Did Writer & Poet "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe" Witness a UFO?

I'm not seeing anything in his description that suggests the thing he saw was flying. Did I miss something?

Wasn't it Goethe who claimed to have seen his doppelganger?

He said (I think it was him anyway) that, when he was a young man, he was walking along a road and noticed an old man approaching him in the opposite direction.

As the old man passed him, he realised it was Goethe himself - but as an old man.

When he was an old man, he reckons he walked down the same road and passed a young man on the opposite side.
It was Goethe as a young man...and with a shocked expression on his face.

In the past I've worked with many complex young folk with various seizures (coincidentally enough, at the place where i was intro'd to Goethe) and will second what Bybyots posted re the diverse types that can be experienced - some folk just experienced an inner glow and a "spooky" 30 seconds or so... Goethe apparently "treated" his symptoms of severe depression, and perhaps other undocumented symptoms with his artistic, scientific and literary pursuits.... the guy was one of the last true polymaths if you ask me - he was nothing short of remarkable and deserving of far more recognition outside of Germany where he is rightly celebrated.

What a stud

You aint wrong, he has some serious flair, and leaving things up in the air like that is a proper tease. He was a bit of a "swordsman" by all accounts too . Some film director totally needs to make a semi mystical knockabout romp on this dude - I've no idea why I've never feverishly read more about him and collected his works. Bad Skalla

reply to post by CJCrawley


Best. Story. Ever

conundrummer

 

I'm not seeing anything in his description that suggests the thing he saw was flying. Did I miss something?

That is correct. No mention of whether or not it was hanging in the air, sitting on the ground etc. Size is also something he didn't reference, almost as if he was holding back a bit ... in favor of not stretching it too far, but that's just my take on it.

The image in the OP is just some loosely related artwork in order to give a sense of what it could have looked like, back then. With lots of leeway in terms of interpretation.

jeep3r Sceptics have pointed to fireflies & swampgas which, according to them, could be a possible explanation.

The 'witness is too stupid to see what he is looking at so I have to tell him' argument does not work with Goethe. He was a smart guy.

jeep3r

Ross 54

 

Fireflies caught up in a whirlwind, perhaps? That at least fits with the darting about behavior of some of the lights. He says there were countless lights. Fireflies apparently do sometimes swarm.

He didn't mention any circular motion of the lights which, it seems, should have been visible. He seems an acute and careful observer, odd, then, that this detail would have been omitted, if it were present.

The most puzzling aspect is that all this happened in the 18th century. What source of light in the year 1765 could have enough power to blind the observer? That should rule out fireflies, IMO he and others should/would have recognized them.

Then there's the specific shape, which is being described as that of an amphitheatre, suggesting that it was a circular formation with different levels (that were apparently 'stacked' on top of one another). Perhaps he interpreted it as a natural phenomenon due to a lack of other explanations (while being well aware of things coming close, like lightning or ball-lightning)?

... unfortunately, no further details are available but the classic 'UFO profile' could apply to this case, as far as I'm concerned.

A tornado vortex with lightning flashes inside?

A flock of seagulls reflecting sunlight from a low angle?

It was with great reluctance that I moved on [called back by the others], for it was my desire to investigate it more closely.

Bybyots
This is really good stuff, OP.

It seems obvious to me from Goethe's retelling of the story that he was the only one in the group that he was in that saw this "phenomenon".

I disagree. It sounds to me very much like the Travis Walton case.

Rogers stopped the truck and Walton leaped out and ran toward the disc. The others said they shouted at Walton to come back but he continued toward the disc.

reply to post by AntiNWO


I think that's a really good call as far as comparing the setting of Travis Walton's story with Goethe's, but it's still clear from what he wrote that when he asked the others they hadn't seen it and when Goethe then went to compare notes with the carriage driver the man hadn't seen it either. Also, Goethe does not describe seeing a disc, does he?

So, yeah, Travis and Goethe were both in the woods and their friends called to them, as far as I can tell that's where the comparisons stop.



ETA: After another reading I see that it can't be known from Goethe's description whether his friends saw it or not. Seems to me he would have mentioned it so as far as my opinion is concerned they did not.

Bybyots
After another reading I see that it can't be known from Goethe's description whether his friends saw it or not. Seems to me he would have mentioned it so as far as my opinion is concerned they did not.

It's possible that it could have been a natural phenomenon and if his friends were 'locals' perhaps it was a common-place occurence to them.

Hanau lies in the Hanau-Seligenstadt Basin...

The Hanau-Seligenstadt Basin is a Cenozoic graben. As a subbasin of the Upper Rhine Graben it belongs to the European Cenozoic Rift System, a fracture zone crossing Europe from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.

