[music playing]
NARRATOR: Heilongjiang Province, China, June 1994,
Red Flag Logging Camp.
Tree farmer Meng Zhaoguo spots what
he believes to be a helicopter crashing into the nearby Dragon
Mountains. [explosion]
He sets out to investigate.
And when he reaches the lip of the valley,
he is struck on the head and knocked unconscious.
He wakes up several days later in his bedroom at home.
Doesn't know how he got there.
But he, also, that day has a visitation
by what he describes as a 10-foot-tall extraterrestrial
female with six fingers.
They're floating in the air above his bed.
Suddenly, she vanishes.
She walks through the wall in his room,
and he floats back into his bed.
NARRATOR: While this account is certainly fantastical,
Beijing-based psychologists and police technicians
subjected Zhaoguo to a rigorous examination,
including hypnosis and a lie detector
test, and concluded his story to be truthful.
Zhaoguo is one of literally thousands who have come forward
in China in recent years to say that they have had
extraterrestrial encounters.
But his abduction by this otherworldly giant
is particularly significant because
of an extraordinary archaeological discovery
in China that dates back nearly 4,000 years.
[wind howling] The Taklamakan Desert,
known as the "Sea of Death."
It is a vast, unforgiving land shrouded in myths
and lost to time.
The Taklamakan Desert is located
in the northwest of China.
NARRATOR: While the Taklamakan Desert
is one of the least habitable places on Earth, astoundingly
over the last three decades, Chinese archaeologists working
in the Tarim Basin region have excavated hundreds
of tombs that date back to as early as 1800 BC.
[music playing]
The well-preserved nature of the mummified bodies
allowed archaeologists to conduct modern DNA
analysis that determined the ancient travelers were not
Chinese.