Hernán Cortés’s 1519–1520 reports of signs and celestial phenomena in Mexico

Record summary

Hernán Cortés’s Cartas de relación contains descriptions of omens, unusual skies, and Indigenous interpretations encountered during the conquest of Mexico. Researchers sometimes compare these passages with later claims that premodern witnesses recorded “UFOs.” The letters are identifiable primary-era texts, but they are political documents written to justify Cortés’s conduct and filtered through translation, Christian categories, and later editorial transmission. The passages should therefore be studied as colonial records of interpretation, not as straightforward reports of technological craft.