Lyon, France being encounter — 840

This record derives from a passage by Agobard of Lyon about popular beliefs in weather magic, rather than a documented landing in 840. In his early ninth-century treatise On Hail and Thunder, Agobard describes people who believed ships came through the clouds from a country called Magonia. Their supposed sailors purchased crops damaged by storms from local weather-makers. Agobard then recounts seeing four captives, three men and a woman, brought before an assembly. Their accusers claimed they had fallen from such ships and wanted them stoned. Agobard says that reasoning prevailed and the accusers were confounded. He does not report watching an aerial ship, identify the captives as nonhuman, or say the threatened execution was carried out. Those distinctions directly contradict the imported shorthand about a mob lynching three figures who admitted flying. The year 840 corresponds approximately to Agobard’s death, while the treatise is commonly dated around 815. Later imaginative retellings and modern UFO comparisons should be separated from his text. The plate depicts a medieval accusation and its rejection: ordinary captives, townspeople, and a cleric. It includes no physically observed spacecraft or invented alien visitor.