BEIJING (The Reuters World Service via Individual Inc.) -- A Chinese passenger plane was forced to make an emergency landing after the exterior glass of the cockpit window was cracked by an unidentified flying object at 9,600-metres (31,500 feet), the Yangcheng Evening News said.
The object collided with the Boeing 757-200 passenger plane on December 19 on a flight from Beijing to Wuhan, capital of central Hubei province, an edition of the newspaper seen in Beijing on Wednesday said.
The plane belonging to a Hubei subsidiary of China's Southern Airlines made a successful emergency landing at Beijing's Capital International Airport, it said but did not elaborate.
Company officials reached by telephone declined to give further details.
[CNI News comments: The cracked window is proof positive that the plane collided with something, but that something had to be relatively small to do so little damage. At that altitude, it was not likely to be a bird (though birds have seriously damaged planes at lower altitudes). Nor was it likely to be anything dropped from another airplane. That suggests that the object did come from space. Most likely, we think, it was either a small meteor or a small piece of satellite debris.]
Original file name: CNI - Chinese Plane.UFO?
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