The Ship in the Air over Clonmacnoise (749)

One line in the annals

The Irish annals are laconic. Year by year their compilers noted deaths of kings and abbots, battles, burnings of monasteries, storms and famines, usually in a sentence each, in a mixture of Latin and Irish. In the year that the modern editors of the Annals of Ulster date to 749 (the manuscript itself reckons it 748), the list runs like this: a king of the Cruithin killed, the monastery of Clonfert burned, a battle in Ard Ciannachta, a great windstorm, the drowning of the community of Iona. And then, as entry nine in the translation: “Ships with their crews were seen in the air above Cluain Moccu Nóis.” In the original the annalist writes in Latin, “Naues in aere uisae sunt cum suis uiris,” and then slips into Irish for the place: “os cinn Cluana Mc. Nois,” above Clonmacnoise. That is the whole report. There is no witness named, no hour, no shape, no number of ships. The years around it were hard and strange. The annal for the year before records snow of unusual depth that killed nearly all the cattle of Ireland, followed by drought, and three years earlier the same chronicle notes, just as briefly, that “dragons were seen in the sky.”

A vellum manuscript page in two columns of dense brown Irish minuscule script; each year entry opens with a large letter K and the words Anno Domini, and small glosses are squeezed into the margins between the columns and along the edges. — A page of the Annals of Ulster in Trinity College Dublin MS 1282, written by the scribe Ruaidhrí Ó Luinín in the late fifteenth century. This page covers the years 902–913; the ship entry sits earlier in the same volume, in the same terse year-by-year style. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Image source · Public domain

Sources: The Annals of Ulster (Latin and Irish text), entry U749.10The Annals of Ulster (translation), entries U746.2, U748.3, U749.3–9, U755.2, U764.6, U786.3, U845.3

The city of Ciarán

Clonmacnoise was no quiet hermitage. Saint Ciarán, “the son of the wright” in the annals, founded it in the 540s (the Annals of Ulster say 548) on a gravel ridge above the Shannon, where the river crossed the great east–west road through the bogs of the midlands, and died there within a year or so, in his thirty-third year. By the eighth century it was one of the great monastic towns of Ireland, rich enough to be worth burning and powerful enough to fight. The Annals of Ulster chart its fortunes in the decades around the sighting: abbots dying in 740 and 753, the monastery burned on March 21, 755, and in 764 a pitched battle at Argaman between the community of Clonmacnoise and the community of Durrow, in which two hundred of Durrow’s men were killed. In 786 the same annals note, without explanation, “a horrible vision in Cluain Moccu Nóis, and great penance done throughout Ireland.” The Vikings came later, plundering the monastery by 842; in 845 Turgéis, camped on Lough Ree, burned Clonmacnoise “with its oratories.” The round towers, high crosses and stone churches that visitors see today mostly date from the tenth century onward, rebuilt after raids by Irish kings, Norsemen and eventually Normans.

Low evening sun lighting the gable and doorway of a roofless stone cathedral among smaller ruined churches, with the dark stump of a round tower on the left, grave slabs and crosses scattered over the grass, and flat water meadows and a glint of the river under a soft peach and blue sky. — Clonmacnoise at evening, with the cathedral in the low sun, O’Rourke’s round tower at left and the Shannon and its callows beyond. Photo: JohnGill, 2014, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Image source · CC BY-SA 4.0

Sources: The Annals of Ulster (translation), entries U746.2, U748.3, U749.3–9, U755.2, U764.6, U786.3, U845.3Clonmacnoise

Four annals, four dates

The notice turns up in the other great chronicles too, which strongly suggests a single early record copied down different lines of transmission. The Annals of Tigernach, under 748, say simply “Naues in aere uise sunt cum uiris suis,” ships were seen in the air with their men, and name no place. The Annals of the Four Masters, compiled in the 1630s, put it in 743 and add an adverb: ships with their crews “were plainly seen in the sky this year.” The Annals of Clonmacnoise, which survive only in Conell Mageoghagan’s English translation of 1627, give it under 744 in his splendid spelling: “There were shipes seen in the skyes with their men this yeare.” The Chronicon Scotorum, another Clonmacnoise-connected annal, has a gap covering these decades. And the Book of Leinster, a twelfth-century compendium, tucks the Latin line into its roll of the kings of Ireland under Domnall son of Murchad, who reigned from 743 to 763. Of all these witnesses, only the Annals of Ulster puts the ships above Clonmacnoise; even the chronicle named for the monastery leaves the place out.

