【赫芬顿邮报 20150406】中国伐木工与外星人同眠
本帖最后由 满仓 于 2015-4-29 09:02 编辑【中文标题】中国伐木工与外星人同眠
【原文标题】Meet the Chinese Lumberjack Who Slept With an Alien
【登载媒体】赫芬顿邮报
【原文作者】Michael Meyer
【原文链接】http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-meyer/chinese-lumberjack-alien_b_6986618.html?utm_hp_ref=china
“如果你找不到我，”孟照国的声音在手机听筒里断断续续，“就向林场的最后一所房子走，或者问问附近的人。”每个人都知道中国第一个声称被外星人绑架的人。
中国的经济蓬勃发展，各项指标在国际上均达到历史新高：数百万人会说流利的英语、数量最多的百万富翁和最不懂得节俭的游客。但是，尽管中国的国土面积稍大于美国，人口是美国的4倍，但它所遭遇到的外星访客数量远远落后于美国。截止到目前，只有一个中国人——伐木工孟照国——声称与外星人有性接触。
来自中国东北部五常市的工人孟照国，在北京接受测谎。
孟的家在红旗林场，位于中国东北部一片原始森林中，这里在历史上被称为满洲里。中国人对东北人的印象是胸怀广阔、勤劳，有时脑子不大灵光。所以当这个国家第一个自称与外星人有接触的人来自这个地方，人们并不感到震惊。2003年，我穿过寒风凛冽、冰雪覆盖的道路来和他见面。
孟住在林场一个两居室的木屋中，这是他自己搭建的房子。光秃秃的灯泡从房顶上垂下来，这里没有电话，也没有手机，但是一个大屏幕的索尼电视占据了一面墙。
“这里只能收到两个台的信号，”他说，“所以其实是浪费。但这不是我买的，一个商人听过我的故事之后，送给我的。”来自马来西亚的一位访客还送给他一头奶牛，孟说：“我把它卖了。养牛要花不少钱，在这里养头牛有什么用？”
我们走到屋外，踩在厚厚的雪地上，面对龙山（译者注：应为凤凰山），太阳刚刚落山，山峰笼罩在一片紫色的迷雾中。孟说，1994年这样的一个晚上，他看到山峰后射出金属般的光线。
“我以为是一架直升飞机坠毁了，于是赶过去看看能不能收集一些废品。”他来到山谷的边缘，从远处观察这片废墟。突然之间，“嗡一声，什么东西打到我的前额，我摔倒在地。”
他在家中醒来，不知道自己是怎么回到家的。几天之后的一个晚上，他醒来，发现自己漂浮在床的上方，他的妻子在下方睡觉。一个10英尺高、有6只手指、大腿内侧毛发编成辫子状的外星女性，跨坐在他腰间。孟和外星人性交了40分钟。
“之后她穿过这道墙消失，我又飘回床上。她给我留下了这个。”他脱下裤子，露出一个两英寸长、参差不齐的疤痕，他说这和锯子不小心造成的疤痕有些类似。
我请他把这个生物画出来，他接过我的笔，撕下一张草纸。出乎意料的是，我认识这个外星人。当他在外星人的大腿内侧画上一个小“X”时，我发现孟画的是一个长毛的米其林轮胎吉祥物。他的微笑、胖胖的白脸，就出现在红旗林场一家骑车修理厂的招牌上。我想到了这一点，同时还想到堆在孟前门外的5个空的五星啤酒箱子，以及东北冬天里无尽的长夜。
但是孟平静地讲述了他的故事，没有急切、恳求的语气，也没有强求听众相信的意思。我把自己的想法埋在心里，他提议我们到外面和他的孩子们一起放我带来的烟花。那天晚上，我在孟的床上睡觉，他睡在沙发上。
2014年5月6日，法国中部的克莱蒙费朗，两个米其林吉祥物（必比登）被展示在法国轮胎制造商总部股东大会的入口处。
“60年后，在一个遥远的星球，一个中国农民的儿子将会降生。”
在中国，除了共产党，政府限制其它所有信仰，但允许相信外星生物。这属于天文学的范畴，党支持“科学社会主义”。一份不明飞行物期刊的发行量可以达到40万份，全国各地的不明飞行物学会有5万名成员。中国不明飞行物研究中心每年召开大会，后来解体了——一个组织的信众往往会做出这样的事，变成相互对立的派系。北京分会的主席是一位退休的外交部官员，他在亲眼见过一个不明飞行物之后，相信外星生命的存在。
孟的故事在热衷人士间传开，媒体不断来电，他自己也出现在全国各大报纸和电视台上。甚至维基百科页面上还出现了一个有关他的主题，其中列举了各个版本的故事，包括他被带到外星人所居住的木星上，以及外星人对他“持续不断的骚扰”。
第二天早上，他对我说：“记者喜欢在我的故事中寻找漏洞，我已经厌倦重复这些故事了。再怎么说，我就是一个农民。”
孟说，外星人造访的一个月之后，他再一次醒来，发现身体穿过了挂在床头的世界地图。他上升到平流层，进入一个太空飞船，几个外星人围住他。
“他们说的是中文，但是有严重的口音，一开始很难听懂。他们说自己是难民，像我一样，希望逃离以前的生活，所以他们离开了垂死的家乡。”
这和很多中国农民工的故事类似，包括孟自己也想把家人迁出已经不复存在的红旗林场。
孟要求见他的旧情人，那个把大腿内侧毛发编成辫子的外星人。
“他们说：‘不行。’但是他们接下来说的话让我感到安慰，‘60年后，在一个遥远的星球，一个中国农民的儿子将会降生。’”
这真是神来之笔：孟把中国的阶级观念带到了外太空。（他还想办法确保今天听到这个故事的人都不会去寻找证据。）尽管我那位在东北出生的妻子宣称他的故事就是“东北人忽悠艺术”的典型代表，但这个颇具创意的故事让孟、他的妻子和孩子从林场中最后一个小房子里，来到了一个大都市的校园，因为一位高校官员给他提供了一个工作的机会。
“没有亲眼见过，人们都会质疑它的存在，生活就是这样。我是第一个敢于站出来说‘我看到了’的人。”
十年后，当我在为自己的书《在满洲里：废土之村与中国农村的转型》做研究而联系到他时，他再一次让我来林场的最后一个房子，或是向其他人打听。每个人都知道中国第一个被外星人绑架的人。
他站在那里，脸上堆满笑容。“我在这里工作很愉快，这里很安静。我负责照看锅炉和蒸汽管道。”这个工作比伐木要好，林地现在受保护。他在红旗林场的工友有些已经离开，有些在这里种植大豆。
孟穿了一件干净的白色外衣、一条便裤和一双便鞋，短发梳得很整齐。他看起来更加消瘦、更健康，还想以前那样精力充沛。但是他已经不想讲述那个被人称为“孟照国事件”的故事了。与他交谈，就像是在采访一个对过去不堪回首的前色情电影演员。他说：“有学生从电视上认出我，我都会告诉他们我是另外一个人，只不过长得有点像。”
但是他的坏名声为他找到了这份工作。
“一位朋友帮我联系的，我来面试的时候，老板读过我的新闻。学校给我提供一间有暖气的公寓，我的妻子和女儿也在校园里工作。儿子在哈尔滨一所好学校里读书，他在学习英语，这里的生活比森林里要好。”
