Huang Yanqiu Incident (1977)

By the accounts collected from Huang and his neighbours, the first episode took place around 27 July 1977, when Huang, who had recently moved into a newly built house, fell asleep at night and said he awoke far from home in the area of Nanjing. He reported that two men dressed like traffic police helped him and that he obtained a train ticket onward to Shanghai.^[6][5] A telegram sent from a Shanghai repatriation station (associated with Mengzi Road) reportedly reached his home district the following day, stating that he was in Shanghai and asking his family to collect him — a turnaround his fellow villagers regarded as far too fast for ordinary rail travel of more than a thousand kilometres.^[6][4]

In the second episode, weeks later, Huang said he again fell asleep and awoke at night at Shanghai Railway Station in heavy rain, and that men in military-style uniform brought him to a military compound, where staff were reportedly unable to explain how he had passed the guard posts.^[6][4] In the third episode, in September, he said the two men named Gao Dengmin and Gao Yanjin, claiming to be from Shandong, took responsibility for the earlier events and carried him in flight over a tour of many Chinese cities before returning him home.^[6][5] Investigators also reported that the two men's names had been found written or carved on a wall of Huang's home.^[4][5]

The episodes were not examined in depth until years afterward. From the late 1980s, civilian ufologists — among them Ji Jianmin (冀建民), associated with the local Feixiang UFO group, and later Zhang Jingping (張靖平) of the China UFO Research Organization's Beijing circle — gathered statements from Huang and surviving witnesses, including personnel connected with the Shanghai military compound.^[6][3] A re-investigation by Henan and Hebei UFO societies in 1994 was written up by Ji Jianmin and published in a Chinese ufology bulletin, and material from the long-running magazine *UFO Exploration* (飛碟探索) circulated the case among enthusiasts.^[6][3]

In the 2000s investigators arranged more technical tests. Accounts describe a regression-hypnosis session in 2002 involving Zhang Jingping, Ji Jianmin and a Beijing university medical specialist, and later polygraph testing and a brain scan at a Beijing hospital, which were reported to show no signs of obvious deception or neurological abnormality.^[6][4] Supporters cited these results, the telegram, and the named witnesses as reasons the story could not be dismissed; the China UFO Research Organization's involvement helped make the case one of the most frequently retold in Chinese UFO literature.^[6][3]

Mainstream commentary in China has generally treated the account as a psychological or behavioural phenomenon rather than evidence of teleportation or extraterrestrial contact. In 2005 China Central Television's science programme *Approaching Science* (走近科學) broadcast a multi-part feature, "Who Is Carrying Me in Flight" (誰在背我飛行), which concluded that the disappearances were most plausibly explained by sleepwalking (夢遊) combined with suggestion and the influence of a milieu interested in UFOs and aliens.^[2][7] Critics of the programme argued that the sleepwalking explanation was vague and did not account for the long distances or the telegram, while skeptics of the case in turn noted that almost all of the extraordinary details rest on Huang's own much later testimony.^[7][6]

Some Chinese online media have gone further, reporting that Huang in later life acknowledged that he had simply run away from home — wishing to see the world but lacking money — and had invented and then maintained the supernatural account; this version, however, appears mainly in self-media retellings and is not consistently corroborated by the earlier investigative record, so it should be treated with caution.^[4] Taken together, the competing claims — an unexplained anomaly, a sleepwalking or psychological episode, or a fabricated travel story — mean the Huang Yanqiu Incident is best regarded as disputed. It is comparatively well documented in Chinese-language sources but remains under-represented in English.^[1][4]