Among Jiayou, there is a Yangzhou Pearl, which is very big and dark. It first appeared in Beize, Tianchang County, and later moved to Fushe Lake and then to Xinkai Lake. For more than ten years, residents and pedestrians often see it. Yu Youren's study is by the lake. One night, he suddenly saw its beads close together. At first, he opened the room slightly, and the light came out of his kiss like a golden thread. Suddenly, he opened his shell, which was half the size of a seat. The white light in the shell is like silver, and the beads are as big as fists. It is impossible to face it. There were shadows on the trees more than ten miles away. It was like this on the first day, but in the distance, he saw the sky as red as wildfire, and suddenly it was far away, and his line flew. In ancient times, there was a pearl of the bright moon, which was not like a pearl, but almost like sunshine.
The "friend" in this record is Sun Jue, a Gaoyou native and a famous scholar in the Northern Song Dynasty. This autumn, Sun Jue was a scholar in high school. So people say that Sun Jue went to high school because he saw pearls, which can bode well. Huang Tingjian, his son-in-law, a famous poet and calligrapher, specially wrote a poem "A Message to My Uncle and Grandson Shen Lao":
There is a bright moon in the floating lake.
Huainan vegetation borrows glory.
Therefore, it is necessary to cut mussels into the palace.
If you don't do it, it will rain.
Since then, in order to see the wonders of the pearl, people "often wait for the boat for several nights" (Meng Qian Bi Tan). In order to facilitate the waiting, some people built "Pearl Pavilion" and "Pearl Pavilion" by the lake, expecting exotic pearls to come again.
Shen Kuo is a very serious scholar, and his writing is eloquent, vivid and meticulous. However, Shen Kuo did not come to a conclusion about what this light was. However, in recent years, after seeing this record in Meng Qian Bitan, some astroscientists boldly speculated that it might be the arrival of an alien UFO. If so, it will become the earliest written record about flying saucers. 198565438+In February, Zhenjiang held an academic seminar to commemorate the 890th anniversary of Shen Kuo's death. Xi, then director of the Institute of Natural Science History of Chinese Academy of Sciences, mentioned in his chief speech: "People have noticed Bitan's Article 369, which may be the evidence that UFOs flew to the ground in ancient times."