According to a report from China’s Science and Technology Daily, the country announced that their giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of an alien civilization. But strangely, the report and related posts about this discovery were later deleted.
The initial report said Sky Eye, currently the world’s largest radio telescope, detected narrowband electromagnetic signals that were completely different from any signals recorded before. This prompted the research team to investigate further. The report quoted Zhang Tonjie, the chief scientist of the alien civilization search team, which includes co-founders from Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of California, Berkeley.
It’s still unclear why the report was removed from the website of Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, especially since the news went viral and sparked a huge reaction on China’s Weibo social media. The story was even reposted by other media outlets.
Sky Eye began searching for extraterrestrial life in September 2020 with its 500-meter diameter telescope. According to Zhang, the team found two suspicious signals in 2020 while analyzing data collected in 2019, and discovered another suspicious signal in 2022 from observations of targets beyond Earth.
Zhang explained that Sky Eye is extremely sensitive to low-frequency radio waves and plays a key role in the search for alien civilizations. However, it’s also possible that the suspicious signals were just some kind of radio interference that requires further investigation.
Source: Bloomberg
