Medieval UFOs? The Story of the "Flying Ship" over Ireland
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In the middle of the 8th century CE, a small flotilla of “flying” ships were seen in the skies over Ireland, and a story soon began circulating around Western Europe that one of the sailors “swam” down to the people below. There are at least seven different versions of this story, with different details, but all share a few core elements, and play to the same metaphysical themes. Like other sightings of UFOs, the story of the flying ship compels us to believe in a race of “higher” beings from a world beyond our own, and calls attention to our human limitations.
The Irish Tradition
The earliest references to flying ships over the British Isles are found in four Irish annals - or brief, year-by-year historical records of major events. There is also a mention in some manuscripts of The Book of Invasions, first compiled in the 11th century. The references in the annals - apparently recorded contemporaneously with the events - state variously that there were sightings in 743, 744, and 748 CE.(1) Only the Annals of Ulster, however, which date the sighting to 748, mention a location. The entry places the event at Clonmacnoise, a borough and monastery on the River Shannon that remained one of the leading centers of learning and culture in Ireland for the next 600 years.(2) However, an off-hand remark on a separate incident in the 12th-century Book of Leinster states that “three ships voyaging in the air” were seen over an assembly for the Tailteann games during the reign of King Domnall, which began in 743.(3) Like Clonmacnoise, Tailteann - now called Teltown - was also a site of great importance in Ireland, named for Tailtiu, a local goddess who is said to have died from exhaustion after clearing the Irish plains for agriculture.(4) Teltown is also the site of several iron-age earthworks.(5) However, none of the annals mention Teltown as the setting.
Between 1074 and 1084, Patrick, Bishop of Dublin wrote a poem that lists a number of marvels in Irish legend, with a further embellished version of the Teltown story.(6) Patrick says only that an unspecified king at an unspecified assembly saw a ship “glide through the air,” but adds that a man on that ship then cast a spear at a fish and missed. The spear fell to the ground, prompting the man to swim down through the air to recover it, as if he were underwater.(7) Aristotle’s writings on natural philosophy - the foundation of Medieval physics - held that the atmosphere was sharply divided into three regions of vastly different densities. Given this, it would not be unreasonable to assume that a lighter being of the upper atmosphere would have to “swim” through our denser air like humans swim through water.(8)
A fuller account of this same story comes in the 14th-century Book of Ballymote, itself derived from the 12th-century Book of Glendalough.(9) A corroborating - and much abridged - account is also found in the Irish version of the Historica Britonum. This version of events once again establishes the setting as the Teltown fair, but dates the incident to the reign of Conghalach Cnoghbha, the High King of Ireland from 944 to 956 CE. However, none of the Irish annals mention sightings of flying ships in Conghalach’s reign, and there is evidence that the Tailteann games had ceased to be held under his predecessor.(10) Historian John Carey has suggested that the name of the king and the date of the incident were both deliberately changed for political reasons. It’s likely that the incident - if ever one occurred - took place in the middle of the 8th century, as the annals attest.
In this version, it’s claimed that Conghalach "perceived a ship in the air,” with a few crew members on an open deck. One of the sailors threw a fishing spear at a salmon - perhaps a cooked one at the feast, perhaps a live one in the nearby blackwater river, or perhaps even one spotted in the air - the text does not specify. When the spear missed the fish and fell in the midst of the fair, its castor dove from the ship's deck and swam down to get it. As the sailor grabbed the top of the spear, a man on the ground grabbed it at the bottom end. "You are drowning me!" cried the sailor, and Conghalach ordered that his captor let him go, allowing him to "swim" back up to the ship.(11)
This account establishes several key plot points common to all later versions of the story: a ship in the sky drops an object before an assembly of people, so a sailor descends to our level to retrieve it before being apprehended by the crowd. After a struggle with his captors, the sailor either drowns, or is released after a human authority warns that he will drown, and the ship flies away. These tropes endured, but many of the details changed in later versions.
Later Variants
A significant mutation of the story of the flying ship can be found in a manuscript collection of monastic legends located in the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, Scotland. In this version of events, the clergy of Clonmacnoise were assembled at the monastery when they saw a ship in the sky above, which then dropped its anchor. As the anchor landed in the clergy’s midst, they seized it, prompting “a man from the ship” to come down, “swimming as if through water.” When the man reached the anchor, the clerics seized him, too. At this point, the man exclaimed, “for God’s sake let me go! For you are drowning me,” then released himself and swam away with the anchor. Carey has argued that this telling is a deliberately altered version of that contained in the Book of Ballymote that likely dates to the 12th century.(12) The addition of an anchor, he suggests, indicates a conflation with another Irish legend about a group of sailors dropping their anchor in the ocean and discovering that it struck the oratory of an inhabited, underwater monastery.(13)
Another variation of the story is found in the work of Geoffroy du Breuil, a twelfth-century chronicler and abbot of Vigeois, France. Sometime between 1170 and 1184, Geoffroi wrote a history of a Cenobitic Monastic community in which he claimed that the people of London saw a ship in the sky that dropped its anchor in the middle of the city.(14) Once again, a “sailor” leapt off the ship and dislodged the anchor, only to be captured by the people of London and “drowned in water,” presumably in the River Thames.(15) This is the sole version of the story in which the captors deliberately kill the sailor, and it’s likely that Geoffroy misinterpreted a source which claimed that the sailor drowned as if in water, or warned that he would drown in the air if not released.
