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UFO sighting one for Shanghai's X-Files

Saturday, December 4, 1999

JOSEPHINE MA

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The usually staid state in Shanghai carried reports yesterday that an unidentified flying object had been sighted in the city. In a front-page story, with colour photographs of an object a meteor, the Wenhui Daily said the UFO was over western Shanghai on Thursday afternoon.

The paper said one of its reporters to the 43rd floor of a building after receiving a call from a reader about the sighting. The reporter claimed he saw an illuminated object which remained in the sky for about 10 minutes before it disappeared.

Two Shanghai television channels broadcast footage of an object through the sky with a orange tail, saying nearly 100 people saw it. A former researcher at the Shanghai Observatory, Professor Jiang Xiaoyuan, was among the but he could not offer any explanation.

The UFO hovered over Shanghai for 1.5 hours, reports said. The city's aviation bureau and Hongqiao airport said their radar did not anything. The Shanghai Daily also reported the incident in a story headlined "UFO darts across the city's skyline".

The paper ran its story on the same page as an advertisement for the X-Files movie, which is based on the television series about two American Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who unexplained phenomena. The paper's Web site also listed incidents of UFO reports from different parts of the mainland throughout the year.