Documents / FOIA release
This Foreign Broadcast Information Service China Report on science and technology, JPRS 77236, dated 26 January 1981 and released through the CIA, translates Chinese technical articles. Its lead item, from the journal Ziran Zazhi (Sep 1980), surveys almost 100 Chinese UFO eyewitness accounts. It sorts them into disk or globe, huge long, and spiral nebula types, and details sightings from 1965 to 1979. The authors judge the reports substantially reliable and call for objective scientific study. They also link some Chinese reports to foreign events. The remaining items cover electronics and computing.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# NATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS
UFO PHENOMENON IN CHINA ANALYZED
Shanghai ZIRAN ZAZHI [NATURE JOURNAL] in Chinese No 9, Sep 1980 pp 685-686
[Article by Cha Leping [2686 2867 1627] and Lin Hongjing [5677 4767 2468]: "Preliminary Survey of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in China"]
[Text] Every country in the world has had large numbers of reports giving eyewitness accounts of unidentified flying objects (UFO's). During the past half year, fans of the study of UFO phenomena in 15 of China's provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions have also collected and exchanged almost 100 examples of eyewitness accounts. This shows that in the vast territory of China, UFO's objectively exist as a phenomenon.
Reports about unidentified flying objects may be divided into three categories on the basis of their shapes.
The first type has been described as being like a disk or a globe in shape, with some being ovular or egg shaped. During daylight hours, they frequently appear as being silver in color, while at night they emit an orange-red brilliance. They are frequently accompanied by a white smoke cloud that has been emitted. This type has appeared in about 80 percent of the reports. The following are several fairly classic real examples.
At 2100 hours on 13 November 1978, Zhang Zhengmin [1728 1767 2402], a student in the 76th class of the Department of Space Physics at Wuhan University returned to his dormitory from the school library. As he entered the door, he said that the "moon" in the west was really frightening and had become much larger than usual. His roommates, Cheng Shanda [4453 1472 1129] and Han Erfan [7281 0059 4907] did not believe him because at this hour the moon should be in the east. The three thereupon rushed out of the room to take a look and sure enough, there in the west at a $ 4 0^{\circ} $ angle of elevation in a clear night sky was a round object with a visual diameter of about 1 degree, giving off an orange-red light at a light intensity slightly less than of a full moon. The top part of the object was covered with a slowly curling cloud mass. The concealed portion was at times large and at times small. The entire object was slowly flying in a west by north direction, its color becoming deeper and deeper, and its brightness also gradually diminishing, but its visual diameter showed no apparent decrease in size. Classmate Cheng Shanda said, "There was complete silence at the time, and the three of us felt a little afraid. When the chemistry building blocked our view of the object, we raced to the top of the big FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 7 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.