At daybreak on April 14, 1561, between four and five in the morning, people in and around Nuremberg saw what a broadsheet printed that month called a dreadful apparition on the sun. Two blood-red arcs stood in the middle of the sun, with dark iron-coloured balls around it, some in rows of three and some in squares of four.
The broadsheet, written by Hans Glaser with a woodcut, says crosses, tubes and spheres moved about and seemed to fight one another for about an hour, then fell to earth "as if all was on fire" and vanished in smoke. A large black spear-shaped object appeared as well.
Glaser treated it as a warning from God. Ufologists have called it an early aerial battle between craft; skeptics point out that the shapes match a strong sun dog or halo display, which was often written up as an omen at the time. The original broadsheet is kept at the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich.