UFO (unidentified flying objects) enthusiasts gathered yesterday morning in Dalian, a port city in northeast China's Liaoning Province, for the 2005 World UFO Conference, the first time the event has been held in China.
China now boasts the largest community of UFO enthusiasts in the world. Numbers now exceed half of the world's total number of "UFO spotters," claimed Sun Shili, chairman of the conference.
The wide availability of cameras and camcorders has made "comparing notes" much easier and more exciting, Sun added.
Gu Qingwen, a member of the Beijing UFO Society, showed China Daily a video segment on his mobile phone. The footage, purportedly taken in Beijing's Longqingxia District on Lunar New Year's Day, shows a bright object in the sky. However, it did not cast a shadow on the ground, the 37-year-old taxi driver said.
Gu related another incident that has made him a UFO "believer." One night in late 2003, after he had dropped off some passengers in Yizhuang District, his head started to hurt. "I pulled over. Then, out of nowhere, a beam of blinding light shone on me, and I passed out. When I opened my eyes, I found myself on another street."
But the interest in UFOs and extraterrestrial life isn't limited to the common man.
"It's exciting for us to use science to decipher UFO sightings," said Zhou Xiaoqiang, secretary-general of the Beijing UFO Society.
Most of those who came to the conference believe that extraterrestrials do exist and that they are more intelligent than humans.
"Ufology is blossoming in China, and the participants are mostly professionals," said Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist from the US.
And organizers of the conference have some surprises up their sleeve: They are offering two case studies of "encounters of the third kind."
Eleven years ago, a youth named Meng Zhaoguo from Heilongjiang Province claimed he was attacked by aliens and taken to their flying saucer. "The kind of things I saw and heard there were incredible," he said.
In 1977, Huang Yanqiu, then a 21-year-old villager in Hebei Province, claimed he "vanished three times" in one night. The last time was around 9 PM when he fell asleep in the courtyard. When he woke up at midnight, he found himself 1,200 kilometers away at the plaza of Shanghai Railway Station.
There will, no doubt, be much debate about the authenticity of these stories at the conference.
Whichever way one looks at it, "the truth is out there."
(China Daily September 9, 2005)
