UFOs over the skies of Taiwan
Sun, Jun 23, 2024
Before Tsai’s announcement, Taiwan’s earliest UFO photo was believed to be taken by then-high schooler Chih Chung-chieh (池仲傑) in 1973.
However, UFO enthusiasts, including the elder Tsai, have long questioned the authenticity of Chih’s photo due to a number of discrepancies.
During the press conference, former TUFOS president Ho Hsien-jung (何顯榮) noted that while 95 percent of reported UFO sightings can be explained as natural or human-made phenomena, he felt confident enough to announce Tsai’s photo as “Taiwan’s first UFO photo.”
The United Daily News did report a “strange object flying around in the sky” the same day Tsai claimed to have snapped the photo, describing a pale red, cigar-shaped object that emitted bright light.
The Taipei City Observatory told the paper that it first appeared around 8:25pm for about 90 seconds before reemerging roughly an hour later.
Several citizens also saw it and called the observatory, which was unable to explain the phenomenon.
The Central Weather Bureau quickly clarified that the “strange object” was a weather balloon they released — although Ho maintains that they were two different objects and that the bureau was trying to cover up the event for the authorities.
Tsai Chang-hsien told reporters that it was unlikely to be a balloon, and although he wouldn’t call it an alien spacecraft, it was certainly an “unidentified flying object.”
UFO PIONEERS
While ancient Chinese texts contain numerous events that could be interpreted as UFO sightings, Ho writes in the 2004 book, Tracking UFO Sightings (UFO目擊大追蹤), that no references were found in Taiwan until the modern era.
In fact, the study of UFOs was largely unknown in Taiwan until Lu Ying-chung (呂應鐘) began translating Western UFO books in the mid-1970s.
Reports show that Lu, often called the “godfather of Taiwan UFO studies,” coined the commonly used Mandarin term (you-fu, 幽浮) for UFO.
Of course, people had an idea of what an extraterrestrial spacecraft “should” look like, as cartoonist Liu Hsing-chin (劉興欽, see “Taiwan in Time: The inventive comic artist,” April 9, 2023) published Robots Battle Flying Saucers (機器人戰飛碟) in 1968.
Both Ho and Lu attribute the earliest credible UFO sightings in Taiwan to Tsai Chang-hsien, who headed the Taipei City Observatory from its inception in 1958 to 1991.
Tsai became the first Taiwanese to have an asteroid named after him in 1978. Between 1956 and 1959, Tsai witnessed mysterious light bodies glide through the sky three times, and although he was reluctant to call them UFOs, he found it difficult to explain their presences.
Tsai writes in The Journal of UFO Research (飛碟探索) that he received dozens of calls about flying saucers during his tenure at the observatory.
Most of them were explainable, some were falsifications. He only deemed two cases “unidentifiable” — one in 1974 and one in 1979.
“As of now, those who believe in flying saucers can continue believing in them, and those who don’t are free to do so as well,” Tsai writes.
“Too many people say that they’ve seen a flying saucer, met an extraterrestrial or that there are already many aliens living among us, but none of these claims have been scientifically proven.”
Tsai writes that extraterrestrial life surely exists somewhere in the universe, but the chances of humans encountering them are quite minuscule.
By contrast, Lu not only believes that aliens have played a crucial role in human development, he told the Liberty Times in 2010 that he and countless others are human reincarnations of extraterrestrials.
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