The 1981 Sky Spiral over Western China

They called it the sky spiral. An article in the Chinese aerospace magazine Hangtian would later name it the "First UFO Incident for Our Country." Its witnesses were counted in millions.

Friday, 24 July 1981. The sky over western China was clear and starlit. There was no moon. At 22:38 Beijing time, people across southwest and northwest China noticed "a strange star-shaped bright spot." Then it changed. "The glimmer became brighter, began to oscillate and then a cloud-like band of light formed around the circumference of the bright spot."

Peasants in Guizhou saw the star sprout a tail in about two minutes, "encircling the center of the object in five spirals." At last it took "the shape of a 'dragon' coiling in the sky, the star being its head." Chinese accounts compare it to a mosquito coil. Five or six rings of light. Purple-red outer rings. Some 20 times the diameter of the full moon. Others described a bright silver color.

It turned as it moved, a spiral that "spun while slowly flying east to west." In Xichang, Sichuan, about 300 people at an open-air film watched it cross slowly from the northwest sky to the southwest. At Delingha, in Qinghai, observatory staff saw it vanish about 30° above the western horizon. No mountain or building hid it. From appearance to disappearance, six to seven minutes. Some witnesses said more. It "stopped during its flight and hovered." It "changed its direction of travel." A few described "its central bell-like shape as well as a row of portholes."

Xinhua reported it as fact. Its third report, carried by UPI on 11 September 1981, placed the first sighting over Tibet, with more from Peking and at least 12 provinces. Xinhua even suggested the same object had appeared over San Diego, California, that night. Within months some 40 newspapers, periodicals and radio stations had produced around 70 reports and analyses. In Guan County, Sichuan, Wu Zhihong took two photographs, later printed in the Journal of UFO Research.

Early press reports blamed a Cassiopeia meteor shower. Many astronomers rejected that. Long Ruyi's article in Hangtian set out calculations from the Purple Mountain Observatory and the Sichuan UFO Research Association. Altitude 500 km ±10%. A speed of "several kilometers per second." Orbital inclination 112° ±5%. A meteor did not fit. A spy satellite or aircraft was "plausible but unconfirmed." A flying saucer lacked physical evidence. The incident, the article concluded, "must be thoroughly clarified." It also noted similar spirals recorded at least three times in the preceding four years in northwest China.

At Purple Mountain Observatory, Liu Yan worked from the best witness reports. He concluded it was likely a man-made space vehicle at about 650 km. His colleague Wang Sichao put it at roughly 650 kilometers and 1.6 kilometers per second, tracing a path of some 2,000 km.

Chinese commentators later suggested that spirals above 100 km tend to come from high-altitude man-made craft, such as leftover fuel released by jettisoned rockets. One magazine reported a US Air Force hypothesis of a clumsy spy plane. Yet no source has named a specific launch or spacecraft for that night.

In September 1983 a USAF Foreign Technology Division translation of the Hangtian article, by Randy Dorsey, was approved for release. It now sits in the Department of Defense FOIA Reading Room and on The Black Vault. Liu Yan went on to become China's best-known UFO correspondent. Wang Sichao later argued publicly that some UFOs may be extraterrestrial. And when a spiral lit the sky over Norway in 2009, writers reached back to 1981 for comparison.