Even at that time of year, the weather in Kriesbuhl, a small, picturesque farming community in the foothills of the Swiss Alps, is cool and clear. Kriesbuhl is located in Switzerland.
Hans Buchmann, a poor peasant farmer, has a debt that needs to be paid on that particular day, which is a Saturday.
He is indebted to a creditor in the neighboring commercial center of Sempach to the tune of sixteen florins, which is about equal to $600 in today’s money. In order to pay his financial obligations and provide for his family, Hans has taken out numerous loans secured by his modest piece of land.
But it doesn’t seem to matter how much money Hans borrows, the money always appears to vanish, and his family is still living in abject poverty. To his good fortune, the harvest from this past fall has been rather profitable, and he has enough money stashed away to repay his debtor. Hans is getting ready to make the trek to Sempach, which is a distance of around four miles, so that he can settle his obligations.
The sunlight is crisp and early in the morning. The road from Kriesbuhl to Sempach is mostly steep and winds through wooded areas. However, in November 1572, snow had not yet fallen on the foothills of the Swiss Alps, even though temperatures had been dropping slowly over the last few days.This is unfortunate for Hans.
The trip should take just less than two hours one way, but Hans Buchman won’t be back at his house for almost three months. Hans prepares himself for the chilly weather by donning his woolen overcoat, hat, and mittens before taking his walking stick and setting off on his journey. Hans sneaks out of his home without informing either his wife or his two boys, who are both in their adolescent years, precisely where he is going.
This could be because he feels embarrassed about the debts he’s racked up, or it could be because he has altogether different plans in mind. Two weeks later, Hans Buchman awakens to find himself filthy, untidy, and suffering from a throbbing headache.
He is curled up against a stone wall in an alleyway in an unknown and exotic city. He is just wearing a torn shirt and pants that are too big for him, and his hat, mittens, coat, and walking stick are nowhere to be found. He is only dressed in what appears to be his undergarments. clothes that have the appearance of having belonged to another person at one time.
He has no idea where he is or how he got here. He panics and goes out into the street, shouting in German to everyone he can catch a glimpse of, “Wo bin ich? Where in the world is this city? ” However, no one is responding.
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Everyone simply ignores this filthy and untidy madness, thinking that Buchmann is nothing more than a drunken beggar from another country, the kind of person that can be found rather frequently in this international and early modern city.
It is Saint Andrew’s Day, approximately two weeks after November 15, 1572, and hundreds of people, including adults, children, and even infants, can be seen walking throughout town while church bells sound out a call to worship.
Hans notices a man who is clad in a military outfit that is quite similar to the uniforms that Hans has seen worn by troops in his home country of Sempach. This soldier appears to be a man of authority, one of the numerous uniformed and heavily armed guys that appear to reside in this weird and overcrowded metropolis.
He is one of the many soldiers that wear military outfits. Hans yells out in German to the soldier, “Sir, my name is Hans Buchmann,” as he makes his way up to greet him. I was trying to make my way to the city that I grew up in, Sempach, but it seemed that I had gotten lost. Where in the world is this city? ” The soldier says, in flawless German, “This is Milan, and you are a long way from Sempach.” “This is Milan, and you are a long way from Sempach.”
Somehow, Hans Buchmann has found himself more than 240 kilometers away from his home. It had been two weeks since he had left his native village of Kriesbuhl on a journey that would take two hours, a simple walk of four miles that he had undertaken perhaps hundreds of times before, and he had ended up on the other side of the Alps in Italy, on a journey that would take five days from his native village. He had started out on the journey by walking. He has no idea how he arrived at that location.
It turned out that the soldier who answered Hans’ frantic query was Swiss, and he was one of the many thousands of foreign mercenaries who regularly came to Milan to bolster up that city’s defenses during the continual and never-ending battles between the autonomous Italian city-states.
Hans is aided on his journey back to Switzerland by this soldier as well as other Swiss soldiers of fortune. The trek back to Hans’s house during the winter, across high mountain passes that are covered in snow, is lengthy and difficult. The journey to Kriesbuhl will take Hans Buchmann several weeks to complete. I
t is already the first week of February 1573 when he arrives at the threshold of his homestead by the time he finishes his journey. During this time, Hans’ two kids had embarked on a journey in search of their absent father via the same overland trail that their grandfather had taken on their way to Sempach.
They discovered Hans’ coat, hat, mittens, and walking stick lying by the roadside at the edge of a forest outside of town. However, when they arrived in Sempach and inquired with as many residents as they could find about the possible whereabouts of their father, no one reported having seen him in at least two weeks.
Residents of Sempach did claim that they had seen Hans enter the town on the afternoon of November 15, 1572, and that he had stopped at a local bar to have a drink. However, after that point, the trail went cold and no further information was forthcoming.
In the middle ages, it was usual practice for towns and cities in central Europe to have a local chronicler who would record events for posterity in a town chronicle, which would be stored in city record offices.
During this time period, the sixteenth century, this practice was prevalent. It would appear that when Hans Buchmann did eventually return home and told his fantastical tale of having ended up, by means unknown, over 150 miles away in Milan, Italy, that he was questioned by both a chronicler and a magistrate from the nearby German city of Rothenburg. Buchmann’s story was about how he got to Milan and how he didn’t know how he got there.
