The Nicholas Roerich Expedition Sighting, Kukunor District, 1927

Nicholas Roerich was a Russian painter, Theosophist and explorer. In the summer of 1927 his Central Asian Expedition travelled south from Mongolia through Kansu, the Nanshan and Tsaidam. From that summer until mid-1928 it lost contact with the outside world.

That August the camp stood in what Roerich called "the Kukunor district, not far from the Humboldt chain." Kukunor was the old name for the Qinghai region. The Humboldt chain is the historical European name for the Danghe Nanshan, a range also known as Ulan Daban.

August 5. About half-past nine in the morning. Some of the caravaneers noticed a remarkably big black eagle flying above them. Seven of the group began to watch it. Then another caravaneer shouted his astonishment: "There is something far above the bird."

They all saw it. Something big and shiny reflecting the sun, "like a huge oval moving at great speed," heading from north to south. It crossed over the camp. It changed direction, from south to southwest. Then it disappeared in the intense blue sky.

There was time to take up field glasses. Through them the group saw "quite distinctly an oval form with shiny surface, one side of which was brilliant from the sun." Roerich began the diary entry simply: "something remarkable!"

Roerich published the account in his travel diary Altai-Himalaya in 1929. In 1930 he told it again in Shambhala, and the details shifted. The camp was now "not far from Ulan-Davan." The eagle became "a huge black vulture." The object was "something shining and beautiful." A lama explained it. The vulture was an enemy. The shining thing was a protecting force from Shambhala, following the expedition "in this Radiant form of Matter." His advice was plain: "You must follow the same direction."

Leon Davidson worked out from the diary that the year was 1927, not the 1926 many retellings still give. He also proposed a mundane answer. A weather balloon from Sven Hedin's Sino-Swedish Expedition, whose teams, according to Mark Pilkington, launched about 350 weather balloons between 1927 and 1935.

Brad Sparks, writing for NICAP in 2007, pushed back. Davidson gave no documentation of a launch that day. Hedin's balloons were 2½ to 4 feet across. To be seen with the naked eye they would have had to go up "no more than 1 mile away." The two expeditions were never closer than about 400 miles. Hedin's party was far to the north in the Gobi, heading west toward Urumchi, and only reached the Edsen-gol oasis on 23 September 1927.

Andrew Tomas met or heard Roerich in Shanghai in 1935. That year his The Planetary Doctrine described "strange shiny objects" in the Himalayas as possible "vehicles belonging to supermen." Jason Colavito argues Tomas later presented Roerich's account to Australian UFO investigators as his own research. Bill Chalker tied the case to a 1927 event at Fernvale, New South Wales.

Retellings drifted. The year slid to 1926. The setting moved to the Himalayas, some 1,500 km away. But the diary remains. Seven witnesses. A clear blue morning sky. A shining oval, twenty years before Kenneth Arnold.