There were a lot of untold stories in the backgrounds of these historical paintings, including images in the artworks that look like UFOs.

THE CLIMATE AT STEPHEN F. AUSTIN STATE COLLEGE was an eerie one in the year 1967-1968.  There were sit-ins, moratoriums, bomb threats that required dorm evacuations in the middle of the night, less ominous panty raids.

There was a rumor that Jeane Dixon, famed psychic, had predicted a series of axe murders at a college in the South.  The fact that the SFASC mascots were known as The Lumberjacks, with some of the school spirit designs depicting burly lumberjacks carrying axes did not help ease tensions.  Co-eds used the buddy system like they never had before.

I loved art history – learning about the artists’ lives, their techniques, and their crude art substances, learning about the moral climate of the times they lived in and how it influenced their work. My eyes were always open and looking for unusual things in the backgrounds of paintings.  Some of the things I had seen were very mysterious but fascinating.

There were a lot of untold stories in the backgrounds of these paintings, including images in the artworks that look like UFOs, or at least something similar. In the painting, Madonna With St. Giovannino by Ghirlandaio in the fifteenth century, I could see an unknown oval object in the sky. And if you look closely, you can see a tiny figure on the ground, shielding his eyes and looking up at it

In the fresco of The Crucifixion, painted in 1350, Kosovo, Yugoslavia, there is clearly an aircraft with a pilot, in the sky—and the aircraft is leaving an emission trail behind it. A beautiful medieval tapestry has what clearly resembled a flying saucer in it.  It was called Summer’s Triumph, 1538, created in Bruges, Belgium.

Those were the three I had been studying, but there were many, many more.  I had been going over our whole art history book with a magnifying glass, just looking at backgrounds to discover what might be unusual in them.

In The Annunciation of St. Emidus, Crivelli, 1486, The Glorification of the Eucharist, Salembini, 1600, La Tebaide, 1465, by Uccello, The Baptism of Christ, De Gelder, 1710, The Miracle of the Snow, 1400, Da Panicale, The Magnificent, another French tapestry, I had found flying saucers similar to the one in Summer’s Triumph.  Both of these tapestries were located in the French Basilica of Notre Dame in Beaune, Burgundy.

All of these artworks had strange objects hovering in the skies.  They were clearly not angels – or even moonbeams.

What had they really seen?

Were they symbols?

Was it part of a code?

A message?