Columbus’s luminous phenomenon recorded during the first voyage

Record summary

Christopher Columbus’s first-voyage journal, preserved largely through Bartolomé de las Casas’s abstract, records a moving or intermittent light seen from the ships shortly before landfall. The entry has often been revisited in discussions of unusual aerial observations because its description is brief and its source is derivative. It may matter for comparing navigational sightings, optical effects, and later legendary retellings. The original journal is lost, and wording varies between surviving versions, so the event cannot be treated as a verbatim contemporary transcript or as evidence of a nonconventional craft.