Man no alien to six-fingered love

MENG Zhaoguo, a rural worker from northeast

“She was three metres tall and had six fingers, but otherwise she lookedcompletely like a human,” he says of his close encounter with an alien species. “I told my wife all about it afterwards. She wasn’t too angry.”

While few Chinese claim to have managed to get quite as intimate with an extraterrestrial as Meng, a growing number of people in the world’s most populous nation believe in unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.

Officially registered UFO associations in China have about 50,000 members, but some estimate the actual number of Chinese interested in the subject is probably in the tens of millions.

Sun Shili is one of the most serious enthusiasts, and he knows exactly where he will be the day the extraterrestrials finally make contact with mankind.

The 67-year-old retired Beijing professor will be in the 21-member delegation picked by international UFO associations to represent Earth as the first negotiations get under way.

Once a Spanish translator for Mao Zedong during high-level state visits, Sun says language will not be a problem.

“We expect to communicate using telepathy,” he says.

In a country that has lost its spiritual bearings as Marxism has given way to materialism, the idea of strange worlds light years away offers a last great hope for many.

Richard McNally, a Harvard psychologist, says he recognises the pattern from research into Westerners who claim to have been abducted by aliens and who characterised the experience as “spiritually deepening.”

He says abductees typically describe themselves as “spiritual” individuals.