The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) uses a three-tiered system to investigate instances of “unidentified air conditions” – a euphemism reminiscent of the US military’s term for UFOs, “unidentified aerial phenomena,” the South China Morning Post reported.
The PLA relies on reports from military radar stations, air force pilots, police stations, weather stations, and Chinese Academy of Sciences observatories to gather as much data as possible about mysterious flying objects. The information is then processed by the military and undergoes preliminary analysis, before being submitted to a national database. PLA headquarters then assigns a “threat index” to each sighting, based on the object’s behavior, physical features and any other relevant variables.
But Chinese analysts have been “overwhelmed” in recent years by the growing number of sighting reports from “a wide range of military and civilian sources,” according to the Post, prompting the PLA’s UFO task force to rely on artificial intelligence to help sort through the data. Many of the reports are ultimately attributed to natural phenomena which are picked up by radar or trigger electronic sensors, according to Chinese military researchers cited by the paper.
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