Sources: The Annals of Tigernach (translation), entries T746.3, T748.3, T748.13Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters, entry M743.9The Annals of Clonmacnoise, being Annals of Ireland from the Earliest Period to A.D. 1408The Book of Leinster, formerly Lebar na Núachongbála, Roll of the Kings (fol. 25b)Airship of Clonmacnoise

Three ships over the fair at Teltown

Then the story began to move. The Book of Leinster also keeps a list of the wonders of Tailtiu, the great royal assembly held each summer at Teltown in County Meath, where kings presided over games, horse racing and law. One of them is “seeing three ships voyaging in the air above them, when the men of Ireland were celebrating the assembly with Domnall son of Murchad.” The eighth-century sighting had acquired a crowd and a king. By the eleventh century it had also acquired a plot. In a collection of the wonders of Ireland preserved in the Irish version of the Historia Brittonum, the ship appears over the fair at Teltown in the presence of a different king, Congalach son of Máel Mithig, who ruled in the mid-tenth century and was killed by the Norse in 956. One of the crew throws a dart at a salmon. The dart falls among the crowd, and a man comes down out of the ship after it. As he comes down, a man below catches hold of him. “I am being drowned,” says the man from above. “Let him go,” says Congalach, and the stranger is released and goes “away from them, swimming in the air.” James Henthorn Todd, who printed the Irish text in 1848, dismissed it as “this unmeaning story”; another manuscript has the sailor throw a fork instead of a dart.

Sources: The Book of Leinster, formerly Lebar na Núachongbála, Roll of the Kings (fol. 25b)Of the Wonders of Eri (Do ingantaib Érenn), wonder no. 23The Irish Mirabilia in the Norse “Speculum Regale”Airship of Clonmacnoise

A king at the theater of the Irish

The same scene appears in Latin verse in De mirabilibus Hibernie, a poem on the wonders of Ireland usually attributed to Patrick, bishop of Dublin in the late eleventh century. One of its wonders is headed “De naui que uisa est in aere,” on the ship that was seen in the air. A king is at the “theater of the Irish,” probably meaning an assembly like the one at Teltown, with thousands of people around him in fair array, when suddenly they see a ship running through the air. One of the crew throws a spear after a fish, the spear drops to earth, and the man swims down and pulls it back. The poem drops the king’s mercy and the man seized from below, but keeps the inversion that makes the story endure: to the sailors, the air above Ireland is the sea, the Irish live on its floor, and a man can swim down through it after a lost spear. The poet ends by asking who could hear of such a thing without praising the Thunderer.

Sources: On the Wonders of Ireland: Translation and AdaptationAirship of Clonmacnoise

The anchor comes to Clonmacnoise

At some point the ship came back to Clonmacnoise, this time with an anchor. An Irish version preserved in a late-medieval manuscript in Edinburgh (National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 72.1.26) sets the story at the church of Clonmacnoise: an anchor drops down from the sky, the clergy seize it, a man comes swimming down after it, and when they will not let go he protests that he is drowning, until he is allowed to swim back up to his ship with the anchor. Scholars disagree about its date. Kenneth Jackson thought the text perhaps fourteenth or fifteenth century, while the Celticist John Carey assigned it to the later Middle Irish period, before about 1200. Carey, whose 1992 article traced the whole evolution, also proposed where the anchor came from. A gloss on an early Irish hymn to Saint Brigit tells of a ship at sea whose anchor fouls on a monastery at the bottom of the Sea of Wight, and he suggests the monks of Clonmacnoise borrowed that marvel for their own sky-ship. In Carey’s reading, Clonmacnoise in this period was a house hungry for marvels.

