In 1994, a woodcutter claimed to have a date with a 3-meter-tall female alien, and never wavered from his story since
One night in June 1994, Meng Zhaoguo was awoken by an interplanetary visitor. The 26-year-old timber worker alleged that the extraterrestrial was female, about three meters tall, had six fingers on each hand, and had entered his home in rural Heilongjiang province by floating through the wall.
Meng recounted later that the alien had made him levitate above his bed while his wife and child continued to sleep, and had sex with him. A month later, he found himself aboard the alien’s spacecraft, which had landed on Phoenix Mountain, near the forest plantation where he worked. There, another alien told him that in 60 years’ time, Meng’s son would be born on their planet.
This story, first reported in several local magazines, made Meng a minor celebrity during a time when curiosity about UFOs, science fiction, and the universe was beginning to boom in China. As the economy and society opened in the 1980s and 90s, and access to foreign media brought pop culture phenomena like Star Wars to the public, interest in space and the supernatural boomed.
As media control loosened, science magazines and journals spread across the country. Soon enthusiasts founded clubs and associations for UFO “research,” with tens of thousands of members at the movement’s peak. UFO sightings proliferated too: the South China Morning Post counted 5,000 reports of UFOs in China in the decade up to 1995.
Meng’s story was fantastical, but at least some of China’s new UFO enthusiasts believed him, and a number of organizations even sent research teams to the site where the alien ship had supposedly landed and also to Meng’s home to get the full story from him. His story is still probably the most famous UFO sighting in China, and one of the most investigated and discussed. It turned Phoenix Mountain in Heilongjiang into a pilgrimage site for other UFO enthusiasts, some of whom have also reported sightings of unidentified objects in the sky, including two allegedly caught on camera in 2005 and 2012.
Sam Davies is the managing editor at The World of Chinese. He writes mainly about Chinese society, especially life outside the biggest cities. His pieces touching on diverse topics from the future of China’s ski industry to efforts to prevent juvenile crime.
