Aliens? Yes! But Maybe No

Sky Battles! Unexplained Aerial Phenomena Throughout History

• Aliens? Yes! But Maybe No • Episode 16

Share episode

What happens when multiple witnesses observe aerial warfare between unidentified flying objects? Throughout history, four remarkable incidents have left historians and researchers baffled, each describing what appears to be organized combat in the skies.

The 1561 phenomenon over Nuremberg remains one of history's most puzzling aerial events. Witnesses described blood-red semicircular arcs, spheres, and crosses battling above them before falling to earth with immense smoke. Five years later, citizens of Basel, Switzerland experienced a similar week-long display of "fiery red" objects and black spheres moving with uncanny precision. These medieval accounts, preserved only through religious broadsheets, force us to question whether natural phenomena like bird murmurations or atmospheric effects can adequately explain what these observers recorded.

Perhaps most compelling is the 1665 Stralsund incident, where fishermen claimed to witness ship-like formations engaging in battle, complete with cannon fire and smoke. When a flat, disc-shaped object "like a big man's hat" appeared over the church until evening, it created one of history's earliest descriptions matching modern UFO encounters.

The most recent and well-documented case occurred during WWII. In 1942, Los Angeles fell under siege from an unidentified aerial threat that prompted military forces to fire over 1,400 anti-aircraft rounds without bringing down any target. Despite occurring in modern times with photography available, this "Battle of Los Angeles" remains unexplained, with theories ranging from Japanese aircraft to experimental technology to extraterrestrial visitors.

What makes these accounts so fascinating isn't just their individual details, but the remarkable consistency of elements across centuries – structured formations, battle maneuvers, and objects that defy conventional explanation. While skeptics point to mass hysteria or misidentified natural phenomena, the persistence of these sky battle reports across different eras suggests something more mysterious might occasionally visit our skies.

Have you ever witnessed something unexplainable moving through the sky? Share your experience with us, or let us know which historical sky battle you find most compelling!

Send Fan Mail!

Support the show

Josh:

aliens aliens yes but maybe no.

Travis:

Welcome back you guys. Welcome to the. I said I'm saying welcome too many times. I think Scratch this. Josh deleted all. Welcome to the show. Aliens, yes, but maybe no. I'm Travis, I'm Josh, and this is an otherworldly podcast, as ambiguous as our title.

Josh:

Should we do that first part again? No, leave it Double it An episode of just intros. Yeah, no, leave it, double it An episode of just intros.

Travis:

That's it. That's all we need, we're going to record it in a couple of weeks, so I'm a little rusty. I got too excited to introduce the show so I said welcome. I am very happy that you guys are here listening to us. I will say that I am too Triple the welcome, josh.

Josh:

Most of the episodes we've recorded that are being released. We recorded and had no episodes out, so now we have a few episodes out and it's kind of cool to see people listening to it, hearing some feedback. We're in a different era now, in our podcast.

Travis:

We have people listening to the show. Yeah, oh, I'm going to be a lot quieter.

Josh:

Shy A little shy boy.

Travis:

So what are we doing today? Do we want to talk about what we did on our last episode? I can't even remember.

Josh:

We did the final segment of the congressional hearings.

Travis:

That was our last episode. That was months ago.

Josh:

Yeah, we did it in January. We did Immaculate Consolation, that's right, which is still creepy. It bothers me that that all exists and the government is doing all this stuff. I'm almost speechless with it, Like come on.

Travis:

Well, don't be speechless. This is a podcast, so we we need that from. I will use speech okay for the listeners, yeah I'm used to doing all the heavy lifting on the show, so that's good yeah, we call you the talent.

Josh:

No, you don't. Yeah, we do. We clean the house when you come. I think that's uh the talent's coming. That's sarcasm so, yeah, we, we finished that, we went through. So if you haven't heard those episodes, I recommend listening to them. It's pretty informative. We kind of go through if you haven't been following any of the congressional stuff or anything that has been released.

Josh:

With that we'll kind of give you the elementary equivalent of information for that the aliens, yes, but maybe no notes of it, like cliff's notes, but for our show yeah, so in this immaculate consolation at the very end, like we do every episode, we kind of give a sneak peek for the next topic and we did a quiz about this topic I gotta say like instant boner when I read the title.

Travis:

Oh, yeah topic for today.

Josh:

Yeah, I've been thinking about it nonstop.

Travis:

It is a very interesting title. So today we're talking about Sky Battles. Just the thought of Sky Battles is so fucking cool.

Josh:

Some days I would wake up and I would open my eyes and just say Sky Battles.

Travis:

You know what I did last night just to get ready for this. I watched Top Gun.

Josh:

Hey, that's great.

Travis:

Yeah, guess what's in top gun sky battles volleyball oh yeah, yeah, they had uh that too yeah, and sky battles and sky battles yeah which is a lot of fun. I haven't seen that.

Josh:

I watched it with my youngest I was more of a fan of iron eagle oh, with lewis gossett jr yeah, that was my jam.

Travis:

Okay, so Sky Battles. You love it. I love the idea of it Absolutely. I think it's fun.

Josh:

Yeah, and I think we can hold on to that idea. So when you're feeling like a little skepticism, I can just realize Sky Battles.

Travis:

We introduced the fact that Sky Battles have maybe existed, and now let's just move on to the quiz for the next episode.

Josh:

Okay, let's just move on to the quiz for the next episode. Okay, yeah, do your own research.

Travis:

End of episode.

Josh:

Yeah, we did our research. We don't even talk about it. You do your research and then we'll just move on to the sneak peek for next episode.

Travis:

Next episode yeah.

Josh:

So today we are going to talk about sky battles, ufo, cosmic incidences that were witnessed by the masses.

Travis:

Okay, I do have some exception about mass witnesses, because all we have are like one or two witnesses claiming there were mass witnesses, at least in the first two, with the leaflets right, they say that there was a bunch of people that witnessed this, but these leaflets were written and printed by these two religious historians.

Josh:

Yeah, I mean, what else are they going to do? I mean, there's nothing, there's no electricity, like when something happens, everyone is going to see it, there's nothing else to do. Well, that's, they're not inside because there's no electricity. Everyone is outside most of the time.

Travis:

Oh, I think that there are a lot of people still inside, oh no, doing housework and taking care of kids. Men are outside. This is the 1500s, so there was a lot of work being done outside. There's a lot of things to do inside. Candles exist in this world Barely Okay, but sunlight is also a thing.

Josh:

Anyways, let's get into this. So there are four pretty big, and there are more than this, but we are sticking with four big events that have happened in history that were theoretically unexplainable. There's a couple fiery spheres over medieval Europe, there were shadowy ships engaged in an aerial combat and more recently there was a mysterious presence over Los Angeles. All of these have just kind of defied an explanation over the centuries.

Travis:

So these are all accounts that we're going to talk about. Let's just get into it. Then We'll go through this, I guess chronologically. So we'll start with the Nuremberg.

Josh:

Yeah, we'll, we'll start with Nuremberg. I'm just going to start off. I mean, it sounds like we're on the same page where we both believe that these are absolutely alien experiences. But we'll, it's obvious, but we'll, we'll talk about it. So, the battle over Nuremberg. Where's Nuremberg? Where is it Germany? Where is it Josh? It's Germany. Okay, where else would a town with that name come from?

