June 24 to June 30
A curious article titled “Taiwan’s earliest UFO photo taken 29 years ago?” appeared in the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) on May 5, 1996. “That flying saucer was multi-colored,” read the pull quote.
The black-and-white photo in question was taken in Taipei by Tsai Chang-hung (蔡章鴻) on June 28, 1967, but he says he never publicized it because he wasn’t sure what it was and worried about being ridiculed. With the establishment of the Taiwan Ufology Society (TUFOS, 台灣飛碟學會) in 1993 and increased reported sightings in the mid-1990s, Tsai felt that it was finally time to reveal his secret — one that he only recently told his elder brother Tsai Chang-hsien (蔡章獻), long-time chief of the Taipei City Observatory.
Photo: Huang Ming-chien, Taipei Times
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.
Photo: Wu Chun-feng, Taipei Times
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.
Photo: Huang Ming-chien, Taipei Times
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.
Photo courtesy of TUFOS
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.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS?
According to the 1996 Liberty Times report, a teenaged Tsai Chang-hung was hanging out at the observatory looking at stars when he saw a bright dot make an abrupt 90 degree turn near the Big Dipper. He grabbed his 16mm camera and called his brother to come look, but the dot had disappeared. Tsai waited for a while alone, and as soon as it reappeared, he snapped three photos. The object hovered above Guanyin Mountain (觀音山) in New Taipei City for about 30 seconds before disappearing.
The developed photos only captured about two-thirds of the object and were of poor quality, and Tsai didn’t know what a UFO was back then, so he says he never told his brother and soon forgot about it. He still kept all his film, enabling the brothers to later redevelop the photo and digitally enhance it to show the object clearly in 1996. The Central Daily News and United Daily News also picked up this story.
Another oft-cited account is from 1983, when a student from Taoyuan’s Touchou Elementary School (頭洲國小) heard a loud explosion in the middle of the sports field. He found a 30cm long humanoid and took it to his teachers, who observed a specimen of it under a microscope and were unable to find any cells or organic matter. He later took it home, and despite his parents urging him to get rid of it, his elder brother Wen Wen-hsing (溫文星) dissected it to find just tubes and gooey matter underneath. They later buried the “being.”
Thirty years later, Wen made an appearance at a UFO exhibition in Taipei and retold his account to reporters. The Liberty Times ran it on June 23, 2013 under the headline “I dissected an alien’ — witness tells his story in person.”
ALIEN CRAZE
In September 1995, Chinese Television System (華視) showed the British documentary Alien Autopsy, which was later proven to have been a hoax. Nevertheless, coupled with the popularity of the X-Files, UFO sightings increased dramatically in Taiwan afterwards.
Ho’s chronology records seven instances in 1996 alone. On March 10, 1996, a China Airlines plane narrowly avoided a collision with a flat and round object over the ocean while preparing to land at Taoyuan Airport. After successfully landing, the pilot jokingly told reporters, “Maybe it’s a UFO.”
As the incident happened during a tense period of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, authorities did not rule out the possibility of it being a Chinese warplane.
The book lists more than 50 alleged UFO sightings in Taiwan from 1954 to 2003, and reports have continued to make the news over the decades — although they’re usually light-hearted pieces that are debunked at the end of the articles.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that either have anniversaries this week or are tied to current events.
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