The combination photo shows similar drawings by eye witnesses from China's different regions who detected the UFO that appeared in the country in 1981.

Don't spend your flight catching z's next year or the year after, or you may miss some UFOs as they fly past!

Unidentified flying objects (UFO) may appear in 2011 or 2012, Wang Sichao, a Chinese astronomy and minor planet scholar, was quoted as saying during an interview with the Yangcheng Evening News.

Wang made the forecast under recently-heated speculations about UFOs, as some unidentified flying objects have been spotted in several Chinese regions of Zhejiang, Hunan, Chongqing and Xinjiang since last month.

A UFO spotted in Zhejiang's provincial capital of Hangzhou even disrupted air traffic over east China for an hour in early July. Some media reports guessed the UFO might have been a private aircraft, because of the increasing number of privately owned aircraft.

Yet Wang hinted the possibility of aircraft from outer space, based on "the possible existence of 2.5 billion planets with possible civilization and advanced technology in the Milky Way Galaxy, among which the earth and its civilization are merely at a primary evolution stage," said the Guangzhou-based newspaper.

As for what British cosmological physicist Stephen Hawking claimed about aliens in April this year, saying "an alien encounter could have bad consequences for humans and Earth had better watch out," Wang called it too early to make a conclusion.

Wang also urged scientists to design and create more advanced and agile telescopes in order to observe the unidentified flying objects that usually turn up on occasion, often for only seconds at a time.

The unidentified flying object snapped in New Jersey of the United Stated in 1952.

The earliest reported UFO photo.

By Liu Shanshan