Travis:

Everybody knows that it's Germany.

Josh:

So, according to a broadsheet. What's a broadsheet? By the way? That's the one thing I didn't look up. I've heard of it, I've seen them, but I don't know the actual definition.

Travis:

So but I don't know the actual definition, so a broadsheet is just basically a big piece of paper. The printing press was invented in 1400s and this broadsheet was like. I think there were hundreds of these leaflets that were just dropped throughout the town, right, and not just about this specific incidence, but they were in wide use as how people would communicate.

Josh:

Like news, like they would have the bulletin board, basically the town board.

Travis:

Okay, and this was just one of those those things, and it's bigger than like a regular leaflet.

Josh:

But it is just a broad sheet, big piece of paper. Broad as in large yeah, a big piece of paper. Yeah, usually with an image and then some writing underneath.

Travis:

It's like the basic format that you'd see in a newspaper. Which print media is kind of going away. We don't see a lot of newspapers, but that is the basic format.

Josh:

So what's a newspaper?

Travis:

Oh, my God.

Josh:

I've seen them, but I just don't know what they are.

Travis:

It's this thing that you use to clean your mirrors in your house with you start fires with them you can start fires with them.

Travis:

Yeah, I just save up all my newspapers I get in the mail for little fires. I used to have a paper route and we would always have newspapers that we would get too many for the amount of customers that we have. So we would save those. And when we'd go camping you could shred that newspaper and use that to start a fire. Paper boy Cute, take this out, josh. I feel like I'm doxing myself. I don't want to give out too much personal information. Yeah, what are we talking about? Like the way I dress, the activities I'm into, basically everything, except for my social security number, which, I'm afraid, is going to be released somehow. We know what kind of car I drive.

Josh:

You could have changed cars since then.

Travis:

I have changed cars, absolutely I have changed cars.

Josh:

Yeah, you drive a very similar rocket car that Bob Lazar drove. I did. You just became obsessed with it. We know you were in a swing band.

Travis:

I was in a swing dance group. Yeah, that was a shock to me. I'm naturally gifted with groove. So, anyway, what we talked about is a broadsheet. Broadsheet is just like a basic newspaper, where it's vertically set up, articles are placed within and they go top to bottom.

Josh:

Okay, cool. So, according to this broadsheet, which is now archived in Zurich and where's Zurich oh? No one knows that it's a lost city.

Travis:

Yep, it's down at the bottom of the ocean with Atlantis.

Josh:

Yeah, on the morning of April 14th 1561 in Nuremberg, when it was a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire. A strange sight filled the skies.

Josh:

So basically the broadsheet is pretty long. This is the cliff notes of that, what we thought was important and what our researcher thought was important. So this is the eyewitness account.

Josh:

In the morning of April 14th 1561, at daybreak, between between 4 and 5 am, a dreadful apparition occurred on the sun. At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semicircled arcs, and in the sun above and below, on both sides the color was blood there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black color color. Likewise there stood on both sides and as a tourist about the sun, such blood-red ones and other balls in large numbers, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible blood-red crosses between which there were blood-red stripes. These all started to fight among themselves. They all fell from the sun down upon the earth as if they all burned and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this, there was something like a black spear sighted. So that's basically. I mean it goes on in detail a little bit. A lot of religious things were said in the full context.

Travis:

So you can find, if you look this up, there is a German Wikipedia page and you can get a translated version of that.

Travis:

But yes, these leaflets were thrown out and it's a way for, like, the church of the time to spread its doctrine, and so a lot of these leaflets do have a religious context to them and they are also because literacy wasn't widespread.

Travis:

They use pictures a lot and then they would have people you know read these. You'd have town criers or pastor or religious leader of the area who could read, would read these out to their congregation. So a lot of them did have religious context to them and so the author being somebody who is like a religious historian, like these two people that we'll talk about for the Basel thing, they are going to interpret this in a religious way. They're going to look at something could be, you know, doing this research, there's these things called sundogs, where in the middle latitudes that being like where we are situated here in our state and across Europe, those are considered middle latitudes, you know, between zero, the equator and then the poles, okay, and these sundogs occur when it's a little colder out, and usually in the morning or in the evening and it's light being refracted off of a certain kind of cloud, like a cirrus cloud.

Josh:

Yeah.

Travis:

And it looks like kind of a halo around the sun. So they are attributing maybe what they're seeing and taking a religious angle to interpret what they saw. I also think that maybe it could have been I don't know if you know what a murmuration is. I think I have one of those on my back. If it's moving around, that's something you need to get checked out.

Josh:

Oh, okay.

Travis:

But murmurations happen when flocks of birds will move or migrate. So they see it a lot in swallows, especially in the UK and a lot of Northern Europe. There are also murmurations in Rome and then, looking through Reddit, somebody saw murmurations in Portland. So swallow populations now are on the decline, but back in the 1500s I imagine that there were a lot of birds around. Birds are scavengers and they're very opportunistic and will pick up trash and so the bird population back then was in probably a little better health.

Travis:

We also see murmurations in things like locusts and in bug populations. Okay, so those are potential natural things. Those are potential natural things, and if you are inclined to think everything is a religious event, then you're going to document that in that way.

Josh:

So I don't know if these guys thought it was a complete religious event. They did. They wrote about it Because, I mean, listen to the last couple of sentences of the leaflet and then make your decision. It says, after all, the God fearing will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God that he may avert his wrath, including the well-deserved punishment on us, so that we may temporarily here and perpetually there live as his children For it. May God grant us his help, amen. So I don't see a lot of religious context. Yeah, I don't either.

Travis:

Brilliant, you pulled the rug right out from under me.

Josh:

It says things despise such high signs and miracles of god or in order that god may send us frightening punishment on account for our ungratefulness. I mean, it was. It was, uh, religious, heavy, very religious heavy whatever such signs mean, god alone knows. Yeah, like I mean, it was riddled with little or I mean josh.

Travis:

I'm gonna say I wanted to believe this so bad until I started reading some of the stuff and it is so open to like religious interpretation and the way they're viewing things which I think, and not even the religious people, even just the common folk.

Travis:

In that time, everything was viewed through a religious lens everything yeah everything, yeah, and if you were a part of a different religious subsect, then you were made to leave that area. We saw like during the Spanish Inquisition that's happened, where Spain was trying to form one state church and so all Muslims and Jews were either forced to leave the country and then that spread throughout parts of Europe, but mostly Spain. But these Inquisitions where they were trying to suss out heretics, it created a certain level of fear amongst the population, where they were just worried that they were going to be believing the wrong thing and these people in power trying to force them to believe in a certain way.

Josh:

My thing is just because from the little thing I read at the beginning, it talks about how there were rows and there was multiple things. So that kind of takes away the sun dog or something like that for me. But I think we can't discount what they saw because of religious views, If that's the only way they know how to communicate it doesn't mean I'm not saying we can discount it.

Travis:

I'm not saying that they didn't see something. I'm saying that they interpreted it as a religious event and so we're getting. And, like we said, literacy wasn't widespread, so the few people that could read and write also controlled all the information that came out there.

Josh:

The only people that could read and write learned it from the church. Yeah, so that's really all they know. And then, because basically they were granted permission to learn that from the church, they have to incorporate the church in everything. Yep, I mean, come on, sky battles, travis. Anytime I doubted when doing my research, all I said was but sky battles.

