A massive unidentified flying object was reportedly spotted on the night sky of Shanghai and Beijing at the same time on August 20, news agencies report.

A huge glowing ball hovering high above Shanghai at around 9 pm was said to be seen by several civil aviation pilots who reported the sightings to the East China Air Traffic Control Bureau.

According to the Oriental Morning Post, the pilot of airliner CZ6554 wrote micro blog that a "huge spherical illuminant was seen in the sky, 10,700 meters above Shanghai at 9 pm on August 20. The luminant was really round and getting huger, (looks) hundreds times bigger than the moon and the diameter of the luminant was longer than 50 sea miles".

Almost at the same time, a strange, bubble-like expanding light was reported from Beijing, Shanxi and Anhui provinces, reports say.

Several reports say astronomers linked the bubble to the launch of an intercontinental missile from California four minutes before the object appeared.

Other astronomers have argued that the object was an aircraft beyond human technology.

The UFO reports follow another report from southwest China's Jiangbei city where a mysterious UFO hovering over the landing route of the airport shut flight operations.

The white doughnut-shaped object stayed in the sky for nearly an hour before fading away.

The newspaper said that some airport workers dismissed the UFO as a huge balloon or Chinese lantern, and though these skeptical explanations may have been responsible for earlier UFO sightings, this particular UFO had a much more prosaic explanation.

In fact, the UFO seen over Jiangbei looked almost exactly like a UFO seen over Moscow last year.

And that UFO, in turn, was identified by meteorologists as an optical illusion caused by sunlight hitting a cloud disturbed by wind (or, when it occurs near an airport, plane traffic) under the right circumstances.

Many of the Chinese reports have been debunked as astronomical phenomenon, military tests and so on.