A seventeenth-century engraved plan on foxed paper titled Ecclesiarum & Coemetery Clonmacnoisae Descriptio, showing an irregular walled enclosure with small shaded church buildings lettered A to K inside and along the wall, a compass rose at upper left, and a key below naming Temple Keran, Temple Ri, Temple Coner, Temple Dermot, Temple Finian and others. — A plan of the churches and cemetery of Clonmacnoise engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607–1677), with Temple Keran, Ciarán’s church, marked A. An old title for the print misplaces the site “in Ulster.” Public domain, via the University of Toronto Hollar collection and Wikimedia Commons. Image source · Public domain

Sources: Airship of ClonmacnoiseAerial Ships and Underwater Monasteries: The Evolution of a Monastic MarvelWhen a Sighting Report Is Not

Sunday Mass at Cloena

The fullest version was written down not in Ireland but in Norway. Around 1250 an anonymous author composed the Konungs skuggsjá, the King’s Mirror, a dialogue in which a father instructs his son in everything a courtier or merchant should know, including the marvels of Ireland. One happened, he says, in the town called Cloena, which the scholar Kuno Meyer identified as Clonmacnoise, in a church dedicated to a saint named Kiranus. “One Sunday while the populace was at church hearing mass, it befell that an anchor was dropped from the sky as if thrown from a ship,” in Laurence Larson’s 1917 translation. A rope was tied to it, and one fluke caught “in the arch above the church door.” The congregation ran out and followed the rope upward with their eyes. They saw “a ship with men on board floating before the anchor cable,” and then a man leaped overboard and dived down toward the anchor, his hands and feet moving “like those of a man swimming in the water.” The people rushed to seize him. But the bishop, whose throne stood in that church, forbade them, “for, said he, it might prove fatal as when one is held under water.” Released, the diver hurried back up; the crew cut the rope, and “the ship sailed away out of sight. But the anchor has remained in the church since then as a testimony to this event.” The Old Norse makes the bishop’s fear vivid: the man would die “sem hann væri i vatni haldinn,” as if he were held in water.

A tall Gothic doorway in a grey limestone wall with several deep moulded pointed arches under a carved hood, flanked by slender pinnacled pilasters, with three small carved figures of saints above the arch and a view through the opening into the roofless interior and a far doorway onto green grass. — The north doorway of the cathedral at Clonmacnoise, the “Whispering Arch.” It dates from the fifteenth century, long after the King’s Mirror was written, but it is the kind of church-door arch the Norse story has the anchor catch on. Photo: Sarah Murphy, 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Image source · CC BY-SA 4.0

Sources: The King’s Mirror (Speculum regale – Konungs skuggsjá), chapter XI, “Irish Marvels which have Miraculous Origins”Speculum regale. Konungs-skuggsjáThe Irish Mirabilia in the Norse “Speculum Regale”

Wonders heard in Ireland

The King’s Mirror places the anchor tale among a string of Irish wonders: an island where the dead never decay, a lake where a stake of holly turns to iron in the mud and to stone in the water, and the men called gelts (from the Irish geilt, “madman”), who flee in terror from battle into the woods and grow feathers after twenty winters. Kuno Meyer, who compared them with the Irish lists in 1894 (reprinted in 1910), thought the Norwegian author had collected them by word of mouth in Ireland rather than from books. His comparison also showed how much the Norse version differs from the Irish ones then known. The Irish lists Meyer knew put the ship over Teltown and give its sailor a spear; the Norse text moves it to Saint Ciarán’s church, as the Edinburgh Irish text also does, and alone adds the bishop, the Sunday and the whole anchor kept in the church as a relic.

A worn vellum leaf in two columns of brown Gothic book hand, with a decorated initial in red and blue in each column and a few later notes in the right margin; the page is numbered 37 at the top right. — A page of a medieval Norwegian manuscript of the King’s Mirror, reproduced in Kristian Kålund’s Palæografisk Atlas (1905), plate 37. This page comes from the book’s account of Greenland, which follows the Irish wonders. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Image source · Public domain

Sources: The King’s Mirror (Speculum regale – Konungs skuggsjá), chapter XI, “Irish Marvels which have Miraculous Origins”The Irish Mirabilia in the Norse “Speculum Regale”Airship of Clonmacnoise

