UFO Sightings in Old Joseon?

My childhood dream was to become an astrophysicist, someone like Prof. Carl Sagan. Until… I got my ass handed to me by quantum mechanics class in college. But from time to time, I would look up some stuff in physics, like what the hell quantum entanglements are. I don’t understand it but I have kept my general interest in the field after all these years. So naturally, I’m gravitated (see what I did there?) to all these talks of UFOs.

Although there was a part of me that wanted to believe it (for those of you who are old enough to remember the “X-Files” series, Fox Mulder was THE man and Dana Scully was the hottest thing on TV), I used to think it was all horseshit. People trying so hard to get attention. The prehistoric version of today’s Instagrammers prostituting themselves for follows and likes. It’s all probably some secret mission the US government is working on, I thought.

Then, stuff started coming out that turned my interest to the other way. Hmm, maybe there IS something to this.

The New York Times ran a cover story a few years back about the UFO and the Pentagon. The New York effin’ Times! You can go down the rabbit hole yourself, if you’re so inclined. Here are some keywords you can google. Bob Lazar, the Tic Tac video, Commander David Fravor.

Anyway, you might have seen these paintings in passing and never paid any attention to them.

from 1350, wall fresco, artist unknown. you see those 2 odd-looking objects on both sides of the painting?

15th century, artist unknown, Florence, Italy. locally known as “Madonna dell’UFO”

that weird object over Madonna’s left shoulder blown up, and there’s a man looking up at it

There are other paintings that show similar things, but I’ll move on to what happened in Korea during the Joseon Dynasty. Again, Joseon is sometimes known as the Dynasty of Records because it kept very detailed records of just about everything, including of course phenomena that was deemed mystery back then, and remain so until today.

In the 조선왕조실록 (Veritable History of Joseon Dynasty), there are about 100 different records of objects in the sky leaving plumes of smoke and a trail of thunderous noise and having some colors. They do sound like fairly large sizes of meteoroids getting destroyed in the atmosphere, and I’m not particularly interested in those.

What I do find very interesting are two specific events that happened in the 15th and 16th century, during the reign of Joong-jong (중종, r. 1506~1544) and Gwang-hae-guhn (광해군, r. 1608~1623), respectively.

In 1522, there were multiple accounts of “balls of light moving about at strange angles and appearing here one moment and appearing there another moment, all during the broad daylight,” meaning that they’re probably not the “shooting stars” = small meteor/debris burning up in the upper atmosphere. Those are usually visible only in the dark night skies and fly in straight line. At its face value, it doesn’t sound like much. Until… you hear the United States Navy fighter pilot Commander David Fravor’s account of what he saw off the coast of San Diego/Mexico in 2004 when he was flying in a training mission, a story that’s prominently featured in the New York Times article I mentioned above. They’re eerily similar.

this is called 세수대야 (seh-soo-dae-yah). consider it a drainless sink bowl where you wash your face from. actual relic from the Joseon Dynasty times.

Then, there’s this. In 1609, during the reign of Prince Gwang-hae (one of the two Joseon Kings not worthy to be called King), there were all sorts of reports from the eastern part of Korea (강원도, Gangwon Province) about a flying object that was in the shape of a “wash bowl” on the same day around the same time. According to the official records, the governor of Gangwon Province compiled numerous reports from different localities and came up with this.

On August 25, 1609 (lunar calendar = Sept. 22), between 9 am and 3 pm, an object that was round and shiny, something akin to a wash bowl (세수대야), suddenly rose up from a local official Kim Moon-wi’s house and floated. It was about 6 feet in diameter, it was white on the right side, blueish in the middle, and reddish on the left side. It flew up, turned red, the top of the object was pointed and the bottom half was flat. Then, it separated into two pieces—one flew away to the southeast and the other floated at the same spot, it looked like a seat cushion.

This is most interesting to me. Does that purported shape of a wash bowl remind you of something you’ve seen and heard about before about UFOs?

The Korean UFOlogists put together this map of where this object was seen flying at different hours, according to the witnesses at different localities reporting the incident.

The way the time of day was measured back then, the object was first seen at the southern part of Gangwon Province as early as 9am or as late as 11am, flew north, and it finally split into two and one of the two turned southeast out to the sea between 1pm and 3pm.

And just so that there is no misunderstanding about the people of Joseon, the old Koreans have known about the existence of shooting stars and meteoroids for at least a thousand years, according to the records. The way this thing is described by so many people, it is hard to fathom that this was a naturally occurring space debris in the sky.

Add to the fact that in the same year, Japanese people have reported seeing almost exactly the same phenomena in the sky. Curious, isn’t it?

The hugely popular K-drama called 별에서 온 그대 (My Dearest from Outer Space, or something to that effect) was based on the theory that there was a UFO crash landing in Korea that year.