Travis:

Come on, it's sky battles, dude, get your head in the game. What am I doing? Just believe in this.

Josh:

And then I would.

Travis:

Yeah.

Josh:

So there are some theories, like you mentioned some of the atmospheric phenomenons like the sun, dog or other natural optical illusions, some UFO logical, ufo logical.

Travis:

Uh, you, you F logical. One of the videos that we watched. The guy said it. It's just such like an awkwardly put together name.

Josh:

Yeah, it feels like it has an extra syllable. F logical ufo logic ufological god english. What a beautiful language yeah, some consider it a potential sighting of extraterrestrial spacecraft engaged in some form of battle, because I mentioned these weren't just dots well we're talking about, like our audience that think that, but there are a lot of interpretations. You might have listeners and fans that are like, yeah, I listen because I want to hear.

Travis:

Yeah, but this is we're talking about people that are on the outer edges of culture. Like you would say, fringe, yeah.

Josh:

Well, they correctly believe that it is extraterrestrial spacecraft engaged in some sort of battle, because they mentioned that there was battle. They were in fighting formations, they were moving around. Either this was the first piece of sci-fi ever written Well and that's.

Travis:

That was also something like we are looking at what you would call purple writing, where they take these artistic flourishes like saying blood, red moon and solid ferrous smoke or things like that. Where it's not written or documented in a scientific way, it's got a lot of flowery language.

Josh:

Yeah, which I can appreciate, okay, as a very artistic, flowery handsome, okay.

Travis:

Yeah, but that's what I'm saying is that this specific broadsheet, this leaflet, was written by one author, and this author had a bent towards flowering language, and so he's going to look at this and he's going to, like, zhuzh it up a little bit, you know, so that people will read it and find some sort of interest or value in it. And I don't think he was necessarily documenting it. I mean, it's not like he had a camera and then was, you know, recording this and then taking it back to his little hut and watching this video play out. As he was writing it, he witnessed this thing.

Travis:

This person witnessed a supposed event happen and then who knows what he did Went about his day, went and picked up his apples, and then came back, and so it was all a remembrance and this was done on a broadsheet, so it wasn't handwritten. He had to go to a press and then get all the typesettings set up, and so there was a process to it, and so I think with every iteration of this story it changed a little bit and he, you know, used more and more colorful language. I don't have any documentation, obviously, but that's just my interpretation of it, knowing the little I know about historical texts from this time.

Josh:

Okay, well, let's not make assumptions.

Travis:

We're making a huge assumption with this podcast, like assuming that it's aliens. So I'm going to make my own assumptions. I'm just saying what you've said to me in the past yes, okay, I just want to Good, I'm glad that you're thinking skeptically about this, josh, push back.

Josh:

Okay, so the only reason that we actually were able to see this broadsheet was because of a guy named Carl Young. Yes, in 1958, he had a book come out called Flying Saucers, a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, and this was in that book.

Travis:

I mean it's in a museum. This is in a museum in Zurich.

Josh:

We talked about that at the top of the show. Yeah, but in the widespread world, like we probably wouldn't have noticed this. He pulled this out from their archive. Well, not literally, but he printed a book with this in it and it went out to the masses and he believed it was likely a natural event, with religious and military interpretations overlaid by observers. He stated if the UFOs were living organisms, one would think of a swarm of insects rising with the sun. There we go, murmuration, not to fight one another but to mate and celebrate the marriage of flight. He also suggests that imagery could be tied to concepts of individuation and revelation of the light. No idea what that means. So that's psychological professional looking at this and saying, nah, this doesn't check out. And a lot of psychologists like historical psychologists studying people's minds and how they thought and worked in history. They have an upper hand in this kind of situation than most of us. There's also the military theory. The tubes were interpreted as cannons and spheres as cannonballs, emphasizing the fighting aspect of the sighting.

Travis:

Which we'll see play out with the Battle of Los Angeles, perhaps.

Josh:

Possibly, and then saying crosses, I don't know. That seems odd.

Travis:

Again. Again, that's religious interpretation. Uh, I think it was. The basil leaflet does mention that a figure was seen within this battle or whatever all this chaos.

Josh:

There was a figure floating in the sky well, let's hop over to the basil, because the basil phenomenon, or the celestial phenomenon over basil, that happened not too long after.

Travis:

Like five years yeah. Yeah so that was 1561, was Nuremberg and this is 1566, basel, switzerland.

Josh:

Yeah.

Travis:

So very similar latitudes. You know same region of Europe.

Josh:

Yeah, so pretty similar situations too, but this one lasted over the course of a week, which is crazy. So red and black spheres moved with unnatural precision, twisting and turning into the morning sky as the sun rose, blood red on the horizon. Reports described what seemed to be a conflict, an organized battle between these mysterious objects. So the eyewitness account. This is what the leaflet said. So the eyewitness account. This is what the leaflet said.

Josh:

During the year 1566, on the 27th of July, the sun lost all its radiance and luster and it seemed to weep tears of blood, and the air behind him went dark. The next day the sun rose at about six o'clock and slept with the same appearance, as if everything was blood, red and fiery. At the dawn of August 7th, we saw large black spheres coming and going with great speed and precision. Many of them were fiery, red and soon crumbled and then extinguished. So it's kind of the same thing, except it lasted a lot longer. And that was also Cliff Notes as well Kind of had the same feel as the other one. Sure, the broadsheet.

Travis:

What do you think about this account?

Josh:

This account is a lot more bizarre to me than the Nuremberg, for sure I agree with you 100% on that. I mean having the sky just kind of littered with black dots. I have yet to see anything or hear about anything like that. I mean that is sci-fi shit, yeah. And then them moving around kind of in formation. It just seems a lot scarier. The blood red, all that stuff. You know, I looked up fires during that time. I looked up volcanic eruptions.

Travis:

See, and that's what I was thinking is that a lot of cities of this time would butt up right against a forest. A forest was a huge resource. That's where you would go to find food and heat, and I mean it was a place where you could go to. It's like setting up your camp or your town next to the sea. It's a resource, and fires forests do catch on fire quite often and it's about managing those forests. During a fire, the sun can look very red and hazy and you can get things in the air and you see wildlife and birds flying through the air yeah, it is bizarre.

Josh:

I could not find any documentation of volcanic eruptions, sure, or fires?

Travis:

I don't well. I mean, there are there any volcanoes in that area even?

Josh:

I didn't look that deep okay, well, I just went. I mean there's volcanoes that have gone off, that have changed half the earth's sun image. Good, well done.

Travis:

Yeah, I mean the Mount St Helens erupting in 1980, I believe that darkened the sky and we were getting ash here in our state from that eruption, yeah, I mean, and that can happen, yeah, and that's why I went into this skeptical Good.

Josh:

I wanted to do my due diligence and I was coming up with different possibilities and I knew that volcanic incidences could create weird things and those could be interpreted by a lesser mind of the middle ages as something religious or I mean extraterrestrial wasn't really a thing back then, but something bizarre.

Travis:

Okay, Um, you, you did say fires, and that's as you were reading this.

Josh:

That was what first sprung to my mind was yeah, I mean, that happens here when we have fires.

Travis:

Maybe not really knowing why the sun looks a certain way, because of how a fire and smoke will change your immediate viewing if you're close to that fire.

