Hello, it's Richard McLain Smith here, not the impostor you've been listening to on the podcasts, the real one. Join me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com forward Slash Unexplained pod. In seventeen ninety two, in ching Dinnasty, China, a philosopher, politician, and writer named che Lun wrote an unusual book. Notes of the Thatched Abode of Close Observations is a collection of over one hundred stories, thought to be a series of satirical portraits of people and society
at the time. Cleverly concealed within intricate plot lines, ghost tales co mingle with history and fantasy in a way that makes it difficult to separate truth from figs. One of the stories relates the events surrounding an eighty year old man living in what today is the city of Laijo in Shangdong Province. One day, the elderly man, who is somewhat forgetful and unable to walk, is sitting outside alone.
He asks a family member to bring him something from the house, but when they return, the old man and the chair he was sitting on are gone. The family look high and low for their elder without success. After a few days, a neighbor and friend of the family returns home to Liaijo from a trip to ching Dao, another town located about one hundred miles away. On his arrival, he hurries straight to the missing man's son at his home and asks him if he's still looking for his father.
When the Sun, still desperate with worry, replies that he is, his neighbor tells him with delight that his is safe and well and staying in ching Taut. Though disbelieving it at first, the Sun immediately dispatches some servants to ching Dau to look for him. Sure enough, the old man is soon located in the distant town and promptly returned safely to his home. When the Sun asks him how on earth he got to ching Dau, the old man explains that he was quietly minding his own business when
suddenly two mysterious figures appeared out of nowhere. Without saying so much as a word, the men picked him up in his chair, then flew him up to the sky and all the way to the town. It is, of course, a fantastic fable with no possible foundation in truth. Or is it you're listening to unexplained, and I'm Richard mc lean smith. It was some time around ten PM when twenty one year old farmer Huang yang Cho collapsed into his bed after a long day toiling in the fields.
That night of July twenty seventh, nineteen seventy seven in Dongbei Cao, a remote rural village in the Herbei Province of northern China, was a hot one. Although most of rural China at the time was gripped by extreme poverty and the continuing effects of the Cultural Revolution, by all accounts, Huang was doing quite well for himself. He'd also recently become engaged and was excited for the wedding due to
take place at the end of the autumn harvest. Some of his neighbors even told him that he was living a dream of millet, a Chinese proverb meaning his life was like a fanciful dream, but the saying also had an alto alternative meaning, sometimes interpreted as your hopes will ultimately come to nothing. That night, in the thick, humid air of peak monsoon season, as the chirp of crickets pulsated all around, the exhausted Huang drifted off to sleep.
The following morning, Huang failed to turn up at the rice farm where he worked. Since he was an ordinarily reliable and punctual employee, a colleague contacted his family and asked if they could check in on him. A short time later, a relative of Huang's arrived at the young farmer's home and knocked on its door. No Huang's bike, his only mode of transport, was still leaning against the side of the house. There was no response from inside.
Feeling a little perturbed by the silence, the relative let themselves into the property, where inside they found Huang's clothes for the work day ahead neatly laid out in his room, but no sign of Huang. In a panic, its family and neighbors immediately began to search around the village and surrounding fields, which were at least thirty miles away from the nearest railway station, But after days of fruitless searching for the missing farmer, Huang was still nowhere to be seen.
It was some ten days later, on August sixth, when a telegram was received by the village committee. It had been sent from Shanghai, a city located six hundred miles away to the south. It said incredibly that Huang was being held there in a detention center, and that he needed a member of family to confirm his identity so they could allow him to return home. But that wasn't the strangest thing. The telegram had apparently been delayed on its way to the village, having originally been sent to
the wrong address. But more than that, it appeared to have been written at nine a m. On July twenty eighth, less than twelve hours after Huang had gone to bed. When Huang finally arrived back home two weeks after he had gone missing, he was naturally subjected to intense questioning by his family and neighbors. The story he had to tell was utterly out of this world, as Huang is
said to have recounted it. Having gone to bed on the evening of July twenty seventh, Huang had enjoyed a solid night of sleep when sometime around six a m. Seemingly on the verge of waking, he drifted in and doubt of what he first assumed was a lucid dream. All around him, he heard the cocoffhon any of busy traffic replete with honking horns, and the trundling of trucks. Then slowly images came to him of a busy street scene, as if he were standing right in the middle of it.