A feast day somewhere in Britain

Four decades before the King’s Mirror, the anchor had already crossed the Irish Sea. Around 1211 Gervase of Tilbury, an English lawyer and courtier in the service of Emperor Otto IV, filled his Otia Imperialia, or Recreation for an Emperor, with marvels, and in his chapter on the sea he tells a darker version, a marvel he calls new and widely reported in his own day. On a feast day “in greater Britain,” as a congregation came out of its parish church after Mass into thick, cloudy air, they found a ship’s anchor lodged in a stone tomb inside the churchyard, its rope stretched up into the sky. While they argued over it, the rope moved as if someone above were struggling to free it, and a clamor came out of the fog like sailors shouting. Then one of the crew came down the rope hand over hand, as sailors do. He had just worked the anchor loose when the bystanders grabbed him, and he died in their hands, choked, as Gervase’s Latin puts it, by the dampness of our thick air, as if he were shipwrecked at sea. After about an hour the sailors above gave him up for drowned, cut the rope and sailed away. The iron of the anchor, Gervase says, was made into fittings for the church door, and they can still be seen. He does not name the parish. An older anchor falls in the chronicle of Geoffroy of Vigeois, a twelfth-century monk of the Limousin: a ship “navis sursum in aere” over London in 1122, whose crew had to cut their rope when the townspeople rushed the anchor.

Sources: Des Gervasius von Tilbury Otia imperialia, in einer Auswahl neu herausgegeben (book I, chapter 13, “De mari”)Airship of ClonmacnoiseSt. Patrick’s Purgatory: An Essay on the Legends of Purgatory, Hell, and Paradise

The Bristol knife and the sea above

Gervase told the anchor story as proof of a proposition: that the sea lies above us, in the air. In the same chapter he adds a second proof. A Bristol man sailing for Ireland, far out in remote waters, was rinsing his knife over the ship’s side after a meal when it slipped from his hand; at that same hour it dropped through the roof-light of his house in Bristol and stuck in the table in front of his wife. She knew the knife and put it away, and when he came home long afterward the day and the hour matched. Medieval readers had a text for this upper ocean in the first chapter of Genesis, where God divides the waters under the firmament from the waters above it, and Irish writers in particular played with the idea. In the Voyage of Bran, the sea god Manannán drives his chariot across the waves and tells Bran that what looks like ocean to him is a flowering plain, and the leaping salmon are his calves and lambs. Against that background the sky-sailors are not visitors from another world so much as neighbors from an upstairs one, fishing, dropping anchor and drowning in our heavy air as we would drown in theirs.

Sources: Des Gervasius von Tilbury Otia imperialia, in einer Auswahl neu herausgegeben (book I, chapter 13, “De mari”)Voyagers in the Vault of Heaven: The Phenomenon of Ships in the Sky in Medieval Ireland and BeyondSt. Patrick’s Purgatory: An Essay on the Legends of Purgatory, Hell, and ParadiseIreland’s Upper SeaAirship of ClonmacnoiseWonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times

Magonia

The oldest sky-ship story from the Continent has nothing to do with Ireland. Around 815 Agobard, archbishop of Lyon, wrote a tract against the popular belief that storm-makers, tempestarii, could raise hail. He complains that many people believe and say “that there is a certain region called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds,” to carry away the crops beaten down by hail and storms, the aerial sailors paying the weather-wizards for the grain. Worse, he writes, he had seen four people, three men and a woman, displayed in chains at a gathering as if they had fallen from those ships. They had been held for some days and were being shown to the crowd, “in our presence,” as though they were to be stoned. After a long dispute, Agobard says, the truth prevailed and their accusers were confounded, “as a thief is confounded when he is caught.” More than a thousand years later Jacques Vallée borrowed the name for his 1969 book Passport to Magonia, which argued that modern UFO encounters continue the old folklore of fairies and aerial visitors. The book quoted Agobard at length and gave the anchor stories their own pages.