Josh:

Yeah, I really think this one is a little more interesting, just because how long it lasted the battle part, it's just odd to me. I mean Switzerland, they didn't really fight much, did they? Yeah?

Travis:

absolutely they did. This is like feudal Europe Everybody's vying for power. All these little bergs are fighting against each other just to get a little bit of leverage and gain a little more territory, like some of the darkest periods of human history happened during this time.

Josh:

So that would confirm what I was thinking is these people are familiar with battle and battle formation. I was thinking battle formations in the sky are very different than ground formations. So if they're interpreting sky battle formations from what they know on the ground, it's still very bizarre movement.

Travis:

Well, we're looking at, like, to use your comparison, you know, a fight on the ground is going to be different in the air. Yes, of course, we are looking at like two-dimensional down here, where everything is flat and linear. We might have cannonballs coming, but that is, you know, a trajectory you can track. You know, to use Top Gun I was talking to my kid about this last night. That's what makes flying so scary is that you're navigating through three-dimensional space. You go, yes, left to right, but you can also go up and down, and you have to be aware of that 360 degrees around you in order to be like a great jet fighter pilot. To that point, when you're looking at something in the sky and you're looking at the way it moves, yeah, it's going to look very odd to you because they're going to be moving up and down, left and right, diagonally, diagonally, diagonally. That was a bad Harry Potter reference, yeah. So, yes, looking at that from the ground, it could look very odd.

Travis:

But again, I don't want to, like, lean too heavily into murmurations, but that is if you've seen them. They're very loud. I was watching some videos of budgies that are like parakeets budgie murmuration in Australia and it is a very loud thing that happens. And if we're talking about like migration, like just like a cacophony of birds, like, yes, exactly. And if we're talking about migration, yes, that can last over a week. We see cicadas come up and those will last for months down the South. Anyway, I'm just throwing this stuff out there.

Josh:

Yeah, I mean it's good. That's why we're here. We're here to talk about sky battles, you know.

Travis:

It's very interesting, but we're also relying pretty heavily on, like one or two accounts.

Josh:

Right, it's not like this guy went and interviewed everyone in town and then did his research and then he's writing exactly what he saw.

Travis:

He's writing what he saw and what he remembers seeing.

Josh:

And the fact of the matter is we will never know the truth. No, it's just a bizarre piece of history. And could there be flourishes?

Travis:

Yeah, but I also don't think that they're just lying either, you know. You don't think that religious leaders or historians of religious contexts are lying. No, you think these guys were just like telling the truth as they saw it. I did not agree with that.

Josh:

There were definitely manipulative tactics used in the church at that time and were still today, but this one guy's okay. This seems outside of that manipulation. This seems more historical. Even though it was pampered and flowery with poetic and religious texts and words, it's still telling a story, and it's a story that potentially wouldn't work with a lot of the fear and manipulation that the church was doing at the time. This would make people think and ask questions, and that's what they didn't want.

Travis:

No, I don't know about that. I think, like we talked about, they had to interpret everything in religious text. So if they saw a fire, then that was an act of God. If they saw bird migration, that was an act of God. Everything was seen through the lens of the church and I think it was up to people like the guy that recorded this. It was up to them. They felt probably pressure to interpret this in a religious context because the church back then, as did a lot of churches, held a lot of power, a lot of power, and they wanted to control the information that was put out there, and a lot of churches owned the printing press.

Josh:

So if they wanted to control the narrative and make it a God thing, so maybe a lot of people did see it, so maybe it was a mass sighting and they were trying to put a religious spin on it. So who?

Travis:

knows what they saw. I mean it could have been very well. I mean I like I said I want yeah, we want sky battles to be real. I want sky battles to be real. I think that fucking rules. I think it's a fucking incredible idea, yeah, but we're looking at something that was documented by one person 500 years ago, yeah, and so we have to look at it through that lens, through our 2025 lens.

Josh:

Yeah, and there are theories of what it is. I mean it could have been meteor showers, a comet, the aurora borealis mixed with some other things, optical illusions caused by atmospheric conditions or even dust from the sahara. Sure, it could have been rare astronomical events such as a planetary alignment, which I don't think I've seen. We're going to see that here in 2025, I believe, not a full planetary alignment, but I think like six or seven. So I mean there are potential things, but there's also potential of it being an aerial battle between UFOs. Possibly, sure. I mean, at that time nothing flew other than animals.

Travis:

So it was Cannonballs Barely, yeah yeah, that was just like a long jump really. Come on cannonballs Saying you're flying through the air, that fly is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Josh:

I would say rolling through the air. That fly is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I would say rolling through the air, there you go, all right. So the next one is the air battle of Stralsund. Okay, I don't know if I said that perfectly.

Travis:

I will say we're going to get pronunciations wrong. So like, maybe just chill out if you're going to come at us about mispronouncing a name.

Josh:

Yeah, don't judge us on how we pronounce things and our mistakes.

Travis:

Look at our hearts. Yeah, look at our hearts. That's like somebody on Reddit saying you forgot a period here. Now your entire argument is invalid. Yeah, we're going to mispronounce things. We are. Yeah, we're flawed. We're flawed.

Josh:

Yeah. So in the spring of 1665, fishermen near the city of Stralsund watched in awe as an impossible event unfolded above them A fleet of dark shapes appeared in the sky, moving with intelligence, engaging in a fierce battle. Smoke, fire and cannon-like flashes erupted in the air. And then a final haunting sight a massive disc-like object, dark as the moon during an eclipse, hovered silently above the city's church. According to Franceschi's account, the fishermen saw a large flock of birds forming a ship-like shape. The ship from the north was soon joined by numerous others, followed by a fleet from the south. A fierce battle ensued, with cannon fire and smoke. A flat, round object like a plate or a large hat then emerged from the sky, shining with colors akin to a darkened moon, and hovered motionless above saint nicholas church until evening. The initial leaflet stated a little while later out of the middle of the sky appeared to them a round, flat form like a plate and like a big man's hat, with colors like the moon when eclipsed okay, that's bonkers, bonkers, that's uh.

Travis:

But what was included in that account? That's straight up bonk.

Josh:

Birds, birds, yeah, birds being weird yeah and I also read somewhere that it looked when the birds made the ship-like shape. Yeah, that it looked as though there were ghostly apparitions moving along the ships. Oh, that's yeah. What do?

Travis:

you think that was?

Josh:

I don't know. I mean, it's possible that it could be. We've talked about multidimensional beings. You know, if we're getting a glimpse or these fishermen were getting a glimpse into a battle that wasn't in our realm of existence it was in a different timeline or a different. Yeah, that'd be interesting I, I think so.

Travis:

They said something about cannon fire there yeah imagine you work for whatever the military of that time, like the town guard, right, and you have a cannon. You are going to be itching at the opportunity to fire that cannon off. You're going to look for any opportunity to do that because it's going to be fun like a big, loud boom and you're gonna see destruction. That's like a little boy's dream, right? I think that they may have saw a murmuration and like let's fucking shoot it, let's shoot into this big flock of birds, and so that's what happened.

Josh:

Maybe okay, so you're saying that potentially, these people were watching this murmuration happen and they were observing it?

Travis:

And they were like smash the fucking birds.

Josh:

As though someone like us would watch the clouds and try to come up with an image.

