Chinese Village That Went Missing Overnight

Chinese Village That Went Missing Overnight

Date: 1987

Location: Shaanxi village, China

Stories of wholesale vanishings exist in many national mythologies:

There is North Carolina’s infamous lost colony of Roanoke, the Angikuni Lake legend in Canada, supposedly a whole village in Ireland, the legend of the Marie Celeste, and even Australia’s apocryphal Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Despite only being 69 years old, the People’s Republic of China has accumulated more than its fair share of disappearances, many of them purportedly state sponsored, including, if the tale is to be believed, an entire village in the central province of Shaanxi.

According to the undated tale, all inhabitants of a village in the Qinling mountains disappeared overnight in 1987, not just the 1,000 residents, but their cats, dogs, even the livestock.

A village with nothing particularly out of the ordinary or exceptional about it, other than its proximity to a rocket launch center.

But it would begin making the Chinese news and generating buzz on social media in 2010 when the story came out about how this little village one day just completely vanished off the face of the earth.

Unsurprisingly for the era and location, information is scanty and the sources are sketchy: one of the main reports comes from New Tang Dynasty TV, a Falun Gong owned enterprise that isn’t afraid to print stories made out of whole cloth.

Many conspiracy theories and eyewitness accounts state various events that led up to the strange disappearance of the rural village. Some say there were UFO sightings prior to the phenomenon, while others also noted that they saw military personnel and vehicles around the area before it happened.

Still, what a story. According to NTDTV, the villagers were transferred in the middle of the night as part of a top-secret operation that was linked to a secret project, likely of a military nature, though there is, allegedly, a nuclear base buried somewhere deep in the mountains.

Retellings of the Shaanxi village mystery usually offer numerous embellishments: Strange lights spotted in the sky, the appearance of several UFOs, and scores of snakes seen slithering out of the mountains for cover beforehand.

Whatever the reason was, it's still unknown and nobody has any knowledge of what happened to the residents of that rural village.

A large number of troops were dispatched to the site, one old local tells NTDTV: They moved the whole village somewhere else overnight, and persuaded the people to come along.

The mysterious mission apparently had a code name, Operation Night Cat, or yè límao shìjiàn, and was even denied by a local official who claimed it was just a rumor.

Certainly, there were several disasters and cover-ups during that time, famously, the 1996 Long March 3 catastrophe in Xichang. Details about history’s worst launch accident are only known because it was witnessed by numerous foreign experts. As Smithsonian’s Air and Space Magazine reported in 2013,

Retellings of the Shaanxi village mystery usually offer numerous embellishments: Strange lights spotted in the sky, the appearance of several UFOs, and scores of snakes seen slithering out of the mountains for cover beforehand.

In the end, the story is perhaps best filed under China Unsolved’s unproven folder, alongside the Cat Woman of Harbin and the 1995 Chengdu Zombie Outbreak.

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