After twenty years of studying prehistoric rock art across North Africa, I have learned that cave walls are not decoration—they are archives of perception.

This image comes from Saharan rock art, painted thousands of years ago when the desert was still a grᴀssland dotted with lakes and migrating herds. The animals are rendered in iron-oxide red, their bodies elongated in motion, legs stretched as if fleeing. Human figures appear small, almost fragile, caught mid-stride. Above them hovers a disk-shaped form, from which a vertical beam descends—deliberate, centered, impossible to ignore.

From a strictly archaeological perspective, we must begin with context. Prehistoric artists often used symbolism to express cosmology: the sun, storms, ancestral spirits, or celestial power. Vertical beams can represent rain, divine force, or transformation. Fear and movement—especially animals fleeing—are common motifs in ritual or mythological scenes.

But here is what makes this panel unusual, even unsettling to a trained eye.

The object is not stylized like the sun.
It has no rays, no circular repeтιтion, no mythic framing.
It is isolated, mechanical in shape, and visually dominant.

In two decades, I have cataloged hundreds of solar symbols. This is not one of them.

That does not mean it depicts a “UFO” in the modern sense. Archaeology deals in evidence, not certainty. What it does mean is that the artist witnessed—or believed they witnessed—a phenomenon they could not explain, and chose to document it with urgency. The fleeing animals are critical. Prehistoric art rarely shows animals reacting to abstract symbols. Fear implies experience.

Whether this scene represents a meteor event, a rare atmospheric plasma, a ritual trance vision, or something entirely unknown, it tells us one undeniable truth:

these people were not painting myths for entertainment.
they were recording moments that disturbed their understanding of the world.

Cave art is humanity’s first attempt to say: “this happened, and it mattered.”

Thousands of years later, we stand beneath the same image, still asking the same question they left behind on stone—

were they imagining the sky… or remembering it?