Sources: Liber contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruisPassport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying SaucersSt. Patrick’s Purgatory: An Essay on the Legends of Purgatory, Hell, and Paradise

The anchor lands in Texas

In 1844 the English antiquary Thomas Wright paraphrased Gervase’s anchor tale and the Bristol knife in a book on medieval legends, placing them beside Agobard’s Magonia as examples of a medieval belief in a sea above the sky. Wright’s English wording, with the anchor “hooked to one of the tombstones” and the villagers making the church-door hinges out of its iron, was recopied for half a century, and in the spring of 1897 it went out again as newspaper filler. A piece headed “A Sea Above the Clouds,” credited to the Boston Post, ran in the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic in Arkansas on March 7 and in other papers through the spring. That spring the United States was in the grip of the great airship wave: after a first flurry over California in late 1896, lighted craft were being reported across the Midwest and Texas. On April 28 the Houston Post printed a dispatch from Merkel, Texas, dated April 26: “Some parties returning from church last night noticed a heavy object dragging along with a rope attached.” They followed it until it caught on a railroad rail, looked up and saw what they took for the airship, with light coming from several windows and “one bright light in front like the headlight of a locomotive.” After some ten minutes a man came down the rope. “He wore a light-blue sailor suit, was small in size.” Seeing the people at the anchor, he cut the rope below him and sailed off to the northeast. “The anchor is now on exhibition at the blacksmith shop of Elliott and Miller and is attracting the attention of hundreds of people.”

A pen-and-ink newspaper drawing of a long cigar-shaped airship with a gondola beneath, floating high above swirling clouds over a railway track and wooden sheds, while a man in the foreground points up at it and another watches. — The mystery airship as the Chicago Times-Herald drew it on April 12, 1897, two weeks before the Merkel anchor story. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Image source · Public domain

Sources: St. Patrick’s Purgatory: An Essay on the Legends of Purgatory, Hell, and ParadiseA Sea Above the CloudsA Sea Above the Clouds. Extraordinary Superstition Once Prevalent in EnglandWonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern TimesAirship of Clonmacnoise

Demon ships and the flying saucer books

The Clonmacnoise ship entered the flying saucer literature through Harold T. Wilkins, a British writer on mysteries, whose Flying Saucers on the Attack (1954) retold the King’s Mirror story as one of the “demon ships” of old Ireland. His version was garbled in ways that later writers could not see past. Cloena became “Cloera,” Saint Kiranus became “St. Kinarus,” the ninth-century writer Nennius was moved to around 212 AD, and Gervase’s unnamed churchyard became Gravesend in Kent, where a blacksmith supposedly beat the anchor into ornaments for a lectern. In Flying Saucer Review in 1964, W. Raymond Drake offered what he called a translation of Gervase “possibly the first in English” and inferred that the anchor fell at Bristol. Frank Edwards, in Flying Saucers—Serious Business (1966), dated the Irish story to 956 AD, the year King Congalach died, and gave the anchor sharp flukes and a wooden arch to catch on. Donald Hanlon set the Merkel dispatch beside the medieval tales in Flying Saucer Review later that year and found the resemblance “downright suspicious.” Jacques Vallée quoted him in Passport to Magonia: the Texas account “sounds much too familiar to be taken lightly.” John Keel opened a section of UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970) with “the puzzle of the anomalous anchors,” set the Irish ship, Gervase and Merkel beside an Iowa farmer’s tale of an airship grapnel that snagged his trousers, and offered readers a choice: either the stories were derivative, or airships “all dragging anchors, appeared in 956, 1200, and 1897.”

Sources: Flying Saucers on the AttackFlying Saucers UncensoredFlying Saucer Review: W. R. Drake, “Spacemen in the Middle Ages,” vol. 10, no. 3 (May–June 1964); Donald B. Hanlon, “Texas Odyssey of 1897,” vol. 12, no. 5 (September–October 1966)Flying Saucers—Serious BusinessPassport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying SaucersUFOs: Operation Trojan Horse

Out of the marvellous

The story’s most famous modern telling is not a UFO book but a poem. Seamus Heaney came across the legend in an academic paper and retold it as the eighth of his twelve-line “Lightenings” in Seeing Things (1991). In his version the monks are at prayer when the anchor hooks into the altar rails; the sailor cannot free it, the abbot warns that he will drown in their air, the monks help him, and he climbs back up into the ship and out of the marvellous as he had known it. When Heaney won the Nobel Prize in 1995, the Swedish Academy’s press release singled the poem out as “a crystallisation of much of Heaney’s imaginative world.” Heaney later called the legend a kind of dream instruction and in a commencement address in 2000 urged his listeners to “never be so canny as to ignore the uncanny.” In 2014 a tapestry by the Czech artist Peter Sís, Out of the Marvellous, woven in France and paid for by Heaney’s friends and admirers, was hung in Dublin Airport’s Terminal 2. It shows a small figure in a tiny ship in the sky, so that travelers passing beneath look up at the sailor from below, as the congregation did.

