Xiaoshan Airport shut down due to UFO sighting

By Phil Boehmke

Wednesday night at 9:00pm local time, Xiaoshan Airport in Hangzhou City (capitol of Zhejiang province in east China) was shut down for an hour when radar detected an unidentified flying object. Inbound flights were diverted to alternate airports and departures were delayed for approximately four hours. Shanghai Daily reported that.

The UFO looked like a twinkling spot and disappeared very soon, Xinhua quoted a passenger on board an incoming plane who claimed he witnessed the object.

[...]

An airport worker said the UFO was only visible to radars at the airport and none of the passengers or workers on the runway could have seen it with the naked eye.

The UK Daily Mail tells us that.

Stunned witnesses reported seeing a comet-like fireball in the sky and a number of local residents took photos of the strange ball of light.

A local bus driver, giving his name only as Yu, said he had seen a strange glowing object in the sky late on Wednesday afternoon.

A number of explanations have been offered thus far for the phenomenon. Provincial meteorologists theorized that the UFO "might have been sunlight reflected from regular airplanes" and several experts claimed that the unusual sight may have been "debris from a US intercontinental ballistic missile." Today's Shanghai Daily reports that.

An investigation team, comprising police and aviation officials, were still trying to identify the UFO that was spotted over Zhejiang Province.

"No conclusion has yet been drawn," Wang Jian, head of air traffic control with the Zhejiang branch of the Civil Aviation Administration, said yesterday."

Stay tuned, it will be interesting to see what sort of explanation the Chinese government comes up with. Could it have been a weather balloon? Perhaps just an atmospheric anomaly or an electrical discharge could be the cause, or just maybe it really was a UFO.

In an unrelated flight of fancy, Barack Obama continues to tell our beleaguered nation that thanks to his stimulus program the economy is heading in the right direction and thousands of new jobs are being created in the private sector. By comparison, a UFO over Xiaoshan Airport sounds awfully reasonable to me.

paboehmke@yahoo.com