China Says It May Have Detected Aliens, Then Delete Report

There is something there – maybe.

China’s science ministry said this week it had detected signs of extraterrestrial life on the world’s largest radio telescope – then appeared to quickly delete a report of the find.

 

The country’s powerful Sky Eye telescope has detected electromagnetic signals from possible civilizations on other planets, according to a report published Tuesday in Science and Technology Daily, the official journal of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

“[There were] several instances of possible technological traces and extraterrestrial civilizations from outside the earth,” the report states.

The research team, led by Beijing Normal University, said the mysterious frequencies were unlike anything they had encountered before and were investigating further, according to the report.

But the report had apparently been removed from the newspaper’s website on Wednesday – even as the news started trending on the country’s popular social networking site, Weibo, as well as other outlets, according to TIME.com

It was not immediately clear why the article was removed from the website.

But Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of the university’s Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Team, was quoted in the report as saying the signals may have been radio interference.

“The possibility that the suspicious signal is some kind of radio interference is also very high, and it needs to be further confirmed and ruled out. It may be a long process,” Zhang said.

The 500-meter single-antenna Sky Eye was launched in the southwestern province of Guizhou in September 2020 with the primary purpose of detecting life on other planets.

In 2020, researchers also detected two sets of suspicious signals as well as a signal earlier this year related to so-called “exoplanet targets”, Zhang said, according to the report.

The latest research was also conducted by the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.