The CAAC Boeing 747 Encounter: Captain Wang Shuting's Light Over China

By the mid 1980s, China had a UFO movement of its own. The UFO Research Society was founded in 1981. By 1985 it counted more than 20,000 members, many of them academics. Reports were piling up. More than 600 UFOs had been seen in China over five years. In those days the Civil Aviation Administration of China, or CAAC, was both the regulator and the national airline. And it flew Boeing 747s.

The night of June 11, 1985. A CAAC jumbo jet was flying with Captain Wang Shuting at the controls. According to the account reported by UPI, the aircraft was above Inner Mongolia.

The flight crew glimpsed a light. Walnut-sized. Yellow. Surrounded by a blue-white nimbus. It did not simply pass. It flew alongside the aircraft, holding its place beside the 747 for two minutes. Then it began to pull away, outpacing the airliner. Neither account gives a flight number, and neither mentions passengers.

John Spencer's UFOs: The Definitive Casebook tells it differently. In Spencer's version the 747 was flying from Beijing to Paris in the late evening, over "Lanz Hau" in Gansu Province, a spelling later read as Lanzhou. Here the UFO flew across the path of the airliner at extremely high speed. It was enough to make the captain, Wang Shuting, consider an emergency landing. Spencer singled out one detail: "Of particular importance was the size of the UFO, also reported in other countries in the same year: an apparent diameter of 6 miles."

The two versions sit uneasily together. A small light against a vast object. Pacing against crossing. UPI says nothing about an emergency landing, and Spencer does not say where his details came from. Even the place is unsettled. Inner Mongolia in one account. Gansu in the other. Only the date agrees.

The case reached the outside world through China's first UFO Seminar, a five-day conference in Dalian organised by the UFO Research Society. According to UPI, 40 scientists presented papers on UFO sightings in China, research methods for the study of UFOs, and hypotheses concerning the nature of unidentified flying objects. The wire story ran on 28 August 1985.

No findings from CAAC or the Chinese government about the flight have surfaced. There is no radar record, no photograph and no film.

No conventional explanation has been offered for this case. In the same era, an astronomer who helped calm China's UFO craze attributed high-altitude sightings to man-made spacecraft, or to residual traces formed by leftover fuel released by jettisoned rockets. That reasoning was never applied to the Wang Shuting sighting. With a single named witness and two conflicting accounts, there is little left to test.

Spencer placed the entry right after Aeroflot Flight 8352, another 1985 airliner encounter, and framed China as one of several countries to report an extraordinary UFO that year. The London UFO Research Unit files the case as a close encounter of the first kind. In November 1986, Japan Air Lines Flight 1628, another 747, would report lights pacing it on a Paris to Tokyo route. The Chinese case remains the quieter one. One captain. One night. Two stories that refuse to agree.