Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

What are the first things to come to your mind when we say ‘Germany?’ For us it’s throaty languages, short green pants with shoulder straps and white people eating billions of sausages.

Also genocide.

After you read this super awesome article, something else might come to your mind too – UFO’s fighting it out in German skies sometime in the 1500s. Have you heard of that? You haven’t? Then by all means read on!

In keeping with last week’s theme of really old, weird UFO sightings, we’ve got another one for you today. A week ago we told you about a few weird lights that zoomed around the Bostonian sea side with disembodied voices. This week we’re telling you about aerial UFO battles held at least twice in the air space over the ski-friendly parts of Europe.

MysteryHistory.tv gives a pretty good synopsis of the first one:

“The citizens of Nuremberg, Germany behold what appears to be a large scale aerial battle followed by the appearance of a large black triangular object and a large crash (with smoke) outside the city. A news notice (pictured above) was printed 10 days later (April 14, 1561) describing the event.

“At sunrise on the 4th April 1561, the citizens of Nuremberg beheld “A very frightful spectacle.” The sky appeared to fill with cylindrical objects from which red, black, orange and blue white disks and globes emerged. Crosses and tubes resembling cannon barrels also appeared whereupon the objects promptly “began to fight one another.””

Interesting, but we bet you want to know what the news story said ten days later. Of course you do – here it is straight from 1561:

“At dawn of April 4, in the sky of Nuremberg (Germany), a lot of men and women saw a very alarming spectacle where various objects were involved, including balls “approximately 3 in the length, from time to time, four in a square, much remained insulated, and between these balls, one saw a number of crosses with the color of blood. Then one saw two large pipes, in which small and large pipes, were 3 balls, also four or more. All these elements started to fight one against the other.””

As if that’s not strange enough, in 1566 the exact same thing happened over Basel, Switzerland. Here’s an accounting from a UFO website called Signal In The Noise:

“On August 7, 1566, at dawn, many citizens of Basle (Switzerland), frightened, saw during several hours the black spheres involved in a formidable aerial battle, invading the sky of their city: “at the time when the sun rose, one saw many large black balls which moved at high speed in the air towards the sun, then made half-turns, banging one against the others as if they were fighting a battle out a combat, a great number of them became red and igneous, thereafter they were consumed and died out,” wrote Samuel Coccius, the student in “crowned writings and liberal arts” who consigned the strange events in the city’s gazette.”

Pretty weird, right? And real enough to appear in papers of the time. Real enough for people to make wood cuts about both instances, too. Still, we once made a wood cut of our mother-in-law getting eaten by a thousand alligators, and that definitely hasn’t happened yet.We guess wood carvings aren’t necessarily hard evidence.

Carving out all those teeth was the worst part about it. Now our wrists creak.

It's been a few hours since Britney Spears was wheeled out of her house on a stretcher, possibly on drugs, after a dispute with Kevin Federline over custody of their children.

So what more do we know now? Well, the main news is that Britney Spears has gone to hospital for tests. Not maths or spelling tests – it's far too early to put a strain like that on someone as fragile as Britney Spears – but psychological tests. After a run of weird behaviour that's lasted long over a year, doctors will soon check Britney Spears' system for drugs and alcohol and then begin to assess her mentally to see if she's a danger to herself, her kids or anyone else around her. This process might take anything up to three days, which means by Monday morning we'll know if Britney Spears is a heartbreaking sufferer of a mental illness of just a bit of an overdramatic numpty.

It was the news that shocked the world. No, we take that back – it was the news that the world had been waiting for since some point in the middle of 2006. Last night the Britney Spears/ Kevin Federline custody bitchfight came to an ugly head when Britney's apparent refusal to follow court orders and hand her sons Sean Preston and Jayden James back to their father led to fighting and an overzealous response by the emergency services including six police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, helicopters, a First World War tank and the Tyrannosaurus Red Dragon Thunderzord out of Power Rangers, and ended with Britney Spears being wheeled into an ambulance.

According to some reports, Britney Spears was strapped onto a stretcher and taken away because she was thought to be under the influence of substances. What those substance are – if any – remains to be seen. It could be drugs, alcohol, some kind of violently undiagnosed wheat intolerance, other drugs. We'll find out soon enough after doctors at the Los Angeles Cedars Sinai hospital in Los Angeles have carried out their tests.

More worrying, though, is the notion that doctors could invoke a Californian law that would hold Britney Spears in hospital on suicide watch for up to 72 hours while psychological examinations are carried out on her. And the worst case scenario following that would involve Britney being taken to a secure mental facility.

We'll just have to wait and see what the outcome of Britney's tests are and hope that there's nothing seriously wrong with her. But it doesn't look good – over the last year Britney Spears has shaved her head, flashed the world her genitals, gone to rehab, called herself the devil, made a feeble attempt at a suicide and, perhaps worst of all, released an album that sounds like Dr Stephen Hawking blasting over an electrified cattle grid covered in amniotic fluid. And we have 72 hours to wait before we officially know whether this is all a sign of genuine mental illness or just a slightly overenthusiastic way of getting rid of your children. 

Still, that'll teach Jamie Lynn for briefly becoming more famous than her sister.

Read more:

Britney Spears taken to hospital for tests – CNN