Deep blue twilight over still floodwater: two round towers and a small stone church stand dark against the sky among pines, trees on the right glow orange under floodlights, and the whole scene is mirrored in the water. — Clonmacnoise by moonlight, with McCarthy’s round tower and Temple Finghin at left and O’Rourke’s Tower in the center, reflected in the flooded callows of the Shannon. Photo: Yvonne O Connor, 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Image source · CC BY-SA 4.0

Sources: Airship of ClonmacnoiseThe Nobel Prize in Literature 1995: Press ReleasePoetry in Motion: Tapestry Tribute to Seamus Heaney

c. 548
Saint Ciarán founds the monastery of Clonmacnoise on a ridge above the Shannon.
743–763
The reign of Domnall son of Murchad, under whom the Book of Leinster later places three ships over the Teltown fair.
746
The Annals of Ulster record that “dragons were seen in the sky.”
748
Snow of unusual depth kills nearly all the cattle in Ireland; drought follows.
749
Ships with their crews are seen in the air above Clonmacnoise, in the same year as a great windstorm and the drowning of the community of Iona.
c. 815
Agobard of Lyon denounces the belief in cloud-ships from Magonia and sees four supposed sky-sailors paraded in chains as if to be stoned.
845
Turgéis’s Vikings burn Clonmacnoise with its oratories.
944–956
The reign of Congalach son of Máel Mithig, the king in the spear-and-salmon version at Teltown.
LATE 11TH C.
Patrick of Dublin’s Latin poem on the wonders of Ireland includes the ship seen in the air.
1122
Geoffroy of Vigeois records a sky-ship’s anchor seized by the people of London.
c. 1211
Gervase of Tilbury tells of a sky-sailor who drowned in a British churchyard and an anchor made into church-door iron.
c. 1250
The Norwegian King’s Mirror describes the anchor caught above the church door at “Cloena” during Sunday Mass.
12TH–15TH C.
An Irish version, preserved in Edinburgh, moves the ship back to Clonmacnoise and gives it an anchor.
1627
Conell Mageoghagan translates the Annals of Clonmacnoise: “shipes seen in the skyes with their men.”
1844
Thomas Wright paraphrases Gervase’s anchor and pairs it with Agobard’s Magonia.
7 MAR 1897
“A Sea Above the Clouds” runs in the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic.
28 APR 1897
The Houston Post prints the Merkel, Texas, airship-anchor dispatch.
1954
Harold T. Wilkins retells the “Cloera” demon ship in Flying Saucers on the Attack.
1966
Frank Edwards dates the Irish anchor to 956; Donald Hanlon links Merkel to the medieval tales.
1969
Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia reprints the anchor stories.
1991
Seamus Heaney publishes “Lightenings viii” in Seeing Things.
1992
John Carey traces the evolution of the legend in the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium.
5 OCT 1995
The Swedish Academy cites the Clonmacnoise poem when awarding Heaney the Nobel Prize.
APR 2014
Peter Sís’s tapestry Out of the Marvellous is hung in Dublin Airport.

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Connected files

The Sky Battle over NurembergEight centuries later a Nuremberg printer sold a broadsheet of globes and tubes battling in the sky, another marvel reread by each new age.The Light in Jeon Mun-wi’s CourtyardAnother sky portent kept in a court chronicle, rediscovered centuries later and turned into modern popular legend.Utsuro-bune: The Woman in the Hollow BoatA strange vessel and a stranger crew from the edge of the known world, whose story also grew with every retelling.The Sun That Danced at FátimaVallée read Fátima, like Agobard’s Magonia and the Irish sky-sailors, as part of one long tradition of aerial visitors.Jacques ValléeNamed his 1969 book after Agobard’s Magonia, reprinted the anchor stories in it, and with Chris Aubeck traced the ships back to the Annals of Ulster in 2010.John KeelOpened a section of Operation Trojan Horse with “the puzzle of the anomalous anchors,” setting the Irish ship beside Merkel and Sioux City.

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The Ship in the Air over Clonmacnoise