Monday, July 16, 2012

UFO in my eyes - my personal journey through the complexities of the Chinese UFO experience


In the next few posts I will summarise a lecture I gave to the Sydney based group UFO Research (NSW) on 7 July 2012.  My talk was entitled "UFO in my eyes - Bill Chalker's personal journey through the complexities of the Chinese UFO experience and its reflections in the wider worldwide UFO experience." (The images included in this series are from my Powerpoint presentation and are copyright - Bill Chalker, 2012, unless otherwise indicated on the image or as credited)

The title was inspired by Xiaolu Guo's wonderful novel "UFO in her eyes" which I drew attention to
back in September 2009 Now she has turned her satire into a movie which has been making waves in a number of film festivals where Xiaolu has been describing it as a metaphorical satire on the impacts of the modern transformation of China   In the film the village chief's assistant gives a great Chinese tea ceremony style explanation of the meaning of UFOs and our place in the solar system.

I used Xiaolu Guo's striking literary and cinematic take on the impact of transformational events on modern China as my lead into the wild and wonderful world of Chinese ufology.  The recent dubious dance on whether the Shenzhou 9 launch, which took China's first female "taikonaunt" into space, was nicely satirised by the lovely Elle in her regular commentary on Chinese social media Weibo Today  Recently Hong Kong TV in  "The Pearl Report" gave a sweeping take on Hong Kong ufology, which inevitably is a broad and colourful mix of a little mainland Chinese ufology and a whole lot of western takes.
The Pearl Report also covered efforts in investigating UFO sightings from both a skeptical and pro-UFO points of view and even gives a boiled down overview of Hong Kong UFO history.  It also gives a brief coverage of the Hong Kong International UFO Congress back in December 2011 which showcased apart from Hong Kong researchers, a Japanese researcher, a Taiwanese researcher, and Australian (originally Hungarian) abductee and prolific UFO video photographer Lazlo Novak, also some of the major mainland Chinese UFO researchers, who I had extensively interviewed at the 2005 Dalian UFO conference - Sun Shi Li, Professor Chen Gongfu and Zhang Jingping.

I will get into mainland Chinese ufology in my next post.

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