2010 Chinese Airport Closures: Hangzhou Xiaoshan and Baotou

Summer 2010. China was in the middle of a run of UFO reports. On June 30, a light in the sky was reported near Urumqi, in Xinjiang. A week later, the story reached an airport.

Wednesday, July 7. Evening. A flight crew preparing for descent into Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport saw an object with a bright, comet-like tail. They reported it to air traffic control. At about 20:45, the airport closed.

Outbound flights were held. Inbound flights were sent to Ningbo and Wuxi. Eighteen flights were affected. Nothing appeared on radar. The airport reopened at 21:41.

On the ground, others had been watching. At 8:26 p.m., Ma Shijun was out walking with his wife. "I felt a beam of light over my head," he told Xinhua. He described "a streak of bright, white light flying across the sky," and said he could not tell "whether the object was a plane, or whether it was Xiaoshan Airport's UFO." A local bus driver was more certain. "The thing suddenly ran westwards fast, like it was escaping from something." Less than an hour before the shutdown, residents had seen "a flying object emitting red and white rays of light."

Two months later, it happened again. Saturday, September 11. About 8 p.m. Bright lights moved erratically in the sky, and controllers at the Hohhot Air Traffic Management Bureau spotted the object on their radar, about 40 km east of Baotou. Air traffic was held from 21:14 to 22:00. Three flights from Beijing and Shanghai circled. Two were diverted, to Ordos and Taiyuan. "To guarantee security, the aircraft heading for the airport had to land at secondary airports," said Ms. Luo, the airport's spokeswoman. "Otherwise, it may have led to collisions." After about an hour, the lights were gone.

Wang Jian, head of air traffic control at the CAAC Zhejiang branch, said: "No conclusion has yet been drawn." He called the private-plane idea "just a guess." No final official finding was ever published.

The closest look came from outside government. A joint team from the Beijing UFO Research Society and a Shanghai UFO research centre visited the airport and CAAC offices on July 14 and 15. They found "no evidence the sightings were connected to alien spacecraft." Private or military aircraft "could not be ruled out," since civil radar only identifies aircraft carrying transponders. Baidu Baike, though, quotes team member Zhou Xiaoqiang calling it "at least not an ordinary aircraft." The airport responded that the report was "purely civilian, not official." As for Baotou, the Chinese government denied the incident happened at all.

Zhu Jing of the Beijing Planetarium said Ma's photo "looks just like a plane shining its strobe lamps." China Daily blamed an illegally flown private plane. The South China Morning Post pointed to a military test at a nearby air force base, and blamed Baotou on "black flights." Geoff Forden at Arms Control Wonk argued for a DF-21 missile launch near Jiuquan. The CS Monitor raised a superior mirage.

The famous footage did not survive scrutiny. The viral "Hangzhou UFO" video was identified as a rocket launch from Baikonur, filmed around the time of the Urumqi sighting. Robert Sheaffer wrote in Skeptical Inquirer that "most of the footage shown was actually taken a year previous."

The witnesses were never accused of anything. The flight crew was never named. Their report closed an international airport for about an hour, and in September, Baotou followed. Years later, Chinese media were still comparing new airport scares to Xiaoshan.