The next to mention the story of the flying ship is Gervase of Tilbury, an English cleric and statesman who served in the court of Otto of Brunswick of the Holy Roman Empire. In his Otia Imperialia, a kind of survey book for his benefactor published around 1211, Gervase gives what’s now the most well-known variant of the story.(16) After mass on a holy day, the congregation of an unspecified church in Britain saw an anchor fixed to a stone tomb in the churchyard, with its cable stretched tight up to the clouds. The people saw the rope moving as though being pulled from above, and they even heard muffled voices through the clouds. Then, a man came climbing down the rope hand over hand, with his legs dangling below him. While attempting to free the anchor, the man was seized by some bystanders, and died after a brief struggle, “stifled by the breath of our gross air as a shipwrecked mariner is stifled in the sea,” to use Gervase’s words. After an hour, the rope fell to the ground as if cut from above, leaving the anchor where it lay.(17)
The final variation on the story of the flying ship comes in an Old Norse text intended for the Norwegian King, written around 1250. The Konungs skuggsjá or the King’s Mirror relocates the event to Clonmacnoise.(18) One Sunday, a mass at a church dedicated to St. Ciarán was interrupted when an anchor was dropped from the sky “as if thrown from a ship,” lodging itself in the arch above the church door. The congregation rushed outside to see a ship with several “men” on board at the other end of the rope. One of these men dove overboard, and “swam” down to the ground in an apparent attempt to release the anchor. The author states explicitly that the “movements of his hands and feet and all his actions appeared like those of a man swimming in the water.” As he was trying to free the anchor, the assembled crowd rushed in to grab him. However, the bishop of Clonmacnoise ordered the people to release the man, as he worried that his containment at ground level “might prove fatal as when one is held under water.” Once released, the man then swam back up to the ship before the crew cut the rope and sailed away.(19) Once again, they left the anchor, which was said to remain in place at the time of the source’s writing, though there is no trace of it today.
Historical UFOs
Though none of the accounts of the Irish flying ship agree completely, there are enough common elements to suggest that all derived from a single event - or perhaps two events - that occurred in the middle of the 8th century CE. The event or events may have simply been the sighting of three manned ships in the sky, or they may have involved a “sailor” throwing a spear to the ground and swimming down to retrieve it. All later variations of the story, and all of those that mention anchors, appear to be corruptions of the original records, mixed with existing legend.
But these stories were not the first or only of their kind. The sixteenth-century scholar, Stefano Breventano, noted that there were “celestial ships” seen over Rome in 215 BCE, on the verge of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy.(20) Around 815 CE, Agobard, the Spanish-born archbishop of Lyon, wrote a treatise "On Hail and Thunder," in which he lamented the fact that so many Franks believed that human wizards, or Tempestarii, could summon storms by magic.(21) He added that it was also widely believed that there existed a realm above the clouds called Magonia, inhabited by human-like beings with flying ships. It was said that the Magonians had an agreement with the tempestarii, in which they paid them to summon violent storms over the countryside, then sailed over the path of destruction, plundering the harvest of the hail-battered crops. Agobard even claimed that some people once presented him with four shackled captives that had allegedly fallen from a Mogonian ship, imploring him to have them executed.(22)
The sky people - later called sylphs by the 16th-century Swiss theologian, Paracelsus - made frequent appearances in early modern popular art and literature, where they were often portrayed in association with demons and stormy weather.(23) What’s more, in 1896 and 7, there were thousands of sightings of “mystery airships'' over the continental United States. People saw a variety of fantastical contrivances, including flapping wings, downward-facing propellers, and even open-deck ships. On April 28, 1897, the Houston Daily Post reported on an eerily familiar event alleged to have occurred in the new railroad town of Merkel, Texas. A small crowd was returning from church on a Sunday when they saw an anchor being dragged along the ground, pulled by a rope from the sky. As the anchor was pulled across the railroad, it got caught on a rail, at which point the people gathered were able to see that the rope was suspended from what appeared to be a flying craft with several lit windows and a headlight. A small man in a blue sailor’s uniform climbed down the rope and cut it with a knife, freeing the craft to sail off into the northeast. The anchor was said to be on display at a local blacksmith’s shop, but like the anchors in the 12th-century versions of the story, no trace of it now remains.(24)
All of these alleged incidents are properly classified as UFO sightings, but how exactly they relate to modern reports of silver saucers and balls of light is an open question. There are many aesthetic differences between the flying ships over Ireland and the sleek metal discs seen in the 1950s, for example, and there are major methodological difficulties in comparing reports from such vastly different times and places. However, all sightings of sky ships before the 20th century involved flying craft that appeared very similar to transportation technologies already common at the time, but also exhibited a previously unattained capacity for flight. For example, all of the Medieval flying ships appeared to be floating on the top of our region of air in the same way that ships float on water, and yet, they appeared to represent the accomplishment of lighter-than-air flight, later achieved with hot air balloons. The mystery airships of the late 1890s displayed a mix of failed 19th-century mechanisms for generating lift, and yet appeared to represent the accomplishment of heavier-than-air flight, later achieved with airplanes. Only in the 1940s and 50s, as humanity took its first steps towards leaving the planet, did UFOs appear to represent the accomplishment of interplanetary flight, later achieved by unmanned drones.
Analysis
True or not, the stories of the flying ship over Ireland are all quite rich in symbolism. As Clive Hart surmised in his book, The Prehistory of Flight,
In the middle of the 8th century CE, a small flotilla of “flying” ships were seen in the skies over Ireland, and a story soon began circulating around Western Europe that one of the sailors “swam” down to the people below. There are at least seven different versions of this story, with different details, but all share a few core elements, and play to the same metaphysical themes. Like other sightings of UFOs, the story of the flying ship compels us to believe in a race of “higher” beings from a world beyond our own, and calls attention to our human limitations.
