Is anyone out there? The days when UFO fever gripped China
Stories about aliens and flying saucers once grabbed the public imagination in China but hardly generate interest now
Chinese factory worker Meng Yang has been obsessed with UFOs since he was a child.
Growing up in the 1980s, the 49-year-old from Mengyin county, Shandong province, remembers doing everything he could to get his hands on information about unidentified flying objects and aliens.
“I read all kinds of articles, and I really wanted an encounter with a UFO,” Meng said.
Then in 1993, when he was 25, he “felt” the aliens contact him “spiritually”.
Meng’s experience was one of a flood of sightings and encounters across the country when China was in the grip of all things alien. The interest exploded in the late 1970s and peaked about two decades later. Today though, UFO news barely rates a mention – as was the case earlier this month when the Pentagon confirmed it had a multimillion-dollar programme for UFO research.
But while flying saucers might no longer spark the public’s imagination, some believers say the interest will never completely die.
The national conversation about UFOs took off in China after 1978, with the revival of science and technology, an area that had been neglected during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.