The 1665 Air Battle of Stralsund and the Dark Disc over St. Nicholas Church

Stralsund in 1665 was a Hanseatic port on the Baltic. It had recently become part of Swedish Pomerania, and Chris Aubeck and Martin Shough would later call it "a militarized Hanseatic city". To the northwest lies the Gellen, the spit at the southern tip of Hiddensee island, beside the sea approach to the city. Six fishermen were working there on 8 April. None of them is named in any surviving source.

Nachmittag umb zwey Uhr. Two in the afternoon. The men were catching herring outside the Gellen when a flock of birds in the sky took the form of a ship. Other ships followed. Then they fought.

The battle was thunderous. Ships fired on one another and lost rudders, beakheads and masts. Figures "all black clothed" were seen climbing the masts. A commanding figure stood on the large ship. By about 6 p.m., the fleet was gone.

Then something else arrived. In the words of the 1665 leaflet, as translated by Aubeck and Shough, "out of the middle of the sky appeared to them a round flat form like a plate and like a big man's hat". Its colours were "like the moon when eclipsed". It seemed to stand directly above St. Nicholas Church. It stayed there until the evening.

The fishermen fled. Afterwards, all six were struck by trembling. They found "their hands and feet, and their heads and other body parts, burdened by a great shaking."

The story spread in print. A leaflet printed in Leipzig in 1665 is the oldest known source, with an engraving made from the written description. In Stralsund, Michael Meder printed a "Gründliche Relation" of what the six fishermen saw. On 20 April 1665, the Berlin newspaper Ordinari- und Postzeitungen reported the air and sea battle. It said nothing about a flying plate. In 1680, Erasmus Francisci published an engraving of the sea battle in the air. At the time, the event was read as a divine omen.

Centuries later, the plate drew UFO researchers. Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck included the case in Wonders in the Sky in 2009. In Return to Magonia, Aubeck and Shough tried to rule out astronomical objects, birds and weather, using computer simulations of the sky on 8 April 1665.

Jason Colavito took another view in June 2015. He suggested the fishermen fell ill first, perhaps from spoiled food or an infection, and that the illness shaped what they saw: naval battles and an eclipsed moon, images from their own world. That, he argued, explains the vivid scene, the shaking afterwards and the silence from the city, where nobody else is said to have seen anything. Ralf Buelow, consulted by Colavito, read the phrase "umbher begriffen" as "with the circumference of". On that reading the hat was the wide-brimmed hat of the period. A flat disc, not a dome.

In 2023 the Kunstbibliothek of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin opened UFO 1665. Die Luftschlacht von Stralsund, curated by Moritz Wullen. It ran from 5 May to 3 September and traced how 17th-century reporting habits carry on in today's UAP coverage. The six fishermen remain unnamed. Their dark plate over St. Nicholas Church is still being argued over.