Travis:

No, they saw this murmuration, this bunch of birds, and they have a cannon there and they're just like. We're just going to shoot into that flock of birds and see what happens. Just like you would shoot a cannon into a tree or a rock wall or whatever. You're just going to be looking for an opportunity to shoot a cannon off. If you had a cannon here at your house, josh, you would want every celebration you'd be firing that cannon off.

Josh:

Oh yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't even need a celebration. No, you wouldn't. It could be 2 am, that's how I would get my kids up in the morning. Yeah, cannon up in the morning. Yeah, cannon blast cannon blast.

Travis:

I mean that doesn't explain the shape that these birds made. Again it's. It's an interpretation. Yeah, if you were looking at a murmuration, a group of birds, from one angle, it's going to look different from somebody that's at a different angle. So it may have looked like a ball when it could have been a tube. It may have looked like a ship when it was, and they don't have the vernacular to say it looks like a UFO or a ship or a saucer or whatever.

Travis:

Their idea of a ship is like something you would see in the sea right.

Josh:

Yeah, that's what I imagine like a ghost ship and a ghost crew. That's kind of why I brought up that earlier, and the weird thing is is there's different events that happen. So that was the beginning, and then other things came down that were not bird influenced, like a large man's hat, which is the disc over the church that stayed there for most of the day. Well, it came in later in the day and stayed until evening. So this all happened around 2 pm. So all these events start at 2 pm and then they went into the evening. The aftermath is also weird. Witnesses reported falling ill with tremors and pain in the following days. So I mean, that's all I got. I don't know how many.

Travis:

Yeah, or even if they were linked.

Josh:

Yeah, they may not have been linked I mean people were falling sick all the time.

Travis:

That's true Back then. I mean it's and we'll talk about this with the Battle of Los Angeles, the five deaths that were attributed to that event. But yeah, I mean people are going to be sick and they're like well, what caused it? I don't know. I saw this weird fucking thing in the sky. Well, that's got to be it. That's why you're sick and dying.

Josh:

Yeah.

Travis:

It's not because you're drinking water that has poop in it or you ate rotten meat that you didn't age properly. You know. Age properly, you know, yeah, any number of things.

Josh:

So here are the theories. There's a handful of theories around natural phenomenons, but a lot of them have been debunked just because, like I said, there's different things that happened and all of these can't make multiple things. So there was ice halos, astronomical events and cloud formations. Those are considered unlikely due to the specifics of the sighting, including the description of the darkened moon or the eclipsed disc, and the lack of local geographic features associated with the lenticular cloud formation. Some people say a theory could be a mirage, but that is also unlikely because, like I said, it started at two and went into the evening. Mirages usually don't last that long. That's usually like a heat and light thing, I don't know. Unless time stood still, I don't know.

Travis:

Which could be aliens, Could have been food poisoning, Like that's another thing that nobody like. I'm just saying the person that wrote this could have been on some hallucinogenic and seen some wild ass shit.

Josh:

Yeah, there could have been mold in the city's water. Everyone got high and then sick.

Travis:

Really sick.

Josh:

Yeah. Another theory is the flock of starlings theory. This is the most plausible natural explanation, as the behavior of a large flock of starlings during roosting aligns with some aspects of the sighting. However, the reports of smoke, crossfire and physical illness in witnesses remain unexplained. Sure.

Travis:

I think we explained it, though I don't think any other explanation needs to be done. I think that we nailed it. The water, Mm-hmm, poop in the water. Yeah, interesting side note on that poop in the water Because water was so bad. This is like the rise of beer and wine, because that process would kill bacteria, but they didn't know it.

Josh:

They didn't know it.

Travis:

They didn't know it.

Josh:

That's what they drank. The people that survived like the Black Death Yep.

Travis:

You would have like table wine that had maybe 2% or less alcohol, and it was something that everybody in the house drank.

Josh:

Yeah.

Travis:

They boiled the water which cleaned it?

Josh:

Yep, the UFO community and experts. They think the event is a common candidate for pre-modern UFO sightings with similar aspects to modern day accounts of UFO activity. Yeah, and I agree. I mean, all of these have a handful of things in common. We'll talk about the commonality near the end. But yeah, this is number three and we're going to move on to number four, One of the bigger ones especially way into the future now. Yeah, do you know the date?

Travis:

uh, it was 1942 yeah, february so just after hawaii had been, uh pearl harbor had been attacked yeah, a little less than three months.

Josh:

So the battle of la, so everybody's like in a very heightened sense yeah there are air raid sirens all along the West Coast.

Travis:

Everybody is on a heightened alert. We are now engaged in World War II.

Josh:

Yeah, I mean because of Pearl Harbor, all the coastal cities were prepared for things like this. They were doing tests and drills. People had blackout curtains installed in their house to block light.

Travis:

Yeah, because back then you would navigate a lot through sight, yeah. And so flying into a city if a city was blacked out from the air was really hard, and I mean it seems silly, but but it works, it worked. And so flying through the air, if you didn't see a bunch of lights, you wouldn't necessarily know.

Josh:

You'd just fly over the city.

Travis:

You'd just fly right over the city. You wouldn't know that you're flying over a city.

Josh:

Yeah, and so that happened. They got the call to do a blackout in LA.

Travis:

Wouldn't you say that's convenient if the entire city has blacked out their windows and now they can't see? Oh, come on, come on. I mean, it was so controlled back then that they didn't allow people to walk around and light cigarettes during a blackout.

Josh:

Yeah, they had patrols. I saw an image, a little clip, of a blackout patrol vehicle that was driving around making sure that everyone was following the rules. I mean, it was basically a temporary, quick martial law is what would happen, and they would cut out electricity and then there's no light and it's at nighttime. You would not know. The city was there from the air, correct? So this is a tense night. February 1942, la fell under siege and nobody knows from who really there's speculation. This is one that when I tell people that I have a podcast about this topic, this is probably one of the most. They don't lock you up.

Josh:

I don't talk to CIA and FBI agents, but maybe you talk to somebody who knows a CIA agent but when I talk to people, this is one of the more common stories that people bring up Like have you heard about this? Have you heard about the LA?

Travis:

sky battle. Going to be honest, I just found out about this, did you? Yeah, no surprise.

Josh:

No, it's fine. No, no surprise anybody else that listens to the show. I mean, I found out about this maybe a year ago, so I mean, I'm new, I don't know a lot. I think I saw it in some alien tv show somewhere, but I never researched it or anything until now for this show. So what happened is the military searchlights cut through the darkness, illuminating an unidentified object in the sky. That was the end result.

Travis:

That was the oh, so now it's over.

Josh:

Yep, Okay, cool. But before there was an object, an unidentified target, picked up around 120 miles off the West Coast, and remember this is three months after Pearl Harbor, so we're on alert. At 718 pm the air raid alert was called yeah, and then at around 10.23, they lifted it and everyone was kind of relieved Like okay, there's false alarm. But at around 2.15, radars picked up this target and at 2.21, a total blackout was ordered for Los Angeles by the regional controller Right. And then at 2.25, the air raid sirens went off all over Los Angeles County and thousands of air raid wardens were summoned to their positions. Because with the earlier attack at Pearl Harbor they started planning out positions and they're adding anti-aircraft guns all up and down the coast, hidden in barns, Like I mean they're everywhere up and down the coast, hidden in barns, Like I mean they're everywhere. And then everyone gets in position.

