Zhang Jingping had never thought about becoming an ambassador, but once the aliens from Planet Dongsheng got in touch, he couldn’t refuse.

“Their empress Li Guanyin sent a direct message saying that I should be the ambassador of their planet…it’s one of the most important things I do now,” the 52-year-old amateur UFO researcher tells TWOC during a three-hour long conversation, in which he speaks effusively about his many close encounters of the third kind over the past three decades.

According to Zhang, his alien employers hail from the Sirius solar system, are 1.9 meters tall, may be able to pass through solid walls, and only communicate with him through a select few human intermediaries (Zhang has never spoken to them directly). They’ve tasked him with establishing diplomatic relations between their planet and some countries on Earth, promoting science and technology, and predicting and alleviating natural disasters.

They are just one of the alien civilizations Zhang claims to have come across since he began investigating UFO sightings and reports of alien contact in 1990. This was the beginning of a decade when UFO clubs and research groups in China boomed, magazines and publications about aliens flourished, and reports of sightings multiplied.

The 90s boom in UFO enthusiasm has since died down, but the research groups aren’t totally extinct: The catch is they now have to register with a government body such as the China Association for Science and Technology, pushing many UFO organizations to close. But dedicated hobbyists like Zhang, whose day job is running an advertising agency (aptly named Beijing Flying Saucer Advertising), are still hunting for more proof that ETs live among us, despite skepticism from officials and disdain from the mainstream scientific community.

Interest in visitors from another planet could be primed to soar once more in China. Social media and smartphones with cameras have made reporting alleged UFO sightings easier than ever, while Chinese science fiction has seen a renaissance through writers such as Liu Cixin, whose Three-Body Problem imagines chaos when people on Earth attempt to make contact with alien civilizations. Among the general public, there’s booming interest in space travel, extraterrestrials, and celestial phenomena: There’s a “Mars Camp” in a desert in Qinghai province for tourists to experience what life might be like on the red planet, while millions tuned in to watch a livestreamed physics lesson for middle-schoolers led by astronauts on China’s Tiangong Space Station in December last year.

Likewise, China’s space program, which put the Tiangong Space Station into orbit above the Earth in April 2021, has driven public interest in space exploration with a string of launches in recent years. The country’s researchers now have access to the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the world’s largest radio telescope of its kind, which was constructed in Guizhou province to scan the vast emptiness of space for radio signals that might indicate alien life.

In the 32 years Zhang has been investigating UFOs, there has been no shortage of strange incidents for him to probe. In 1994, Meng Zhaoguo, a farmer from Heilongjiang province, said he saw a UFO parked on Fenghuang Mountain one evening. When he and his niece’s husband tried to approach the craft, he says a powerful but invisible force, which felt like an electric current moving through his body, stopped him from getting any closer. Later, he claimed the aliens took him from his bed onto their spaceship and that a three-meter-tall female alien had sex with him for 40 minutes, telling him their child would be born 60 years later.

Zhang investigated and concluded that the incident really took place, citing the fact that the ground and trees at the alleged UFO landing site were scorched even months later, a Geiger counter appeared to go haywire in Meng’s home, and that Meng had “nothing to gain” from lying.