Section A · Astronomy (China) · 1937–2016

Wang Sichao

Planetary astronomer · researcher at the Purple Mountain Observatory (Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Biography

Astronomer at the Purple Mountain Observatory (Nanjing), of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he researched asteroids, meteors and comets between 1963 and 1999. For some four decades he also studied unidentified sightings with astronomical method: he reconstructed trajectories, altitudes and speeds from reports —as in the 1981 mass spiral over fourteen provinces, which he placed at orbital altitude— to separate confusions with rockets, satellites and optical phenomena from the few cases he considered unexplained. He represents the scientific filter of Chinese casework.

Why they're here · 2 pieces

  1. 1981

    Análisis de la espiral del 24 de julio de 1981

    Reconstruction of altitude (~650 km) and speed of the 14-province mass event

  2. 1999

    Estudio astronómico de avistamientos UAP (≈1977–2016)

    Nearly four decades applying astronomical criteria to tell real anomaly from confusion

Sources

Associated cases (1)

China.

Luminous spiral over China · 14-province mass event (1981)· 1981

On the night of July 24, 1981, roughly between 10:33 and 10:53 p.m., hundreds of thousands of people across 14 Chinese provinces observed an enormous luminous spiral expanding in the sky — possibly the most-witnessed unidentified aerial event in history. Planetary astronomer Wang Sichao, of the Purple Mountain Observatory (Chinese Academy of Sciences), studied it for years and estimated an altitude of about 650 km and a speed of ~1.6 km/s. Those parameters, together with the spiral morphology, point to the known prosaic mechanism: a rocket or satellite upper stage venting fuel in the upper atmosphere — the same phenomenon that produced the 2009 Norway spiral and the Chinese spirals confirmed as launches in 2013 and 2025. It belongs in the corpus as a calibration anchor: the most-witnessed event is not the most anomalous.

B22%

Synthesized bio from the UAP disclosure ecosystem — categorized by epistemological section (A-F).