Josh:

At 3.16 am the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade began firing. They fired over 1,400 anti-aircraft rounds and yet nothing was brought down. No enemy aircrafts were recovered, no bombs were dropped. But a lot of reports came through from people in the town that they saw numerous aircrafts at varying speeds and altitudes above Los Angeles. The artillery fire continued sporadically until 4.14 am, until the all-clearers sounded and then the blackout was lifted at 7.21 am.

Travis:

Wild night Okay, so I'm going to read a little bit from this website. It's called Celebrate California. The web address is californialibrarycagov.

Josh:

This is California's website.

Travis:

This is Basically. Yeah, I mean it's an informational website put out by the state of California, their government. Okay, so in Washington DC, Navy Secretary Frank Knox says, as far as I know, the whole raid was a false alarm and could be attributed to jittery nerves. Secretary of War Henry Stimson says 15 unidentified aircraft were over Los Angeles, possibly commercial aircraft operated by the enemy from secret fields in California or Mexico, or light planes launched from Japanese submarines. No-transcript imaginative reporting of the war. Swarms of planes, or sometimes balloons, of all possible sizes, numbering from one to several hundred, traveling at altitudes which ranged from a few thousand feet to more than 20,000, and flying at speeds which, to this journalist, who had also talked to somebody who'd served in one of the anti-aircraft batteries, and he said early in the war, things were pretty scary and the army was setting up coastal defenses At one of the new radar stations near Santa Monica, the crew tried in vain to arrange for some planes to fly by so that they could test the system.

Travis:

So they want to test this radar system. Right, no planes in the area, because they have all been dispatched, right, yep. As no one could spare the planes at the time, they hit upon a novel way to test the radar. One of the guys bought a bag of nickel balloons and then filled them with hydrogen attached metal wires and let them go Catching the offshore breeze. The balloons had the desired effect of showing up on the screens, proving the equipment was working. So the equipment is catching the metal right Right From these balloons? Yeah, but king. So the equipment is catching the metal right right from these balloons? Yeah, but because they can't see anything bigger, they're like what the fuck is this?

Travis:

After traveling a good distance offshore into the south, the nightly onshore breeze started to push the balloons back towards the coastal cities. The coastal radars picked up the metal wires and the searchlight swung automatically on the targets. Looking on the screens as aircraft heading for the city, the AK-AK started firing and the rest was history. So because everybody was so on edge and so worried, it was more of like a shoot first, ask questions later type scenario, where they saw something that was unidentified. You know, if it was a US military plane, they would identify themselves coming in because they're not going to want to get it.

Travis:

They know that we have these bases and these anti-aircraft artillery shooters, whatever they're called. Big guns, big fucking guns, boom, booms yeah, set up and they're not going to want to get shot. You know friendly fire. So these weather balloons obviously did not communicate. They thought, oh, it's got to be the Japanese, and they just started firing. They're like better be safe than sorry. We thought, oh, it's got to be the Japanese, and they just started firing. They're like better be safe than sorry. We can't have another attack like Pearl.

Josh:

Harbor. We're just going to start fucking firing, so I'm going to throw this back on you and say that these weather balloons.

Travis:

They're not weather balloons, they're just tiny little.

Josh:

Yeah, these balloons Nickel balloons Full of helium. Just tiny little balloons that you'd buy at a pharmacy. They could not be real. This is potentially just one man's testimony that this is what they did to test it. Sure, you know and we don't know. The big confusion around this whole event is that there are a bunch of different stories. Even the top brass couldn't get it straight. You know you had someone saying one thing, another saying another, you know, saying that it was a fluke, there was nothing there, it was just trigger, happy, scared people.

Travis:

And then another saying I wouldn't say trigger happy, I would say terrified members of Coastal Force. They were terrified.

Josh:

Oh yeah, of course. I mean it's been drilled into their head that this is going to happen, because it already did. I do want to point out that there was a lot of damage that happened because of the bullets, which is oh yeah, I mean, if you're going to fire 1400 rounds of something, there's going to be some collateral damage.

Josh:

Yeah, there's a lot of buildings that were damaged, a lot of vehicles and, like you mentioned before, some people died because when this was happening, first of all, it's the middle of the night, it's a blackout and it's loud. Everyone thought bombs were dropping because of how loud it was. I mean, there was a war. This has never happened in the United States. I don't even think, since All these people in LA thought there was a war going on. So there was panic. Everyone was running around. Two people died of a heart attack because of the stress of them thinking that it's happening, and then three were killed in car accidents trying to escape right, but isn't that on them?

Travis:

they should have been at home. It was a blackout right. I mean, was it the blackout police?

Josh:

that maybe got hit. You shouldn't be driving in a blackout. Yeah, yeah, that's on that. They're not allowed to turn on their lights, and if they did, I was surprised that that's what they reported on like to me.

Travis:

I was like okay, so two people died of a heart attack, all right, so this thing happened. Now we're just going to say, oh, they died as a direct result of this. It wasn't like bad health or maybe they had, you know, some congenital problems or any other thing that could have led to them having a heart attack. They were going to say it was a definite result of this, that's.

Josh:

I mean, they still do that in today's news.

Travis:

Sure you know, that's fine, okay. And then the two accidents. I was surprised that firing 1,400 rounds of something didn't result in a death. Yeah, that was what was shocking to me.

Josh:

I mean that alone could be aliens, protectors of.

Travis:

Earth, yeah Right, but what happened? I mean, they put themselves in the line of fire. Where are their ships? Where's the fallout from that?

Josh:

Well, maybe the nickel balloon thing was real and maybe they started firing and there was a lot of damage and a lot of people's lives at risk, and then the aliens showed up to save everyone, okay, where the spotlights were finally kind of all converged to one location and it was shining on something in the sky and it was big, but you can't. And there's an image, a very famous image, of this. You can't really see what it is because so many spotlights were shining on it, but it is a very interesting looking potential spaceship style thing. It is completely illuminated. Maybe that was a UFO.

Travis:

Yeah, I'm looking at that and it looks like a doctored video but that's an original image from the newspaper. Yeah, but I mean you could get an original image of a movie film and put it in the newspaper and say it's original.

Josh:

I mean you could, but that's a speculation, I'm just going with what we have. You know, I just and I'm not truly saying that the aliens came and saved that, you know I. I'm just not discounting that this potentially could be something, because I mean, yeah, this is history, this is a long time ago. There was a lot of fear, but if we look at modern day, our pilots and our military are still having very bizarre encounters in the sky and for some reason, after this point, we're not really attacking back. We're just kind of letting them do their thing. So, with the combination that you know, looking at through a 2025 lens, it is possible that this is another one of those.

Travis:

Well, like the rules of engagement have changed since we've introduced jets into fighting, so like planes are a very new factor in war, right, and so back to the rules of engagement were a lot different than they are now, where it's like just hold on, wait a second, don't fire until you're fired upon that, that sort of thing. So I mean there's still a lot of I'm sure a lot of shoot first, ask questions later.

Josh:

Yeah, in certain situations.

Travis:

Certain situations, but as far as like engaging with the quote unquote enemy, those are different.

Josh:

Yeah, and this was a high, high stakes situation too, you know, I mean.

