Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport closure

Summer 2011. China's press was full of UFO stories, part of a wave that had already closed or disrupted airports at Hangzhou Xiaoshan in July 2010 and Baotou in September 2010.

Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport sits in Yubei District, in the southwest of the country. Fox News called it "an important aviation hub for southwestern China." On Wednesday, August 17, 2011, its traffic stopped.

According to Shanghai Daily, as quoted by Fox News, there were reports of a UFO circling a runway. It was spotted floating high above the airport. Writing for Live Science, Benjamin Radford described it as white and doughnut-shaped. It hovered for nearly an hour. Then it faded away.

Chinese social media told a different story. A Tianya forum user described an object at about 4,800 m altitude, moving at about 600 km/h. It was not a passenger plane, it had an unusual shape and it emitted light. A post relayed by a Yunnan Information Daily reporter placed it about 20 km north of the airport, approaching, and said it could not be contacted. A post by 892 Baotou radio spoke of an "unidentified floating object" in the landing path that had drifted away by about 14:00.

Around 12:30, arrivals were halted. Only departures were allowed. Arrivals resumed roughly 30 minutes later. Fox reported that the object disappeared about 50 minutes after it was spotted, and traffic returned to normal.

A Weibo photo of the arrivals board reportedly showed 7 inbound flights diverted to Guiyang, Zhangjiajie, Chengdu and Xi'an. Chongqing Commercial Times counted 3 affected arrivals. A Hubei airport official said one Xiamen Airlines flight went to Wuhan Tianhe, with others sent to Hefei and Changsha. One airline told passengers it was air-traffic control. Then it blamed an aircraft fault.

The airport confirmed a temporary air-traffic control measure. It denied that any unidentified flying object had been over the airport, calling it "merely a simple air-traffic-control measure," and gave no reason. The Chongqing government, Shanghai Daily reported, "has not offered any explanation." No witness was ever named. Radford noted that the report never said whether pilots, controllers or people on the ground had seen it.

Skeptical airport workers believed it was a sky lantern or a large balloon. Gizmodo's Cyriaque Lamar disagreed, calling it "a stereotypically round UFO" and "most certainly not a lantern."

Radford proposed a hole-punch cloud. He said it closely resembled the Moscow halo "UFO," which meteorologists blamed on sunlight on a cloud disturbed by wind or by aircraft near an airport. Citing Wang Sichao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he noted that other Chinese UFO reports had turned out to be Venus, military tests or lamp reflections. A cloud fits the white doughnut. It does not fit a light moving at 600 km/h.

Three days later, pilots over Shanghai reported a large glowing object that radar did not show. In 2014, Cheryl Costa listed Chongqing among airport UFO events in her "New York Skies" column. The case left no investigation, no named witness and no verdict. Only a photo of stranded passengers crowding the terminal, and a story told two ways.