Since the 1980s, Chinese enthusiasts have organized societies to publish periodicals, host conferences, and work with universities on sightings analyses. Some members collaborate with astronomy institutes to investigate cases.12345
Founding and early growth
The movement began on 20 September 1979, when students at Wuhan University created the China UFO Enthusiasts' Liaison Office, formalised months later as the China UFO Research Association. By 1985 the network counted more than forty branches and thousands of members, with satellite groups in Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, and provincial capitals. Early meetings paired amateur skywatching with lectures by astronomers, and in 1981 the association launched the peer-reviewed Journal of UFO Research, still China's longest-running periodical on anomalous aerospace events.2
Key people
Flagship projects and publications
The Journal of UFO Research reached a mid-1990s circulation of three hundred thousand and regularly printed case studies, atmospheric-physics papers, and translations of overseas research. Local societies ran "joint observation nights," forwarding photographic negatives to regional observatories for spectrographic analysis. Since 2020 data from the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou have been shared with Beijing SETI teams to search for narrow-band signals matching unexplained optical events.
Institutional hurdles and revival
In 1992 a fractious national congress reaffirmed a materialist stance and rejected pseudoscientific qigong theories, but political scrutiny intensified after the Falun Gong crackdown. The association lost its legal charter in 1997 and fragmented; the Dalian branch regrouped overseas as the International Chinese UFO Association in 1999. Despite the setback, most provincial groups continued informally, sustaining a grassroots archive of more than twelve thousand case files.
China's defence ministry now labels unknown targets "unidentified air conditions" and draws on civilian networks for corroboration. Public interest remains strong—livestreamed "skywatch" sessions from Beijing and Chengdu attract millions—and academic symposiums on airborne anomaly statistics are again held under the China Association for Science and Technology.