Wang Sichao

Early life and background

Wang Sichao (王思潮, 1937–17 June 2016) was born in Rong County, in China's Guangxi region, with ancestral roots in Guangzhou. According to his Wikipedia biography, he attended schools affiliated with Sun Yat-sen University and South China Normal University before moving north to Peking University, where he studied astrophysics in the Department of Geophysics. In his own account of his career he describes six years of astrophysical training there, the grounding for the quantitative habits he later carried into a notoriously unquantifiable subject.

In 1963 he joined the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, the flagship institution of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as a research intern. He rose through the ranks to assistant researcher, associate researcher and finally full researcher (the Chinese equivalent of a senior research fellow), and remained there until his retirement in 1999. China in those decades was not a place where an astronomer could comfortably announce an interest in flying saucers; Wang's career straddled the Cultural Revolution, the reopening of Chinese science in the late 1970s, and the gradual appearance of a popular UFO hobby in the 1980s.

Career in astronomy

Wang's conventional résumé is substantial. Chinese press accounts summarised on Wikipedia credit him with studying a 1976 meteorite shower in Jilin (with the geochemist Ouyang Ziyuan), a meteor fall in Ningqiang County and a fall of ice in Wuxi. He researched comets, including Comet Hale–Bopp, and travelled to Australia with colleague Zhang Jiaxiang to observe Halley's Comet during its 1986 apparition. His team is also reported to have predicted when a comet would collide in 1994.

He is best remembered within mainstream astronomy as the first Chinese scientist to promote the study of near-Earth objects and the problem of asteroid impact avoidance, and he helped design and build a near-Earth-object survey telescope at Xuyi, Jiangsu Province. In retirement he taught courses on planetary science, small Solar System bodies, meteorites and the search for extraterrestrial life, wrote popular-science books and appeared frequently on television. Late in life he opened Sina Weibo and WeChat accounts to share astronomy with the public.

This double identity matters. Wang was not an outsider cranking out pamphlets; he was a salaried professional at a state observatory, and his UFO work was done in the vocabulary of orbital mechanics. That is the whole reason he is a notable figure rather than one more enthusiast.

The UFO research

Beginnings

Wang says he began investigating UFOs around 1971, which makes his research programme roughly forty years old by the time of his most public statements in 2010. A decisive social moment came in 1981, when he introduced his Purple Mountain colleague Liu Yan to students from Wuhan University who represented the China UFO Research Association; that meeting set Liu on the path to studying the famous 1981 "24 July incident" (the episode is described in Sixth Tone's profile of Liu, "The Astronomer Who Calmed China's UFO Craze"). The 1980s were the high-water mark of Chinese amateur ufology, with the association's journal Feidie Tansuo (UFO Research) and a large public following; Wang became one of the few professional scientists willing to be associated with it.

Method

The distinguishing feature of Wang's work was that he tried to treat sighting reports as astrometric data. Where several observers in different locations had recorded the apparent position of a moving light against the stars, he applied spherical astronomy to triangulate altitude, direction and speed, and then used physics to ask what sort of object could produce the observed motion and light. In a 2010 Beijing Review interview, reproduced here, he said he had analysed at least twenty events of the "spiral", "fan" and "light-spot" types since 1971 this way.

The headline results were striking. He reported objects at altitudes of roughly 130 to 1,500 kilometres, travelling at speeds far below the first cosmic velocity (about 7.9 km/s). One example he cited was an object moving at about 0.29 km/s at roughly 1,460 km for 25 minutes. Since an object at that height and that slow speed should simply fall, he argued, such things "may possess anti-gravity ability." It is this inference, from slow motion at orbital altitudes to a propulsion hypothesis, that is the most quoted and the most contested part of his work.

Classification

Wang also sorted more than 100 typical events from four decades of Chinese reports into about ten types. By his account, seven types had natural explanations: bolides, light spots, bright constellations or stars, flying point clusters and "flying sticks" among them. The remainder, including spiral, fan, spindle, ball, V-shaped, ball-lightning-like, "strange vehicle" and flying-saucer forms, he left unexplained, and he suggested that the spiral, fan, light-ball and saucer shapes "may be related to extraterrestrial craft." He placed a V-shaped object over Nanjing on 10 January 2006 in this catalogue, and noted that Chinese events cluster north of the Yangtze. Notably, he conceded that China had never produced a reliable, documented close encounter of the "third kind" type.