The Irish Tradition
The earliest references to flying ships over the British Isles are found in four Irish annals - or brief, year-by-year historical records of major events. There is also a mention in some manuscripts of The Book of Invasions, first compiled in the 11th century. The references in the annals - apparently recorded contemporaneously with the events - state variously that there were sightings in 743, 744, and 748 CE.(1) Only the Annals of Ulster, however, which date the sighting to 748, mention a location. The entry places the event at Clonmacnoise, a borough and monastery on the River Shannon that remained one of the leading centers of learning and culture in Ireland for the next 600 years.(2) However, an off-hand remark on a separate incident in the 12th-century Book of Leinster states that “three ships voyaging in the air” were seen over an assembly for the Tailteann games during the reign of King Domnall, which began in 743.(3) Like Clonmacnoise, Tailteann - now called Teltown - was also a site of great importance in Ireland, named for Tailtiu, a local goddess who is said to have died from exhaustion after clearing the Irish plains for agriculture.(4) Teltown is also the site of several iron-age earthworks.(5) However, none of the annals mention Teltown as the setting.
Between 1074 and 1084, Patrick, Bishop of Dublin wrote a poem that lists a number of marvels in Irish legend, with a further embellished version of the Teltown story.(6) Patrick says only that an unspecified king at an unspecified assembly saw a ship “glide through the air,” but adds that a man on that ship then cast a spear at a fish and missed. The spear fell to the ground, prompting the man to swim down through the air to recover it, as if he were underwater.(7) Aristotle’s writings on natural philosophy - the foundation of Medieval physics - held that the atmosphere was sharply divided into three regions of vastly different densities. Given this, it would not be unreasonable to assume that a lighter being of the upper atmosphere would have to “swim” through our denser air like humans swim through water.(8)
A fuller account of this same story comes in the 14th-century Book of Ballymote, itself derived from the 12th-century Book of Glendalough.(9) A corroborating - and much abridged - account is also found in the Irish version of the Historica Britonum. This version of events once again establishes the setting as the Teltown fair, but dates the incident to the reign of Conghalach Cnoghbha, the High King of Ireland from 944 to 956 CE. However, none of the Irish annals mention sightings of flying ships in Conghalach’s reign, and there is evidence that the Tailteann games had ceased to be held under his predecessor.(10) Historian John Carey has suggested that the name of the king and the date of the incident were both deliberately changed for political reasons. It’s likely that the incident - if ever one occurred - took place in the middle of the 8th century, as the annals attest.
In this version, it’s claimed that Conghalach "perceived a ship in the air,” with a few crew members on an open deck. One of the sailors threw a fishing spear at a salmon - perhaps a cooked one at the feast, perhaps a live one in the nearby blackwater river, or perhaps even one spotted in the air - the text does not specify. When the spear missed the fish and fell in the midst of the fair, its castor dove from the ship's deck and swam down to get it. As the sailor grabbed the top of the spear, a man on the ground grabbed it at the bottom end. "You are drowning me!" cried the sailor, and Conghalach ordered that his captor let him go, allowing him to "swim" back up to the ship.(11)
This account establishes several key plot points common to all later versions of the story: a ship in the sky drops an object before an assembly of people, so a sailor descends to our level to retrieve it before being apprehended by the crowd. After a struggle with his captors, the sailor either drowns, or is released after a human authority warns that he will drown, and the ship flies away. These tropes endured, but many of the details changed in later versions.
Later Variants
A significant mutation of the story of the flying ship can be found in a manuscript collection of monastic legends located in the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, Scotland. In this version of events, the clergy of Clonmacnoise were assembled at the monastery when they saw a ship in the sky above, which then dropped its anchor. As the anchor landed in the clergy’s midst, they seized it, prompting “a man from the ship” to come down, “swimming as if through water.” When the man reached the anchor, the clerics seized him, too. At this point, the man exclaimed, “for God’s sake let me go! For you are drowning me,” then released himself and swam away with the anchor. Carey has argued that this telling is a deliberately altered version of that contained in the Book of Ballymote that likely dates to the 12th century.(12) The addition of an anchor, he suggests, indicates a conflation with another Irish legend about a group of sailors dropping their anchor in the ocean and discovering that it struck the oratory of an inhabited, underwater monastery.(13)
Another variation of the story is found in the work of Geoffroy du Breuil, a twelfth-century chronicler and abbot of Vigeois, France. Sometime between 1170 and 1184, Geoffroi wrote a history of a Cenobitic Monastic community in which he claimed that the people of London saw a ship in the sky that dropped its anchor in the middle of the city.(14) Once again, a “sailor” leapt off the ship and dislodged the anchor, only to be captured by the people of London and “drowned in water,” presumably in the River Thames.(15) This is the sole version of the story in which the captors deliberately kill the sailor, and it’s likely that Geoffroy misinterpreted a source which claimed that the sailor drowned as if in water, or warned that he would drown in the air if not released.
