Urban Legends or Mass Memory? An Exploratory Study of the “Miniature Flying Craft” Myth in 20th Century China

This study presents a preliminary investigation into a widely shared yet academically undocumented phenomenon reported by children in China during the late 20th-century China. These accounts describe low-flying, metallic “miniature aircraft” that were said to be within reach of a bamboo pole and often included sightings of “tiny humanoid figures” inside. Remarkably, these narratives emerged independently across multiple provinces and socioeconomic backgrounds, exhibiting striking consistency despite the lack of physical evidence or official records. Drawing on theories of collective memory, narrative psychology, and urban legend formation, the study explores how such vivid and synchronized memories may have emerged, persisted, and become encoded into generational identity. A mixed-methods approach is employed, incorporating qualitative analysis of digital oral testimonies sourced from Chinese online platforms (e.g., Zhihu, TikTok), visual mapping of memory distribution, and interpretive sociocultural modeling.To account for the underlying cognitive and cultural mechanisms, a new theoretical model: the Narrative-Induced Visual Myth (NIVM) framework is proposed. This model explains how ambiguous perceptual stimuli, when filtered through culturally shared narrative templates and psychological desire structures, may be transformed into vivid, narratively organized, and experientially convincing visual memories. While developed in response to the “miniature aircraft” phenomenon, the NIVM framework also offers broader applicability to other cases of collective hallucinated memory, mythic misrecognition, and symbolic perception across cultures. All code used for data collection, cleaning, and visualization is available at: https://github.com/ramsayxiaoshao/miniature-aircraft-myth.