What happened
Around 9 pm on 7 July 2010, a flight crew descending toward Hangzhou's Xiaoshan International Airport in eastern China reported a strange glowing object in the sky. Airport operations were shut down, and according to the state news agency Xinhua, eighteen flights were delayed or diverted to other airports. Local residents described a twinkling light with a bright, comet-like tail, and one bus driver said it suddenly raced off westward as if escaping something. It was one of the rare cases in which a UFO report closed a major airport, and photos claimed to show the object spread rapidly online and on television, although many later turned out to be unrelated or doctored. A day later, the Shanghai Daily reported another UFO over the city of Chongqing. Officials said they were looking into whether the object was a private aircraft, a military aircraft, rocket flares or a reflection.
The official explanation
Xinhua reported that speculation centred on a private aircraft, while a source quoted by the state-run China Daily said the object had a military connection. Members of the Beijing and Shanghai UFO research organisations found no radar images and concluded it was probably an aircraft, possibly military, adding that widely shared photos were not of the airport event. MIT weapons analyst Geoffrey Forden argued that some wider China sightings that month matched a DF-21 missile launch and that others were faked.
The anomalous case
An unknown object was serious enough to stop operations at a major international airport and divert or delay eighteen flights, a step air traffic managers rarely take. It was reported by a professional aircrew on approach and by people on the ground. The Chinese government never published a conclusion, and the most specific hint, from a source quoted by China Daily, pointed to a military connection rather than a mundane explanation. If it was a Chinese military aircraft or test vehicle operating over a busy civil airport without warning, that itself is a notable, undisclosed event. Either way, the object that halted Xiaoshan has never been publicly identified.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- UFOs over China? Not quite, analyst says CNN
- UFO over Chinese airport? The Christian Science Monitor
- UFO sightings in China Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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