Travis:

Yeah, we're right in the dawn of World War II for us, as far as we're concerned, like they've been fighting in Europe for five or six years at this point, and we had decided to stay out until we were brought in by the Japanese.

Josh:

Well, I mean it is still one of those that is just unexplained. We just don't know all the facts. It is bizarre, bizarre enough, to have even a lot of people in today's day and age still questioning it. With all the information that we have. I mean we have a lot more information than back then, and even back then they were just like, oh, the UFOs and all that stuff. It still wasn't, I mean it wasn't hot.

Travis:

People didn't think Well, a couple years after this, orson Welles has his War of the Worlds broadcast. That sent people into panic, and this was that was before that was 38, 1938.

Josh:

Oh shit, so, yeah, so it is in the back of their minds somewhere, but it wasn't a common thought, it wasn't mainstream, it wasn't anything like it is now or a couple of years later, especially with Roswell. When was Roswell 44, 46. It was right after world war II. So there are some conspiracy theories. I mean it could have been the Japanese coming. Yeah, that is very real, and you know what it could have. And it could have been a coverup. You know, it could have just been a military war cover-up.

Josh:

Ufologists think a possible encounter with an extraterrestrial object, fueled by photos showing that searchlight converging on that central object, like I talked about, and then the aircraft maneuvering in anomalous ways. And some fringe elements of this theory include the recovery of two crafts, one off the coast and one in San Bernardino Mountains. And then I mean just the public response is a huge range of reactions and interpretations of the event, including skepticism about the official explanation and the demand for more truthful explanations. So overall, these four events have a lot in common, they have a lot of connections. All four events involved a lot of witnesses observing unusual aerial phenomena.

Travis:

Allegedly.

Josh:

Indicating the events were not isolated or hallucinated. Hmm, it wasn't hallucination.

Travis:

There goes our no, I could write all this stuff in here too. I could put that in the dossier and say that it was a hallucination. You would read it just like it was a fact.

Josh:

Yeah, but I'm saying that it was a hallucination, you would read it just like it was a fact. Yeah, but I'm saying that it's most likely not a hallucination because of how many people saw it. Allegedly Allegedly you're going to leave this room alive. Whoa, Come on. Travis Sky battles, I know.

Travis:

Just remember sky battles. But I don't want to put too much faith in the accounting of one person. We need this. I mean, I really want it, I know, but okay. So allegedly a bunch of people saw these right, okay.

Josh:

Yeah.

Travis:

I am okay with that Also.

Josh:

the connection is just smoke, fire, crossfire, ships, disks, spheres, just weird shapes and behaviors. I mean that correlates with all of these Sure Sky battles yeah, Sky battles. And also just the correlation of battles.

Travis:

They all mentioned that there was fighting or military maneuvering Like you talked about, though Carl Jung interpreted it a different way. It could have been a mass mating ritual that these beings you know, maybe extraterrestrial beings were observing. You know they all come together. It could have been a way for them to communicate. So that's. Another thing is we're interpreting this in our own dumb earth way, right? Right, we don't know that these people even have vocal cords or have evolved the same way we have with speech, like there are ideas out there that maybe they are communicating with us and it's through blowing of leaves or a certain way up. Something is arranged, like through patterns, because they haven't evolved through speech and we have a lot of creatures here on earth that communicate through one form or another yeah and not communicating is also a form of communication.

Travis:

Right, right, they do it without use of vocal chords, like we have, like we are anomalous of all the species on planet earth yeah, for us to be able to speak for us to be able to speak and communicate these ideas is bizarre bizarre.

Josh:

Yeah, you mentioned wartime paranoia and that kind of correlates with, I mean, not just los angeles, but you were saying we're kind of in the the midst of where we talked about this like very early on.

Travis:

We're a very violent people like human beings are violent and prone to violence, and in europe, in the 1500s.

Josh:

There was a lot of violence, you know. So it's not just la being so close to World War II and Pearl Harbor. I mean, no one knows what was happening in Europe in the 1500s. Nobody, no one. No, it's the dark ages?

Travis:

Yeah, but outside of these broadsheets and leaflets, we don't know what was going on.

Josh:

Yeah, I was kidding, but yeah, you're right, they could have written their own history. Yeah, completely. Yeah, it could have been paradise. We could have had crazy technology back then and they just like no, we're just going to say we didn't.

Travis:

Yeah, Marty McFly was in his time machine back there and saying you guys need to write it like this was a very dark time because I don't want anybody to look back too fondly on human history.

Josh:

Yeah. So, in conclusion, overall these events will always remain a mystery, while natural phenomena, psychological factors and wartime anxiety likely contribute to some of the explanations. The consistency of a lot of the elements across these sightings and the detailed events, and the fact that some of the aspects cannot be easily attributed to any of these known phenomena, fuel the ongoing interest of skeptics, researchers and ufo geeks like us. Sure. So let us know what you think. If you think we're full of shit, Sky battles Sky battles Just tell us what you think of sky battles.

Travis:

What is your first response? That's what I want to know.

Josh:

And did we follow through? Were you really excited about sky battles and then you heard us talk about it and you're like, oh shit. So if you want to get a hold of us, talk to us any of that. There'll be a link in our show notes to do fan mail. You just click on that and then you can just send us a message directly and we will get it.

Travis:

Yeah, josh is very active on the social, so you can hit him up there. I am not.

Josh:

Yeah, just get a hold of us, and I'm excited that you guys are listening.

Travis:

Do we have a quiz for this week or no? Oh yeah, Uh-oh.

Josh:

Yeah, we got a quiz, so we're going to do the baseline quiz. I'm just going to give you a sneak peek into the topic of the next episode by taking a quiz to see how much we know and to let you know that we don't know a lot.

Travis:

So the topic of our next episode is going to be crop circles.

Josh:

Oh, just finding out that that's what we're talking about. Okay, I mean, I've heard a lot about crop circles. I don't know a lot, I've just heard different things. I've watched some documentaries. They've talked about it, but I haven't researched anything. Well, okay, I'm excited about this. So let's get into this. Question one when was the earliest known mention of a crop circle-like phenomenon? Is it A 84 BC, B 1291, c 1678, or D 1823? I have no idea.

Travis:

I'm just going to throw this out there, I'm going to make a wild guess. I'm going to make a wild guess and I'm going to say 84 BC.

Travis:

I was leaning towards that, but, man, I didn't know that, and I'm going to say not because of a crop circle. There's this thing in the UK and I was trying to remember what it's called. It's not like the green man or something like that, but it's a figure on a hillside that looks like a giant man and I think it's like a druidic thing, something that was done by the druid population, and I think it's very old. So I'm going to guess 84, and all this information I'm throwing out is probably wrong, because I might be. I'm misremembering huge chunks of the story, but I'm going to say very old, 84 BC.

Josh:

Okay, I'm going to say B 1291. Okay, and I don't know why I'm just guessing. Because I mean, I just You've got to feel it. Yeah, I'm just guessing. Mm-hmm. All right. Next question who were the two pranksters who famously admitted to creating many of the crop circles in the late 20th century? Mm-hmm, was it A entry? Was that a dave and buster?

Josh:

b doug and dave wow, dave's really showing up yeah, c bill and bob or d tom and jerry I want to say dave and buster, because it's silly, because there's a dave and busters.

