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India shut down Bir Tikendrajit International Airport on Sunday and scrambled two Rafale fighter jets to investigate a UFO sighting over the northeastern state of Manipur.
“The UFO was visible with bare eyes moving westwards of the airfield till 4 pm,” India Today reports a Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) official stated.
Video of the UFO shared on social media showed a crowd of people standing outside the airport watching the strange object in the sky.
#BREAKING: Today, air-defence readiness of #India was examined by a foreign country that had a luminious object (UFO) hovering over Imphal Airport near Myanmar. To intercept the UFO, two Rafale EHs of the #IndianAirForce's 101sq from Hashimara AFS, Jalpaguiri were scrambled. pic.twitter.com/fqkkneQtIs
— Babak Taghvaee – The Crisis Watch (@BabakTaghvaee1) November 20, 2023
The two Rafale fighter jets were launched from Hasimara air base in the eastern state of West Bengal.
“Soon after information about the UFO near the Imphal airport was received, a Rafale fighter aircraft from a nearby airbase was scrambled to go and search for the UFO,” a defense official said, according to news agency ANI.
The Independent reported that the second fighter jet was sent out only after the first one had returned to the base.
Two flights were diverted from the airport and three flights were delayed for several hours as the IAF investigated the UFO.
Neither of the fighter jets, equipped with advanced sensors, were able to locate the UFO.
The Indian Air Force (IAF) stated on X (formerly Twitter), “IAF activated its Air Defence response mechanism based on visual inputs from Imphal airport. The small object was not seen thereafter.”
A similar UFO sighting took place above several districts of West Bengal, India in December of 2022.
“People are scared of what is this. We didn’t listen to any sound like aircraft totally silent we see only light, sometimes after it disappeared in the sky,” one person on Twitter wrote at the time.
The object was believed to possibly have been a test missile, but that didn’t explain why the object in the sky suddenly vanished.
Also, the location of that particular UFO sighting was the same area where UFOs were spotted and filmed in 2020 and 2019.