Meng Zhaoguo Incident: Phoenix Mountain, Wuchang, 1994

Summer 1994. Meng Zhaoguo was a forestry worker with a fifth-grade education at the Red Flag Forest Farm near Wuchang, in Heilongjiang. Above the farm rose Phoenix Mountain. On 7 June, Meng saw a white, shining object descend onto the mountain. His first thought was a weather balloon. Then he saw a metallic glinting and wondered whether a helicopter had crashed.

About 15 villagers saw the giant circular reflective object flashing brightly on the south slope. None went close except Meng. On 8 June he climbed toward it with Li Honghai, his niece's husband. Meng called it "not the typical flying saucer." He described it as tadpole-shaped and milky white with a yellowish tint, with a thick tail and a shiny metallic round part in the middle, and said one end seemed stuck into the hillside.

Then it made a squeaking sound, and Meng felt an electric force, a sharp pain in his eyes, and was pushed back. On a later approach he watched through binoculars as a figure held a matchbox-sized object that gave off light as intense as a welding arc. "Foom! Something hit me square in the forehead and knocked me out." Thirty or more forest workers were there when he collapsed.

Meng said it did not end on the mountain. He described a female visitor who came through the wall of his home. She was about 3 metres tall, with six fingers on each hand. He said they had sex while floating above his sleeping wife and daughter, for 40 minutes. They saw nothing. He was left with a 5 cm mark on his thigh.

On 16 July, he said, he was taken through the wall into a spacecraft. He saw a hangar holding dozens of identical craft. He was shown a comet striking Jupiter. Afterwards a gel-like film covered his skin, and his wife threw it away. The message he brought back: in 60 years there would be an alien born with the genes of an earthling farmer.

Xinhua reported the case nationally, and the Heilongjiang Science Committee sent a team of scholars. Some found the burns and ground damage abnormal. Others blamed sun damage, frost, or people, and no conclusion was reached. Wang Fangchen, chairman of the Beijing UFO Research Organization, saw scorched branches and split rocks at the site and said he could not explain them. He also recalled that a Geiger counter went haywire near the wall.

Early September 2003. In Beijing, Zhang Jingping of the World Chinese UFO Association arranged a lie-detector test and hypnosis. Reports said Meng passed the polygraph. Global Times said he failed the hypnosis test. "This may be beyond our technology and understanding," Zhang said.

In 1997 the Wuhan University UFO Enthusiasts Club concluded that the initial contact may have occurred, but the later events were almost certainly untrue. Zhou Xiaoqiang was blunter: "Meng Zhaoguo has no credibility… local leaders have said he's mad." No physical evidence was kept, and the numbers shifted. In a 2021 interview, the 40 minutes became "three or four seconds." Fragments of Shoemaker-Levy 9 began striking Jupiter on 16 July 1994. After the story spread, Meng reportedly received a Sony television, a cow and a job at a Harbin university.

It is often counted among China's "three major unsolved UFO cases." TIME, The Independent and the South China Morning Post carried it abroad. Podcasts and documentaries still retell it. In 2022, Meng was last reported working in a cafeteria at Harbin University of Commerce. The main message, he said in 2021, was that humans must look after the planet.