An Oxford professor’s 1686 account of strange field markings resembles a 1561 Nuremberg sky event.

Nuremberg saw shapes crowd the sky in 1561. An Oxford professor logged strange marks in English fields in 1686. Both left pictures.

In 1561, Hans Glaser's Nuremberg broadsheet showed the sky crowded with forms and a black spear, appearing in phases. In 1686, Robert Plot, an Oxford professor, wrote up unusual markings in English fields, now an early chapter in crop-circle history. Above and below, a century apart, each witness reached for the symbols of their age. Maybe they were drawing the same kind of visitor.

• What it could changeIf sky events and ground markings share a source, the history of crop circles would start in the air.
• How it touches todayResearchers still read old broadsheets for what the artist saw beneath the religious framing.
• Our futureOld prints may hold eyewitness data we have not learned to decode.

• The originating comparison specifically treats Plot’s 1686 account or image as resembling the aerial object in the 1561 Nuremberg artwork.reddit
• Historical accounts of unusual skies were shaped by visual conventions, religious interpretation, witness rhetoric, and the limits of single-sheet printing, according to a recent study of German broadsheets.doi
• The Nuremberg broadsheet’s author described successive phases, with the black spear appearing only after the earlier events, complicating attempts to treat every depicted form as one object.doi