The widespread news of mysterious iron pipes at the foot of Mount Baigong, located in the depths of the Qaidam Basin, Qinghai Province, has roused concern from related departments.
Some experts believe that these might be relics left behind by extraterrestrial beings (ET), for the site, with its high altitude and thin, crisp air, has long been held as an ideal place to practice astronomy.
Three caves are found at the foot of Mount Baigong. Two of them have collapsed and are inaccessible. The middle one is the biggest, with its floor standing two meters (6.6 feet) above the ground and its top eight meters (26 feet) above the ground.
This cave is about six meters (20 feet) in depth, a little like a cave dug out by human beings, with pure sand and rock inside.
What is astonishing is inside for there is a half-pipe about 40 centimeters (16 inches) in diameter tilting from the top to the inner end of the cave. Another pipe of the same diameter goes into the earth with only its top visible above the ground.
At the opening of the cave there are a dozen pipes at the diameter between 10 and 40 centimeters (4 and 16 inches)run into the mount straightly, showing high fixing technique.
About 80 meters (262 feet) away from the caves is the shimmering Toson Lake, on whose beach 40 meters (131 feet) away, many iron pipes can be found scattered on sands and rocks. They run in the east-west direction with a diameter between 2 and 4.5 centimeters (0.8 and 1.8 inches). They are of various strange shapes and the thinnest is like a toothpick, but not blocked inside after years of sand movement.
More strange is that there are also some pipes in the lake, some reaching above water surface and some buried below, with similar shapes and thickness with those on the beach.
(People's Daily June 26, 2002)
