After a plume of light streaked across the pre-dawn sky from Taipei to Pingtung on Feb. 22, many witnesses cried UFO.
But as the eerie light grabbed headlines, the one group whose credibility would have soared after a mass UFO sighting rushed to debunk the claim.
The naysayers were none other than the flying saucer enthusiasts of the Taiwan UFOlogy Society (TUFOS).
February's light show, they said, was not a close encounter of the "first kind" -- that is, a sighting of one or more UFOs -- but of the Japanese kind.
"Exposing the truth," the group said in its latest quarterly, "was the right thing to do."
On Feb. 26, the "ufology" club announced that the spectacle had, in fact, been a Japanese M-5 rocket roaring into space. The blastoff of the three-stage solid rocket and its 950kg astronomical satellite from southern Japan lit up the skies over Taiwan, they said.
"We disprove about 90 percent of all UFO sightings investigated," said the club's president Teng Yao-hsiung (鄧耀雄), who sports a Fu Manchu-style mustache, a starched shirt and tie.
Teng and the club's suspenders-wearing vice president, Chen Cheng-peng (
The last time the words "Taiwan" and "UFO" appeared together in headlines worldwide, for example, was in 1998, when Taiwanese Christian cult leader Chen Heng-ming's (陳恆明) predictions that God would land in Texas in a flying saucer proved wrong.
Boasting more than 150 members, the cult moved from Taiwan to Garland, Texas -- Garland, they had said, sounds like "God's land" -- to witness the expected landing.
They disbanded after the UFO failed to appear, but not before leaving an indelible impression on the world; Taiwan and UFOs became the stuff of jokes -- a dubious legacy TUFOS has tried hard to play down.
Teng and his partner Chen Cheng-peng have investigated "200 to 300" UFO sightings since they got "roped into" serving as the club's president and vice-president, respectively, two years ago, Teng said.
They have confirmed only 20 such cases as genuine UFO sightings -- meaning they are at a loss to scientifically explain the sightings, he said. "UFO" to them refers only to what the acronym stands for -- unidentified flying object.
Although Teng, like Chen Heng-ming, spends much of his time pondering UFOs and Jesus Christ (Teng is an avid churchgoer), he doesn't mix the two so loosely.
The club's de facto headquarters, Teng's telescope shop in Taipei, Sun Optical Co, is more pigsty shrine to science than UFO geeks' hangout. Dusty photos of stars and nebulae -- no crucifixes or flying saucer pics -- hang on the walls amid telescopes, microscopes and binoculars.
Teng and his employees -- one his wife and the other Chen Cheng-peng -- enjoy a Sunday afternoon-like calm behind their astronomical devices and clutter.
Occasionally, a phone rings from a customer or somebody wanting to report a UFO. Mostly, the shop and phones are quiet -- these days are the "off-season," Chen Cheng-peng said.
"Things pick up around the lunar new year," he added.
That's because holiday fireworks and sky lanterns lead to erroneous UFO sightings, as do Venus and the way sunlight plays off pollution from China and airplane fumes at dusk, they said.
Another major source of false sightings are the big, sleek windmills on the west coast, Chen Cheng-peng said.
The turbines' churning up the air at night can distort the stars, he said, adding that "legitimate" sightings rarely occur in densely populated areas like Taiwan.
The truly strange phenomena happen in the skies over deserts and other wilderness, he said.
"We know it's worth investigating if it's a mass sighting, or if the evidence or description can't be explained," he said.
Teng and Chen Cheng-peng sometimes go on road trips to look into UFO sightings.
Most of the time, however, they're at Sun Optical Co, updating the club's Web site, manning phones and organizing meetings. In Chen Cheng-peng's words, their work consists of "telling people that what they saw wasn't a UFO."
Founded in 1993, TUFOS boasts many high-profile members, including lawmakers, university presidents and scientists.
It's the first source that local news outlets turn to for sound analyses of bizarre sightings in the sky, they said.
Although some members -- including a former club president -- have made fantastic claims, Teng and Chen Cheng-peng just shrug when asked if they've seen a UFO.
Teng said he once saw a glowing dot on the horizon that "moved like a plane can't."
Chen Cheng-peng, who owns several high-powered telescopes, has never seen one.
The last club president, they said, claims that a baby alien corpse fell from the sky and landed near him when he was a boy in rural Taiwan. He took the dead creature to school to show his teachers, they said, adding that it was later buried. Years later, the corpse was dug up to identify its origins, but was too decomposed to examine, Chen Cheng-peng said, smiling.
Even wackier reports abound in China, where the club interacts with a growing legion of flying saucer enthusiasts, he said. Besides a huge volume of UFO sightings there, reports of men getting beamed up into UFOs, where they have sex with foxy female humanoids, are proliferating, he added.
Asked if they often receive prank phone calls, Chen Cheng-peng said: "People call us to say that they were abducted by aliens, that they rode in flying saucers -- you name it, we've heard it."
"But I never hang up on such callers," he said. "We're polite. We hear them out."
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