying in organisation at high pep pill . According to Eghigian , Arnold suspected these were military aircraft that the public was n’t supposed to know about . He took this sighting to the local newspaper .
One newsman asked about how the aircraft go , and Arnold described it as a saucer jump across the urine . This reporter change by reversal that description into " fly saucer . " The following summer , many more people reported sighting of flying saucers . In this way , the Arnold sighting kick off forward-looking UFO culture as we hump it .
German artist Hans Glaser created a woodcut engraving that depicted a strange aerial disturbance that people in Nuremberg reported seeing on April 14, 1561.
Aubeck agreed that this sighting " is widely regarded as the event that kick - started modern UFO culture . "
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Still , Eghigian say the populace did n’t immediately point to extraterrestrials in the mid-20th C . Instead , they suggest it was either the U.S. or Soviet military machine . This theme of paranoia and suspicion of other homo extends back to previous sightings . Eghigian said there were a number of steerable sightings in England in 1912 and 1914 , and civilian suspected the Germans .
Ultimately , understanding the history of UFO sightings aid us realize human storytelling . " Studying UFO sightings is worthful because they represent the urban legends of our time , " Aubeck said . " They allow us to examine the interplay between human resourcefulness and observation , serve us understand how ethnic narration shape our perceptions of unexplained phenomena . "
