UFO seen over Beijing could have been SpaceX rocket, astronomer says

Residents of Beijing and other parts of China reported seeing a UFO on Sunday evening, with one astronomer suggesting it could have been the rocket launching the latest Starlink satellites.

The unusual sighting caused a stir on Chinese social media – by noon on Monday it was the fifth most searched topic on Weibo, with more than 900,000 threads about it.

Posts started appearing on social media after people saw and photographed an unidentified flying object in the sky just after 6pm on Sunday.

One Beijing resident described it as “a moving cloud-like object”.

Another gave a more detailed description, saying the weather in Beijing was “very clear, with no clouds, and then I saw a glowing object looming, but the light was not flashing”.

The luminous object “had three light sources and was shaped like an isosceles triangle”, the person wrote, adding that it eventually “dissipated like a mist and disappeared without a trace”.

The UFO was reported by people in a number of places in China, including the nearby city of Tianjin, as well as in the central province of Shanxi and Shandong in the east.

They described the object as “a misty ball of light” that flew rapidly from west to east and made no sound. Many who saw it noted that there were no flashing lights so it was not likely to be a plane.

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Wang Zhuoxiao, a researcher at the Centre for Astronomy Technology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said he believed it could have been the rocket used to launch a Starlink mission – the satellite internet constellation operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

A Falcon 9 rocket sent 22 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Sunday at 3.59am local time (4.59pm in Beijing).

Wang said the rocket’s trajectory was a 53-degree inclination to the south, and it would have been over northern China at the halfway point. That would have made it visible in Beijing and other cities at sunset or before sunrise.

He said that after the Starlink satellites were sent into orbit, the rocket would have dumped its excess fuel.

That process can scatter light, meaning it could have formed a cloud around the rocket, according to Wang.

He said the rocket would also have been tumbling to get rid of the extra fuel, which would explain why the “rocket cloud” had different shapes.

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An astronomer with the Beijing Planetarium, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said it could have been a rocket launched from the US.

People in northern China reported a similar object in the sky on the night of September 13, describing it as two beams of light that gradually disappeared after about a minute. That turned out to be a rocket cloud that had formed after a spacecraft launch.