Emilia Jiang Daily Mail Tue, 03 Nov 2020 11:35 UTC
Footage filmed on Friday night shows the bright flash of light moving at a relatively slow speed above a residential area on Friday night in north-eastern China's Heilongjiang Province
A mysterious beam of light has been spotted sweeping across the night sky in front of stunned onlookers in a Chinese city.
Footage shows the bright light moving at a relatively slow speed above a residential area on Friday night in north-eastern China's Heilongjiang Province.
The unusual scene, amassing over 1.7million views on Chinese Twitter-like Weibo, has been likened by curious social media users to an illuminating UFO.
The blazing object was spotted at around 10.05pm on October 30 by residents in the city of Shuangyashan, Heilongjiang Province.
In the footage filmed by a spectator, the bright dot beaming in a shade of yellow, followed by a trail of what seemed to be flames, as it swept across the night sky.
Shocked by what he saw, the onlooker can be heard shouting: 'Look at that big flame!'
The moving light was visible for about one and a half minutes, the resident told Pear Video, before it suddenly dissolved and disappeared in the darkness.
Curious netizens rushed to make their speculations about the mysterious drop of brightness as the footage quickly attracted over 1.7million views on Weibo since being shared on Sunday.
One viewer wrote: 'Could that be a UFO?'
Another commenter said: 'The aliens are landing on Earth!'
Despite the web users' theory of 'a visitor from outer space', experts suspected that the rare scene could be a fireball, a type of extremely bright meteor that could even be observed in daylight.
'It might seem that [the light] looked like a visitor from outer space, but it's still very confusing,' said Liu Chuanhao, secretary-general of Heilongjiang Provincial Astronomical Society.
'But its speed was not as fast as the average fireball meteors, so we need to look into it further,' said Mr Liu.
The expert also suggested that the light could be space debris — fragments and elements of human-made objects including spaceships and abandoned vehicles — re-entering into Earth's atmosphere.
A quick note about things heating up in the South China Sea right now. Last year a small nuclear detonation was detected in the South China Sea, southeast of the Paracel Islands, and it spells the death knell to current allied anti-sub defensive strategy. It involves hypersonic weapons that are able to be deployed to destroy hunter-seeking helicopters and their attendant drones by Chinese PLAN attack submarines. At present allies don't have counter measures...
The fact remains that it will be regional players Japan, Australia, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines that have a direct self-interest in deterring Chinese expansionism over the long run, and their national survival is possible only if the United States does not provide China with advanced military technology, as the US has done with secret nuclear technology transfers to the Chinese, including atomic bomb technology, even before George H.W. Bush served as ambassador to Beijing, or a young CIA officer named Joe Biden was sent to the PLA listening post in the Tianshan mountains to monitor Soviet nuclear tests done at Semipalatinsk in the Kazahk SSR.
Hypersonic technology, another case in point, was invented by Americans and gifted to Russia and China at conferences of nuclear engineers and physicists like those on the governing board of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.Why would atomic scientists on contract with the Department of Energy (DOE) be in denial of continuing strategic weapons-technology transfers to adversaries?
To understand how is it that NASA's hypersonic accelerators that propel rockets at five times the speed of sound are now powering Russian and Chinese cruise missiles aimed at American cities, a short chapter of modern history needs review. For the present boomer-generation of science policymakers, the ill-gotten lucre goes back to the gut-wrenching Arab oil boycott that started in 1973, when the American economy collapsed and Ph.D. graduates from nuclear physics departments couldn't get a job, even as janitors. After all, who needs nuclear physicists other than the enemy?
R.C.