Staff Writer
July 16, 2010 | 4:17 a.m.
Hangzhou, Zhejiang CHINA —
An unidentified flying object forced an airport in a major Chinese city to shut down operations for an hour, various reports said.
According to state media outlet China Daily, the incident happened at Hangzhou’s Xiaoshan Airport on July 7, when the UFO was spotted around 8:30 p.m. According to the report, the object did not show up on radar.
All inbound and outbound flights were grounded from 8:45 p.m. to 9:41 p.m., and up to 2,000 passengers were affected, according to the China Daily.
An unknown source told China Daily the UFO may have been military-related. The government said the investigation is ongoing.
Update:
A second China UFO sighting has residents on edge, just seven days after an unidentified flying object shut down a Chinese airport.
The new UFO sighting took place in Chongqing in eastern China on July 15. Witnesses told Shanghai Daily they saw the same thing: “four lantern-like objects forming a diamond shape that hovered over the city’s Shaping Park for over an hour.”
Like the one before it, there has been no official explanation to date for this latest incident.
Last week, flights were diverted in Hangzhou — also in eastern China — after a mysterious object was seen hovering in the sky, People’s Daily reports.
State-run Xinhua News Agency quoted a head of air traffic control as saying, “No conclusion has yet been drawn” about the UFO by the airport.
China Daily reported that a source with knowledge of the matter said there was a military link but made no further comment.
UFO sightings in China are not as common as some places, and there have been only a handful of well-publicized incidents in the last several decades.