我们在午饭时又谈起了他的遭遇，他讲述的细节有一点发生了变化。“我问外星人是否可以看到我的孩子，他们说可以，但没有告诉我在哪里。”
我打了个趣，但是孟没有笑。
他说：“人们曾经认为地球是平坦的。即使在十年前，人们也不会相信移动电话的普及。没有亲眼见过，人们都会质疑它的存在，生活就是这样。我是第一个敢于站出来说‘我看到了’的人。”
“但是，你知道，”他郑重其事地说，直勾勾地盯着我的眼睛，上面反射出他自己的那张脸，“当你在这里生活下去，你总会看到奇怪的现象。”
原文：
"If you can't find me," Meng Zhaoguo said over a cell phone whose signal faded from its isolation, "Just head to the last house on the logging commune lane. Or ask anyone who's around." Everyone knows the first Chinese person to allegedly be abducted by aliens.
With its surging economy, China is summiting once-unseen heights in world rankings: millions of English speakers, almost the most millionaires and actually the least frugal tourists. Yet despite being slightly larger in area than the United States with four times as many people, China trails far behind when it comes to visitors from outer space. To date, only one Chinese person -- lumberjack Meng Zhaoguo -- claims to have slept with one.
Meng Zhaoguo, a rural worker from northeast China's Wuchang city, taking a lie detector test in Beijing.
I first visited Meng at his home on the Red Flag Logging Commune, set among the remains of a forest in China's far northeast, an area historically known as Manchuria. Chinese characterize Northeasterners as big-hearted, industrious and sometimes a bit touched in the head. So it was not a shock when the nation's first person claiming interstellar relations came from here. In 2003, I traveled over a winding, ice-covered, one-lane road through the forest to meet him.
On the commune, Meng lived in a two-room timber frame house he had built with his own hands. Bare yellow light bulbs dropped from the ceiling, and there was no phone -- or cell reception. But a big-screen Sony television filled one end of the room.
"Out here, it only picks up two channels," he said. "So it's a waste of money, but I didn't buy it. A businessman brought it, after he heard about my story." Another visitor, from Malaysia, had brought him a cow. "I sold that," Meng told me. "Cows cost money to take care of. What am I going to do with a cow out here?"
We stepped outside, boots crunching snow, and faced the Dragon Mountains, veiled in purple mist as the day's light faded. Meng said that on a night much like this in 1994, he saw a metallic glint shimmer off those peaks.
"I thought a helicopter had crashed, so I set out to scavenge for scrap." He made it to the lip of a valley, spying the wreckage in the distance, when "Foom! Something hit me square in the forehead and knocked me out."
He awoke at home, he told me, with no memory of how he got there. A few nights later he woke to find himself floating above his bed. As his wife slumbered beneath him, a 10-foot-tall, 6-fingered alien woman with thighs coated in braided hair straddled his waist. Meng and the alien copulated for 40 minutes.
