Courtesy of De Bethune
The world beyond our earthly realm has long served as a jumping-off point for watchmakers’ imaginations to run wild. This year, a few continued to expand upon their ideas with new creations in everything from materials like meteorites to hour markers that split into a V for a clever Star Trek reference via serious engineering. Some pieces even look like those alien objects Air Force pilots and regular citizens alike keep spotting in the sky. From the hardcore futurist to the aesthete, there’s something for everyone in these quirky timekeepers.
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Ulysse Nardin UFO Clocks
Image Credit: Courtesy of Ulysse Nardin This spaceship-inspired design may look like the pill-shaped foreign objects that have been spotted in the skies according to recent news, but the mechanics date to the early 18th century, when marine chronometers helped sailors determine a ship’s position by celestial navigation. Ulysse Nardin built its reputation on creating these pieces for navies around the world. Such early tools were suspended in gimbals so they could keep time without being affected by the movement of the ship; the Ulysse Nardin UFO riffs on the concept with a cylindrical shape that rocks back and forth like a roly-poly toy.
The clock is a playful party trick that also doubles as a sleek objet d’art, but the interior is serious business. The balance wheel operates at a low frequency of 0.5 Hz, while energy is stored in six extra-large barrels that give each UFO a power reserve lasting an entire year. The piece is hand-wound with a key that can also be used to set time zones on the three trapezoidal dials; a deadbeat seconds mechanism marks the time. In total, it’s made up of 675 components. Three final editions of the UFO, introduced in 2021, are available in ice-blue (only at Bucherer in the U.S.), green (only at Yoshida in Japan), and champagne (only at the Hour Glass in Southeast Asia). Limited to 30 each, $68,000
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De Bethune DB25 Starry Varius Aérolite
Image Credit: Courtesy of De Bethune De Bethune’s watches are already rare, with only around 300 being made a year. But just a handful of collectors will be able to lay claim to this latest inspiration from the heavens, as production of the DB25 is limited to five per annum. What makes this piece even more exclusive is its Muonionalusta-meteorite dial in a crosshatched Widmanstätten pattern. Fragments of this celestial stone were discovered west of the border between Sweden and Finland on the banks of the Muonio River, in 1906, and are said to date to about 1,000,000 B.C.E.
Other brands have used meteorite—Rolex, most recently, in its Daytona model from 2021—but what sets this one apart is De Bethune’s treatment: The material undergoes a thermal-oxidation process that creates fluctuations in the bluish hue, a blending of colors that suggests solar systems in a galaxy. Dotted across the surface, a series of white-gold pins of varying diameters creates a constellation of stars. The pattern can be customized to replicate the night sky on a specific date and location—the birth of a child in Dallas, for example, or a big win at poker in Vegas. $280,000
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Vianney Halter La Resonance
Image Credit: Courtesy of Vianney Halter If you’re a watchmaker, it pays to know a little (actually, a lot) about physics. Case in point: When building his latest showstopper, Vianney Halter revisited the concept of resonance, the phenomenon in which one vibrating body causes another object with similar properties to resound at the same frequency. In horology, the effect leads to more accurate timekeeping—it’s the idea behind pendulum clocks—though this wrist-bound version utilizes a pair of spiral-balance oscillators to get the job done.
Although F. P. Journe was technically the first watchmaker to execute this function in a wristwatch, Halter has put his own spin on the complication. His version, a pared-down take on the idea presented in his domed Deep Space Resonance prototype from 2021, offers a classic round case with a sapphire glass that shows off the watch’s ultra-complex architecture, with no dial covering the fireworks beneath. As a bonus for die-hard watch aficionados, the movement can be assembled or disassembled in blocks, in no particular order—not that you’d attempt such a thing on your own, but it’s a clever callback to the peculiarities of space, where there’s no such thing as up or down, left or right, backward or forward. $331,664
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Urwerk UR-120 Space Black
Image Credit: Courtesy of Urwerk Since Urwerk’s founding in 1997, its avant-garde timepieces, with their unconventional case shapes and wild, wandering-hours displays, have always looked like spaceships for the wrist. Time is shown via a trio of rotating hours blocks that align with a minutes arch; older versions, such as the UR-110, came with thick cases to accommodate the turning blocks at their widest. Its latest engineering marvel shrinks this system, using skinnier blocks that split into a V-shape before converging again as they turn to show the hour. It reduces the case size from the UR-110’s 47 mm x 51 mm x 17 mm to a more wearable 47 mm x 44 mm x 15.8 mm. Plus, it now comes with flexible lugs and a monochrome black case of sandblasted titanium with a sandblasted-steel bezel finished with a DLC treatment and a silicon coating.
Practicality aside, it also provides even more dynamic horological action beneath the sapphire-crystal glass. The splitting and rotating satellites, accented with neon-yellow SuperLuminova markers, appear to give the Star Trek Vulcan salute every hour, which is how the UR-120 earned its nickname: the Spock. Show it off by adjusting the time forward or backward to make the cubes rotate, split apart, and close again on cue; it’s a neat trick with the subtext that, whether or not you’ve lived long, you have certainly prospered. $108,000
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