What Richard Dolan Got Wrong about the Spanish "USO" of 939 CE

​This is a bit of a fun one since it casts everyone in an unusual role. Jeff Knox posted on social media a medieval so-called “USO” incident I wasn’t familiar with, along with an excerpt from ufologist Richard Dolan’s new book A History of USOs: Unidentified Submerged Objects, Vol. 1, released earlier this year. In it, Dolan gives the story and then offers a skeptical (or, rather, rationalized) version of the story that goes in an unexpected direction for a talking head from Ancient Aliens. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that Dolan, unfamiliar with the source texts or prior literature, actually went too skeptical in his analysis.
 
Here's how he gives the story:

Another event, from July 1, 949 at the Bay of Biscay in Spain, concerned a fire said to have risen from the sea and which damaged many towns on the Spanish coast. The translation from the original states that on “Saturday at nine o’clock ... fire came from the sea and set many towns and cities, as well as men and animals, ablaze. In this same sea it also caused destruction in Zamora and the district of Carrion, as well as Castro Xeriz and Burgos, Birbiesca and La Calçada, Pancorvo, Buradon and many other towns.”
 
This seems more interesting than the incident from Ireland in 597, as it alleges material damage to several towns which are even named. However, a review of this claim raises doubts. In the first place, these locations are spread out from each other, sometimes by hundreds of miles. The town of Zamora is itself nearly 150 miles inland from the Bay of Biscay. It is hard to believe that a ball of fire would travel hundreds of miles to damage so many cities in that region. Even harder that enough people would be able to coordinate information back then to create a coherent account of it, when written sources of any sort were hard to come by and notoriously unreliable.
 
There is also the political context to consider. In 949, the situation in northern Spain was tumultuous. Central and Southern Spain were under control of the Islamic Caliphate of Cordoba, but the northern region was controlled by several Christian kingdoms, including the Kingdom of Asturias, the Kingdom of León, the County of Castile, and the always irreconcilable Basque people. These groups were hostile to the Caliphate and also each other, vying for power and control. All this led to frequent wars and skirmishes. I don’t know of specific engagements that took place in 949, but when looking at the history of one of the towns allegedly struck by the fireball—Zamora—we learn that during this time, the town had been under attack for years by Muslim forces and was finally seized in 966.
 
Perhaps we might assume that some of the fires and burning had something to do with the political situation?

​Dolan bases his story entirely on a very late source, George Moir’s 1827 volume Table-Talk, or Selections from the Ana (as in -ana, the suffix for various collective nouns). In that volume, Moir presents a somewhat edited excerpt from Francisco de Berganza’s Antiguidades de Espana (1719), taken from what Berganza called the Memorias de Cardeña, a chronicle compiled in 1327 in the Spanish town of Cardeña, in the northeast of the province of Cordoba.
 
Interestingly, the published text is not the only source for this story, nor is it the oldest. There are actually at least four different accounts of the fireball from the sea, with the oldest dating back more than a century earlier. The earliest source was also not written in Cardeña but rather in either La Rioja or Burgos and covers the history of the kingdom of Castille.
 
The four versions are (1) the Chronicon Burgense (after 1212 CE), written in Latin and found in Burgos but probably redacted in La Rioja; (2) the Annales Compostellani (after 1248 CE), written in Latin and found in Santiago de Compostela but probably redacted in La Rioja; (3) Cronicón de Cardeña, a faulty Spanish-language manuscript found in a Gothic Bible in Cardeña and composed sometime before 1327; and (4) the so-called Memorias Antiguas de Cardeña, a Spanish-language manuscript that is the final redaction of the Cronicón in 1327 and corrects the earlier document’s errors of dating—at least according to the eighteenth-century Spanish editor who published both versions. (Forgive me if I am not wholly fluent in medieval Spanish manuscript traditions!) For our purposes, the only salient fact is that both Spanish-language accounts of the fireball are substantively the same but have minor variations in spelling and wording, and the published version of one has a typographical error in the date.
 
A comparison of the four versions demonstrates that the later three accounts are dependent on the Chronicon Burgense, which they copy, at times verbatim. I have translated each of the texts from the standard published versions of the chronicles. All four texts use the “Spanish Era” dating system, which, for reasons no one understood even at the time, counts years from 38 BCE. Note that “Era 977” is 939 CE, and note, too, that the Memorias Antiguas de Cardeña gives an incorrect date, likely due to adding an “X” from the Roman numerals used. 

Chronicon Burgense
In the Era 977: on the Kalends of June, on a Saturday, at the ninth hour; a flame came out of the sea and burned many towns, and cities, and men and beasts; and in that same sea it set fire to cliffs; and in Zamora [it burned] one neighborhood, and very many houses; and in Carrión, and in Castro Xeriz, and in Burgos, and in Briviesca, and in Calzada, and in Ponticorvo, and in Buradon, and many other towns.
 
