July 1981 Spiral Light over Western China

The event

At about 10:40 p.m. on July 24, 1981, observers across Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in western China saw a bright spiral in the night sky. According to Sixth Tone, the spiral turned as it drifted slowly from east to west, and the object was seen by what the article describes as millions of people. A Chinese official account summarized by Umbralog gives a figure of about ten million witnesses watching for six or seven minutes. No reliable count exists, and the larger figures should be treated as official estimates rather than audited numbers.

The sighting came at a time when Chinese public interest in UFOs was already high. A November 1978 People's Daily article titled "UFOs: A Mystery Puzzling the World" had helped set off a wave of popular curiosity, and by the early 1980s roughly fifty UFO research groups had formed nationwide. A UPI report from December 1980 described some 300 "UFO-logists" forming China's first academic society devoted to the subject.

Explanations and analysis

Newspapers first reported that astronomers linked the display to meteoroids from a Cassiopeia meteor shower. Many researchers did not accept that explanation, and the meteor theory was later rejected by Chinese observatories. Their calculations placed the object at roughly 500 km altitude (within ten percent) on an orbit inclined about 112 degrees to the equator, figures that Umbralog attributes to Chinese observatory work.

The most influential analysis came from Liu Yan, an astronomer at the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing who worked on solar radio emissions. Liu reviewed the eyewitness reports and estimated the object's altitude at about 650 km, higher than the 420 km of the International Space Station. He concluded that it was "likely a man-made aircraft" and published the argument in Amateur Astronomer, his first article on UFOs. The altitude discrepancy between Liu's figure and the observatory calculations has not been settled in the sources reviewed here.

The CIA's reading room holds a US government translation of a 1980 article in the Chinese journal Ziran Zazhi that analyzed nearly one hundred eyewitness accounts from across China. That article is a useful record of how Chinese scientists were approaching the reports, though it is not a physical study.

Aftermath and assessment

Because the spiral was seen over such a large area, it became a case that Chinese scientists could not dismiss easily. Liu's office at the observatory became the place where public UFO letters were forwarded, and he later said he had written at least 2,000 replies. His standard message was that sightings were not alien craft or omens, and he urged readers, "Please do not be alarmed."

Liu later said the field took a "wrong turn" in 1988, when the China UFO Research Association joined a qigong research organization and meetings began to feature qigong practitioners and people claiming psychic abilities. That later drift away from astronomy is a separate development from the 1981 analysis, but it shows how the subject moved outside mainstream science after the early period.

The case is best described as contested. Meteor, aircraft and atmospheric explanations were proposed, and no physical evidence beyond a few blurred photographs survives. Its witness numbers are unreliable, and some of the surviving accounts are secondhand. Still, the scale of the observations and the careful, public-facing analysis by Chinese astronomers make it one of the most significant mass-sighting episodes in the country's UFO history.