Chinese Take Great Leap Into the Unknown

The truth is out there.

It’s hiding in the Shennongjia forest, eluding capture with its loping stride and superhuman strength--marks of its origin as half man, half beast, says Yuan Zhenxin.

Or it’s up in the sky, which Sun Shili scours for signs of life from beyond. UFO buffs in China say their nation has become a popular destination of late for interplanetary visitors, and Sun is determined to figure out how they come here--and why.

“Previously, most UFO sightings were in developed countries, like the U.S.,” said Sun, an expert in foreign, if not extraterrestrial, trade. “Now China is developing . . . so this may have aroused the interest of beings from other worlds.”

These are heady days for the millions of Chinese like Sun and Yuan who claim an interest in the unexplained, the unexplored and the downright weird.

As China sheds the shackles of its Marxist past, the old Communist emphasis on strictly scientific, rational and atheistic thought is running into robust competition from a host of unorthodox ideas and beliefs that raise eyebrows in some instances and strain credulity to the breaking point in others.

A cottage industry has sprung up here around investigations into “X-Files”-type phenomena, ranging from the alleged existence of Bigfoot to a hill in northern China that reportedly causes passing cars to flip over without warning.

This explosion of interest in the paranormal follows 20 years of bewildering social change, years that included the erosion of Communist ideology and sent many Chinese on a quest for some deeper meaning, or at least a little excitement and wonder, in their uncertain lives.

“Delving into the unknown is part of human nature,” said Zeng Congjun, deputy editor in chief of Mysteries, a national monthly magazine (circulation 250,000) full of tales of lost civilizations, alien visitations, the secrets of the Pyramids and the astonishing powers of Siamese twins.

“In the past, Chinese people didn’t dare air their [private] imaginings in public,” Zeng said. “Now, with the improvement of living standards, people have more leisure time . . . and want to satisfy their spiritual needs.”

Such pursuits might once have been classified as feudal superstition or deemed incompatible with rigid Marxism. Science fiction, for example, was banned in the 1980s as a form of bourgeois “pseudoscience.”

In today’s freewheeling China, the Communist regime seems content to leave such activities largely alone as long as they pose no direct threat to the state. In sporadic cases, the government even sponsors them.

Take Sun, the Fox Mulder of China, who is convinced of the existence of life on other planets.

Unlike the “X-Files” character, who spies government conspiracies to hush up the truth around every corner, Sun counts party officials and serious academics among his supporters, who see his research as both scientifically valid and technologically valuable.

As head of the Chinese UFO Research Assn., Sun presides over a nationwide network of government-approved UFO clubs that boast a combined membership of 50,000. The group hosts national conferences to discuss principles of jet propulsion as well as reports of sightings of flying saucers. The Chinese air force even sent an officer to the most recent convention, in 1998.

500 Reports of UFO Sightings a Year

To maintain an air of scientific respectability, the local Beijing UFO chapter requires that members have college degrees--not an easy threshold to meet considering that less than 3% of the population has received any form of higher education.

“If we were less stringent, our numbers would be huge,” said Sun, 63, an affable, cardigan-wearing economics professor who once served as a Spanish interpreter for Mao Tse-tung. “We figure that 50% of the total population in China are UFO devotees.”

Sun stays abreast of the latest in UFO happenings through foreign periodicals and China’s fast-growing Internet. He speaks at international conferences and keeps in contact with aficionados around the world.

Sun receives up to 500 reports of UFO sightings a year. A rash of alleged sightings came during the final months of last year, when thousands of people across China reported seeing strangely glowing objects hovering in the sky.

Official media rushed to cover the news, which made national headlines and inspired a segment on China Central Television, the main state network.

“So many people have seen it, and there are even pictures of it. They can’t be lying,” said Yang Tao, 37, a government worker and believer in extraterrestrial life.

“The universe is so big,” he added. “Who knows what exists in places very far away from Earth?”

China also has its share of reports of alien abductions. A few months ago, a Beijing man claimed to have been beamed aboard a spaceship in the dead of night and made to supernaturally heal another captive earthling. After interviewing the man and having him examined by a psychiatrist, Sun concluded that the story was true.

Sun also puts stock in the account of a forestry worker who allegedly was kidnapped by aliens in 1996, experimented on in unspeakable ways, then entrusted with an important message to impart to the people back on Earth: “Don’t make war--and protect the environment.”

“This is consistent with what’s been heard in other places,” said Sun, whose only personal encounter of the UFO kind occurred 30 years ago, when he saw a brightly shining object moving up and down in the night sky. At the time, he says ruefully, he mistook it for a Soviet spy plane.

While Sun and his fellow enthusiasts scan the skies for signs of higher intelligence, Yuan Zhenxin keeps his sights low to the ground for evidence of a creature of lesser intelligence: Bigfoot.

