We need not wonder at Aerial Knights, At elemental combats, and strange fights, when earthly monarchs thus renew their jars, and even all Europe is involv'd in wars. (William Lux, Poems on Several Occasions)
On 6 March 1716, the Historical Register featured a description of an extravagant “display” of sky lights above London. The newspaper reported that during the evening, a number of Londoners noticed something that at first appeared like a huge and motionless body of light that in a curtain-like shape hung over the sky. They then saw it starting to move in a random fashion and dissolve into parts, spreading toward the west and changing into gigantic “pillars of flame.” From the west horizon and with an incredible velocity the lights continued to dart southeastward. After a series of undulatory motions and vibrations, they turned into a “continual fulguration, interspersed with green, red, blue, and yellow.” What were they? The celebrated astronomer Edmund Halley wrote that he was afraid that in delivering the “Etiology of a Matter so uncommon, never before seen by myself, nor fully described by any of the Ancient and Moderns, I fail to answer [philosophers'] Expectation or my own Desires.” But the less scholarly sources had less trouble. In Oxford, people saw swords and cavalries in the sky. In Upton upon Severn, Worcestershire, two heavenly armies waged a war that was so close that the air smelled of gunpowder.