E.T. phone home: airport closed
- Source: Global Times
- [03:34 July 09 2010]
- Comments
By Fu Wen
A UFO seen hovering over East China's Zhejiang Province on Wednesday evening caused massive flight delays at Xiaoshan International Airport after air traffic controllers shut down the airport for one hour, the China News Service reported Thursday.
Control tower officers detected the unidentified flying object with long-range visual instruments. They immediately ordered several incoming flights to land at airports in neighboring Ningbo and Wuxi, delaying passengers for nearly four hours, the report said.
"The UFO could not be seen with the naked eye. It had to be spotted with observation devices," an unidentified airport staff member told the Xinhua News Agency.
However, some local residents swore they saw the UFO with their own eyes.
"I saw an extremely bright spot very high up in the sky around 8 pm. The yellow spot immediately slid through the sky and disappeared within a second," Jia Xiaoying, 27, a Hangzhou resident who is also an E.T. fan, told the Global Times Thursday.
Residents living near the Xiaoshan airport and the city's Fuxing road also reported visual sightings of the UFO, describing a few sparkling flashes of light that streaked through the sky and disappeared within minutes, the Zhejiang-based Today Morning Express reported Thursday.
Air traffic control authorities used radar to try to monitor the position of the UFO Thursday but no data on its latitude and longitude was made available to the public.
An unidentified source with a government agency told China News Service that it could have been a private airplane.
The Xiaoshan airport resumed normal operations Thursday with only a few flights delayed.
Airport police and other agencies were investigating the incident, but no further information was released late Thursday.
Hangzhou is one of several Chinese cities where UFOs have been spotted since last week.
A UFO trailed by a fan-shaped white light appeared last Wednesday in Urumqi, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The unidentified flying object was later identified as debris from an intercontinental missile launched by the US, according to Song Huagang, secretary general of the Xinjiang Astronomy Society, speaking earlier to the Xinjiang Metropolis Daily.
