The Nanjing fireball picture

A Qing picture by Wu Youru, titled Chiyan Tengkong, shows crowds on Nanjing's Zhuque Bridge watching a red ball of fire cross the evening sky. Its inscription says several hundred people saw it.

In 2014 Apple Daily in Hong Kong and ETtoday in Taiwan, citing Xiandai Kuaibao of Jiangsu, reported on a Qing picture titled Chiyan Tengkong (赤焰騰空), meaning roughly "red flame rising into the sky". It shows people on the Zhuque Bridge in Nanjing, then called Jinling, all looking up at a mass of fire. Taiwan's NOWnews said in 2012 that it ran in the Qing news pictorial Dianshizhai Huabao.

The artist, whom the sources call Wu Youru, wrote an account above the image. At eight in the evening on the 28th day of the ninth month, south of the city, a ball of fire appeared, moving from west to east. It was shaped like a giant egg, red but dull, and floated slowly in mid-air under a cloudy, dark sky. He wrote that at least several hundred people on the bridge stood on tiptoe to watch, and that after roughly the time it takes to cook a meal it shrank into the distance and faded.

Chinese Wikipedia records the guesses of the time. Some thought it was a meteor, but it moved too slowly. Others thought it was a sky lantern flown by children, but the wind that night blew north while the object went east. An old man said it had come from beyond the south gate and made a faint sound when it arrived.

NOWnews called the picture the finest sighting report in the history of Chinese UFO watching, and Apple Daily said it had become valued material for UFO research.