Tulli Papyrus — Egyptian 'Circles of Fire'

The Tulli Papyrus takes its name from Alberto Tulli, former director of the Egyptian section of the Vatican Museum, who allegedly encountered it in a Cairo antique shop in 1933. The document purports to be a transcribed copy of annals from the reign of Pharaoh Thutmose III (c. 1504–1450 BCE), one of ancient Egypt's most militarily active and administratively prolific rulers, whose scribal establishment maintained detailed court records.

As translated and published by Prince Boris de Rachewiltz in 1953, the text describes 'circles of fire' appearing in the sky during winter, described as 'more numerous than anything,' shining more brightly than the sun and extending to the limits of the four supports of heaven — the ancient Egyptian conception of the sky's cardinal extremities. The pharaoh's scribes and soldiers reportedly witnessed the phenomena over multiple days. Days later, the objects appeared in greater numbers, accompanied by a secondary phenomenon of fish and other creatures reportedly raining from the sky. The pharaoh reportedly made ritual offerings in response before the phenomena departed.

The document's provenance is contested on scholarly grounds. The original papyrus has never been independently examined and verified — the Vatican Museum states it holds no record of the original, and the available text derives from de Rachewiltz's published translation rather than a directly authenticated source. Egyptologists have also raised questions about the translation's accuracy and the text's relationship to known Egyptian scribal conventions of the New Kingdom period.

Despite these evidentiary limitations, the Tulli account is significant as a reference point in the study of ancient Egyptian aerial anomaly records, which include other texts describing unusual sky phenomena. If the document is genuine, it would represent the earliest detailed multi-witness aerial phenomenon account in Egyptian written history, predating by more than three millennia the modern UAP era. The debate over its authenticity has itself become a notable episode in the history of ancient UAP research.