Madonna's prayer

Voila’

Madonna’s prayer, Saint Giovannino, and the UFO

The churches of Europe are truly works of art. The buildings were meticulously planned and designed to display the awesome grandeur of God and His message. They were created unconstrained, by the combined use of God-given imagination, and a new age of mathematics and mechanical science. There are many unusual wonders for the explorer to discover in their shadowed niches, splashed with deep colored light from massive stained glass. Some of these windows, like the one found in the front of Notre Dame, Paris, is a huge circular orb showing what some debate to be ether the twelve zodiac divisions of the equinox, or the twelve apostles. Pisces the fish, two thousand years before our new Age of Aquarius, is embedded in these lead lined biblical stories. Wood and marble carvings of strange and mythical creatures, men in strange bubbled costumes, and holding unidentifiable tools, is an abundance of symbolism that continues to be debated to this very day. It will probably never end.

Christianity is falling hard in several of the countries I have visited; none more noticeable to me than England. To the north, many of Scotland’s grand Churches are being sold, or leased, for pennies on the dollar, converted into high end apartments. It is just amazing. Beautiful hand carved statues are found in dusty antique shops, fenced and pilfered, and original antique paintings by the score are being transported to America, where Christianity still flourishes, marketed for small fortunes.

Museums have moved in to purchase what some consider priceless art objects. Objects of mystery that can stimulate surprises for even the most seasoned of collectors… There are men who study art their entire lives, but are constantly astounded by new discoveries. Discoveries that defy our conventional understanding of reality...

In the National Gallery of London there is a mystifying picture that can not be explained. It was painted in the 15^th century by Carlos Crivelli, and is called “The Annunciation.” Christians know that “The Annunciation” happened when an angel appeared to Mary to tell her she was with child. “It was at the hour of midnight, when the most holy Virgin was alone and absorbed in prayer, that the Archangel Gabriel appeared before her, and asked her, in the name of the blessed Trinity, to consent to become the Mother of God.” Wrote Dom Gueranger, O.S.B. "And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women." - St. Luke 1: 28. I have studied this picture with a fine tooth comb, and both the reality and symbolism fails me. Just what it meant when painted in 1486 AD, seems now to be lost. All that I have gotten from it is total amazement, and so called critics come away with pure speculation.

Between the buildings, in a clouded sky of bark blue, is an illuminated disk emanating a golden beam of light. It is seemingly going through the solid building’s structure, directly to Mary kneeling in a room below. She has her arms folded, as if in prayer, and it raises the question as to why Crivelli depicted this well known biblical scene in such a way.

Though there are literally dozens of paintings that seem to depict UFOs, one of the more famous was painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio. It is part of the “Loeser Collection” and is hanging in the Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence, Italy. It is a painting of the Madonna praying over the infant Saint Giovannino. The child is supported by a cherub with a halo. There is also a halo above the Madonna. I don’t know the significance, but the child Giovannino does not have one that I can see. The striking point of the painting is in the upper right corner. In a gray-blue sky, an object is being observed by a man, standing next to what looks to me to be a dog on one side, and what may be a high fortified wall on the other. What in the world? (This painting is shown in its entirety above.)

It is intriguing to speculate, and perhaps this was the main reason these paintings were created. Many artistic avenues were used to display objects in the sky, shown to be present at significant religious and historical times. Frescos, stele, tapestries, illustrations, illuminations, pencil drawings, as well as oil paintings have shown these objects in a mostly religious context. Early cave paintings around the world display objects floating in the sky, and primitive clay carvings excavated from South America show what looks to be children’s toys with the exact dimensions of a modern airplane. The ancestors of these people still use a strange whistling instrument swung on the end of a long string. It manufactures a vibratory noise that resembles the sound of a motor. They say they are calling the gods to come back from the sky, and have been doing this for untold generations. I have heard this sound, and the realization will send chills down your spine! Of course modern photography, for the last hundred or so years, has recorded many unexplained phenomena, with UFOs having a lion's share. Many have been authenticated to be totally undoctored.

Other unexplained art can be found in the French Basilica. There, a tapestry depicting the life of Mary is displayed, with a saucer shaped UFO in the sky. (#3 below) Another remarkable fresco called “The Crucifixion,” (#2 below) painted by Visoki Dicani in 1350, is now found in a Kosovo Monastery in Yugoslavia. There is a man with his head turned, clearly panted in a flying machine! Two flashing lights are unmistakable. Still another by the Flemish artist Aert De Gelder in 1710 is called “The Baptism of Christ.” (#4 below) It now hangs in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. It shows a disk illuminating a beam of light on John the Baptist and Jesus. It looks to me, without reservation, to be a solid disk. Lastly, though I could go on, is a very strange woodcut depicting an event that happened in Basel, Switzerland in 1566. (#1 below) A local newspaperman, Samuel Coccius, an eye witness to this event, wrote in his paper, “Many became red and fiery, ending and being consumed and vanishing.” Sounds like a meteor shower to me, but the woodcut clearly shows something that is definitely not of the normal, with black and white orbs filling a sunny sky, as men stand in awe. These paintings and works of art are just another set of strange unexplained phenomena attached to our human history, with haunting speculation that may never entirely be known.

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Love and Peace, and have a Very Merry Christmas! –Ken klarive@bellsouth.net Special thanks to UFO Folklore Center, ARTANDUFO, and UFOs in European Art.

Note* I must admit that I have seen strange lights in the sky; just pinpoints the size of stars moving at great speed over the spangled velvet that can only be found far away from city lights. I’m told these lights are man made, a modern “Sputnik” satellite in an elliptical orbit around earth. I suppose the knowledge that they probably are, keeps me stable, balanced, and sane. I wonder how a person fifteen hundred years ago would have tried to record an unexplained sighting in the sky. What unreasoned fear might fill the heart of a person who knew that the technology he witnessed did not exist in the reality he understood? It is written of the “chariots of fire” that crossed the sky. What other descriptive means for a mode of transportation could be found, for something so alien?