The next to mention the story of the flying ship is Gervase of Tilbury, an English cleric and statesman who served in the court of Otto of Brunswick of the Holy Roman Empire. In his Otia Imperialia, a kind of survey book for his benefactor published around 1211, Gervase gives what’s now the most well-known variant of the story.(16) After mass on a holy day, the congregation of an unspecified church in Britain saw an anchor fixed to a stone tomb in the churchyard, with its cable stretched tight up to the clouds. The people saw the rope moving as though being pulled from above, and they even heard muffled voices through the clouds. Then, a man came climbing down the rope hand over hand, with his legs dangling below him. While attempting to free the anchor, the man was seized by some bystanders, and died after a brief struggle, “stifled by the breath of our gross air as a shipwrecked mariner is stifled in the sea,” to use Gervase’s words. After an hour, the rope fell to the ground as if cut from above, leaving the anchor where it lay.(17)
The final variation on the story of the flying ship comes in an Old Norse text intended for the Norwegian King, written around 1250. The Konungs skuggsjá or the King’s Mirror relocates the event to Clonmacnoise.(18) One Sunday, a mass at a church dedicated to St. Ciarán was interrupted when an anchor was dropped from the sky “as if thrown from a ship,” lodging itself in the arch above the church door. The congregation rushed outside to see a ship with several “men” on board at the other end of the rope. One of these men dove overboard, and “swam” down to the ground in an apparent attempt to release the anchor. The author states explicitly that the “movements of his hands and feet and all his actions appeared like those of a man swimming in the water.” As he was trying to free the anchor, the assembled crowd rushed in to grab him. However, the bishop of Clonmacnoise ordered the people to release the man, as he worried that his containment at ground level “might prove fatal as when one is held under water.” Once released, the man then swam back up to the ship before the crew cut the rope and sailed away.(19) Once again, they left the anchor, which was said to remain in place at the time of the source’s writing, though there is no trace of it today.
Historical UFOs
Though none of the accounts of the Irish flying ship agree completely, there are enough common elements to suggest that all derived from a single event - or perhaps two events - that occurred in the middle of the 8th century CE. The event or events may have simply been the sighting of three manned ships in the sky, or they may have involved a “sailor” throwing a spear to the ground and swimming down to retrieve it. All later variations of the story, and all of those that mention anchors, appear to be corruptions of the original records, mixed with existing legend.
But these stories were not the first or only of their kind. The sixteenth-century scholar, Stefano Breventano, noted that there were “celestial ships” seen over Rome in 215 BCE, on the verge of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy.(20) Around 815 CE, Agobard, the Spanish-born archbishop of Lyon, wrote a treatise "On Hail and Thunder," in which he lamented the fact that so many Franks believed that human wizards, or Tempestarii, could summon storms by magic.(21) He added that it was also widely believed that there existed a realm above the clouds called Magonia, inhabited by human-like beings with flying ships. It was said that the Magonians had an agreement with the tempestarii, in which they paid them to summon violent storms over the countryside, then sailed over the path of destruction, plundering the harvest of the hail-battered crops. Agobard even claimed that some people once presented him with four shackled captives that had allegedly fallen from a Mogonian ship, imploring him to have them executed.(22)
The sky people - later called sylphs by the 16th-century Swiss theologian, Paracelsus - made frequent appearances in early modern popular art and literature, where they were often portrayed in association with demons and stormy weather.(23) What’s more, in 1896 and 7, there were thousands of sightings of “mystery airships'' over the continental United States. People saw a variety of fantastical contrivances, including flapping wings, downward-facing propellers, and even open-deck ships. On April 28, 1897, the Houston Daily Post reported on an eerily familiar event alleged to have occurred in the new railroad town of Merkel, Texas. A small crowd was returning from church on a Sunday when they saw an anchor being dragged along the ground, pulled by a rope from the sky. As the anchor was pulled across the railroad, it got caught on a rail, at which point the people gathered were able to see that the rope was suspended from what appeared to be a flying craft with several lit windows and a headlight. A small man in a blue sailor’s uniform climbed down the rope and cut it with a knife, freeing the craft to sail off into the northeast. The anchor was said to be on display at a local blacksmith’s shop, but like the anchors in the 12th-century versions of the story, no trace of it now remains.(24)
All of these alleged incidents are properly classified as UFO sightings, but how exactly they relate to modern reports of silver saucers and balls of light is an open question. There are many aesthetic differences between the flying ships over Ireland and the sleek metal discs seen in the 1950s, for example, and there are major methodological difficulties in comparing reports from such vastly different times and places. However, all sightings of sky ships before the 20th century involved flying craft that appeared very similar to transportation technologies already common at the time, but also exhibited a previously unattained capacity for flight. For example, all of the Medieval flying ships appeared to be floating on the top of our region of air in the same way that ships float on water, and yet, they appeared to represent the accomplishment of lighter-than-air flight, later achieved with hot air balloons. The mystery airships of the late 1890s displayed a mix of failed 19th-century mechanisms for generating lift, and yet appeared to represent the accomplishment of heavier-than-air flight, later achieved with airplanes. Only in the 1940s and 50s, as humanity took its first steps towards leaving the planet, did UFOs appear to represent the accomplishment of interplanetary flight, later achieved by unmanned drones.
Analysis
True or not, the stories of the flying ship over Ireland are all quite rich in symbolism. As Clive Hart surmised in his book, The Prehistory of Flight,
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most dreams of flight take us, potentially, away from earthly bounds, set us free from earthly bonds. The flying ship, on the other hand, comes to us; and, in the typical story, it is briefly ensnared by our mundane entanglements. A tombstone (death) or a church door (established moral law) momentarily restrains the freedom of the fliers. The bond is quickly broken, but while it lasts we have a hurried opportunity to establish contact. Above and below are linked, as they were in the dream of Jacob's ladder, allowing human access through the medium of air to the heavenly regions.(25)
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John Carey added that these stories illustrated “the transgression of our habitual ideas of human space,” a common theme in early Irish literature.(26) The Celtic scholar, Proinsias Mac Cana claimed that all the different versions of this story show that monastics were “experimenting imaginatively with the inversions of reality implicit in the whole concept of the Otherworld,” and exploring “the relationship between the natural and the supernatural” as well as the “relativities of time and space which were implicit in their interaction.”(27)
Real or imagined, all of these encounters seem to have had the function of compelling the witnesses, as well as those who heard their stories, to accept the existence of "higher," less physical beings who inhabited a world that was literally and figuratively “above” our own. Although the stories of the flying ship showed that these beings could occasionally penetrate the barrier to our world below, they also served to reinforce the hierarchy that divided us from them. The beings from this higher level of existence were unable to survive in the lower, cruder air that we breathed on earth, not to mention the fact that humans seemed decidedly hostile to their passing through. Every version of the story from the 12th century on involves a sailor fighting off human attackers while frantically trying to detach himself from a thing of worldly importance - at risk of his life.
