While Russia has long made an effort to weaponize Western conspiracy theories to exacerbate mistrust and polarization in countries like the United States, China has been slower to catch on. Preferring to focus its early malign influence operations on Taiwan, its big debut in the effort to link information warfare to conspiracy theory occurred during the COVID-19 global pandemic, when the Chinese government helped promote the discredited idea that the virus was manufactured in a U.S. weapons laboratory. The Chinese social media and content creation platform, TikTok, has also been a major vector for conspiracy theory, promoting the circulation of videos on all manner of conspiracy theories, from the hollow to the flat earth and beyond. However, China’s latest foray into conspiracy theory appears to have seized on U.S. conspiracy theorists’ current and most enduring obsession: unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and the aliens believed by many to pilot them.
What is driving the puzzling politics of the UFO in great power competition? China appears to be taking advantage of the confluence of three recent events: the recent discovery of a chemical biosignature on Mars; misinformation about the serendipitous passage of an extra-solar cometary body, 3I/ATLAS, through the solar system this year; and, most importantly, the ongoing fascination with the topic of UFOs in the U.S. Congress. While these three things are just the latest in an ongoing moment of American cultural fascination with all things extraterrestrial, the events taken together have created a unique opportunity for Beijing to target U.S. conspiracy theorists and possibly audiences well beyond the United States with a signal about its advancing military capabilities.
A video recorded in Shandong, China on September 12 went viral on Chinese social media before being recirculated in the West by The Daily Mail, Newsweek, and a number of other outlets. Ostensibly showing the successful destruction of a UFO over the skies of China, the video depicts a slow-moving object being successfully intercepted by a fast-moving missile, with both going up in a ball of fire. Videos reposting and dissecting the footage have racked up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
Although there is nothing else to the video, the exact message behind the apparent missile test is clear from the headlines: China can successfully shoot down a UFO.
This might seem silly, but the information operation at the heart of the video’s release is communicating something more serious. By properly contextualizing the Chinese UFO video, the full content and gravity of the message becomes clear.
To that end, consider the clamor raised in Congress over the past few years about UFOs in U.S. airspace and other U.S. military operational environments. Just three days before the appearance of the Shandong footage, members of Congress released another video – this one raising concerns about the United States’ own inability to successfully accomplish the same mission. Provided to Congress by the U.S. military whistleblowers, the video shows what appears to be a Hellfire missile targeting a fast-moving UFO in airspace over Yemen. The missile “bounces off” without detonating, and the alleged UFO continues on its journey mostly unphased.
In reality, the video likely depicts a missile fired by one drone bouncing off another, with the failed detonation being the result of the fact that the missile is tailored for air-to-ground operations. The video represents the disclosure of the first known instance when the MQ-9 Reaper drone was used in an air-to-air operation. The failed detonation could be thus the result of the same atypical mission set.
But the Hellfire missile’s bladed “Ginsu” variant has reportedly been used previously in Yemen, suggesting another plausible explanation for a “failed” detonation: It is also conceivable that the video shows a missile piercing a balloon or similar object. If this is the case, the video would appear to be a repeat of the shootdown of the Chinese spy balloon that drifted over the United States for a week back in 2023.
Either way, the ongoing military operations targeted at Yemen-based terrorist organizations, and the threat of Houthi drones emanating from the region, it makes sense that U.S. forces in the region would strike down any potentially hostile aerial objects, be they drones or balloons.
Yet, the kinds of things depicted in the decontextualized, black and white, infrared video lacking clear resolution – illusions of rapid movement, nebulous objects – often pass for evidence in conspiracy theory belief communities, an audience that rarely brooks with such explanations. Thanks to phenomena like confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and the so-called “backfire effect,” conspiracy theorists instead often prefer fantastic narratives that support their preexisting beliefs and misperceptions. These the exact sorts of bias targeted by China’s sophisticated information operations.
Worse, because the message is amplified by the congressional bullhorn, China is able to target a much wider audience than the average conspiracy theorist. By watching these two videos together, the full message for a much larger audience becomes clear: China can successfully shoot down a UFO; the United States cannot. In other words, the release of the Chinese video is a signal designed to erode confidence in U.S. military capabilities, and with it, decades of U.S. soft power messaging to the contrary.
Hollywood movies from “Stargate” and “Independence Day” to “War of the Worlds” and “Battleship” have long reinforced the idea of U.S. hegemony and the U.S.-led world order through the depiction of the U.S. military leading a global resistance to extraterrestrial invasion. But movies are fiction. Thanks to the narrative being promoted about the Yemen drone strike, China has positioned itself as the real deal – with Congress inadvertently providing its stamp of approval on Beijing’s strategic messaging. As such, the politics of the UFO in great power competition make China out to be a guarantor of global security, capable of doing something in real life that the United States can only accomplish in the movies.
Taken literally, this may again seem silly. Surely, only the most ardent believers in the extraterrestrial origins of the UFO would buy into this messaging? Perhaps. Yet, in the United States alone, somewhere between 44 percent and 63 percent of Americans believe in a government UFO coverup, while even serious scholars conceive of UFOs as threats to international order. This means the message could resonate with a broad audience.
Despite this, the message is not actually meant to be taken literally. On one hand, it should be read as a signal of Chinese capabilities, in which case, the message could be meant to create feelings of insecurity in the domestic U.S. audience, not about aliens but about China’s relative power compared to that of the United States.
On the other hand, the message can be interpreted as a signal to foreign governments about Chinese capabilities vis-à-vis the United States. That is, it may not be intended for U.S. audiences at all. It may be a message reinforcing China’s overarching strategy to those countries throughout the Indo-Pacific region, or in Africa or Latin America, that either remain undecided about whether China or the United States would be a more reliable security partner in the coming years, or that otherwise remain open to the idea of a Chinese-led world order.
In this respect, as bizarre as it may seem, the release of the Chinese UFO video can function similarly to the conflict between India and Pakistan in May 2025. The short-lived outbreak of hostilities over Kashmir was a military success for India, but thanks to claims that Pakistan’s Chinese-supplied air defense systems shot down a number of Western-built Indian fighter craft, Pakistan created a perception of Chinese technical superiority. As a result, China came out of the conflict victorious in the narrative space.
Of course, China – like many a nation-state – is familiar with the problem of multiple audiences. As such, the release of the video may easily have been intended for both Western and non-Western audiences. In any case, the securitization of the UFO phenomenon in the United States, and the broader politicization of UFOs in Congress, has gifted China with the opportunity to punch at one of the United States’ core insecurities by painting it as a nation declining in relative capability. This can, in turn, ultimately pay off for Beijing both by eroding US domestic political will for sustained competition or conflict with China, and by broadening China’s international base of support.