Magonia
A cloud realm referenced by the Archbishop Agobard of Lyon in his 9th-century treatise De Grandine et Tonitrua (“On Hail and Thunder”). Agobard wrote to refute a popular belief in his diocese: that aerial sailors from the cloud-city of Magonia would descend during storms to steal grain from fields.
He was writing to debunk the myth. But in doing so, he documented it precisely, including an account of four people who were nearly lynched by a crowd who believed they had descended from Magonia. Agobard intervened and saved them.
The First UFO Incident?
UFO researcher Jacques Vallée opened his 1969 book Passport to Magonia with this story, arguing that the Magonia accounts are structurally identical to modern UFO encounter reports: craft in the sky, beings who descend, terrified witnesses, attempts to capture the visitors. The mythological content changes; the structure of the experience does not.
Why It Belongs Here
Magonia is the aerial city before there were aerial cities, a floating civilization existing in the clouds, accessible only from above, whose inhabitants interact with those below in ways that blur the line between trade, theft, and contact. It anticipates Cloud City, Laputa, and the UFO phenomenon by over a thousand years.