Tulli Papyrus (1953)

Background

The Tulli Papyrus is one of the oldest-looking UFO documents in circulation, and one of the most thoroughly discredited. It is named for Alberto Tulli, a Vatican Museums Egyptologist. According to a 2015 account in Dawn, Tulli visited Cairo in 1933, found a hieratic papyrus in an antique shop, could not afford to buy it, and instead copied its text. The document was said to date to the reign of Thutmose III, roughly 1479–1425 BCE, which is why it is treated as an 'ancient' UFO account. The Wikipedia article on the papyrus gives the fullest account of its history.

The claimed content is vivid. The translated text describes a headless 'circle of fire' with a foul-smelling breath, scribes reporting it to the king, further disks that 'shone more than the sun', fish and birds falling from the sky, and the king ordering incense offered to Amun-Re. Believers read the passage as a description of flying saucers and a landing. Skeptics point out that the text's themes, such as omens, strange falls and divine intervention, are familiar from genuine Egyptian and biblical literature.

The 1953 publication

The papyrus entered the public record through Prince Boris de Rachewiltz, an Italian Fortean and Egyptology student. He claimed to have found the original among Tulli's papers after the Vatican curator's death and produced a translation. It appeared in Doubt, the magazine of the Fortean Society, which was then edited by Tiffany Thayer. The article, titled 'Forteana ca 1500 BC', described a document of about 20 by 18 centimetres (Wikipedia).

The magazine itself is a useful piece of context. The Fortean Society was founded in New York in 1931 at the home of Charles Fort, and the magazine was largely filled by Thayer's own writing after he took over editing; it ended with his death in 1959 (Wikipedia: Doubt (magazine)). The Tulli text was therefore printed in a small, idiosyncratic venue with no peer review and no access to the document it purported to describe.

Scholarly and skeptical assessment

The provenance problems are severe. Rachewiltz later admitted to Gianfranco Nolli, Tulli's successor at the Vatican, that he had never seen the papyrus himself. His translation rested on Tulli's notes from a brief 1934 viewing in Cairo, possibly at the home of Phokion J. Tanos. The Vatican never held the original. In letters published in 1962 and 1971, Rachewiltz accused Thayer of falsifying his account, a dispute that left the attribution muddled ever since (Wikipedia).

Scholars have gone further. Nolli suspected that Tulli had been taken in and that the papyrus was a fake. Samuel Rosenberg, writing for the 1968 Condon Report, argued that the passage borrowed from the Book of Ezekiel. Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck, in Wonders in the Sky (2010), called it a hoax and 'somewhat too convenient a find' for the editors of Doubt. A 2017 study by Marcello Garbagnati and Nicola Reggiani proposed that the text was adapted from Alan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar (1927), and the Dawn piece reports that some argue the whole thing is a hoax, with its text copied from genuine ancient Egyptian manuscripts. Jason Colavito, in a 2016 critique, summed up the evidence bluntly: a single translator, no surviving original, and 'very little evidence in its favor' (Colavito).

It is fair to note what cannot be proven. Colavito concedes that no one can conclusively show the papyrus never existed. But the chain of custody runs through a single translator who never saw the original, a dispute over whether the magazine altered his account, and a magazine whose editor filled its pages with his own writing. On those terms the document is unsupported.

Cultural afterlife and current status

Despite its weak footing, the text has been repeated in Fortean and ufological writing and in popular retellings, several of which present it without the provenance problems described above. Its persistence is a useful case study in how a single translation can outlive its evidence: a text that cannot be inspected can still be quoted for decades.

No original has been produced in the decades since, and no Egyptologist of standing is on record endorsing the translation. The Tulli Papyrus is therefore best classified as a debunked document. It remains of interest chiefly to historians of ufology, who use it as an example of how the genre has repeatedly assembled 'ancient' evidence from unverifiable secondary claims. Its credibility rating reflects that consensus rather than any question about the Egyptian record itself.