The Hanau-Seligenstadt Basin is separated from the Upper Rhine Graben to the west by a horst block. The Spessart mountains form its eastern margin. To the south it is bounded by the Odenwald mountains. Towards the north the graben margins converge. The basin sediments rest on top of the Variscan basement and Permian to Triassic rocks. Oligocene to Quaternary basin sediments reach more than 280 m in thickness. Marine, limnic and finally terrestrial clays, marls, limestones and sands with interbedded basalt layers dominate within the Oligocene and Miocene. The Pliocene and Quaternary river deposits consist of sand, gravel and silt, in Pliocene also lignite. The recent landscape is formed by river terraces.

en.wikipedia.org...

The last major earthquake along the fault was in 1356, it's epicentre in Basel, but major damage was caused in France and Germany, through which the rift runs. It is still seismically active and therefore combustible gases could be a factor. However, given that Goethe saw the light show emanating from a quarry, I would also wonder whether lignite deposits may have been responsible.

Lignite has a high content of volatile matter which makes it easier to convert into gas and liquid petroleum products than higher ranking coals. Unfortunately its high moisture content and susceptibility to spontaneous combustion can cause problems in transportation and storage. It is now known that efficient processes that remove latent moisture locked within the structure of brown coal will relegate the risk of spontaneous combustion to the same level as black coal, will transform the calorific value of brown coal to a black coal equivalent fuel while significantly reducing the emissions profile of 'densified' brown coal to a level similar to or better than most black coals.[3]

en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by KilgoreTrout

It's possible that it could have been a natural phenomenon and if his friends were 'locals' perhaps it was a common-place occurence to them.

So true, I can't help but think that the quarry might have had something to do with it. Either way, still sounds more to me like Evans-Wentz than Travis Walton.

reply to post by Bybyots

A will-o'-the-wisp /ˌwɪl ə ðə ˈwɪsp/ or ignis fatuus (/ˌɪɡnɨs ˈfætʃuːəs/; Medieval Latin: "foolish fire") are atmospheric ghost lights seen by travellers at night, especially over bogs, swamps or marshes. It resembles a flickering lamp and is said to recede if approached, drawing travellers from the safe paths. The phenomenon is known by a variety of names, including jack-o'-lantern, friars's lantern, hinkypunk, and hobby lantern in English[1] folk belief, well attested in English folklore and in much of European folklore.

en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by KilgoreTrout


The song is really sad but the image collection and text are pretty good.

reply to post by Bybyots


The song, I think, suits it. It is sad. The drainage of the wetlands, first for farming, and latterly to build homes upon, is a huge loss of natural habitat and biodiversity...plus it means the loss of the lights.

You're right though, nice images and explanatory text. Cheers.

Bybyots
reply to post by AntiNWO

 

ETA: After another reading I see that it can't be known from Goethe's description whether his friends saw it or not. Seems to me he would have mentioned it so as far as my opinion is concerned they did not.

edit on 16-3-2014 by Bybyots because: .

I could be wrong of course, but I got the impression that it was just assumed that they all saw it. It would have been strange if he had seen it and the others didn't, and judging by his great fascination, I'm sure he would have called for them to come and take a look.

But since he doesn't say either way, we can only speculate.

Most likely a reservoir of water flickering with the moon light. That is most probably or an encampment of people with fires lit or torches and he was seeing sparks or those flames in the distance. Any way I would not believe a word this guy says, he is a MASTER story teller, of fiction. If you look for lists of the greatest human geniuses that have ever lived, on one list I found he is listed as number 1! That is a remarkable honor, he is also featured on most every other list. But anyway, who knows his motive for saying this, certainly during this time and prior mystical and mythical stories were discussed, ghosts and spirits and angels so the human imagination has always been stirring, and he made his entire living as a writer and imagination explorer, who knows if he wanted to rile up people and make them believe things, get his kicks even from the grave, pulling one over on the public...anyway, you are justifying it.

reply to post by ImaFungi


Not just of fiction...

Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, known in English as Metamorphosis of Plants, was published by German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1790. In this work, Goethe essentially discovered the (serially) homologous nature of leaf organs in plants, from cotyledons, to photosynthetic leaves, to the petals of a flower. Although Richard Owen, the powerful British vertebrate anatomist (and staunch opponent of Charles Darwin), is generally credited with first articulating a definition of the word “homology” (in 1843), it is clear that Goethe had already arrived at a sophisticated view of homology and transformation (within an idealist morphological perspective) more than fifty years earlier.

en.wikipedia.org...