Yuan is convinced that between 1,000 and 2,000 of the apelike creatures roam the forests of central China, particularly the Shennongjia Nature Reserve in Hubei province.

Like Sun, Yuan dabbles in stories of abduction, including those of two farmers who say they were kidnapped by Bigfoot but escaped to tell the tale. Another person claimed to have spent two hours in conversation with the creature, who reportedly gesticulated and mimicked bird sounds.

“They’re very clever,” said Yuan, a silvering man in his 60s.

Yuan is no mean scholar. He is a retired paleoanthropologist and member of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences. One of his mentors, he says, was the late Pei Wenzhong, who discovered the skullcap of Peking man.

Yuan describes Bigfoot as more than 6 1/2 feet tall, with reddish brown hair, long limbs and a rather nasty case of BO. It is smaller than the Bigfoot creatures, the sasquatches, that some people say populate the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the U.S.--accounts Yuan dismisses.

“Bigfoot in America is fake science. In China, it’s true science,” he said.

Funding Is Dwindling for Bigfoot Expeditions

In 1976-77, the government sponsored a Bigfoot expedition to Shennongjia consisting of 100 people, including army personnel.

That trip, and subsequent others, yielded numerous samples of what Yuan maintains are the hair, footprints and feces of an undiscovered species, probably descended from a giant ape whose fossilized teeth can still be found in the region.

“They’re a cousin of humans,” he said of Bigfoot, known in Chinese as “wild man.”

But money for such study has dwindled, because fewer and fewer of Yuan’s fellow scientists are willing to approve funding without more conclusive proof, in the form of a clear photograph and a DNA analysis.

Yuan and his supporters have been forced to dig into their own pockets to keep three informal research centers operating. One of Yuan’s colleagues even has divorced his wife, sold his home and moved permanently to Shennongjia to carry on the work.

They are wary of outside help, taking a proprietary--and somewhat patriotic--approach to their research.

“In the past, many rare animals in China were discovered and named by foreigners,” Yuan said. “We don’t want this kind of creature to be found first by foreigners.”

Such fascination with the undiscovered and the unknown, with the strange and the mysterious, has flowered in China in response to the ideological vacuum created by the deterioration of communism, analysts say. Unorthodox ideas long suppressed or declared illegal are bubbling back to the surface.

It is similar, some say, to the religious revival underway in China, a renewal encompassing mainstream faiths, such as Buddhism, as well as local folk religions, which mix ancient superstitions and mysticism, and such quasi-religious groups as the outlawed Falun Gong meditation sect.

Like those interested in UFOs and other unsolved mysteries, many such groups borrow scientific concepts and terminology to lend their beliefs a veneer of legitimacy.

For example, masters of certain sects of qigong, the ancient practice of deep breathing and slow movement, sprinkle their teachings with references to black holes, gamma rays, antimatter and the like.

“Qigong masters have a firm command of this vocabulary,” Sima Nan said.

Sima, China’s answer to the Harry Houdini who exposed fraudulent spiritualists, makes a living as a professional debunker of fantastic claims. A fund he set up with an American donor offers $1.2 million to anyone who can prove that he or she wields paranormal powers. Various qigong gurus have claimed to be able to bend silverware, see into the future, change the composition of matter or even put out forest fires from a great distance by using only their mental powers.

One applicant for the reward, a middle school teacher, said he had been kidnapped by flying aliens who subsist on a diet of mushrooms and mineral water and live for thousands of years. The aliens come from a planet directly above Beijing and make regular visits to the Chinese capital, the man said.

“This guy thinks [Beijing] is the next big tourist destination” for higher life forms, Sima said. “A lot of people take illusions or hallucinations to be reality.”

Scoffers note that scientific education in China is weak, making it easier for people to fall prey to crackpot theories that wouldn’t pass muster in more educated societies. Sima also blames traditional Chinese thinking for making people susceptible to the unscientific.

“Chinese thinking is different from Western thinking,” he said. “Westerners try to get at things very clearly, asking what, why and how much. Chinese are more interested in dealing with things using metaphors or intuitive comparisons.”

Yet for true believers, there is simply too much evidence on their side--scientific evidence, they insist--for their ideas to be dismissed so readily.

“It’s not a question of whether one believes in the existence of UFOs or not. UFOs are an objective fact,” declared Wang Yuming, editor of the Journal of UFO Research, a magazine (circulation 240,000) put out by Gansu Science & Technology Press, a state-owned publishing house.

“I can understand why people don’t believe in UFOs, because modern science can’t explain them,” Wang said. But “hundreds of years ago, who could imagine metal objects--today’s planes--flying through the air?”