That collision four years ago, and what followed, has made Meng a celebrity even today among the growing number of Chinese gaga for little green men. In a country that bans "evil cults" and monitors faith in anything but the Communist Party, a belief in extraterrestrial life is one of the few fringe convictions that's been allowed to grow into an organized movement. The government-approved China UFO Research Center boasted 50,000 members and held annual conferences before splintering into competing factions three years ago. A 20-year-old Chinese bimonthly magazine about UFOs enjoys a circulation of 200,000. "We have so many visitation reports that if people don't have pictures, we won't bother investigating," says Zhang Jingping, director of the Beijing UFO Research Association.
Few have enjoyed as remarkable a journey as Meng. Several nights after his wallop on the head, Meng says he found himself floating above his bed. As his wife and daughter slept below, a 3-m-tall, six-fingered alien with braided fur on her legs straddled his waist. After 40 minutes of levitational copulation she departed through the wall, leaving Meng with a 5-cm mark on his thigh. A month later, he says, he was transported through the wall into a spaceship. Meng asked to see the woman with the braided fur. Impossible, they said. But they gave him hope. "In 60 years, on a distant planet," they said, "the son of a Chinese peasant will be born." Meng asked if he would ever see this child. He would. The aliens did not say where.