As it has already been pointed out, he did not wax overly lyrical, just reported it as he observed it, much as he did with most things. It is a great pity and a shame that there are less Goethean-like minds exploring science and the natural world today.

jeep3r

Some sources say this event had already been referenced by Jaques Vallée in the late 1960s, although I wasn't able to locate any websites or texts linking to this incident.

Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - page 16 of the pdf version - slightly different wording to that in the OP (although similar in content) and apparently from the sixth book of Goethe's autobiography.

...in September 1768, a young man of sixteen was traveling to the University of Leipzig with two passengers from Frankfurt. It rained most of the journey, and the coach sometimes had trouble moving uphill. On one occasion when the passengers had left their seats to walk behind the horses, the young man noticed a strange luminous object at ground level:

"All at once, in a ravine on the right-hand side of the way, I saw a sort of amphitheatre, wonderfully illuminated. In a funnel-shaped space there were innumerable little lights gleaming, ranged step-fashion over one another; and they shone so brilliantly that the eye was dazzled. But what still more confused the sight was that they did not keep still, but jumped about here and there, as well downwards from above as vice versa, and in every direction.

The greater of them, however, remained stationary, and beamed on. It was only with the greatest reluctance that I suffered myself to be called away from the spectacle, which I could have wished to examine more closely.... Now whether this was a pandemonium of will-o'-the-wisps, or a company of luminous creatures I will not decide."

The young man in question was Goethe. You will find this sighting in the sixth book of his autobiography, according to movie director and occult scholar Kenneth Anger, to whom I am indebted for this very interesting discovery. Would the German poet and scientist have had occasion to learn more about the "luminous creatures" had he lived in the twentieth century? If Paracelsus came back, would he find new material for his theories on the nature of the strange and fugitive races of beings from the sky? We can safely assume that their attention would be immediately attracted to the modern files of UFO landings and abduction reports.

-Dr. Jacques Vallee. Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact

I am especially interested in Vallee's question about Paracelsus and how data available today might change what Paracelsus thought. I started thinking about that when the Freidman AMA came up. I mean no offense, the guy is 80, but it seems that at some point Freidman stopped learning and continued to write from his limited perspective.

Bybyots
I am especially interested in Vallee's question about Paracelsus and how data available today might change what Paracelsus thought. I started thinking about that when the Freidman AMA came up. I mean no offense, the guy is 80, but it seems that at some point Freidman stopped learning and continued to write from his limited perspective.

Does anyone know what aspect of Paracelsus's work Vallee is referencing here? I am not completely familiar with his work, but I don't recall and mention of strange and fugitive races of men from the skies. I feel that Vallee is twisting Paracelsus's descriptions of the 'Elementals' a touch...

In his 16th century alchemical work Liber de Nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris et de caeteris spiritibus, Paracelsus identified mythological beings as belonging to one of the four elements. This book was first printed in 1566 after Paracelsus' death[2] and may be pseudepigraphical. He wrote the book to "describe the creatures that are outside the cognizance of the light of nature, how they are to be understood, what marvellous works God has created". He states that there is more bliss in describing these "divine objects" than in describing fencing, court etiquette, cavalry, and other worldly pursuits.[3] The following is his archetypal spirit for each of the four elements:[4]

Gnome, spirit of earth
Undine, spirit of water
Sylph, spirit of wind (also known as spirit of air)
Salamander, spirit of fire

en.wikipedia.org...

It ties, somewhat, into Paracelsus's holistic view of the 'Light of Nature', which is Trinitarian in principle. The 'beings' are somewhat allegorical, not necessarily meant to be taken literally, though that may be something of a gray area. He is really describing principles of life, divinity and connectivity in all living things, as well as those things that, today, we consider essentially inanimate. For Paracelsus, the microcosmic man encompassed all the molecular and particulate forms of the stars and the Universe but was connected to all other material by these Elementals, which he saw, in essence, as being the interface between the material and immaterial. A conduit of information and data if you will, and so, combined, forming the macrocosm. In a way, it holds parallels with Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance theory, and as such was simply a means by which to describe bio-chemical-physical relationships, ableit, in what is now perceived in a 'fairy tale' landscape. Paracelsus, much like Goethe and unlike most modern scientists, did not view man as the be-all and end-all but rather understood man's increasingly abstract relationship to his environment and sought ways in which to heal the rift. In that, I think that he and Vallee would have something akin to common ground.

As an aside, I was inspired by this thread to retrieve Faust from my book shelf and give it a go. I buy a lot of books on the basis of ‘I should read that’ and then feel somewhat intimidated by the writer’s stature and import in the world of literature, and so file it under ‘one day’. I am a third of the way through book one, and captivated, his reputation is well earned and in vindication of my tardiness, there is no way that I could I have fully appreciated the imagery he employs three years ago, or perhaps even three months ago.