"She was 10 feet [3.03 metres] tall and had six fingers, but otherwise she looked completely like a human,'' he says. "I told my wife all about it afterwards. She wasn't too angry.''

While few Chinese claim to have managed to get quite as intimate with an extraterrestrial as Meng, a growing number of people in China believe in unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.

Officially registered UFO associations in China have about 50,000 members, but some estimate the actual number of Chinese interested in the subject is probably in the tens of millions.

Sun Shili is one of the most serious enthusiasts, and he knows exactly where he will be the day the contact is made. The retired Beijing professor, 61, will be in the 21-member delegation picked by international UFO associations to represent Earth as the first negotiations get under way.

Once a Spanish translator for Mao Zedong during high-level state visits, Sun says language will not be a problem. ``We expect to communicate using telepathy,'' he says.

In a country that has lost its spiritual bearings as Marxism has given way to materialism, the idea of strange worlds light years away offers a last great hope for many.

Richard McNally, a Harvard psychologist, says he recognizes the pattern from research into Westerners who claim to have been abducted by aliens and who characterized the experience as ``spiritually deepening.''

``Our abductees typically describe themselves as `spiritual' individuals for whom organized religion provides scant spiritual nourishment, and the Chinese UFO spotters may very well be like our subjects,'' McNally says.

As Sun sits one sunny spring morning in the capital, he points at the streets outside and explains how many of the people walking by are probably extraterrestrials in human guise.

They are here to help mankind move civilization on little by little, he says.

Shakespeare and Einstein were not from another planet, but they may very well have received inspiration from a galaxy far, far away.

``It's estimated that 80 percent of new inventions come to people in their dreams,'' says Sun. ``Maybe this is is how the extraterrestrials pass on their knowledge to us.''

Extraterrestrials are moving mankind on the path towards perfection, but they can only do so in a very gradual fashion, Sun says.

``They give us wisdom and skills that are just a little bit more advanced than what we have at any given moment,'' he says.

``If they gave us their full range of knowledge all at once, we wouldn't be able to handle it.''

In September, the International Chinese UFO Association will hold an international meeting on UFO research in the northern port city of Dalian.