Summary
In 2010, Xiaoshan Airport in Hangzhou – a large international airport serving a major city – was shut down for an hour after a UAP was detected by a flight crew descending into the airport. Although operations resumed around 60 minutes after the sighting, the incident captured the attention of international media, and sparked a whirlwind of speculation on the identity of the UAP.
Interests were further heightened after a number of Hangzhou residents published images taken shortly before the sighting, of a strange object with a comet-like tail. To this day, there is no official confirmation on the identity of the UAP.
Descent Interrupted
On July 7, 2020, a flight crew was preparing for descent into Xiaoshan Airport at around 8.30pm when one of its members noticed a “twinkling”¹ unidentified object in the sky. The UAP did not show up on radars, but the crew alerted the air traffic control department authorities regardless.
Despite there being no sign of the object on any of the traffic control’s surveillance, aviation authorities responded to the sighting within minutes,² grounding all outbound flights and diverting inbound aircraft to nearby airports in Zhejiang province's Ningbo and Jiangsu province’s Wuxi.³
Up to 18 flights and as many as 2,000 passengers were affected while the airport was closed, between 8.45pm and 9.41pm. According to a staff member of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) who would not go on the record, it was the first time a Chinese airport had been shut down due to a UAP incident.
"We should first find out how the owner got the approval to fly the object," the staff member told China Daily,⁴ adding "even a fire balloon needs to get the authority's permission before lifting off."
As there were no further sightings of the object, the airport reopened an hour later. "No conclusion has yet been drawn," Wang Jian, head of air traffic control with the Zhejiang branch of the CAAC, said at the time.⁵
Media Frenzy
The incident caught the attention of Chinese media, with some outlets reporting the UAP was a private airline, as the number of privately owned aircraft in the region had recently been increasing. Wang, however, said the possibility of the UAP being a private plane was “just a guess”.
Two days later, on July 9, an unnamed Chinese official said the UAP had a "military connection",⁷ but the officer refused to disclose more details about the UFO as it was not the “proper time” to publicly disclose the information. He added there would be an investigation and further details would be released.
Zhu Dayi, a member of staff at the Shanghai Observatory, told the state-run China Daily: “If the speed of the twinkling object is extremely high, it could be a military aircraft. But no conclusion can be drawn now, as the information is limited."
Dayi added the twinkling could have come from a light below the horizon reflecting on an airplane flying very high, which is a phenomena that usually happens an hour or so after sunset, and would coincide with the time the UAP was spotted.
Fox 8, a Fox News Affiliate station, aired a video that it claimed came from the incident – as did the LA Times. The video showed four objects moving as one, with three displaying white lights and one craft emanating red light.
Meanwhile other outlets published images showing a wide trail of light behind an object that is zipping through the sky, parallel to the horizon.⁸ Another image that circulated around media channels showed a long narrow-looking object that had a glowing white light under its carriage, and five window-shaped lights on the body of the object. The object left a bright trail in its wake as it flew over houses and power lines.
Witnesses claimed to see a comet-like fireball in the sky, while a local bus driver, who gave his name only as Yu, said he had seen a strange glowing object in the sky late that Wednesday afternoon. 'The thing suddenly ran westwards fast, like it was escaping from something,' he said.⁹
Resident Ma Shijun was taking a nighttime stroll with his wife when he saw the object:
"I felt a beam of light over my head. Looking up, I saw a streak of bright, white light flying across the sky, so I picked up the camera and took the photo. The time was 8:26 p.m. However, whether the object was a plane, or whether it was Xiaoshan Airport's UFO, I don't have a clear answer,"- Ma Shijun
Debunking
Zhu Jing, curator at the Beijing Planetarium, dismissed the visual reports saying that the images looked like a plane shining its strobe lamps.¹⁰ Meteorological authorities in Hangzhou province added that residents most likely saw light reflecting off an airplane, while other internet commenters pointed out the aircraft crew may simply have seen Venus.¹¹
Both Fox News and the LA Times took down the video¹² ¹³ after experts spoke out to clarify that the video was not taken over Hangzhou, but from somewhere hundreds of miles away – Kazakhstan.
Geoffrey Forden, an MIT weapons analyst who is often called on to analyze UAPs, said the video was taken on June 30, a week before the alleged Hangzhou sighting, and in fact showed a Progress M launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Progress M is a Russian cargo spacecraft which delivers supplies to astronauts in orbit, and it launches from the Baikonur spaceport in an area of southern Kazakhstan which Russia leases out to launch its crewed space flights from. The rocket, explained Forden, who also runs the the blog ‘Arms Control Wonk’, was a routine launch to resupply the International Space Station:
“It looks so strange because the upper stages have already left the earth's atmosphere and the plume has expanded to many kilometers. It's very unusual to see this from the Earth's surface (and very interesting since it shows the transition from one stage to another) but it is not a black-ops rocket at all."- Geoffrey Forden, 'Arms Control Wonk'
In the wake of the sighting, five researchers from the Beijing UFO Research Society and the Shanghai UFO Investigative Research Center traveled to Hangzhou to conduct research into the event.
They later concluded the sightings were simply another aircraft, and that the photos and videos used by news reports had no direct relationship with the UAP at Xiaoshan airport.¹⁴
On Forden’s blog, he discussed the numerous images that appeared in the media, particularly debunking the photograph of the UAP flying over buildings:
“Here, the break-up of the object appears behind buildings reportedly in Hangzhou has a tremendously large apparent angle, making it very, very close to the city of Hangzhou. Too close, in my view, to be credible. I believe these are photoshopped and I am ignoring them.”
Forden, who points out his blog is “serious and not interested in UFO theories” dismissed propositions the UAP could have been a satellite teetering the Earth’s atmosphere after being in orbit. There were no predictions for reenters anywhere near the date of July 7, nor did NASA list any satellite decays. The most credible image, he believes, shows an arc streaking across the sky soon after local sunset. He eventually concludes the most likely explanation is the DF-21, a Chinese ballistic missile:
“It seems to me that a DF-21 launch somewhere near Jiuquan and aimed at a point somewhere in the eastern Gobi desert is the most likely cause of this ‘UFO’ even given the problem of illuminating the solid-motor discharge above the Earth’s atmosphere.”- Geoffrey Forden, 'Arms Control Wonk'¹⁵
Other Sightings
The Hangzhou incident came after a string of recent UAP sightings. Local media¹⁶ published reports of residents seeing a UAP on June 30, this time a fan-shaped object with a white light that was spotted in Urumqi, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Other similar sightings were reported in HUnan, Shandong and Jiangsu provinces.¹⁷
One week later, on July 15, another sighting was reported, this time in southwestern China's Chongqing Municipality. Purported witnesses in nearby provinces alleged seeing the same thing. “Four lantern-like objects forming a diamond shape that hovered over the city’s Shaping park for over an hour”, local Xinhua news agency reported, although this UAP was never investigated by officials.
"I stared at it and it did not move," one resident told the The Shanghai Daily.¹⁸ "After hovering for an hour, the thing started to fly higher and finally out of people's sight."
Conclusion
The primary issue with confirming the identity of the UAP spotted at Xiaoshan Airport is the unverified images, and the fact that there was no image taken by the crew or from the airport area. The initial video of the UAP that circulated in media outlets was debunked, and UAP commentators question the authenticity of other images. One commenter on Forden’s blog noted: “None of the photos seem to have any authentic connection to the event.”
Although the explanation from Chinese officials that the UAP was military-related has been backed up by UAP experts such as Forden, it hasn’t stopped the online community from engaging in speculation that what the Chinese crew saw on July 5, 2010 was not a man made object.