Looking around, he saw shops, restaurants, and street science that all proclaimed he was in the metropolis of Nanching. Then Huang had the sudden, horrifying realization that he wasn't in a dream at all. He was really there. Somehow, it appeared he'd managed to travel four hundred and eighty five miles in the dead of night with no luggage, no money, and no memory of the journey. At least that's what he's said to have told the two strange men who
apparently approached him moments later. The men, who Huang is said to have thought were traffic police, had little sympathy for the amused young man and demanded to see his Nuanjing residency permit. When he failed to produce it, Huang was promptly arrested and escorted to the local railway station. The officers handed him a ticket to Shanghai and ordered him to travel there immediately, where he would be taken to a repatriation camp until they could confirm his identity.
Huang boarded the train and Julie set off for Shanghai, located two hundred miles away to the east. When the train finally pulled into Shanghai station, Huang was staggered to see the same two police officers patiently waiting for him on the platform, despite the fact that he was almost certain they hadn't boarded the train with him. The officers then escorted the bemused young man to the Ninth Repatriation
Camp a short walk away. There he was taken in by a People's Liberation Army soldier named Blu qing Tang, who, as it turned out, had relatives in dong Bai Ko, where Huang lived. Qing Tang felt sorry for the young farmer and immediately dispatched the telegram that would eventually make its way to Huang's family and secure his release. By September, everything in Huang's life seemed to have settled back to normal. On the eighth of that month, the village committee held
a meeting about how to increase their productivity. Huang was assigned a job to deliver manure to the fields first thing the next day, and advised to go to bed early by some of the village elders, and so the young man duly obliged. The following morning, he was nowhere to be found. It said that when Huang went missing for the second time, a co worker was sent to look for him. Once again, Huang was not in his house.
He appeared to have left a message behind. Scrawled across his bedroom wall was the name of a distant province in China, Shangdong, the names of two people unknown to every one in the village, Kao Deng Min and Kao yan Chin, and the single word relax. Three days later, on September eleventh, Huang miraculously reappeared with an even more bizarre tale to tell. Early in the morning of the ninth, he said he felt a cold breeze tugging at his sleep wear and heard a loud clock strike two. Somewhere
in the distance. He realized he was once again back in Shanghai, at the railway station that he'd apparently been sent to on his first mysterious trip. But this type, the normally busy station, was eerily quiet, and the air was thick and heavy, while ominous dark clouds swirled above. Moments later, a loud crack of thunder erupted, followed by
a torrent of rain, drenching the hapless Shang. He wept with frustration and despair until he remembered Lou Qing Tang, the soldier who'd taken him in at the repatriation camp during his previous misadventure. Then he heard a voice saying, hello, you must be Huang yang Cho. Huang was astounded to see what he was certain were the same two men who'd picked him up last time and taken him to the detention center, only this time they were wearing military uniforms.
The men claimed to have orders to pick him up and deliver him to lu Qing Tang. Yuang claimed. He then followed the troopers to Lose Artillery Division, located on the outskirts of what is now the Pu Dong District of Shanghai. Despite the compound being heavily armed, Huang and the two men were waved straight in by the seemingly unconcerned guards at the front gate. Since Liu qing Tang was at a meeting on their arrival, his son lu
Hai Sheng was summoned to meet the visitor instead. Lu Junior is said to have been confused by the two men accompanying Huang. It was mostly the clothes they were wearing. Their uniforms seemed odd, as if they'd been borrowed, and their footwear was all wrong, But when Huang turned around
to introduce them, the men had completely vanished. When the guards were later questioned as to why Huang had been granted access to the facility, none of them recalled Eva, and seeing him enter once again, telegrams were exchanged, this time between the camp commandant and the head of Huang's village, asking again to verify Huan's identity. Huang was then threatened with arrest if he ever came back again, and was
promptly sent home. When Huang returned home for the second time, he claimed to have no idea who'd left the writing on his bedroom wall, but that was the least of his worries. Where at first many in the village had been intrigued by the story, now they felt a great unease. Rumors spread that Huang had been possessed by evil spirits, and his fiancee broke up with him, just like the Chinese proverb about the millet. It seemed Huang's hopes and
dreams were beginning to crumble. A week later, on September twentieth, a disconsolate Huang was heading home from another day of work when he later said, he was suddenly overtaken by dizziness and passed out. When he woke up, he apparently found himself in an unfamiliar hotel room, sat in front of him with those same two men whom he'd apparently
