What happened
On a clear, moonless summer night in 1981, people across China's western provinces looked up at something nobody had a name for. At around 10:40 p.m. a bright, star-like point appeared, swelled in brilliance, began to wobble and then wrapped itself in a vast, glowing spiral of light that turned as it drifted slowly from east to west. It lasted roughly six or seven minutes before fading. Reports came from Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu and from parts of southern China, and within months about forty newspapers, magazines and radio stations had carried some seventy reports and analyses. The 'July 24 Incident' landed during China's first UFO boom, sparked by a 1978 People's Daily article that spawned dozens of amateur research groups. A Chinese aerospace journal article on it was later translated by the U.S. Air Force's Foreign Technology Division, putting the case into American government files.
The official explanation
Newspapers at the time quoted astronomers attributing the display to meteoroids from a Cassiopeia meteor shower, but many experts disagreed. Liu Yan of the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing triangulated eyewitness reports and concluded the object was most likely a man-made craft flying at about 650 kilometres, with the spiral formed as it vented gas or particles while rotating, a pattern now well known from rocket fuel dumps. He went on to explain later Chinese spiral and halo sightings the same way.
The anomalous case
Liu's spacecraft identification was reached by reconstructing an altitude from eyewitness angles; no specific launch, satellite or rocket stage was named for that night in the sources reviewed here. The Chinese article translated by the U.S. Foreign Technology Division set out three competing hypotheses, meteor, aircraft or flying saucer, and noted the China UFO Research Association had recorded at least three similar spirals over northwest China in the previous four years. Witnesses described a point of light that brightened, oscillated and grew a rotating luminous band over several minutes, a sequence they said did not resemble a meteor. That U.S. Air Force intelligence translated and archived the material shows the event was of interest to a foreign military service. Until a matching launch record is published, the precise source of the 1981 spiral remains inferred rather than documented.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- FTD translation of Hangtian article on Chinese UFO reports (DTIC ADA133326) official, apps.dtic.mil
Sources
- The Astronomer Who Calmed China's UFO Craze Sixth Tone (Shanghai Observer)
- Case file: Chinese UFO reports, FTD translation ADA133326 The Black Vault
Witness reports elsewhere
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