An unidentified bright object was spotted by witnesses and picked up on airport radar screens in Kunming, Yunnan Province, on Tuesday, according to a Beijing News report yesterday.

At about 6:45 AM Tuesday, some "unidentified bright object" appeared in the sky, according to eyewitnesses who claimed that the thing radiated blue and yellow rays.

A witness surnamed Chen described what he saw as "the moon being cloaked by a bright object about the size of a medium plate." He said: "The rays had the mixed colors of blue and yellow, and shone like fireworks."

The object gradually expanded to about the size of a 100-centimeter circle, with a dark, irregularly shaped area in the center. The object then began to shrink until it dissipated. The process lasted three minutes, and left in the sky an oval ball with blue rays that disappeared at around 7 AM.

Kunming's air traffic management center under the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China checked its radar records and found that one of the two radar systems that were functioning normally at the time captured the object on its screens. At 6:39:48 AM Tuesday, an unidentified object appeared about eight kilometers away from Kunming Airport. The object was moving fast from the northwest to the northeast, in a jumping up-down motion, and disappeared about 75 kilometers away from the airport 17 seconds later.

Air traffic control staff were surprised to find that only one of the two radar systems captured the unidentified object. Under normal circumstances, the two radar systems keep identical records.

A staff member with the Yunnan Observatory said there were more than 100 phone calls reporting or inquiring after the object over Kunming Tuesday morning. However, eyewitnesses gave different descriptions of it.

(China.org.cn by Wind Gu, February 9, 2006)