| Subject: Sex with Alien in Chinese UFO Encounter |
| From: Dan Clore |
| Date: 25/09/2003, 23:02 |
| Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,alt.paranet.skeptic,alt.paranet.ufo,alt.misc,fortena,alt.fan.rawilson,soc.culture.china |
Time Asia
September 29, 2003 / Vol. 162 No. 12
Close Encounters
I Had Sex with an Alien!
BY MATTHEW FORNEY | RED FLAG LOGGING CAMP
Forget China’s astronauts. The country’s most famous
intergalactic traveler lives in the last house on his lane
at the edge of a Siberian forest. Meng Zhaoguo’s odyssey
began at the Red Flag logging camp in the Manchurian
province of Heilongjiang, when he saw a metallic glint
thrown off nearby Mount Phoenix. Thinking a helicopter had
crashed, he set out to scavenge for scrap. The 36-year-old
lumberjack stood gazing at the wreck from across a valley
when "Foom! Something hit me square in the forehead and
knocked me out."
That collision four years ago, and what followed, has made
Meng a celebrity even today among the growing number of
Chinese gaga for little green men. In a country that bans
“evil cults” and monitors faith in anything but the
Communist Party, a belief in extraterrestrial life is one of
the few fringe convictions that’s been allowed to grow into
an organized movement. The government-approved China UFO
Research Center boasted 50,000 members and held annual
conferences before splintering into competing factions three
years ago. A 20-year-old Chinese bimonthly magazine about
UFOs enjoys a circulation of 200,000. "We have so many
visitation reports that if people don’t have pictures, we
won’t bother investigating," says Zhang Jingping, director
of the Beijing UFO Research Association.
Chinese fascination with interplanetary life isn’t entirely
new. Believers point to a 4th century text called the
Collected Legacies, which describes a "moon boat" that
floated above China every 12 years. Today’s focus is on the
science of UFOs—something tolerable to a Chinese Communist
Party that advocates "scientific socialism." It helps that
heavy hitters such as the former president of Beijing
Aerospace University have long advised UFO-research
organizations. The hard-science bent means it’s acceptable
to publish research on close-encounter stories. It’s not
O.K., however, to wonder if such stories result from people
searching for higher meaning in the hurly-burly of a
changing China by turning to God, Buddha or even E.T.
"Chinese may feel a spiritual impulse that leads some to
believe they’ve been abducted by aliens," says Richard
McNally, a psychologist at Harvard University who has
researched Chinese alien-abduction claims.
Few have enjoyed as remarkable a journey as Meng. Several
nights after his wallop on the head, Meng says he found
himself floating above his bed. As his wife and daughter
slept below, a 3-m-tall, six-fingered alien with braided fur
on her legs straddled his waist. After 40 minutes of
levitational copulation she departed through the wall,
leaving Meng with a 5-cm mark on his thigh. A month later,
he says, he was transported through the wall into a
spaceship. Meng asked to see the woman with the braided fur.
Impossible, they said. But they gave him hope. "In 60 years,
on a distant planet," they said, "the son of a Chinese
peasant will be born." Meng asked if he would ever see this
child. He would. The aliens did not say where.