Travis:

But what if they name themselves but what if well, I mean dave's a pretty common name I know a lot of these crop circles showed up in Europe Buster. Does Buster seem like a European name? I don't know. Tom and Jerry is also another one I want to. I feel like it was a very cartoony name. I'm going to say Dave and Buster.

Josh:

I feel like Dave and Buster and Tom and Jerry are joke ones because Dave and Buster's and Tom and Jerry cat and mouse, but they are also very common names. So it's like Buster's, like I don't know yeah, so I'm leaning on Doug and Dave or Bill and Bob. Okay, I'm going to say Doug and Dave, cause that sounds like two people who would be pranksters.

Travis:

No, we'll get Doug and Dave back out of the game. I just I mean it just sounds Don't shake hands with them. Their hand might be wet or you might get a buzz. So I'm going to go, Doug and Dave, Okay.

Josh:

And you were Dave and Buster.

Travis:

I was Dave and Buster.

Josh:

Okay, next question In which country have the most crop circles been reported? A United States, b Australia, c Brazil or D the United Kingdom.

Travis:

What do you say? I say United Kingdom.

Josh:

I say the United States Okay, logically I think the UK, but I just I'm saying the United States yeah.

Travis:

I have that feeling. I'm going to keep my mouth shut and let's move on to the next one.

Josh:

All right. Which of the following has not been theorized as a crop circle explanation? The? A giant moles creating underground designs. B alien spacecraft landings. C sonic frequencies shaping the plants.

Travis:

I love this one, the one you're about to read.

Josh:

Or D wallabies getting high on opiates. Okay, that would be hilarious, uh-huh, if all the crop circles were just high animals. Yeah, just glazed eyes bending plants and then laughing. Yeah, I know, the giant moles are a real thing. They were, they were a real thing, but I don't know how creating underground designs could affect.

Travis:

I mean, it could, but I don't know that it manifests in this way hundreds of thousands of years later is wild yeah, alien spacecrafts obviously, why we are here today sonic frequencies, so this has not been theorized. So these, this is yeah, this is not a theory, so we are sussing out the least likely or the one that nobody's mentioned taking seriously I mean there's an obvious one on there yeah, I'm gonna say alien spaceships wallabies getting high wallabies, getting high on opiates, is what I'm gonna say too and now, that's probably true, it probably is in australia as a joke.

Travis:

They probably said it as a joke and it showed up to throw us off.

Josh:

Or someone has a video of wallabies doing that and they're like hey, this could be crop circles I just, I just think jordan is fucking with us.

Travis:

You could be and this could be, maybe, an australian had said it's wallabies as a joke and that was in the reading and it's actually like giant moles or something like that yeah, all right.

Josh:

Next question what is the folklore name of the entity blamed for crop circles in the 17th century England? A the corn goblin I love all of these names.

Travis:

Yeah, the corn goblin especially, I'm going to get your corn.

Josh:

B the mowing devil, c the field phantom or D the harvest elf. So I like A corn goblin.

Travis:

I like A so much I'm going to say corn goblin. I think I like a so much I'm gonna say corn goblin, I love it, I think I'm gonna that's gonna be my halloween costume. I'll just corn goblin, I'll figure it out.

Josh:

Yeah, you just throw corn at kids.

Travis:

I love it so much I'm the corn goblin.

Josh:

I'm the corn goblin, heard of me yeah, all these are really good and I can see all of them working. I'm going to say the harvest elf, okay, and you're sticking with corn goblin.

Travis:

I am going to stick with corn goblin I. I just love it so much.

Josh:

I hope that's it.

Travis:

So do I.

Josh:

All right. Last question what is the largest recorded crop circle formation? Is it a a hundred feet wide, b 500 feet wide, c over 800 feet wide or d over 2000 feet wide? I'm going big boy. I am too, because I've seen some formations that are multiple circles and I think a formation would be all of those circles combined. So I'm going to say d sure, all right, let's check our answers. Oh, oh, oh, okay, so we'll start. Oh, he's quickly checking all of his answers. I knew it Sounds like he's getting most of them right. No, okay, so we'll start at the beginning. Yeah, when was the earliest known mention of a crop circle like phenomenon? I said 1291. You said 84. 84.

Travis:

PC. It is 1678.

Josh:

All right.

Travis:

Next one, Dang. We got Doug and Dave.

Josh:

Who were the two pranksters who famously admitted to creating the crop circles in the late 20th century? Doug and Dave.

Travis:

Yeah, not the ones we know and love that. Let you drink while playing video games.

Josh:

Yeah, I knew it. Okay. So next one In which country have the most crop circles been reported? It is the United Kingdom, yeah.

Travis:

I knew that 100%.

Josh:

I didn't. I thought you know it's gotten popular in the US. I don't know.

Travis:

I told you this, this next one. I worked out in my head that we were being fucked with. Oh my gosh.

Josh:

Okay, which of the following is not theorized as crop circle explanations? Damn it. It's the giant moles creating underground designs. I damn it it's the giant moles creating underground designs. I should have stuck with that.

Travis:

I was leaning towards that that's the one I said too. I was like an australian said uh, just so, it's wallaby. I can't do an australian accent. I can say razor blades with an australian accent. Do it?

Josh:

rise up lights okay, that's pretty good you know the secret no you say rise up lights okay, cool, there you go. I'll practice that later but you were almost on to something when you were saying that these giant mole caverns affecting it that much later, like tens of thousands of years.

Travis:

I knew I was being fucked with personally and that walby's getting high on opiates was thrown in there, because if you know a little something about me, I love animals getting fucked up. Love it, it's one of your favorite things.

Josh:

One, one of my favorite things, but we have to legally say that he doesn't do that. He doesn't get animals fucked up.

Travis:

No, I am a free choice person and I want animals to be able to get fucked up in their own time. I'm not drug police. I just love it when they get out their little phones and they record them getting fucked up and doing crop circles.

Josh:

I hope there's video. Okay, next one. What is the folklore name of the entity blamed for the crop circles in 17th century england? Yeah, you said corn goblin. Yeah, I said harvest elf.

Travis:

It's the mowing devil I knew in my heart. I knew it wasn't going to be corn goblin, but I liked it and I suspected it was probably going to be something dumb and pedantic like well and devil religious.

Josh:

We talked about that in this whole episode. They saw everything is religious. And last one what is the largest recorded crop circle formation? We both said over 2 000 feet wide. That is incorrect. It's over 800 feet wide, which is still huge, big, big boy. It is pretty big boy. So I got one correct. I got one correct did you? Yeah, and it wasn't the same one no, I got the united kingdom um.

Josh:

That was the only one and I got doug and dave wow. Well, we have a lot to learn. This is gonna be a fun one.

Travis:

This is gonna be a fun one. I I do like I I remember crop circles being a thing.

Josh:

That was a thing that happened in my lifetime and yours yeah, well, and millions and millions of other people, yeah, so it's the first ones in the 1600s.

Travis:

Well, I'm just saying, like what we know crop circles to be, that happened, like those two pranksters that happened in our lifetime.

Josh:

Yes, yeah, well, hey, thank you for listening and I hope you tune in for this next episode of crop circles. Okay, thanks for listening, all right circles.

Travis:

Okay, thanks for listening. All right, bye, bye.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Josh Snodgrass

Co-host
Head Shot

Travis Wright

Co-host
Head Shot

Jordan Blair

Producer