Hart suggests that these stories would have reminded Medieval peoples of their “inevitable bondage” to the Earth, though he also speculates that they might also have spurred fourteenth century thinkers like Albert of Saxony and Nicole Oresme to consider the physical possibility of a “flying” ship. Both writers imagined, for the first time in Western history, that a manned vessel could float on the boundaries between the first two layers of the atmosphere much as a nautical ship sails on the surface of the water.(28) After all, this is exactly how it was implied that the ships sailed in the Medieval stories.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ufologists Jacques Vallées and John Keel first pioneered the theory that UFOs changed their form, or our perception of their form, according to the witnesses’ cultural expectations, and exhibited technologies that evolved in step with humanity’s cutting edge. In other words, the content of UFO sightings is always constructed within the cultural and technological frame of reference of the witnesses, and plays to the belief systems already established in the witnesses’ culture. Certainly, the stories of sky ships over Ireland were distinctly Medieval in nature, but they may have some deeper connection to the wider UFO phenomenon.
Summary
Whether real or imagined, the many stories of flying ships over Ireland, and the fleeting connection between the earth and sky, served to reinforce many aspects of the Medieval European cosmology. The stories seemed to reinforce the idea that humankind was bound to earth, and could only catch passing glimpses of the higher, spiritual realms, as well as the freedom of the open skies. It also compelled Medieval Christians to accept the reality of “higher” beings in the heavens, or upper atmosphere, who could occasionally enter our world below. If nothing else, these stories kept people talking about flying ships for most of the middle ages, and may have prompted the first serious discussions of lighter-than-air craft.
Notes:
1) John Carey, “Aerial ships and underwater monasteries: the evolution of a monastic marvel,”
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 12 (1992), 16.
2) The event is listed under the year 749, but the annals were a year ahead of modern dating at this point: Annals of Ulster (Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition), compiled by Pádraig Bambury, Stephen Beechinor, trans. Mac Airt & Mac Niocaill. Accessed May 21, 2021: https://celt.ucc.ie//published/T100001A/index.html.
3) The telling in the Book of Leinster, like that in the Book of Invasions, does not mention any men onboard the ships. All versions in the four annals mention men; This telling was likely derived from that in the Book of Invasions. Carey. “Aerial ships,” 16.
4) See the overview of Teltown’s history by the Navan and District Historical Society, accessed May 21, 2021: http://navanhistory.ie/index.php?page=teltown.
5) A range of anomalistic phenomena, including UFOs and crop circles, are thought to cluster around sites of great significance in the ancient world.
6) From his poem, De mirabilibus Hibernie (On the Wonders of Ireland), translated by J. J. Cohen and quoted in Cohen, “Seamus Heaney, and Ships that Sail the Air,” In the Middle: peace love & the middle ages, uploaded September 1, 2013, accessed May 21, 2021: https://inthemedievalmiddle.com/2013/09/seamus-heaney-and-ships-that-sail-air.html.
7) Carey. “Aerial ships,” 17.
8) It is significant that in this telling, the man aboard the ship was apparently trying to catch a salmon: in the Fenian cycle of Irish mythology, the central hero, Fionn mac Cumhaill, is said to have gained all the knowledge of the world after tasting the fat from this Salmon. Another legendary hero, Fintan mac Bóchra, who is said to have accompanied Noah’s granddaughter to Ireland, transformed into a Salmon to survive the biblical flood. He lived for another 5500 years after changing back into a man, and he advised all of Ireland’s earliest kings. To the 10th-century Irish, the Salmon of Knowledge was a potent symbol of the old and wise.
9) There is a controversy over the identification of the Book of Glendalough, but some scholars identify it with Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B 502, written c. 1130; Carey. “Aerial ships,” 17.
10) Carey, “Aerial ships,” 18.
11) Carey, “Aerial ships,” 17. The translation is Carey’s; Leabhar breathnach annso sis, The Irish Version of the Historia Britonum of Nennius, edited, with a translation and notes, by James Henthorn Todd, D.D., M.R.I.A. (DublinL Irish Archaeological Society, 1848), 211, 213; There is also a brief reference to the alleged sighting in the Religquiæ Antiquæ: scraps from Ancient Manuscripts, illustrating chiefly Early English Literature and the English Language, ed. Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell (London: John Russell Smith, 1845), 106.
12) Carey, “Aerial ships,” 18 - 19.
13) Carey. “Aerial ships,” 24.
14) Geoffroy du Breuil, Chronica Gaufredi Coenobitae, quoted in Philippe Labbe and René Rapin, Novae bibliothecae manuscriptorum librorum tomus primus [-secundus]. Rerum aquitanicarum, praesertim bituricensium, uberrima collectio / ... nunc primum ex mss. variarum bibliothecarum codicibus eruta, copiose ac plena manu repraesentans, opera ac studio Philippi Labbe,... (Parisiis, 1657), 299 - 300. Accessed on Gallica, May 21, 2021: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6344291s/f327.item.
15) “Navis sursum, in aëre, velut nauta (natans) in aequore visa est in Anglia, iactâ anchorâ urbis in medio à civibus Londoniarum impeditur. Mittitur à nautis quidam, qui solverer anchoram, sed retentus à pluribus, qui mersus aquis exspiravit. Clamantes nautæ aëra denuò sulcant, fune anchoræ secto.” Du Labbe and Rapin, Novae bibliothecae, 300: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6344291s/f307.image.
16) Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Annotated Edition, 2002), 81.
17) Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, 81.
18) The King's mirror (Speculum regale - Konungs Skuggsjà), trans. Laurence Marcellus Larson (London: Oxford University Press, 1917), 116 - 117.
19) The King's mirror, 117.
20) Stefano Breventano, trattato delle impressioni dell'aere, raccolto da varij autori di filosofia (Pavia: Bartoli Girolamo, 1571), 8; Clive Hart, The Prehistory of Flight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 186.
21) Agobard, Agobardus. 0901-1000. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Départment des Manuscrits. Latin 2853: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8572244q/f193.item.zoom. An English Translation is available in Fordham University’s Medieval Sourcebook: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/Agobard-OnHailandThunder.asp.
22) “They believe and say that there is a certain region, which is called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds. In these ships the crops that fell because of hail and were lost in storms are carried back into that region; evidently these aerial sailors make a payment to the storm-makers, and take the grain and other crops. Among those so blinded with profound stupidity that they believe these things could happen we have seen many people in a kind of meeting, exhibiting four captives, three men and one woman, as if they had fallen from these very ships. As I have said, they exhibited these four, who had been chained up for some days, with such a meeting finally assembling in our presence, as if these captives ought to be stoned. But when truth had prevailed, however, after much argument, the people who had exhibited the captives, in accordance with the prophecy (Jeremiah 2:26) "were confounded … as the thief is confounded when he is taken."”: Translated by W. J. Lewis from the Latin text in p. 3-15 of Agobardi Lugdunensis Opera Omnia, edidit L. Van Acker. Turnholt: Brepols, 1981 (Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis, 52), quoted in Fordham University’s Medieval Sourcebook: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/Agobard-OnHailandThunder.asp.
23) Hart, Prehistory of Flight, 186 - 7. There is also a brief retelling of the story of the flying ship in a 13th-century manuscript on the Wonders of Ireland, MS. Cotton. Titus, D. xxiv. fol. 74, v०. The manuscript was first published by Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell, eds, Reliquiae antiquae II (London: John Russell Smith, 1845), 106.
24) Houston Daily Post, Houston, Texas, April 28, 1897, page 5. The article is reproduced in full in Michael Busby, Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2004), 215. Just over a week prior to the Merkel incident, a prominent citizen or Leroy, Kansas, named Alexander Hamilton claimed to have had an encounter with a zeppelin-like ship that threw a slipknot around the neck of one of his cattle, and got the rope stuck in a wire fence. Hamilton’s story is controversial, however, and some historians, ufologists, and debunkers have claimed to have found proof it was a hoax. For an overview of the “Cownapping” story and the controversy surrounding it, see Daniel Cohen, The Great Airship Mystery (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981), 92 - 95, 97 - 102.
25) Hart, Prehistory of Flight, 184.
26) Carey, “Aerial ships,” 24.
27) Proinsias Mac Cana, quoted in Carey, “Aerial ships,” 24.
28) Hart, Prehistory of Flight, 188 - 93.
Primary Sources:
Agobard, Agobardus. 0901-1000. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Départment des Manuscrits. Latin 2853: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8572244q/f193.item.zoom.
An English Translation is available in Fordham University’s Medieval Sourcebook: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/Agobard-OnHailandThunder.asp.
Annals of Ulster (Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition). Compiled by Pádraig Bambury, Stephen Beechinor, trans. Mac Airt & Mac Niocaill. Accessed May 21, 2021: https://celt.ucc.ie//published/T100001A/index.html.
Breventano, Stefano. trattato delle impressioni dell'aere, raccolto da varij autori di filosofia. Pavia: Bartoli Girolamo, 1571.
Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Annotated Edition, 2002.
Houston Daily Post. Houston, Texas. April 28, 1897.
Labbe, Philippe and René Rapin. Novae bibliothecae manuscriptorum librorum tomus primus [-secundus]. Rerum aquitanicarum, praesertim bituricensium, uberrima collectio / ... nunc primum ex mss. variarum bibliothecarum codicibus eruta, copiose ac plena manu repraesentans, opera ac studio Philippi Labbe,... . Parisiis, 1657: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6344291s/f327.item.
Leabhar breathnach annso sis, The Irish Version of the Historia Britonum of Nennius. Ed. trans. James Henthorn Todd, D.D., M.R.I.A.. Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1848.
Reliquiæ Antiquæ: scraps from Ancient Manuscripts, illustrating chiefly Early English Literature and the English Language. Ed. Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell. London: John Russell Smith, 1845.
The King's mirror (Speculum regale - Konungs Skuggsjà), trans. Laurence Marcellus Larson. London: Oxford University Press, 1917.
Secondary Sources:
Busby, Michael. Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2004.
Carey, John. “Aerial ships and underwater monasteries: the evolution of a monastic marvel.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 12 (1992), pp. 16–28.
Cohen, Daniel. The Great Airship Mystery. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981.
Cohen, J. J. “Seamus Heaney and Ships that Sail the Air.” In the Middle: Peace, Love & the Middle Ages, uploaded September 1, 2013: https://inthemedievalmiddle.com/2013/09/seamus-heaney-and-ships-that-sail-air.html.
Hart, Clive. The Prehistory of Flight. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
This video uses sound effects downloaded from stockmusic.com.
