Maybe… maybe not!  A ton of images and video purporting to show a rash of UFOs over China last week have gone through a flurry of internet activity.  Debunked!  Bunked!  Re-debunked!  It's missiles!  It's a counter-missile system!  It's an optical illusion!  It's UFOs and China doesn't want to admit it!

Here are the facts: something happened to shut down Xiaoshan Airport.  To quote CNN, "Eighteen flights were delayed or rerouted and operations shut down after twinkling lights were spotted above the terminal around 9 p.m. July 7."  Some people thought it was a private aircraft which had gone astray.  Others thought it was something military - an experimental aircraft, perhaps, or who knows what.

What CNN describes as "twinkling lights" has been described by other sources as "a glowing object hovering in the afternoon sky."  

The next day, a UFO was reported hovering over the city of Chongquing for over an hour.  And then all hell broke loose.  I can't even count how many UFO reports have come out of China this month.  Dozens!  Hundreds!  How many of them are just Photoshop trickery?  A lot, probably!

The Chongquing UFO is described as a formation of four glowing lights in a diamond shape, which floated over a park for over an hour.  (Just as a point of information, that's identical to a fake UFO you can build with a few cans of Sterno, a sheet of lightweight plywood, and a garbage bag. You know - the kind of thing you would launch from, say, a park.)

An MIT weapons analyst has taken a look at the evidence for the airport UFO and - perhaps unsurprising, given his specialty - decided that it was probably a ballistic missile headed for the Gobi desert.  Chinese officials have - even less surprisingly - not been very forthcoming with the information.

According to MSNBC it was the work of a missile test.  Why China would be testing missiles by firing them over its own people and airports is left as an exercise for the reader.  Also according to MSNBC the missile was "fired to intercept another missile in flight."  Which is it?  Was China really testing their missile-on-missile system over its own population?  Or were they firing against someone else's missile?  And if so, whose?

MSNBC's report is based largely on a one-line statement given by the Xinhua news agency.  No great surprise that the Chinese government would claim that "oh yeah, it was all on purpose."  Considering the secrecy and lies espoused by the Chinese government on a regular basis, it's no surprise that the UFO-hunting community is going nuts over this.

It's worth contemplating that if the government is telling the truth about this being a military thing, this doesn't exactly spell "good news" for Chinese travelers.  Imagine if a United States Air Force missile wandered over LAX and shut down air traffic while Air Traffic Control tried to figure out what the heck it is.  The sheer volume of incompetence and confusion in this scenario is clearly a bad sign!

Frankly, it probably would have made the government look better if they had just come out and said "Yep, it was aliens."