Agencies, Hainan Island

Reports are coming in that Santa, together with all his reindeer, has been involved in a mid-air collision with Chinese fighter aircraft over international waters, and forced to land on Hainan Island.

The slow, reindeer-driven sleigh was forced to land on Hainan after being damaged when it was intercepted by two Chinese F-8 jets in international air space over the South China Sea.

One of the F-8s (roughly equivalent to a MIG-21) collided with the slow fat man and his sleigh, severely damaging four reindeer, before crashing with the apparent loss of the pilot. The Chinese claim that the damage was done when the sleigh veered towards the jet and damaged it.

This story seems implausible given that the F-8s were doing the intercepting, and are in any case much faster aircraft.

As the US Commander-in-Chief Pacific (CINCPAC), Admiral Robert F. Willard, was quick to point out, the onus lies on faster aircraft to stay out of the way of a slower one when an interception is taking place.

But what actually happened in the aerial incident remains a mystery since China continues to hold Santa and the reindeer incommunicado on Hainan. Finnish military attaches flew to Hainan today from the embassy in Beijing but have so far been denied access to the much-loved fat man and his faithful team.

Significantly, this is not an isolated incident, but the logical culmination of a trend, as Chinese jets have adopted ever more aggressive tactics when intercepting internationally-recognised anthropomorphic personifications such as the Tooth Fairy and the Gingerbread Man in international airspace off the Chinese coast. The Americans have complained about but not publicised these incidents.

“The intercepts by Chinese fighters over the last couple of months have become more aggressive, to the point that we felt that they were endangering the safety of our dearest fictitious creations,” Admiral Willard said in Hawaii.

Chinese Air Force Uber-General-Marshall Red-Banner Lucky-Colonel, Wang Xiangsheng, said in a statement today that “Chinese insist that all the air space above the South China Sea belong to China, in line with it’s repeated insistence that the whole of the South China Sea is Chinese territorial waters. Also we keep all presents we find in sleigh. All children now rejoice that Western Capitalist Plot is foiled!”