Reports of Unidentified Flying Object – Sightings in 1988
There were not very many UFO cases in China in 1988, but there were still over twenty reports. Some of them had rather low levels of credibility. What follows is a selection of the two best cases and a separate description of each one.
Xinjiang Airlines Sighting
The New China News Agency of March 20 reported that at 9:35 p.m. on March 18, Xinjiang Airlines flight 2606 from Beijing to Urumqi was flying above Qijiaojing, Hami County, at an altitude of 11 ,000 meters, when suddenly somebody discovered that a ball of light the size of a basketball, radiating intense beams of light as though from a flashlight, and flying in the opposite direction to the air craft, had appeared on the aircraft’s front starboard side.
The crew immediately contacted Urumqi air traffic control, who replied that there was no other flight activity. Members of the crew turned on the plane’s navigation lights as a signal. There was no response.
Three minutes later, the ball of light changed course and flew off to the north and meanwhile turned into two shapes of light, one above the other. The upper part was a small circular shape, and the lower part appeared as bean-shaped. The two parts were both revolving rapidly. A green halo appeared outside the circle of light.
At this moment, the lights on the plane went off and the passengers on the plane saw this scene before their eyes and followed the two forms as they went into the distance and gradually got smaller. At 9:48 p.m. the unidentified flying object disappeared northward into the night.
Half an hour after the event, when flight 2011 was re turning from Guangzhou to Urumqi, flying close to the Hami region, other people saw this UFO.
Corroboration
With regard to this event, Hami Television Broadcasting Bureau Vice-Chairman and head of Hami Television, Fan Chengliang, submitted a report to the Journal of UFO Re search, which appeared in the journal in the fourth quarter of 1988, and is a more detailed account:
At nine o’clock in the evening on March 18, 1988, I left the office building to return home. When I had reached a point some 10 meters from the building, I suddenly saw a very large ball of light surrounded by a hazy glow in the north-western sky before me. At the time, my first impression was that it was a solar eclipse, because a partial solar eclipse was scheduled on that day. How ever, I immediately realized that was wrong, because it was past nine o’clock in the evening, and the solar eclipse had occurred 12 hours ago. A lunar eclipse?
That was not possible, either. The 18th was the first day of the second month on the lunar calendar, a new moon, so there was no moon out that night. Just then, several students came over. I pointed it out to them and asked them what it was. After looking at it a while, they said it was a disc rotating in a ball of light. I became aware that this might be one of those UFOs which people of ten speak of.
I gave a quick glance at my watch, and the hands showed precisely 9:36 p.m. By that time I had been watching the UFO for about two minutes, which means that the UFO must have appeared at 9:34 p.m. Suddenly, a child shouted, “It is flying, it is flying! , ” and when I looked again, the ball of light, which had been hovering motionlessly, was indeed rapidly moving east ward. In an instant, it had flown from the west of the first antenna to the second antenna of our bureau’s station 7601 . Also, changes in its shape had occurred, beginning as an elongated, upright circular shape, and then making a somewhat smaller circle of light, and in a little while, it formed into a horizontal cigar shape (this may have been an illusion caused by the sideways flying motion of the object). Nevertheless, the yellowish-green halo it produced and the hazy glow surrounding it remained the same throughout.
At this point I realized the need to take a picture, so I rushed back the approximately 80 meters to ‘the tele vision station office building. Before I got there I heard a commotion from the building. Several workers on duty for that shift had run out and were looking at the flying saucer. It turned out that they had also received calls from viewers. I ran up to the editing room but failed to find a photographer, so I just stood on the second-floor balcony and watched . The ball of light was still in the field of vision , but apparently its bright ness had weakened, and it was getting further and further away. At 9:46 p.m. the flying object flew off to the east-north-east and suddenly disappeared. By this time the sky was full of stars, and there was silence everywhere. – In my judgment, the unidentified flying object flew from the north-west to the east-north-east, at times hovering motionlessly, at times moving rapidly, and it could fly straight up and down. It remained in my field of vision fully 12 minutes. The flying saucer appeared about 15 to 20 kilometers from the city of Hami, at a height of about 2,000 to 3 ,000 meters.
Before dawn on March 19th on Xinjiang People’s Radio News, and on the 20th on the Central Television Station’s evening news, it was promptly reported that two passenger planes (Beijing-Urumqi flight 2606 and Guangzhou-Urumqi flight 2011) encountered an un identified flying object in the airspace above Qijiaojing, Hami County (located 200 kilometers from the northern end of Hami, and 130 kilometers from Hami). The times of their encounters were from 9:35 to 9:48 p.m. , one minute off the time of my observation.
Among those in the television broadcasting bureau who had seen this flying object were: television shift workers Wu Wanjun, Ahmed Jiang (Uigur ethnicity), Mi Xiuchun (female, Hui ethnicity), anchorman Ming Aijun, security guard Xu Yongchang, technical engineer Cheng Jingchun, technician Ju Hang. Among the students were: Zhang Gaofeng (Hami High School 4, high junior), Ding Zhipeng (H.S. 2, starting sophomore), Zou Dongjiang (H.S. 5, starting junior), Fan Nanjia (H.S. 4, high sophomore), Wang Xiaofeng (H.S. 4, starting freshman), Liang Yong (Elementary School 4, sixth grader), Cheng Gang (Railroad Technical High School 2, high sophomore)-over 10 people in all.
The event described above not only caught the attention of UFO researchers in China, but also the Civil Aviation Commission and the Air Force.