Hello fellows,
greetings from Germany
. This is my first post here (and could be my last). I stumbled over this strange phenomenon today after an amusing Apollo/MoonBase/AliensEverywhere-roundtrip. Having studied History and German Language I should be able to translate the woodcut text of Hans Glaser in a reasonable quality for you. But I have to say, I am not a professionally trained translator for 16th century German into common modern English. So my first glance at the text reveals some unknown vocabulary I would have to research in a dictionary, and I cannot read one letter adhoc. But most of the text is plain simple to understand for me. I will not speculate on this topic, not now, maybe later, if the discussion will go on. I wanna say: this seems to be heavy stuff - and it would be interesting, what other chronicles of and around Nuremberg would have to say about April,14th 1561. There are tons of paper in the archives here in Germany from this era, well-documented times. There must be more than Glaser's report and woodcut. But it would be a hard task for trained professionals only. Let me tell you, that there is another woodcut in Glaser's series for March 1561, where he reports about strange lights around the moon (the UFO fleets leaving their bases
).
So, here is my (I think reasonable, but not watertight) "translation". Ask, if you have questions, folks:
In the year 1561 on the 14th day of April in the morning between ... [difficult special time phrase] ... and ... [difficult special time phrase], that is in the morning between 4 and 5 on the little clock, a very horrible vision showed at the sun when she rised and was seen at Nuremberg in the town and in front of the gate and at the countryside by alot of male and female persons. First the sun showed and was seen with two bloodcolored, halfround strokes like the diminishing moon right through the sun, and in the sun, above, under and on both sides stood bloodcolored and partly blueish or ironcolored, also blackcolored round orbs. The same on both sides and in circled plates around the sun - there were such bloodcolored and the other orbs in great numbers, standing three in a row, sometimes four in a quadruple, also alot as singles. And between such orbs alot of bloodcolored crosses have been seen, and between such crosses and orbs were bloodcolored strips, thick behind ["streyme hinden dick"] and to the front a bit smoother than ... [ ? "hocken rho[?]"]. Mixed in between together with others stood two big tubes, one to the right and the other to the left [hand's side], in those little and big tubes were three, four and more orbs. This alltogether began to fight ["streyten"], the orbs first in the sun moved towards the ones standing at both sides, so the ones, which were outside, moved together with the orbs out of the small and large tubes into the sun.
Also the tubes moved towards each other like the orbs and everything fought and battled ["gestritten und gefochten"] with each other nearly one hour long. And after the battle, which moved for a while into and again out of the sun from one side to the other most violently, exhausted itself by each other, everything (as drawn above) fell from the sun and the sky down to the earth like burning alltogether and vanished ["vergangen"] down on the earth gradually [? "allgemach"] in a big smoke. After such events something like a black spear, the shaft from sunrise [east] and the head towards sundawn [west], has been seen with big thickness and length.
[It follows a lengthy phrasal standard passage from a typical christian viewpoint of that time, about warning signs of Godfather, the sin of the non-believers and the awaited day of judgement etc. Not very related to the event as such, but there is a hint by Hans Glaser, that the "signs" in the sky were significant in quality and numbers in the recent time.]
EDIT: I corrected "stepwise" to "gradually" (that's what I meant ...
)
by 
) alike make of this incident? Anybody know any previous more-or-less credible research into the case, including but not limited to anything where the original article from the Nuremberg Gazette could be viewed? At a glance, it might be a blown-out-of-proportions description of a particularly violent meteor shower but ascertaining this in any way would require some research 
