-Caveat Lector-
http://www.latimes.com/wires/20000102/tCB00V0126.html
Sunday, January 2, 2000
China UFO Sightings Reported
By CHARLES HUTZLER, Associated
Press Writer
PUSALU VILLAGE, China--Poor
farmers in Beijing's barren hills
saw
it: an object swathed in colored
light
arcing heavenward that some say
must have been a UFO.
They're not alone. People in
12
other Chinese cities reported
possible UFO sightings last
month.
UFO researchers, meanwhile, were
busy looking into claims of an
alien
abduction in Beijing.
At the beginning of the new
millennium, China is astir with
sightings of otherworldly
visitors.
Such sightings are treated with
unexpected seriousness in this
country usually straightjacketed
by
its communist rulers.
China has a bimonthly
magazine
-circulation 400,000 -devoted to
UFO
research. The conservative
state-run
media report UFO sightings. UFO
buffs claim support from eminent
scientists and liaisons with the
secretive military, giving their
work
a scientific sheen of
respectability.
"Some of these sightings are
real,
some are fake and with others its
unclear," said Shen Shituan, a
real
rocket scientist, president of
Beijing
Aerospace University and honorary
director of the China UFO
Research
Association. "All these phenomena
are worth researching."
Research into UFOs will help
spur
new forms of high-speed travel,
unlimited sources of energy and
faster-growing crops, claims Sun
Shili, president of the
government-approved UFO Research
Association (membership 50,000).
A foreign trade expert and a
Spanish translator for Mao
Tse-tung,
Sun saw a UFO nearly 30 years ago
while at a labor camp for
ideologically suspect officials.
"It was extremely bright and
not
very big," said Sun. "At that
time, I
had no knowledge of UFOs. I
thought it was a probe sent by
the
Soviet revisionists."
For thousands of years,
Chinese
have looked to the skies for
portents
of change on Earth. While China
is
passing through its first
millennium
using the West's Gregorian
calendar,
the traditional lunar calendar is
ushering in the Year of the
Dragon,
regarded as time of tumultuous
change.
"All of that sort of
millennial fear
and trepidation fits in so nicely
with
Chinese cosmology -and also the
Hollywood propaganda that
everybody's been lapping up,"
said
Geremie Barme, a Chinese culture
watcher at Australia National
University.
In Pusalu, a patch of
struggling
corn and bean farms 30 miles from
Beijing, villagers believe cosmic
forces were at play on Dec. 11.
As
they tell it, an object the size
of a
person shimmering with golden
light
moved slowly up into the sky from
the surrounding arid mountains.
"It was so beautiful, sort
of
yellow," villager Wang Cunqiao
said. "It was like someone flying
up
to heaven."
What "it" was remains a
topic of
debate. Many villagers are
fervent
Buddhists. But local leaders want
to
play down any religious
overtones,
fearing that government censure
may
spoil plans to attract tourism to
Pusalu.
"Some say it was caused by
an
earthquake. Some say it was a
UFO.
Some say it was a ray of Buddha.
I'm
telling everyone to call it an
auspicious sign," said Chen
Jianwen,
village secretary for the
officially
atheistic Communist Party.
State media ignored
religious
interpretations and labeled the
celestial events in Pusalu,
Beijing,
Shanghai and 10 other Chinese
cities
in December as possible UFOs. But
UFO researchers have largely
dismissed the sightings as
airplane
trails catching the low sun.
"If the military didn't
chase it, it's
because they knew it wasn't a
UFO.
They were probably testing a new
aircraft," said Chen Yanchun, a
shipping company executive who
helps manage the China UFO
Research Resource Center.
Operating from a dingy
three-room flat in a Beijing
apartment block, the Resource
Center keeps a version of China's
X-Files: 140 dictionary-sized
boxes of
fading newspaper clippings and
eyewitness accounts of sightings.
The collection has, among others
items, accounts that the military
scrambled planes in 1998 in an
unsuccessful pursuit of a UFO.
Chen said the center has had
500
reported UFO sightings in 1999,
but
after investigation confirmed
cases
will likely number 200 or so.
He's
currently checking on a worker's
claims that aliens entered his
Beijing
home in early December and, with
his wife and child present,
spirited
him 165 miles east and back in a
few
hours.
"The increase in flying
saucer
incidents is natural," said Chen,
a
former Aerospace Ministry
researcher with a Ph.D. in
aerodynamics. He cited more
manmade aerospace activity and
radio signals from Earth
penetrating
farther into space.
Sun has another theory: He
believes aliens may find China
attractive for the same reason
foreign
investors and tourists do.
"It's very possible that
relatively
rapid development attracts
investigations by flying saucers,
and
here in China we're becoming more
developed," he said. "Generally,
well-developed areas like the
United
States have reported more
sightings."
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times
--
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