More than two thousand years ago, Alexander the Great created one of the largest empires in history, stretching from Greece to northwestern India, earning a reputation as an invincible military man and one of the greatest and most successful military leaders in history.
Was The Army Of Alexander The Great Pursued By UFOs?
There are many stories about the exploits of Macedonski and his army, but some of the strangest ones are about how the Macedonian army was pursued by UFOs.
Given that in that distant antiquity, only birds like eagles or vultures could be the largest flying objects in the sky, this story looks very curious.
The very first report that something unusual was pursuing the Macedonian army from the sky dates back to 329 BC. At that time, his army was advancing on an enemy city in Central Asia and was a huge procession of people, horses, and elephants.
According to the story, when they tried to cross the Jaksart River, now known as the Syr Darya (passing through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan), at night they were attacked from the sky by two “large silver shields spewing fire.”
These “shields” so frightened the soldiers and animals that they postponed the crossing until the next day.
It is difficult to say whether this is true or a late story, since the first known reminder of this appeared only in the twentieth century, in a book on the history of Macedonia from the historian Alexander Donskoy from Yugoslavia. There, it was noticed by the then-popular American ufologist Frank Edwards, who later published it in his book Stranger Than Science, from where it scattered into many other books.
Edwards was sure the story was true:
“Alexander the Great mentioned two strange objects that repeatedly swooped down on his army, until the war elephants, men and horses panicked and refused to cross the river where the incident took place. What did it look like? His historian describes them as large shining silvery shields, spewing fire around the edges. These were the “entities” that came from heaven and then returned back to heaven.”
As for skepticism, another historian Spencer McDaniel wrote about it this way:
“Edwards cites no source for any of these claims, and it is unlikely that he ever had any. His claim that Alexander’s army allegedly saw “great shining silvery shields” in the sky does not even remotely resemble not a single statement in any surviving ancient source about Alexander the Great.
This claim is probably completely made up. The ancient sources about Alexander’s campaigns do mention some kind of “silver shields”, but not in the context of anything that could reasonably be interpreted as having anything to do with UFOs.
As for another case where UFOs were chasing the Macedonian army, the Italian ufologist Alberto Fenoglio somewhere discovered the following story, supposedly taking place in 332 BC, at the height of Alexander the Great’s siege of Tyre, during his campaign against the Persians.
“The fortress did not give up, its walls were fifty feet high and so solidly built that no siege engine could damage it. The Tyrians destroyed the greatest technicians and builders of war machines of that time, and they intercepted in the air the incendiary arrows and projectiles that catapults thrown into the city.
One day, these “flying shields,” as they were called, suddenly appeared over the Macedonian camp, flying in a triangular formation, led by an extremely large shield, the rest were almost half its size. There were five in total.
An unknown chronicler described them as slowly circling over Tyre, while thousands of warriors on both sides stood and watched them in amazement. Suddenly, a flash of lightning burst from the largest “shield”, which hit the walls and they collapsed. More flashes followed, and the walls and towers collapsed as if they had been built of mud, leaving the way open for the besiegers who avalanched through the gaps.
The “flying shields” hovered over the city until it was completely taken by storm, then they very quickly disappeared into the air, soon disappearing into the blue sky.
So, the first story tells how a UFO attacked the Macedonian army, preventing them from crossing, but the “shields” from the second story, on the contrary, helped the Macedonian win. Is there any particular logic here?
Critics also do not consider this case particularly reliable. The same Spencer McDaniel wrote about him this way:
“The only ancient text that even remotely resembles what Fenoglio describes is contained in the History of Alexander the Great” by Quintus Curtius Rufus 4.3.25-26. Curtius writes: “Indeed, [the Tyrians] heated bronze shields with great amounts of fire, which being filled with hot sand and boiling mud, they were suddenly thrown off the city walls. And no plague was feared more than this one; for when the red-hot sand penetrated between the armor and the body, the man could not shake it out by any force, and everything he touched burned. And [the soldiers] having thrown down their weapons and torn to pieces everything that could protect them, stood vulnerable to injury, unable to retaliate.”
I believe this passage is technically referring to flying shields during the siege of Tyre, but the shields are real, literal shields made of bronze, and they only “fly” because the Tyrians throw them at Alexander’s soldiers from the walls of the city. This passage is clearly talking about defensive siege warfare and not UFOs in any sense.
Fenoglio may have read Edwards’ statement that Alexander saw “large shining argent shields”, he may have gone in search of the source, and may have found some version of the passage from Curtius describing the Tyrians throwing down their shields during the siege of Tyre. Then perhaps he severely misinterpreted this passage to make it about UFOs.
I suspect, however, that it is more likely that Fenoglio never read any of Curtius’s works, and he simply made up the whole story of Alexander seeing flying shields during the siege of Tire solely as an embellishment to Edwards’ earlier history, and his description just bore a vague resemblance to something Curtius was actually describing.”
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