Idiosyncratic claims

In the same interview Wang offered a numerological observation that "great" UFO events in China tended to occur in years ending in 1, 2 or 7 (1971, 1981, 1982, 1987, 1991, 1992, 2002, 2007), and on that basis predicted notable events in 2011 and 2012. He also said China was "already walking in the forefront" of international UFO research and had entered a "quantitative analysis stage." Neither the pattern nor the prediction has any statistical support, and critics find them the weakest links in an otherwise careful presentation.

A proposed observation network

Because UFOs, as he put it, appear unpredictably and vanish within minutes, large professional telescopes almost always arrive too late. His constructive proposal was a networked array of small-aperture, purpose-built telescopes, and later a "rapid observation network" through which observers in different places could share reports by text, phone and social media, so that multi-site triangulation would become routine. Liu Yan liked the idea, Sixth Tone notes, but it proved hard to realise. He also made a point of using e-mail to reach people who reported sightings. In 2007 he created, at his own expense, the Big Dipper Observation Award to raise public awareness of the subject.

2010: the public face

In July 2010 more than twenty flights were delayed at Hangzhou's Xiaoshan International Airport after a luminous object was reported over the city. A joint Beijing–Shanghai UFO investigative team later said, according to Hangzhou's municipal press, that there was no evidence of an alien craft and that the object was probably an aircraft. Coverage of the episode, and of other 2010 sightings, made Chinese state media newly receptive to commentary from scientists; the Beijing Review and CCTV both carried Wang's views that year, and Western commentators later described the period as a form of quasi-disclosure (see Richard Geldreich's essay on Medium, which is opinionated and should be read as such).

In media interviews, including with China Central Television, Wang stated that extraterrestrial life exists, that it has anti-gravity technology, and that it is benevolent. He told Beijing Review that solid proof of alien visits would be as consequential as Columbus's discovery of the New World, and that contact "will hopefully come this century." The interview itself carries a caution that statements by Chinese officials of his rank may be vetted, so they should not be taken purely as private opinion.

Reception and criticism

The objections come from several directions. The popular-science writer and well-known sceptic Fang Zhouzi publicly stated that Wang had not offered proof for the extraterrestrial and benevolence claims, a criticism recorded in Wikipedia's entry. There is a gap between the data Wang had (eyewitness angles, often from untrained observers, sometimes from single sites) and the conclusions he drew; triangulation from casual reports is vulnerable to misremembered star positions, parallax mistakes and the well-documented tendency for observers to misjudge distance. Slow, high-altitude light patterns of the spiral and fan types are, moreover, often explained by rocket-stage venting, missile or satellite launches, a common source of such spiral displays elsewhere in the world. Wang's ten-type classification placed these among the "unexplained" categories, which sceptics would read as an unwillingness to exhaust prosaic explanations rather than as evidence of anomaly.

On the other side, many Chinese enthusiasts regarded him as proof that serious scientists could take the subject seriously, and he deliberately positioned himself against what he called superstition. Colleagues were more ambivalent; Sixth Tone records that some Chinese scientists dismissed UFO research as "nonsense work", the stigma Wang and Liu Yan both carried.

A personal detail from Wikipedia illustrates his commitment: he borrowed 300,000 yuan (about US$48,000) to fund a child's overseas education, and paused the Big Dipper Observation Award in order to repay the loan.

Legacy

Wang died in Nanjing on 17 June 2016 at the age of 77 of a cerebral haemorrhage; a funeral was held in the city on 19 June. His lasting scientific legacy is probably the near-Earth-object work and the Xuyi telescope. His ufological legacy is a model: a Chinese professional who argued that UFO reports should be handled with spherical trigonometry, not mysticism, and that observers be networked. For international readers he also stands as a rare, citable instance of an institutionally affiliated Chinese researcher stating that some phenomena may be extraterrestrial in origin, even as his actual evidence rested on a handful of analysed events.

Treat his conclusions with care. The methodology was more rigorous than most of the field's, and his candour about the absence of a documented close encounter is to his credit; the leap from slow, high-altitude luminous objects to anti-gravity and benevolent aliens was never demonstrated. For further context see Wikipedia's overview of UFO sightings in China.