By Franz Schurmann

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Evaluation: The evaluation of Prediction #43 will be made on Tuesday, December 21.

Basis of the Prediction:

On Friday, December 3, before dawn, a UFO appeared in the sky over Shanghai. Many thousands of people saw it and it was shown on television. One week later on December 10 an identical UFO appeared over Shanghai at the same time and place and flying in the same track. It flew at around 10,000 meters or 30,000 feet altitude.

The Shanghai observatory said the apparition was not a cloud nor a light nor an atmospheric phenomenon. They called it an artificial flying object. Some experts said it was an airplane. But others said it no way looked like an airplane. An astronomical observatory said that whether it was made by humans or came from outer space it posed no danger to humans.

This makes for an easy prediction. The evaluation of this prediction should be simple enough. Either the Shanghai UFO appears for a third time in the same place and at the same time or it doesn't.

The National UFO Reporting Center in the US has been monitoring UFO's for a long time. And there have been plenty of movies about extraterrestrial flying objects. But lately there hasn't been much about UFO's in the American media. But in the late 1950's and early 1960's UFO sightings were a common media item.

That was a time when America and the Soviet Union were moving into manned aerospace ventures. UFO's fascinated both publics. Now China is moving into its aerospace era. The Chinese are currently preparing for their first manned flight in space.

That will make it the third country in the world with manned space flight capabilities after America and Russia. And, just as in the case of the other two superpowers, Chinese aerospace ventures will come in two forms, one civil and the other military. While it still has only a few ICBM's China already has enough to create a lot of damage to the USA. And the Chinese are openly talking about developing anti-missile missiles.

If the Chinese government knows the UFO phenomenon to be caused by some foreign civil or military craft they are saying nothing. The wide publicity given the event in the Chinese media implies Beijing knows as little about the phenomenon as the many thousands who saw it.

But when UFO sighting was common in America and the former Soviet Union there was a lot of speculation that maybe some of the UFOs were due to extraterrestrial beings reconnoitering the earth. At first most people felt such UFO explanations were based more on fantasy than fact. But now there is lively and growing scientific exploration of possible signs of extraterrestrial life. This has to be accepted as a valid third aspect of UFOlogy.

But in the case of China there is a fourth aspect to UFOlogy that can be called cosmological. The Chinese have a spiritual tradition that the laws of nature and of morality are interwoven with each other. That means if I act in accordance with the laws of nature my behavior towards others will bring about harmony. Conversely if I break the laws of nature my behavior will bring about chaos. And, of course, the inverse also holds. If I do bad things then that causes pain in nature which it shows through natural disasters such as volcanic explosions, floods, diseases and so on. (This is somewhat similar to the Natural Law tradition in Renaissance philosophy).

Just a few decades short of two millennia ago one of China's most creative philosophers had gained great influence over an emperor who could be called China's Caesar. The philosopher's name was Dong Zhongshu and the emperor was named Wu Di. Wu means military and Di means emperor. But a century earlier the word Di meant the Supreme God in Heaven (a word possibly related to ancient Indo-European word "diu," whence the English divine).

Dong Zhongshu was the key ideological figure in the Han Dynasty's definitive unification of China. Wu Di was a great conqueror who extended the Han realm into Korea, deep into Central Asia and into the modern Vietnam. At that time there only were two other comparable empires in the world, India and Rome. In all three, the rulers and their advisers felt the need for a common faith to hold their many multiethnic peoples and vast domains together. The Roman imperial state finally found Christianity. The Indian imperial state began with Buddhism. And Wu Di and Dong Zhongshu made a cosmologized Confucianism the imperial faith of the Han Dynasty.

Till the Sung Dynasty a millennium ago Chinese philosophy did have a theological tradition somewhat similar to that of ancient India. Confucius frequently spoke about "Heaven's commands." Dong Zhongshu saw both Heaven (Tian) and the Way (Tao) as eternal even as everything else in the cosmos passes away. Translating into the Western tradition one can say that Heaven meant God while the Way/Tao meant Nature. Heaven in the Confucian sense was the Supreme Soul or Consciousness, like the Brahman of the Hindu faith. (By the Sung Dynasty Heaven was melded with Nature; in modern Chinese a natural phenomenon is called a heavenly one).

Hinduism posits a cosmological trinity: Brahman, Vishnu and Shiva. The latter two gods have a vivid presence even in present-day Hinduism while Brahma seems remote though all powerful, all knowing and everywhere present. In China it was the emperor who became the great god. And that may explain why historically the Chinese word Di and the Indo-European Diu are related. In India Vishnu and Shiva seem as real as any human being. In China the emperor, of course, was a human mortal.

Dong Zhongshu taught that the god emperor had to obey the commands of Heaven a.k.a. God. When the emperor obeyed Heaven then the world and all beings on it prospered. But when the emperor was disobedient Heaven "got angry" and warned him with all sorts of disturbing signs that took the form of unnatural phenomena. Some such signs were floods and droughts. Others were an unusual number of deformed babies and animals.

What Confucian scholars kept on emphasizing in later periods was that Dong Zhongshu's doctrines created powerful checks and balances on emperors inclined towards tyranny. If the emperor did not heed the signs then rebels would rise up to overthrow the emperor and found a new dynasty. (That is much the same that happened to Belshazzar [Daniel 5:24-30]).

For the last two years there have been terrible floods in China. This year its foreign relations, especially with America, have been on a roller coaster. Strange quasi-religious faiths like Fa-lun-gong have been spreading all over the country. And now UFO's fly over Shanghai from where China's top leaders come. Are they signs from Heaven that the emperor is disobedient?

China's rulers are Marxist and do not believe in God. Yet their revered leader Deng Xiaoping during the 1980's launched a nationwide campaign to create a "Spiritual Civilization." The elegance of Dong Zhongshu's philosophy is that "Heaven" can be understood either as a personal God or as Nature that binds us all to its laws. If Marxists are atheists they are nevertheless devout believers in the laws of nature.

Albert Einstein firmly believed in a universal nature all of whose parts are interdependent and whose laws and behaviors can be described mathematically. Aside from the mathematics Dong Zhongshu held the same cosmology as Einstein. That means the rulers and people of China will take the UFO's seriously whatever the reality is behind them.

If the Shanghai UFO appears for the third time and no rational and credible explanation is forthcoming some Chinese may wonder whether extraterrestrial beings might be involved. But most likely they will wonder about their government's doings as well as what's going in the world as a whole.