Hi guys, this is admittedly one of the weirder questions asked on this sub but I am completely serious about what I'm asking. Over the past year the U.S. government has openly acknowledged the existence of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (U.A.P.), more commonly known as UFOs, which have been observed by both military pilots and radar. These are not conspiracy theorists who make money by peddling BS on the History Channel, these were trained professionals serving the U.S. who saw and reported these claims. The Pentagon has not only been keeping track of these unexplainable sightings for decades but they are also scheduled to release a report on their current understanding of these objects this June.
With this context in mind, I couldn't help but wonder if humans have had any other recorded instances of observing an unexplainable object or phenomena in their skies and recorded it. I am not referring to events which can be explained by modern understanding of science and astronomy. I am talking about sightings written down from our history that to this day cannot be explained. Of course, the obvious challenge with this question is that written records and historiography throughout our existence were prone to exaggerations and second-hand retellings that can obscure our understanding of what actually happened. I'm already aware of the 1561 event over Nuremberg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg), are there any other notable instances similar to this event in our past? I'm particularly curious of sightings from ancient/medieval history, whether people from this time ever saw such things and if they just wrote it off as "the gods ™" or something else. Thank you all in advance.
There is certainly more to say, but I wrote about some of the best-known of the sorts of accounts that you are interested in here a while ago in a response that looked at chronicle records of "sky ships," crewed by sky-sailors, seen over early medieval Europe.
You might find it interesting to review that response while you wait for fresh answers to your query, not least because it might help you to understand that one key problem with these early "UFO reports" is that C20th-21st researchers tend to read them in a modern, technological context, when they were originally written in a very different, fundamentally religious one.
This makes it a bad mistake to try to hunt for reports of "UFOs" in historical records without trying to properly understand the contexts in which these accounts were first written down. To think that people saw aliens, but reported "gods", or saw spaceships, and reported flying sailing boats, simply because those were the only terms they understood, is common now in ufological circles, but it is, in my view, to see things the wrong way around. In other words, while they actually did think they were writing about what were, to them, perfectly comprehensible religious experiences, we, in our irreligious age, prefer to reinterpret these by now strange-sounding phenomena in terms that make more sense to us.
Similarly, just because a modern government admits it has records of what appear to be unidentified aerial phenomena, we cannot necessarily assume that that government is admitting we are being visited by alien spacecraft. That's to misunderstand the mindset of government. At most they are saying they have records of aerial phenomena that are not fully understood, and require identification. The key part of the term "Unidentified Flying Objects" is the "unidentified" – not the "flying objects".
Anyway, the earlier thread I'm referring to is here:
Is the tale of Magonia and the sky sailors attested beyond the work of Abogard?