Battling Suns and Glowing Spacecraft: UFO Traces in Ancient Chinese Chronicles
In late August, the UFO blog Inexplicata published in English a chapter from a 1984 Spanish book that collects strange sky phenomena from centuries-old Chinese chronicles: suns struggling with one another, glowing, allegedly metallic bodies and unusual star formations. The texts are genuinely ancient in origin, but their credibility and exact meaning cannot be verified.
In 317 AD, the third year of the Jianxing era, according to at least one quoted chronicle, three suns tinted with different hues appeared in the sky at the same time, each surrounded by a halo and hovering about ten meters above the ground, greenish on the inside. This is just one of the many similar accounts recalled in the blog's collection.
The article presents, in an English translation by S. Corrales, a chapter from Andreas Faber Kaiser's Spanish-language book Las Nubes del Engaño, published by Planeta in 1984. The text cites ancient Chinese sources such as the Feng Shen Yen I, the Liu Shi Ch'un Ch'iu and the Shan Hai Jing, which tell of flying dragons, aerial battles and deities with bird bodies and human faces; the author draws parallels between these and similar sky-deity myths of other cultures (for example, the figure of Quetzalcoatl).
The collection also includes more concrete accounts that can be tied to dates. According to the article, Ke Yang, a professor at Lanzhou University in Gansu Province, found eight such records in old Chinese texts; the oldest of these date from 314 and 317 and describe several suns appearing in the sky at once. According to History of Power and Opposition, a work surviving from the Tang era, the historian Zhang Zuo wrote of a star formation, visible for three nights above battling armies, in which stars could be seen to "fight each other," while the astronomy chapter of the New Book of the Tang recorded a bright body with a pointed, cylindrical head flying toward the southwest in 900, and a case from 879 when, according to the witnesses, two suns merged.
What we know for certain: these descriptions exist, tied to specific reign years and months, and the article's author identifies precisely which ancient source each comes from. What we don't know: how the texts may have been distorted on their way from the Chinese original to the 1984 Spanish and then the 2026 English translation, and there is no independent data, separate from the chronicles, that would support the phenomena described. The article does not examine whether atmospheric light phenomena or another natural explanation might lie behind the multiple-sun phenomena.
The authors indicated that the series will continue later with further Chinese cases from more recent eras; there is no information yet about their content.
The sober take
The source does not examine possible natural explanations and does not link the cases to any specific astronomical phenomenon. It is generally known that atmospheric refraction of light, for example a parhelion, a so-called mock sun, could also have produced the sight of several suns at once in earlier ages, but the article does not apply this to the ancient Chinese accounts it quotes.