previously encountered on his strange journeys. They said they were two brothers named Kao Deng Min and Ko yang Jin, the names that were found written on Huang's bedroom wall. The brothers were twenty six and twenty five and apparently hailed from Shangdong Province. According to Huan, the men only then admitted that they were responsible for all his strange disappearances, and now they'd brought him to lan Cho in Gansu Province,
over seven hundred miles from his home. The men took Huang for dinner, then together they spent the night in the hotel. The following morning, the two brothers as said to have led Huang outside and told him to brace himself. Then, just like that, the brothers lifted Huang straight into the air, with each taking it in turns to carry him on their backs, as like Neo from the matrix, They flew through the sky, according to Juan, in just one hour, flying low above the land. The men arrived at the
capital Beijing. There he was taken to Chung'en Grand Theater, where they watched an opera. Next, they traveled to Chianniman Square, landing in front of a tank before checking into a nearby hotel for the night. The following day, they flew to Tianjin and snuck into a movie theater and watched
a film, then traveled to the city of Harpin. Huang described how they strolled through a shopping mall before taking off again at dusk toward the city of chang Chun, followed by shen Yang, Fujo and Nan Ching six hundred miles to the north, all on the same day. According to Huang, each trip between cities lasted only an hour. Not only were the men able to fly, but according to Huang, the brothers also had the ability to speak local dialects wherever they went, and always had enough money
to pay for meals and accommodation. Other than that, the two men apparently ate and slept like normal human beings. And insisted that Huang not take any photographs or keep any souvenirs from their travels. Finally, on the twenty eighth of September nineteen seventy seven, Huang said that the mysterious cow brothers finally returned him to his back yard, where they left him under a jujub tree. He never saw
them or made any lengthy journeys at inexplicable speeds. Again, naturally, Huang's accounts of his strange travels were hard for his family and friends to take seriously, but as his story spread, the authorities felt they had little choice but to investigate. First, the local police and propaganda bureaus are said to have interrogated him, followed by a local division of the armed forces. The thinking among these various agencies was that Huang yang
Cho was deliberately sabotaging the village's reputation. He was pronounced a class enemy, and yet, as the story goes, during repeated questioning, Huang's behavior appeared perfectly normal, and other than insisting that his fantastical flying travels were true, he showed
no signs of mental illness or cognitive disorder. In the end, it said that the authorities simply gave up and let him return to his normal life, and for over twenty five years his story subsided into relative obscurity, except that it is among members of the ufology community. Some of them believe Huang's story to be a clear case of
a close encounter of the fifth kind. The close encounter terminology refers to a system drawn up by the astronomer and UFO researcher J. Allen Heinich published in his nineteen seventy two book The UFO Experience, a Scientific Inquiry. In it, he proposed a quasi scientific classification he believed were the six levels of extra terrestrial encounter. One, the most common type, involves a distant sighting at night, or, as he put it,
seeing nocturnal lights. Level two is a distant observation of a disc or oval shape in the sky during the daytime, known as a daylight disc. The third level of sighting, or radar visual, is a visual report of a UFO
combined with radar confirmation of an object. Level four, also known as a close encounter of the first kite, is a visual sighting of an unidentified flying object appearing to be less than five hundred feet away and with some clearly visible surface details, while level five, also known as a close encounter of the second kite, is a UFO sighting in which a physical effect is alleged, such as interference in the functioning of a vehicle or electronic device,
or inducing fear zeological effects such as paralysis or heat in the witness. A close encounter of the third kind, or level six, after which the nineteen seventy seven Steven Spielberg movie was named, involves a UFO encounter in which a moving entity is said to be present. For j
Allen Heineck, that is where it ended. Others have proposed two more stages, an encounter of the fourth kind being a supposed UFO event in which a human is abducted by a UFO or its occupants, or at the very least where the witness experiences a transformation of their sense of reality, and finally, a close encounter of the fifth kind, where an alien abductee receives some manner of physical effect from their supposed close encounter, be that an injury or healing, or,
as in Huang Yang Chose apparent case, being directly flown through the sky. In two thousand and four, Huang's story was investigated by China Central Television under the auspices of their science and education channels Approaching Science program. They decided to look for evidence to support Huang's stories. Various apparent witnesses were interviewed, including lu Qing Tang, the soldier at the repatriation camp in Shanghai, as well as the head
