Ladakh Border UFOs, Indian Army, Demchok 2013

Ladakh faces China across the Line of Actual Control. In 2013 the frontier was tense, after the Depsang stand-off of April and May.

The sky had been restless for a year. Between August 1 and October 15, 2012, an Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) unit at Thakung, on the south bank of Pangong Tso, reported more than 100 sightings. The reports went to its Delhi headquarters and to the Prime Minister's Office. The ITBP called them "Unidentified Luminous Objects", seen by day and by night.

India Today described "yellowish spheres" that "appeared to rise from the Chinese side of the horizon and move slowly across the sky for three to five hours before vanishing." The Times of India wrote of "orange-yellow luminous flying objects".

By February 2013 the count stood at 329, with the objects "perceived" to have crossed the border 155 times. From an observation post called Point 4715, one light appeared around 6 p.m. and stayed visible until about 5 a.m. Another appeared around 4 a.m. and faded by about 11 a.m. Lance Naik Sheminderpal Singh, a regular observer, noticed that one object appeared about four minutes later each day. It was the brightest light in the sky. It seemed to move against the stars.

Sunday, August 4, 2013. Evening. In the Lagan Khel area of Demchok, Indian Army troops saw an unidentified flying object. The local formation reported it to Army Headquarters. PTI carried the story on August 18 and 19 under a telling headline. "Army troops sight UFO in Ladakh again."

The wire copy gave no shape, no size, no colour, no duration. Years later, India.com wrote that the Army had reportedly filmed more than five moving orbs near the border. That footage has never surfaced.

The Army had tried hard to name the lights. In September 2012 it moved a radar and a spectrum analyser onto a mountaintop near Pangong Tso. Inconclusive. Astronomers from the Indian Astronomical Observatory at Hanle watched for three days and called the objects "non celestial". IAF radars were "unable to pick up any signal". Army officials studied the ITBP's hazy photographs and ruled out drones and low earth-orbiting satellites.

A preliminary multi-agency view pointed to Chinese lanterns, and ISRO was asked to visit Leh. In Parliament, Defence Minister A.K. Antony said there was "no conclusive proof of sighting of unidentified flying objects over the Sino-Indian border."

Then the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore sent two astronomers at the Army's request. They worked from theodolite readings taken between February 17 and 22, 2013. "Our task was to determine whether these unidentified objects were celestial or terrestrial," said senior astronomer Tushar Prabhu. The answer: "the object observed from Point 4715 is Jupiter". The early morning light was Venus. The clear high-altitude air made the planets unusually bright. The Telegraph ran the finding on July 23, 2013. Three weeks later came Demchok, and the Dhaka Tribune noted it was "not clear whether the conclusion arrived at by the research institute has been accepted by the Army and government."

The planet verdict travelled the world. The Register, Reason and SyFy Wire covered it, often with a smile, and the German sceptics of CENAP filed it under planets fooling "elite witnesses". There was precedent. In 2003, 14 Corps reported "non-celestial objects", and Gen. N.C. Vij, then Army chief, dismissed them as hallucinations. For Demchok itself, no conclusion was ever published.