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To: Zardoz who wrote (46572)	1/3/2000 8:19:00 AM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 116762

deeply OT(unless there is "enough" fear?) Monday, January 3, 2000 'Aliens' light up sky for UFO watchers ASSOCIATED PRESS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Poor farmers on Beijing's barren hills saw it: an object swathed in coloured light that some say must have been a UFO. They are not alone. People in 12 other cities reported unidentified flying object sightings last month. UFO researchers, meanwhile, were busy looking into claims of an alien abduction in Beijing. At the cusp of the new millennium, the mainland is astir with alleged sightings of other-world visitors. And for a country usually straitjacketed by its rulers, alien sightings are getting serious treatment. The mainland has a twice monthly magazine - circulation 400,000 - devoted to UFO research. The conservative state-run media reports UFO sightings. UFO buffs claim support from eminent scientists and liaisons with the secretive military, giving their work a scientific sheen of respectability. "Some of these sightings are real, some are fake and with others it's unclear," said Shen Shituan, a rocket scientist, president of Beijing Aerospace University and honorary director of the China UFO Research Association. "All these phenomena are worth researching." For thousands of years, people have looked to the skies for portents of change on Earth. While the mainland is passing through its first millennium using the West's Gregorian calendar, the traditional lunar calendar is ushering in the Year of the Dragon, regarded as a time of tumultuous change. "All of that sort of millennial fear and trepidation fits in so nicely with Chinese cosmology - and also the Hollywood propaganda that everybody's been lapping up," said Geremie Barme, a Chiness culture analyst at Australia National University. In Pusalu, a patch of struggling corn and bean farms 48km from Beijing, villagers believe cosmic forces were at play on December 11. As they tell it, an object the size of a person shimmering with golden light moved slowly up into the sky from the surrounding arid mountains. "Some say it was caused by an earthquake. Some say it was a UFO. Some say it was a ray of Buddha. I'm telling everyone to call it an auspicious sign," said Chen Jianwen, village secretary for the Communist Party. What "it" was remains a topic of (cont) scmp.com