The Gapyeong UFO Photograph

Summer was ending in 1995. Kim Seon-gyu, a photographer with the national daily Munhwa Ilbo, had just returned from a late-summer holiday. His assignment was the lead-up to Chuseok, the Korean harvest festival. He was not keen on it. When colleagues asked where he was going, he kept saying "east". His late grandfathers, he later said, had told him in a dream to head east. That took him to Seolgok-ri, in Seorak-myeon, Gapyeong County. A remote farming village between Yangpyeong and Gapyeong.

Monday, September 4, 1995. About 2:30 in the afternoon. Kim helped an 81-year-old man move rice on a handcart. The man suggested he photograph the sesame threshing in the yard of a traditional house. Kim used a whole roll of film on the elderly couple.

During one stroke of the grandmother's threshing, he shot three frames, 0.2 to 0.3 seconds apart. "Of the three frames taken while grandmother threshed once, the UFO was caught in exactly one," he recalled. Frames one and three are ordinary. Frame two shows a white object near the right edge. No one in the yard saw it.

The discovery came later. A darkroom technician kept wiping the print, sure something was on the paper. The negative was cleaned again. The mark was still there. That is when people first suspected a UFO.

Kim checked before going to print. He contacted the Korea UFO Research Association. He asked the Air Force about air traffic over Gapyeong and checked with the Korea Meteorological Administration. Late at night, he met the astronomer Jo Gyeong-cheol. On the morning of September 6, the editorial meeting voted on whether to run the picture. It passed by one vote. The photo ran on the front page that day, and KBS reported "UFO appears in Gapyeong, Gyeonggi Province" the same day.

Maeng Seong-ryeol, research director of the Korea UFO Research Association, called it definitively a UFO. He described a dome-shaped craft with antenna-like features. His association estimated a diameter of about 100 metres, an altitude of 4 to 5 kilometres and a speed of 4 kilometres per second. A KBS special team took the film to Kodak, which found no evidence of composite or intentional double exposure. The French space agency CNES, in Toulouse, reportedly produced figures of its own. A diameter of 450 metres. An altitude of 3,500 metres. A speed of 108 kilometres per second. There was no government inquiry.

Nobody has seriously alleged a hoax. The debate is about what the camera caught. Skeptics suggest a fly passing right in front of the lens. In 2023, forensic video analyst Hwang Min-gu declared it a bird. Chaff or grain thrown up by the threshing has been proposed too. Critics also point to the physics. At 108 kilometres per second there should have been a sonic boom strong enough to break windows, yet the photographer and the couple were unaffected. The two sets of figures also disagree by wide margins.

One single-source account adds a twist. A Korean Air Force flight instructor reportedly admitted a few days later to seeing "a disc shaped object flying by at great speed" near the photo location that same day.

Yonhap later called it the first UFO photograph taken by a daily-newspaper photographer. SBS revisited it in Geugeosi Algo Sipda in 1997 and in Kkokkomu in 2024. tvN's You Quiz on the Block returned to it as well. Three decades on, one frame out of three still refuses to settle.