of Huang's village committee and its co workers. So to fill in the gaps, they asked Huang to go to two different medical facilities in Beijing to conduct a series of tests. At the first institution, he was given a polygraph test while he was questioned about his story. Huang failed the test. However, doctors were reluctant to conclude that
he was definitely lying. After all, not only was he having to contend with the mental pressure of being in such an environment for the first time, but also twenty seven years had passed since the alleged events took place. It was understandable that some elements of his recollection might be hazy, so his statements were subjected to a second
evaluation at the psychiatric division of Beijing's Anding Hospital. Their deputy director, doctor Chen Bin concluded that Huang was either telling bear faced lies or that he suffered from a bizarre and severe case of somnambulism. In other words, he'd somehow sleepwalked to the various cities. However, he couldn't offer an explanation as to how the man could have apparently
traveled such vast distances in the limited time available. Huang yang Cho's brain health was also tested to see whether he might have some form of epilepsy that might induce such disassociative sleepwalking, but the tests showed Huang's brain to be perfectly healthy. Further tests found no evidence to suggest he suffered from any other dysfunction in the brain, with one physician adding only that he found Huang to be a moderately paranoid person. The documentary producers also arranged to
film interviews with Huang while he underwent hypnosis. The producers watched on expectantly as Huang was filmed being led into the hypnotist's office and invited to lie down on a couch and try to relax his mind. Huang laid back as the hypnotists soporific words washed over him, and before long he appeared to have sunk into a deep trance. The hypnotist began with a few simple questions about who he was and where he came from. Then he asked Huang to recount once more the story of how he
came to be in Nanjing. The first time. Huang proceeded to give a detailed account of his apparent mysterious journey. Then the hypnotist asked him to describe the cow brothers. Huang duly obliged, describing their features, their height, and hair. But as he did so, something became immediately apparent to the documentary producers. Huang was merely describing his own appearance.
Though there is little concrete evidence to back up Huang yang chose claims, speculation in China and abroad remains rife about what it all means. His life's story was even adapted into the twenty twenty three film Tell Them I Flew Away, directed by Chiu Pung Lie. As the blurb for the film on Mubi has it, the film explores the essence of human nature and the pursuit and yearning for a better life after the protagonist is abducted by aliens. Could Huang really have been abducted as some have it?
Was he really just sleep walking, Or was he suffering from some kind of dissociative identity disorder somehow traveling across China as alternately himself and then the cow brothers. Or had a young farmer whose only dream was to travel and see the world felt so trapped by circumstance and the social morase of his community that the only way for him to achieve it was to somehow imagine it
into being. For what it's worth, the producers of the documentary came to a rather vague conclusion that Huang yang Cho had been sleepwalking, but gave no explanation for how he'd seemingly managed to travel so far in such short spaces of time, a feat that would have been simply impossible in waking life, let alone having to do it while you were sleeping. The opera Huang claimed to have seen when he was supposedly flown to Beijing was called
Forced onto Mount Liang. During the making of the documentary, a journalist traveled to the chang Un Grand Theatre in Beijing to inquire if the opera had actually been playing there in September nineteen seventy seven, at the time of Huang's apparent visit. After speaking to the theatre manager, the journalist was disappointed to find that the theater had in fact been closed at the time due to day damage sustained during the nineteen seventy six Tongu Shang earthquake. It
didn't reopen until nineteen seventy nine. However, as the manager went on to explain, shang Un Grand isn't the only theater in the area. There was also the te Shung Theater near by. After getting directions, the journalist headed straight there. A short time later, he was stood in the Tea Chang Theater foyer as a member of staff thumbed through
a large record of the theatre's past productions. He lit a cigarette and watched hawkishly as the staff member turned back the pages until finally they found the date they were looking for and the name of the show that had been playing at the time. Well, well, they said, pointing to it, would you look at that? It was the opera Forced onto Mount Young. This episode was written by Diane Hope and Richard McLain Smith. Diane is an
audio producer and sound recordist in her own right. You can find out more about her work at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram at in the sound field. Unexplained is an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.
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