[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.
