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From my 50-Year-Old Hong Kong Diary
Candles, Mooncake…and a UFO?
During Hong Kong’s Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, lanterns lit the trees —but something else lit the sky.
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Today (October 6, 2025) is the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival Day, which is the second most important holiday for Chinese. The story below was my second Mid-Autumn Festival in Hong Kong when I was an exchange student there from September 1974 to December 1976.
The stories below are slightly edited from my 1976 diary. Comments and clarifications are added in [brackets] and italics. Other diary stories are available through the links at the bottom of this story.
Saturday, September 11 (2am) 1976 Diary Entry
It was a pretty good week — at least since Wednesday [Sept 8th]. Wednesday was the Mid-Autumn Festival. Me and Lisa [my girlfriend] bought lanterns for one another and then went to Victoria Park to enjoy the full moon.
We had just finished eating dinner and were about to cross the street when the sky filled with clouds and unzipped a rainstorm on us. We stood under a construction sidewalk covering and watched as people streamed out…
