An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

U.F.O.s

The U.F.O., or Unidentified Flying Object, was known long before Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting on Mount Rainier, which started the modern investigation into so-called ’flying saucers’.

The Roman author Pliny, in his Natural History, mentions a “flying shield” that appeared in the sky; and there is a wealth of strange tales, scattered through ancient writings, that students of the subject are re-examining today, with fresh interest.

In olden days, strange appearances in the sky were often ascribed to witchcraft. An interesting legend from this point of view is that of the Kingdom of Magonia, told of in old stories from France and Italy.

Magonia was supposed to be a beautiful, unearthly city, somewhere in the clouds. From it, mysterious cloudships sailed over the earth, and sometimes landed. However, the Church regarded Magonia as a wicked heathen place, and said that it was either built by witches, or else the witches were in league with its inhabitants, to rain hail upon the earth and destroy the crops.

A man of more liberal and less superstitious views than many of his time, was the tenth-century Archbishop Agobard of Lyons. He did not share the popular fears about witches and sorcery; and he wrote about the belief in the sky-ships of Magonia in terms which could have a bearing on present-day studies of U.F.O.s. He denounced the idea “that the sorcerers who cause the storms are in connection with the ship-people, and are paid by them”, and said such a belief was “stupid”.

The bishop also related how once he himself had saved the lives of four people, three men and a woman. For some reason the mob believed these people to have landed from a sky-ship, and they were in danger of being stoned to death, when the bishop intervened and rescued them. Unfortunately, Bishop Agobard gives no description of these beings, nor does he say what became of them.

Writers in past centuries have sometimes referred to a strange appearance in the sky which they call a ’fire-drake.’ It seems to have been a kind of fiery cloud, which flew rapidly across the heavens. Such “flying dragons” were seen over various countries in 1532, according to an old book, The Contemplation of Mysteries (quoted in The World of Wonders, Cassell and Co., London, 1884), which was published in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. It ascribes them to the “pollicie of devils and inchantments of the wicked”. In the eighteenth century such appearances were reasoned about, rather unconvincingly, as being caused by differences of temperature in the atmosphere. But the flying ’fire-drake’ sounds remarkably like the twentieth century U.F.O.