On 7 November 1492, on what would otherwise have been another blustery fall day in Alsace, a young farmhand turning the soil outside the town of Ensisheim hears a sudden hiss from above. Startled, he looks up, his eyes widening, as a ball of fire hurtles out of the sky and crashes into the nearby fields with such a tremendous explosion that the impact reverberates along the valleys of the Danube and 70 miles away in Lucerne (Figure 3.1). Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), who is spending the latter part of the year working in nearby Basel as a woodcut designer, may well have witnessed the spectacle, which the humanist Conrad Lycosthenes (1518-1561) would go on to include as a ‘prodigy’ in his 1557 catalogue, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon. Today, we know it as the first recorded meteorite fall in the West.

The farmhand creeps up to the site of impact to discover that the earth has been flattened into a crater a metre deep. At the bottom lies an alien artefact that will be described evocatively by the poet Sebastian Brant (1457-1521) in a broadsheet published later that year to commemorate the event.

The townspeople arrive and, as crowds are wont to do, disperse, though not before hauling the meteorite, since estimated to weigh around 300 pounds, to the Ensisheim parish church, where it is hung from the choir loft as a testament to God's majesty.