Residents of Beijing and Tianjin reported seeing a UFO on Sunday evening, with one astronomer suggesting it could have been the rocket launching the latest Starlink satellites.
The unusual sighting caused a stir on Chinese social media – by noon on Monday it was the fifth most searched topic on Weibo, with more than 900,000 threads about it.
Posts started appearing on social media after people saw and photographed an unidentified flying object in the sky just after 6pm on Sunday.
The UFO was reported by people in a number of places in China, including the nearby city of Tianjin, as well as in the central province of Shanxi and Shandong in the east.
They described the object as “a misty ball of light” that flew rapidly from west to east and made no sound. Many who saw it noted that there were no flashing lights so it was not likely to be a plane.
Wang Zhuoxiao, a researcher at the Centre for Astronomy Technology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said he believed it could have been the rocket used to launch a Starlink mission – the satellite internet constellation operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
