[UPDATE: 07:30 am] Just to clarify: the UFO was not the Soyuz rocket which failed mid-flight yesterday while taking US and Russian astronauts to the International Space Station. That rocket was launched in southern Kazakhstan at 4:40 pm China Standard Time yesterday. This UFO was only seen hours later at around 7 pm.
Yesterday evening, residents of Beijing, Inner Mongolia, and Shanxi province spotted a mysterious object in the night’s sky, leaving behind an unusual exhaust trail.
Overnight, videos and photos of the UFO from eyewitnesses have flooded onto Chinese social media:
While it’s certainly always possible that this was humanity’s first glimpse of extraterrestrial life, it seems far more likely that what people saw was actually a Chinese military plane, rocket, or missile. A similar object was also spotted in the sky in the same area back in April.