Case file · Declassified record
People's Daily opens the UFO question
In November 1978 the Party newspaper ran 'UFOs: a mystery puzzling the world', and some fifty UFO societies sprang up across China.
1978 CE · 39.92, 116.46 · status: official
The account
Groups such as the China UFO Research Association followed; it later joined the qigong research movement in 1988, which the astronomer Liu Yan called a wrong turn. By the 1990s Chinese UFO clubs counted tens of thousands of members.