The Tulli Papyrus: the "circles of fire" of Thutmose III

1953. Doubt, the Fortean Society's magazine edited by Tiffany Thayer, printed two pages headed "Forteana ca 1500 BC."

The story behind them was elaborate. Alberto Tulli, described as curator of the Egyptian section of the Vatican Museums, was said to have seen an ancient papyrus in Cairo in 1934 and taken notes. The translator was Boris de Rachewiltz, an Italian Fortean and self-styled prince. The events, he said, belonged to the reign of Thutmose III.

"In the year 22, third month of winter, sixth hour of the day." The scribes of the House of Life found a "circle of fire" coming in the sky.

It had no head. Yet "the breath of its mouth (had) a foul odour." Its body was 1 "rod" long and 1 "rod" large. It had no voice. The scribes' hearts became confused. They laid themselves on their bellies. Then they went to the King, and His Majesty was meditating upon what happened.

Some days passed. The circles returned, "more numerous than anything." They were "shining in the sky more than the sun to the limits of the four supports of heaven." It was after supper. The army of the king looked on, and His Majesty was in the midst of it. "Powerful was the position of the fire circles." Then they went up higher, directed to the south. Fishes and volatiles fell from the sky. Incense was brought, and the event was recorded "for the Eternity."

In 1966 Brinsley Le Poer Trench called it "the earliest known record of a fleet of flying saucers written on papyrus long, long, ago in ancient Egypt."

Two years later the Condon Committee went looking. Samuel Rosenberg, writing the chapter "UFOs in History," contacted the Vatican. On 25 July 1968 Gianfranco Nolli, Inspector of the Egyptian Vatican Museum, cabled back: "Papyrus Tulli not propriety [sic] of Vatican Museum. Now it is dispersed and no more traceable."

Dr. Walter Ramberg of the US Embassy in Rome reported more. Tulli had left his belongings to a brother, a priest in the Lateran Palace. That priest had died too. His belongings were dispersed among heirs. Nolli called Tulli "only an amateur 'Egyptologist'" and suspected the papyrus was a fake. The Egyptologist Giuseppe Botti had also tried to reach it before his death in 1968. He never heard back.

Rosenberg set the text beside the King James Ezekiel and found "a dozen sequential similarities." A "circle of fire" against a "wheel of fire." Lying on their bellies against "I fell on my face." He saw borrowing, and a lesson about authors relying on "secondary and tertiary sources without any attempt to verify original sources."

Rachewiltz later told Nolli he had never seen the papyrus, only Tulli's notes. In letters published in 1962 and 1971 he said Thayer had "falsified" his account. In 2006 Marcello Garbagnati argued the hieroglyphs were assembled from passages in Sir Alan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar of 1927. Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck called it "somewhat too convenient a find for the editors of Doubt magazine," a text uniting flying saucers with the rains of fish popularised by Charles Fort.

No original has ever been produced. No one known to have handled it has ever been identified. Still the fire circles return, on television in 2013 and on ancient astronaut websites. Jason Colavito has called claims of its authenticity false. It endures as the ancient UFO text that vanishes the moment anyone asks to see it.