China · 07 July 2010

Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport, 2010

Reported

An international airport was closed and eighteen flights grounded or diverted - an official operational act with real cost, taken in response to an unidentified object, and never officially explained.

Where

Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport, Zhejiang

When

07 July 2010

Who reported it

Airport and aviation personnel plus members of the public; count not officially stated

Entities described

None reported

Handled as

UNVERIFIED

Evidence class

GOV-4

The record

An official file preserves that a report was made and examined. It does not, by itself, establish what was seen.

UNKNOWN

No document is attached yet. The retrieval is open work.

What is not settled

The only genuinely official element is the closure itself; everything about the object is press and enthusiast material. Investigators reported no radar images at all and pointed to a military aircraft; a planetarium curator attributed the night photograph to aircraft strobe lamps. There is no accessible Chinese state document of any kind.

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