Support new videos on Patreon: https://patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Research by Jason Charbonneau. Illustrations by V. R. Laurence. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
Real or imagined, all of these encounters seem to have had the function of compelling the witnesses, as well as those who heard their stories, to accept the existence of "higher," less physical beings who inhabited a world that was literally and figuratively “above” our own. Although the stories of the flying ship showed that these beings could occasionally penetrate the barrier to our world below, they also served to reinforce the hierarchy that divided us from them. The beings from this higher level of existence were unable to survive in the lower, cruder air that we breathed on earth, not to mention the fact that humans seemed decidedly hostile to their passing through. Every version of the story from the 12th century on involves a sailor fighting off human attackers while frantically trying to detach himself from a thing of worldly importance - at risk of his life.
Hart suggests that these stories would have reminded Medieval peoples of their “inevitable bondage” to the Earth, though he also speculates that they might also have spurred fourteenth century thinkers like Albert of Saxony and Nicole Oresme to consider the physical possibility of a “flying” ship. Both writers imagined, for the first time in Western history, that a manned vessel could float on the boundaries between the first two layers of the atmosphere much as a nautical ship sails on the surface of the water.(28) After all, this is exactly how it was implied that the ships sailed in the Medieval stories.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ufologists Jacques Vallées and John Keel first pioneered the theory that UFOs changed their form, or our perception of their form, according to the witnesses’ cultural expectations, and exhibited technologies that evolved in step with humanity’s cutting edge. In other words, the content of UFO sightings is always constructed within the cultural and technological frame of reference of the witnesses, and plays to the belief systems already established in the witnesses’ culture. Certainly, the stories of sky ships over Ireland were distinctly Medieval in nature, but they may have some deeper connection to the wider UFO phenomenon.
Summary
Whether real or imagined, the many stories of flying ships over Ireland, and the fleeting connection between the earth and sky, served to reinforce many aspects of the Medieval European cosmology. The stories seemed to reinforce the idea that humankind was bound to earth, and could only catch passing glimpses of the higher, spiritual realms, as well as the freedom of the open skies. It also compelled Medieval Christians to accept the reality of “higher” beings in the heavens, or upper atmosphere, who could occasionally enter our world below. If nothing else, these stories kept people talking about flying ships for most of the middle ages, and may have prompted the first serious discussions of lighter-than-air craft.
Notes:
1) John Carey, “Aerial ships and underwater monasteries: the evolution of a monastic marvel,”
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 12 (1992), 16.
2) The event is listed under the year 749, but the annals were a year ahead of modern dating at this point: Annals of Ulster (Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition), compiled by Pádraig Bambury, Stephen Beechinor, trans. Mac Airt & Mac Niocaill. Accessed May 21, 2021: https://celt.ucc.ie//published/T100001A/index.html.
3) The telling in the Book of Leinster, like that in the Book of Invasions, does not mention any men onboard the ships. All versions in the four annals mention men; This telling was likely derived from that in the Book of Invasions. Carey. “Aerial ships,” 16.
4) See the overview of Teltown’s history by the Navan and District Historical Society, accessed May 21, 2021: http://navanhistory.ie/index.php?page=teltown.
5) A range of anomalistic phenomena, including UFOs and crop circles, are thought to cluster around sites of great significance in the ancient world.
6) From his poem, De mirabilibus Hibernie (On the Wonders of Ireland), translated by J. J. Cohen and quoted in Cohen, “Seamus Heaney, and Ships that Sail the Air,” In the Middle: peace love & the middle ages, uploaded September 1, 2013, accessed May 21, 2021: https://inthemedievalmiddle.com/2013/09/seamus-heaney-and-ships-that-sail-air.html.
7) Carey. “Aerial ships,” 17.
8) It is significant that in this telling, the man aboard the ship was apparently trying to catch a salmon: in the Fenian cycle of Irish mythology, the central hero, Fionn mac Cumhaill, is said to have gained all the knowledge of the world after tasting the fat from this Salmon. Another legendary hero, Fintan mac Bóchra, who is said to have accompanied Noah’s granddaughter to Ireland, transformed into a Salmon to survive the biblical flood. He lived for another 5500 years after changing back into a man, and he advised all of Ireland’s earliest kings. To the 10th-century Irish, the Salmon of Knowledge was a potent symbol of the old and wise.
9) There is a controversy over the identification of the Book of Glendalough, but some scholars identify it with Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B 502, written c. 1130; Carey. “Aerial ships,” 17.
10) Carey, “Aerial ships,” 18.
11) Carey, “Aerial ships,” 17. The translation is Carey’s; Leabhar breathnach annso sis, The Irish Version of the Historia Britonum of Nennius, edited, with a translation and notes, by James Henthorn Todd, D.D., M.R.I.A. (DublinL Irish Archaeological Society, 1848), 211, 213; There is also a brief reference to the alleged sighting in the Religquiæ Antiquæ: scraps from Ancient Manuscripts, illustrating chiefly Early English Literature and the English Language, ed. Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell (London: John Russell Smith, 1845), 106.
12) Carey, “Aerial ships,” 18 - 19.
13) Carey. “Aerial ships,” 24.
14) Geoffroy du Breuil, Chronica Gaufredi Coenobitae, quoted in Philippe Labbe and René Rapin, Novae bibliothecae manuscriptorum librorum tomus primus [-secundus]. Rerum aquitanicarum, praesertim bituricensium, uberrima collectio / ... nunc primum ex mss. variarum bibliothecarum codicibus eruta, copiose ac plena manu repraesentans, opera ac studio Philippi Labbe,... (Parisiis, 1657), 299 - 300. Accessed on Gallica, May 21, 2021: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6344291s/f327.item.
