A fresco entitled "The Crucifixion" was painted in 1350. It is located above the altar at the Visoki Decani Monestary in Kosovo.

In 1964, “discovered” by art student Alexandar Paunovitch in a 16th-century fresco of the crucifixion of Christ, located on the wall of the Visoki Decani Monastery in Kosovo. The French magazine Spoutnik printed them, and they have been featured in many books and web pages ever since as “spaceships with a crew.”

While a layperson might be completely mystified by these suggestive images, a Medieval art historian would only need to know that they were located in the upper corners of a depiction of Christ’s crucifixion to identify them.

Many crucifixion paintings and mosaics done in the Byzantine style show the same odd “objects” on either side of the cross. They are the Sun and the Moon, often represented with a human face or figure, a common iconographic tradition in the art of the Middle Ages.

James Hall,...