Let me flesh it out a little more. William Bramley found many primary source documents with eye witness accounts throughout history of people seeing “comets” with strange flashing lights before war happened. Similarly with the Black Plague.
He makes some really interesting arguments in his book. For example, that the grim reaper originated from the time of the Black Plague where people saw strange people in black hoods wandering the fields, and then shortly after, a “foul mist” came into town, and then people started dying from the Black Death.
Perhaps it’s better understood by reading this interview with William Bramley .
To clarify, I’m asking : 1.) can anybody corroborate or refute the claims about the foul mists? 2.) the flashing lights/comets/ufos? 3.) has anybody looked into WB’s primary sources?
Thank you. I hope this doesn’t get deleted. This is a serious question. The author clearly did a lot of primary source research for his book and interpreted them, like any historian would do, so I hope I can get solid answers.
I don't know Bramley's work — it sounds like crankwork.
But I will say: people in many parts of the world at many points in the past certainly believed in "signs and portents," and looked ferverantly for them as omens of things to come, both good and bad. They consulted these omens with the same seriousness and attention that a doctor today might consult an X-ray, or a trader might pour over the graphs in the Wall Street Journal.
If you do this — if you go looking for minor events, and then try to correlate them to things that happen — you will succeed. This is what statisticians call "chasing noise": you're looking at essentially random things, then correlating with something after the fact, and creating a spurious correlation. You're also creating the circumstances for confirmation bias, in that every comet (or whatever) that doesn't produce a plague you are going to be ignoring. You also have the opportunity for retroactive attribution based on what you think must have caused something: for much of European history, diseases were attributed to "bad air" (and some have names that still reflect this, like "malaria"). So people retroactively saying there were, or must have been, foul mists is hardly interesting; no doubt there were foul mists in the boggier parts of Europe, much less those which had inadequate sewerage.
Historians are interested in these kinds of mindsets (see e.g., Tuchman's A Distant Mirror or C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image, or even Foucault's The Order of Things), but not on the idea that these people were actually correct in their perceptions of the causes of these events.
We know the causes of the Black Death (it was a form of plague bacillius; the exact one is debated, but there is ample forensic evidence to show this). We do not need to appeal to comets anymore; we know what comets are and aren't. We know why "bad air" is correlated with some forms of diseases — it's not the air, usually, it's that either the air is an indication of poor social hygiene (e.g., raw human waste), or it is indicative of the kinds of environments that mosquitoes and other parasites thrive in (hence those trying to avoid malaria by seeking higher, drier, better-ventilated ground were not entirely wrong, but not for the reasons they thought they were).
Anyone who takes these old accounts at their word, and then tries to turn it into a theory about UFOs or whatever, is being very silly, and no serious student of history is going to waste their time on such silliness. History is interesting enough, with enough mysteries to unravel, without the need to create fake mysteries with bad answers.
Lastly, I would just warn you about thinking that the author has done a good job. Has the work been peer-reviewed by other experts? I assume not. Can you confirm the sources really exist, and that the author has quoted them correctly? Probably not. As scholars we don't just say, "trust us, we've got footnotes" — we rely on a network of other scholars who know the same sources, can confirm that we've used them adequately, and would hold us accountable if we mis-used or mis-quoted the data. Cranks don't do any of this, and typically do misquote (or even make up) sources, and certainly don't run them by scholars for review. Don't be fooled by pseudo-scholarship — work that has the appearance of being scholarship, but is just aping its conventions.