Documents / FOIA release
This is an edited English translation, dated 11 April 1983, prepared by the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson AFB, of a September 1982 article by Liu Yan in the Chinese journal Tianwen Aihaozhe. The article covers the spiral luminous object that several million people in western China saw on July 24, 1981. It rejects Zhang Zhousheng's claim that the object was a Cassiopeia meteoroid he had predicted. The author concludes it was most probably a man-made flying machine several hundred km up.
~---· .· .· ..•..·..· ...·...·....·... ·_ ... _ ..... ·~·'-·. · .......................................... .· ·-·•.· .· ·. ·. ·. ·. ·. ·. ·. ·. -.. . -~· What Zhang Zhousheng has predicted is, therefore, not a meteoroid that will become a UFO, but at most the apparent location of the radiant point of a certain meteoric swarm on the celestial sphere. Here, moreover, we have also to add a note that Cassiopeia is not truly the celestial region in correspondence with his pre- diction. To the observers in our country, the celestial region in correspondence with his prediction should be around the Swan, Eagle, Harp, etc • Therefore, even if we accept his theory, his prediction is yet not only vague, but also self-contradictory! The Shape of UFO and Zhang Zhousheng's "Theory" The "7.24" flying object is a hug~ luminous body, for which Zhang Zhousheng has made a "theoretical" explanation. He says: In the Universe "a few meteoroids of large mass that carry volatile matter have an ionosphere on their surface. When these meteoroids enter the geomagnetic field from the planetary space to about several thousand km above the Earth's surface, the charged particles in the meteoroid ionosphere under the action of the Lorentz force will be released from the confinement of the meteoroid's self-gravity and form a particle stream along the geomagnetic field in a spiral motion of changing radius." And the illumination of the spiral body is "the excited radiation" due to the mutual impact between the charged particles. This "theory" seems to glorify the "7.24" UFO; however, this "theory" can also be easily proved to be groundless. First, the mass and gravity of a meteoroid are so small that no gaseous matter can stay on its surface. How can it be that "on the surface of the small heavenly body •.. forms a sphere which resembles the structure of the ionosphere in the outer atmosphere of the Earth and other planets?" 3 .... · .. ,.,· ...
FOIA release, from the osd collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 9 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.