In the halls of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, hidden among grand relics of the ancient world, stands a mysterious statue. Unearthed by German archaeologists in the ruins of Uruk—one of the first great city-states of Sumer—this sculpture is unlike any other. The figure is enclosed within a perfect sphere, as if frozen inside an impenetrable shell of unknown purpose. Scholars have debated its meaning for decades, but no definitive explanation exists. Was it a divine symbol, a depiction of an ancient technology, or something else entirely?
The city of Uruk, flourishing in the 3rd millennium BCE on the land now known as Iraq, has yielded many remarkable discoveries, yet this particular find remains obscure. Some religious scholars suggest it represents the Ophanim—angelic beings described in Ezekiel’s vision as “wheels within wheels.” Others point to the frescoes of the Visoki Dečani Monastery in Kosovo, where ancient Orthodox monks painted celestial orbs, possibly “living ships” that carried beings from beyond. Could these orbs, described in both ancient Sumerian and medieval Christian traditions, have been more than just artistic imagination?
Recently, physicists have offered another perspective—one grounded in electromagnetism and plasma physics. The orbs may represent toroidal fields of ionized matter, self-sustaining electromagnetic structures, possibly even conscious entities. This idea gained renewed interest after a viral video emerged, showing a luminous cloud shifting shape as though something—or someone—was moving within it.
Yet, the most startling connection comes not from Mesopotamia or the Balkans, but from the distant, northern land of Kurzeme, Latvia. In the ancient Sārnate bog, archaeologists uncovered traces of an advanced culture dating back over 10,000 years—the oldest known settlement in the region. Among the artifacts were strange carvings depicting spherical objects hovering above the earth, strikingly similar to both the Uruk statue and the Kosovo frescoes.
What’s more, new interpretations of these findings suggest that the people of Sārnate may have constructed the world’s first hot air balloon. Unlike the well-documented Montgolfier brothers’ ascent in 1783, the Sārnate discovery hints at a much older form of aerial travel—perhaps utilizing natural gas emissions from the bog itself to lift their primitive vessels into the sky. Could it be that the spherical depictions in Uruk and Kosovo were not divine beings, but early records of flight?
The idea may seem improbable, yet history is full of lost knowledge and forgotten civilizations. If the ancient Sārnate people had indeed mastered balloon flight, their technology—and the mysteries surrounding the orbs—may have traveled far beyond Latvia, inspiring myths, scriptures, and even the hidden relics of Uruk.
As we piece together these scattered clues—from the silent halls of Pergamon to the misty landscapes of Kurzeme—one question lingers: Did the ancients know more about the skies than we ever imagined?