15) “Navis sursum, in aëre, velut nauta (natans) in aequore visa est in Anglia, iactâ anchorâ urbis in medio à civibus Londoniarum impeditur. Mittitur à nautis quidam, qui solverer anchoram, sed retentus à pluribus, qui mersus aquis exspiravit. Clamantes nautæ aëra denuò sulcant, fune anchoræ secto.” Du Labbe and Rapin, Novae bibliothecae, 300: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6344291s/f307.image.
16) Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Annotated Edition, 2002), 81.
17) Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, 81.
18) The King's mirror (Speculum regale - Konungs Skuggsjà), trans. Laurence Marcellus Larson (London: Oxford University Press, 1917), 116 - 117.
19) The King's mirror, 117.
20) Stefano Breventano, trattato delle impressioni dell'aere, raccolto da varij autori di filosofia (Pavia: Bartoli Girolamo, 1571), 8; Clive Hart, The Prehistory of Flight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 186.
21) Agobard, Agobardus. 0901-1000. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Départment des Manuscrits. Latin 2853: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8572244q/f193.item.zoom. An English Translation is available in Fordham University’s Medieval Sourcebook: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/Agobard-OnHailandThunder.asp.
22) “They believe and say that there is a certain region, which is called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds. In these ships the crops that fell because of hail and were lost in storms are carried back into that region; evidently these aerial sailors make a payment to the storm-makers, and take the grain and other crops. Among those so blinded with profound stupidity that they believe these things could happen we have seen many people in a kind of meeting, exhibiting four captives, three men and one woman, as if they had fallen from these very ships. As I have said, they exhibited these four, who had been chained up for some days, with such a meeting finally assembling in our presence, as if these captives ought to be stoned. But when truth had prevailed, however, after much argument, the people who had exhibited the captives, in accordance with the prophecy (Jeremiah 2:26) "were confounded … as the thief is confounded when he is taken."”: Translated by W. J. Lewis from the Latin text in p. 3-15 of Agobardi Lugdunensis Opera Omnia, edidit L. Van Acker. Turnholt: Brepols, 1981 (Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis, 52), quoted in Fordham University’s Medieval Sourcebook: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/Agobard-OnHailandThunder.asp.
23) Hart, Prehistory of Flight, 186 - 7. There is also a brief retelling of the story of the flying ship in a 13th-century manuscript on the Wonders of Ireland, MS. Cotton. Titus, D. xxiv. fol. 74, v०. The manuscript was first published by Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell, eds, Reliquiae antiquae II (London: John Russell Smith, 1845), 106.
24) Houston Daily Post, Houston, Texas, April 28, 1897, page 5. The article is reproduced in full in Michael Busby, Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2004), 215. Just over a week prior to the Merkel incident, a prominent citizen or Leroy, Kansas, named Alexander Hamilton claimed to have had an encounter with a zeppelin-like ship that threw a slipknot around the neck of one of his cattle, and got the rope stuck in a wire fence. Hamilton’s story is controversial, however, and some historians, ufologists, and debunkers have claimed to have found proof it was a hoax. For an overview of the “Cownapping” story and the controversy surrounding it, see Daniel Cohen, The Great Airship Mystery (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981), 92 - 95, 97 - 102.
25) Hart, Prehistory of Flight, 184.
26) Carey, “Aerial ships,” 24.
27) Proinsias Mac Cana, quoted in Carey, “Aerial ships,” 24.
28) Hart, Prehistory of Flight, 188 - 93.
Primary Sources:
Agobard, Agobardus. 0901-1000. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Départment des Manuscrits. Latin 2853: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8572244q/f193.item.zoom.
An English Translation is available in Fordham University’s Medieval Sourcebook: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/Agobard-OnHailandThunder.asp.
Annals of Ulster (Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition). Compiled by Pádraig Bambury, Stephen Beechinor, trans. Mac Airt & Mac Niocaill. Accessed May 21, 2021: https://celt.ucc.ie//published/T100001A/index.html.
Breventano, Stefano. trattato delle impressioni dell'aere, raccolto da varij autori di filosofia. Pavia: Bartoli Girolamo, 1571.
Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Annotated Edition, 2002.
Houston Daily Post. Houston, Texas. April 28, 1897.
Labbe, Philippe and René Rapin. Novae bibliothecae manuscriptorum librorum tomus primus [-secundus]. Rerum aquitanicarum, praesertim bituricensium, uberrima collectio / ... nunc primum ex mss. variarum bibliothecarum codicibus eruta, copiose ac plena manu repraesentans, opera ac studio Philippi Labbe,... . Parisiis, 1657: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6344291s/f327.item.
Leabhar breathnach annso sis, The Irish Version of the Historia Britonum of Nennius. Ed. trans. James Henthorn Todd, D.D., M.R.I.A.. Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1848.
Reliquiæ Antiquæ: scraps from Ancient Manuscripts, illustrating chiefly Early English Literature and the English Language. Ed. Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell. London: John Russell Smith, 1845.
The King's mirror (Speculum regale - Konungs Skuggsjà), trans. Laurence Marcellus Larson. London: Oxford University Press, 1917.
Secondary Sources:
Busby, Michael. Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2004.
Carey, John. “Aerial ships and underwater monasteries: the evolution of a monastic marvel.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 12 (1992), pp. 16–28.
Cohen, Daniel. The Great Airship Mystery. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981.
Cohen, J. J. “Seamus Heaney and Ships that Sail the Air.” In the Middle: Peace, Love & the Middle Ages, uploaded September 1, 2013: https://inthemedievalmiddle.com/2013/09/seamus-heaney-and-ships-that-sail-air.html.
Hart, Clive. The Prehistory of Flight. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
This video uses sound effects downloaded from stockmusic.com.
Support new videos on Patreon: https://patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Research by Jason Charbonneau. Illustrations by V. R. Laurence. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
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