Annales Compostellani
The Era 977. A flame came out of the sea and set fire to many cities, and villages, and men, and beasts, and even set ablaze sails on the sea itself. And in Zamora it burned a neighborhood, and in Carrión, and in Castroxeriz, and in Burgos, one hundred houses, and in Briviesca, and in Calzada, and in Pontecorvo, and in Buradon, and it burned many other villages.
 
Cronicón de Cardeña
In the Era 977: Kalends of June, Saturday, at the ninth hour, a flame came out of the sea and set fire to many towns and cities, and to men and beasts; and in this same sea it burned cliffs; and in Zamora a neighborhood, and in Carrión, in Castro Xeriz, and in Burgos one hundred houses, and in Briviesca, and in La Calzada, and in Pancorvo, and in Belorado, and many other towns.
 
Memorias Antiguas de Cardeña
In the Era 987, on the Kalends of June, on a Saturday at the ninth hour, a flame came out of the sea and set fire to many towns and cities, and to men and beasts; and in this same sea it burned cliffs, and in Zamora a neighborhood, and in Carrión, and in Castrojeriz, and in Burgos, and in Briviesca, and in La Calzada, and in Pancorvo, and in Buradón, and in many other towns.

​Dolan’s speculation that this reflects tenth-century warfare is belied by the fact that these same chronicles are some of the primary sources for the accounts of warfare, and the chroniclers make no mention of this being related to war. He would know this if he read the chronicles, but of course he knows only a quoted passage from a nineteenth century text.
 
Dolan also gets the date wrong because he is copying from Moir, who got it wrong, mixing up June and July. It was June 1, 939, not July 1, 949. Why he omitted the correct month, given in the text Moir quoted but Dolan omitted, is beyond me. He is not the only one, however. The Spanish edition of the Atlas Mayor published in Amsterdam in 1647 lists the date as July 1, 942.
 
In the July 1, 1922 edition of Ibérica, law professor Pio Ballesteros of the University of Madrid examined these accounts and produced a plausible analysis of what happened. As his article is now in the public domain, I translate the remainder, following his summary of the differing texts:

The date of the phenomenon was in the late afternoon of Saturday, June 1st, in the year 977 of the Spanish Era (which for many centuries was the chronological reckoning in our country), that is, during the reign of Ramiro II of León. Mention is made of a similar flame in the phenomena of the years 1433 and 1704, recorded by Doctor Faura in his articles; and the flame, according to those accounts, came out of the sea, similar to what is narrated by the observer of the Barcelona meteor of 1704. However, the allusion to this circumstance cannot be denied, a detail characteristic of someone writing from coastal regions, and surprising in a chronicler not only from inland, but who says nothing of damage except in inland localities. The chronicles say nothing about the physical phenomena that accompany the meteor, nor about falling stones; instead, there is talk of flaming rocks and disasters caused by fire that spread from the sea.
 
The trajectory of the meteor appears extremely long, given that localities such as Zamora and La Calzada are mentioned among others separated by about 260 kilometers in a straight line. If the cited locations are joined with Zamora by straight lines, a path can be drawn radiating from that capital to Carrión, through Briviesca (and very near the line, Castrojeriz, Burgos, and Pancorvo), and finally to La Calzada, passing close to Belorado. The central axis of this triangular space is the Zamora-Castrojeriz line, but most of the topographical data corresponds to the Burgos region.
 
The scarcity of data forces great caution in interpretation, lest one get lost in a jungle of conjectures. The fires occurring suddenly suggest the fall of flaming meteoric stones; the vast area affected by the phenomenon inclines one to suppose that it was not one, but several bolides with simultaneous appearances, some of which perhaps arose in coastal zones—hence the account of a flame coming out of the sea and of rocks burning in it. Only those who collected the news, such as the chroniclers of Zamora and the Cradle of Castile, made the coastal and Burgos accounts into a single event, supposing that the same flamma was the cause of all the experienced calamities. But as my interests and my modest historical-legal studies are not accompanied by training in physical-natural disciplines, I must limit my work to merely having pointed out a case whose perfect integration is typical of events adorned with surprising elements.

​Ballesteros’s article was later reprinted in a book about the history of meteors on the Iberian Peninsula.

Earlier writers, included a certain writer named Martínez Añíbarro, suggested that the story is a highly distorted account of the solar eclipse that occurred during the Battle of Simancas in mid-July 939.
 
In short, the medieval accounts suggest an account of a meteor that broke up in the atmosphere and landed across northern Spain, with the largest chunk crashing into the Bay of Biscay. Because accounts of the various events were compiled much later as residents of various towns compared stories over great distances and probably weeks or months later, the chroniclers mistakenly took the ocean crash for the origin point rather than the end point.