"She then disappeared through the wall and I floated back down to bed. She left me with this." He undid his trousers to reveal a two-inch-long jagged mark that he insisted bore only a coincidental resemblance to a scar resulting from a slipped stroke of a saw.
I asked him to draw the creature, and he took my pen and tore off a sheet from a roll of rough, unbleached paper. To my surprise, I recognized the alien. As he made tiny x's on the alien's inner thighs, I realized Meng was sketching a hairy cousin of the Michelin Man. His smiling, puffy white face waved from atop an auto repair shop at the base of Red Flag Logging Commune. I thought of that, and the empty crates of Five Star beer stacked just outside Meng's front door, and the remote loneliness of a Northeast winter.
But Meng told the story calmly, not in a desperate or pleading tone, cajoling the listener to believe. I kept my deductions internal, and he suggested we go outside with his kids and light the fireworks I had brought for them. That night I slept fitfully on Meng's bed, while he took the couch.
Two Michelin men (Bibendums) are displayed ahead of the general shareholders' meeting at the headquarters of the French tyre-making group Michelin in Clermont-Ferrand, central France on May 16, 2014. (THIERRY ZOCCOLAN/AFP/Getty Images)
"'In 60 years, on a distant planet, the son of a Chinese peasant will be born.'"
In China, the government monitors faith in anything but the Communist Party, but an expression of belief in extraterrestrials is permitted, as it falls under the purview of astronomy, and the "scientific socialism" the party supports. A UFOlogy journal has a circulation of 400,000, and the UFO associations across China boast a collective 50,000 members. China UFO Research Center has held annual conferences before splintering -- as organized groups of believers tend to do -- into rival factions. The president of the Beijing branch is a retired foreign ministry official who, after seeing a UFO, believes aliens live among us.
After Meng's story circulated among enthusiasts, the media came calling, leading to his appearance in national newspapers and on television. He was even the subject of a debated Wikipedia page, which listed different versions of his story, including being taken to the aliens' home planet of Jupiter, and "ongoing harassment" from the extraterrestrials.
"Journalists look for discrepancies in my story," he told me the next morning at his house. "I get tired of telling it. In the end, I'm just a peasant."
Meng added that a month after the alien had visited him, he again awoke to find his body passing through the world map hanging over his bed. He levitated through the stratosphere and into a spaceship, where aliens circled him.
"They said in Chinese, but with a heavy accent so it was hard for me to understand at first, that they were refugees. Like me, they wanted to escape their former lives, so they left their dying home."
That echoed the tales of many Chinese migrants, including Meng's desire to move his family off the defunct Red Flag Logging Commune.
Meng asked to see his alien paramour, the one with braided hair on her inner thighs.
"'Impossible,' they replied. But then they said something that made me hopeful. 'In 60 years, on a distant planet, the son of a Chinese peasant will be born.'"
This was a stroke of genius: Meng had introduced Chinese class-consciousness to outer space. (He also made sure few people who heard his tale today would be around to see its proof). And while my Northeastern-born wife declared his story a lesson in the "Art of Northeastern Bullshitting," the story was also an example of self-invention, transporting Meng, his wife and children from the last house on a logging commune lane to a metropolitan campus after a university official reached out and offered him a job.
"Humans, if we have never seen something with our own eyes, naturally doubt that it exists, or that life could be that way. I was the first to be brave enough to say: 'I saw that.'"
When I sought him out there when researching my book -- "In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China" -- in Harbin city a decade later, he again told me to head to the last building on the lane, or just ask anyone where he was. Everyone knew the first Chinese person to be abducted by aliens.
There he stood, in full grin. "I am very happy to work here," he said. "It's quiet. I'm in charge of the boiler and watch the steam pipes." It was a better job than felling trees, which were now protected. His coworkers at Red Flag Logging Commune had either left or stayed to farm soybeans.
Meng wore a clean white tunic, slacks and loafers, with short black hair pushed neatly to the side. He looked thinner, healthier and just as earnest as before. But he was tired of retelling what became known as the "Meng Zhaoguo Incident." Talking with him is how I imagined it would be to interview a former adult film star embarrassed about his past. "When students say they recognize me from television," he said, "I tell them that was someone else who looks like me."
But his notoriety had landed this job.
"A friend told me about it, and when I came for the interview, the boss had seen me on the news," he said. "The college provides an apartment with heating, my wife and daughter are working on campus as well, and my son attends a good Harbin middle school. He's studying English. Life is better for him here than in the forest."
When he retold the tale over lunch in Harbin, only one detail had changed: "I asked the aliens if I would see my child," he added. "They said yes. But they would not tell me where."
I made a joke but Meng didn't laugh.
"Once, humans believed that the earth was flat," he said. "Even a decade ago, people would not believe that a cell phone could work. Humans, if we have never seen something with our own eyes, naturally doubt that it exists, or that life could be that way. I was the first to be brave enough to say: 'I saw that.'
"But you know," Meng said, nodding collegially. He looked directly into my glasses, which in the bright northeast sunlight reflected his own face, and concluded: "When you live up here, you see strange phenomena all the time."
Q48)Q48)Q48)
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