Due to the fact that Hans’ story is so implausible, the magistrate has demanded that a comprehensive investigation be conducted into the matter, and he has asked Hans Buchmann to report to the Rothenburg police station as soon as possible. The judge thinks that the debtor is being dishonest or doing something else bad.
Under intense questioning by the magistrate, which was recorded in the Rothenburg city chronicle for the year 1573, Hans Buchmann made the admission that he had initially set out on his journey to Sempach carrying sixteen florins because he owed the money to a man named Hans Schiirmann, who was the proprietor of the Romerswill Inn in Sempach. This information was recorded in the Rothenburg city chronicle.
The historical record is unclear as to whether or not Hans Buchmann ever explicitly stated what he owed the money for, but it would appear that the sixteen florins may have been some sort of drinking debt that he owed, similar to a bar tab that got out of control. This is because a 16th century inn was more comparable to a modern tavern or dive bar than it was to a type of hotel at the time.
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Hans Buchmann stated that he went to Schiirman’s house, but Schiirman was not present. Since Buchmann was unable to pay his obligations at that time, he went to another local inn to have a drink instead of trying to pay them.
When we reach this stage in Hans Buchmann’s story, things start to become, to put it mildly, a little bit unclear. He confirmed that he had consumed alcohol on the day he went missing; nevertheless, he indicated to the magistrate that “it was just a little bit” despite the fact that he claimed he couldn’t recall exactly how much he had had.
He claimed that he left the unnamed tavern a few hours later, just before sunset, and made the decision to set out on his way home, thinking that he would pay his debt back to Schiirman at another, later date, when the proprietor of the Romerswill Inn was at home.
He claimed that he did this thinking that he would pay his debt back to Schiirman at another, later date. Hans Bruchmann told the magistrate and chronicler of Rothenburg that the last thing he could remember when he was strolling along a forested track on the outskirts of Sempach was hearing a loud and persistent buzzing sound.
He said this happened shortly before he was attacked. He stated that he could recall looking up into the sky and seeing a bright light while being completely engulfed by a buzzing sound that sounded like a swarm of bees and lifted up into the night sky towards the light.
He said that he could remember looking up into the sky and seeing the light while he was also being lifted up into the light. Hans reported that the next thing he could remember was waking up in an alleyway in Milan with a pounding headache two weeks later and over one hundred and fifty miles away. This occurred more than one hundred fifty miles away.
In her book The Old Magic of Christmas (Llewellyn Publications 2013), author, historian, and folklorist Linda Raedisch writes about Hans Buchmann, saying, “(W)hen he was first set upon, he thought that he was under attack by a swarm of bees, but the buzzing then revealed itself into a terrible scraping of bows on fiddle strings.” Raedisch bases her book on European folklore surrounding the holiday season.
It is remarkable that Hans should have noted how the buzzing of bees preceded him being lifted up and taken above the treetops, but we do not know what really occurred to Hans. (Raedisch 12).
Buzzing, noise, and lighting would point to the possible existence of some type of craft or motor, something that a peasant farmer from the Swiss Alps in the year 1572 would have had no way of knowing about at all.
At the time that Hans Buchmann was thought to have vanished, the night sky was particularly active, with a variety of exciting celestial occurrences. This is another interesting fact to take into consideration. In point of fact, on November 11, 1572, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe became the first person in the annals of history to view a supernova. This occurred only four days earlier.
Brahe had spotted and recorded a massive explosion in the night sky, which he had wrongly labeled the “birth” of a new star in the constellation Cassiopeia. Brahe used rudimentary astronomical instruments to make his observations and recordings.
In point of fact, what Brahe had seen—and he had been able to see it pretty much with just the naked eye was the death of a star, an explosion so massive that it was easily visible from billions of lightyears away.
This is the type of astronomical occurrence that might have easily been observed by any extraterrestrial civilization located anywhere in our galaxy.
Is it possible that Hans Bruchmann was the unwitting victim of the first ever verifiably recorded extraterrestrial abduction in the annals of human history? With all of this mention of bright lights, buzzing, and stars bursting in space, is it possible that Hans Bruchmann was the victim? Maybe, but maybe not.
Raedisch, a historian and folklorist, freely confesses in her book that “We don’t actually know what happened to Hans.” She goes on to explain that immediately prior to Hans’s departure, he had borrowed some money without asking for it, so he had plenty of motive to concoct the tale. (Raedisch 12).
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If his debt was in fact a drinking debt or if he never had the money to even begin paying back the debt in the first place, it’s possible that he just arbitrarily decided to make himself disappear and then return once he supposed enough time had elapsed to allow him to think of a fantastic cover story and protect him from debtor’s prison. If this is the case, it’s possible that he just arbitrarily decided to make himself disappear and then return once he thought enough time had passed.
Either Hans Buchmann simply went on a drinking binge that lasted for two weeks and then wandered into Milan, or perhaps, just possibly, he arrived so far away from home as a result of extraterrestrial means.
Hans Buchmann may have been the first known victim of alien abduction in the annals of human history. Alternatively, he may have simply been a guy who was plagued with shame and tried to conceal the truth about his addiction and his debts from his family. There will never be absolute certainty in history…
Source : Wikipedia | History
