The common images of one or more hovering saucer shaped metallic craft, often with highly intense beams of light emanating from the bottom, intelligently controlled and traveling at outrageous speeds - as if the artists witnessed these things first hand - are not in any sense ordinary events, even in modern times. It is extremely hard to find mention of these events, but they do exist - as scattered fragments, vague remnants, survivors of censorship.

One possible explanation is that these paintings were commissioned (by the church or the state) to place these phenomena in a deified context. Officially declared to be the vessels of angels, the peasants would ask fewer annoying questions - that likely, the clergy of the day had scant answers for themselves. It is likely that ancient UFO sightings coincided with important historical and political events - and just as likely that the sightings impressed, or pressured, leaders of the day to take bold, or unusual actions.

One set of images depicts a late 8th century battle, in which Saxon Crusaders besieged and surrounded the people of Sigiburg Castle, in France - when suddenly a group of saucers appeared in the sky, apparently hovering over the top of the church. The Saxons fled, believing that the French were being protected by the "flaming shields."

It was a very superstitious time - but people, as today, knew what they saw - though they probably had little context to associate with it. While there were certainly no flying machines (designed by humans) in those times, there were sailing ships - people were familiar with portholes. Some depictions illustrate these and other classic UFO details - begging the question: what did the ancients think of flying saucers?

Today, we are more comfortable with the idea of beings from outer space. For one thing, we know our world to be a planet, orbiting a star that is one of billions in a rather ordinary galaxy, floating somewhere in the vast reaches of the incalculably infinite universe. People of ancient times were told quite the contrary - that Earth was the center of the universe, the planets were gods, and the stars were fixed points of light on the inside of a celestial sphere. Any close encounter of any kind would most likely have been met with immediate extreme fear and wonder (as is the case today, for the most part), but considered without question to be angels, gods, demons or monsters. Their assertions may have been more on the mark than ours.

There were no airplanes, weather balloons, or experimental military jets to explain away the UFOs native to the skies of the pre industrial aeons. Events such as these would not have been as easily dismissed. Would those who witnessed such craft or encountered such beings first hand, be feared as witches, seen as cursed ~ or even blessed? A medieval abductee might descend from the mountain saying, in a reverent but dazed tone, "I have been touched by the angels."