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.
.. Second, even if there are indeed some charged particles in the meteoroid, it is still impossible that they "will be released from the confinement of the self-gravity of the meteoroid" (note: What kind of gravity? It is very vague) because of the action of the Lorentz force. As far as we know, the Lorentz force does not work on charged particles; it gives only centripetal force to the rotating motion. Third, even if the charged particles are indeed rotating several thousand km above the Earth, it is still impossible for us to observe the details of the spiral shape by eye on the ground. Fourth, even if under a certain external force a small amount of the charged particles can be pulled out of a lump of plasma possessing both positive and negative charges, because of the Coulomb attraction it is impossible that only the particles of the same charge will flow out of the plasma to form a micro- particle stream, while the particles of the other charge stay in the lump. Fifth, the radius of rotation of the charged particles is re- lated to their mass and charges, and the direction of rotation of the particles is related to the property of the charges; the di- rection of rotation of the positively charged particles is opposite to that of the negatively charged particles. Therefore, even if we accept that the charged particles in a meteoroid can be in rotating motion, what we may observe is not a clear spiral body rotating in one direction, but a superposition of two spiral bodies rotating in opposite directions or even in a blurry pattern. Nevertheless, Zhang Zhousheng has repeatedly "overlooked" this critical question and always talks vaguely about "charged particles" or "micro- particle stream," etc., and never points out whether they are electrons, protons, or other particles. 4
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.