------Program code: DO-080610-01508 (what's this?)
Source: CCTV.com
06-10-2008 08:56
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The second issue of the magazine “Science Experiments” in 1979 carried an article under the headline, “Investigation of the Shennongjia ‘Wild Man’”. It detailed the first ever large-scale investigation of the “Wild Man” conducted by Chinese scientists. It also drew several young people into the sphere of this famous scientific project.
In the early years of the 1980s, young people in China were experiencing an unusual thirst for knowledge. Science publications had been banned during the Cultural Revolution. But now they were being published again and were on sale in post offices and bookshops. Magazines such as “Mystery” and “Secrets of Nature”, which were about strange natural phenomena, were particularly popular. For a while, their circulation was in the tens of thousands. And before long, people were talking about the “four greatest natural mysteries of the world” – the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, and the ‘Wild Man’.
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The Shennongjia Forest is located deep among the high mountains of western Hubei Province. The air of mystery that traditionally shrouded the primeval forest was deepened when rumours started spreading that the “Wild Man” had been seen there.
In 1976, the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences received a telegram from the Yunyang Prefecture government. The telegram reported the sighting of a strange animal in the Shennongjia Forest in Hubei Province, which might be the much talked-about “Wild Man”. The news attracted considerable interest among the specialists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A research team was dispatched to the Shennongjia Forest, made up of more than 100 experts from Beijing, Shanghai and Hubei.
The team remained in the area for nearly a year. In that time they travelled 5,000 kilometres, carefully searching a 1,500 square-kilometre area deep among the mountains. But they found no trace of the “Wild Man”.
In the past century alone, there have been tens of thousands of sightings worldwide of giant human-like animals in the wild. There have also been countless rumours circulating about them. 8. The most controversial and sensational of these sightings occurred in 1967, when a man in a mountain valley of northern California captured an image on video. For years afterwards, people around the world debated the authenticity of the film.
"After receiving the report, the Party and government organized four large-scale searches. But no trace was found of Peng Jiamu."
