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Researching the Paranormal in China [S-12-47]

This class session is based on the presenter’s data collecting on the paranormal in China in 2011, an adventure which took him to sites from the snowy slopes of Mt. Changbai, on China’s northeastern border with North Korea, to the subtropics of Sichuan province, in southwestern China. He tracked reports of lake monsters, yeren (the Chinese yeti), crop circles, ghostly visitations, unexplained disappearances, bronze artifacts thought perhaps to be of extraterrestrial origin, and various other inexplicable historical puzzles. He also shot video footage at each of the sites. All this information became field data sources for his students to analyze later.

Sid Sondergard is a professor of English and also of Asian Studies at SLU. For the past six years he has been working on the first complete English translation of the folkloric/supernatural tales written by Pu Songling (1640-1715), Strange Tales from Liaozhai. Five of this project’s six volumes are in print. Sid was again in China in January 2012, not only returning to the archeological sites he had been to before, but also visiting a number of new sites in Guizhou province, including the site of a reported major UFO event in 1994.

Cap: 30