Beijing Planetarium curator Zhu Jin has denied that the two flying objects swooping against Shenzhou 9 four minutes after its launch on June 16 were UFOs.

According to Zhu, also the vice executive director of Beijing’s UFO Research Society, the two glistening objects caught onscreen during the live broadcast of China’s first manned space docking mission last Saturday, were probably birds, planes or other flying modules.

The TV appearance of the glistening flying objects (Up, Right)

Yet Zhu elaborated that because of the temporary lack of access to the technological figures and infrared video images, it is difficult to identify the flying objects as well as to measure their velocities and actual distances to the spacecraft. The approximate-one-second TV appearance of the objects is insufficient to provide any evidence backing up the UFO claims, Zhu said.

In stark contrast to Zhu’s rational and scientific analysis, Weibo users (China’s Twitter-like microblogging platform) turned out to be more liberated and imaginative in their assessments of the unidentified objects in the sky.

Many of them do believe the shining objects were indeed UFOs, whereas other bloggers raised the possibility of the objects to be supernatural phenomena predicting disaster.