China Releases & Then Removes Report Stating Its Telescope May Have Detected Signs Of Alien Life
According to a recently published and then deleted report by Chinese scientists, China may have received trace cues from a mysterious alien civilisation.
Science and Technology Daily, the official news outlet of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, claimed that astrophysicists at Beijing Normal University have uncovered “a few cases of potential technical traces and alien life civilisations from outside the Earth.”
The vibrations were detected by China’s 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), also recognised as Tianyan, which roughly translates to “Sky Eye”.
FAST is currently the world’s largest radio telescope.
It was revealed that officials had decamped over 9,000 inhabitants of the southwest province of Guizhou in 2011 to make room for an alien-hunting telescope, hoping to capture a credible peek at alien intelligence.
FAST is built in a natural flat depression area in the landscape and is the world’s largest filled-aperture radio telescope and the second-largest single-dish aperture, trailing only Russia’s RATAN-600.
It has a unique design that employs an effective surface area made up of 4,500 panels to shape a shifting parabola of metal panels in real time.
The cabin, comprising of the feed antenna suspended on cables above the dish, moves automatically by steering the device with winches to pick up signals from multiple directions.
It detects wavelengths ranging from 10 centimetres to 4.3 metres.
FAST broke ground in 2011 and saw its first light in September of 2016.
It was proclaimed fully operational on January 11, 2020, after three years of experimentation and commissioning.
Sky Eye was tasked with inspecting deep space for radio signals that could imply life on other planets in 2019. After trawling through the records in 2020, the researchers discovered two questionable narrow-band, possibly artificial radio waves.
Then, in 2022, another peculiar narrow-band radio signal was noticed during a focused survey of known planetary systems, bringing the total up to three.
Scientists say that the cues may have been generated by alien technology, because they are narrow-band radio waves that are customarily used among human aircraft and satellites.
However, they also stated that their research results are tentative and should be interpreted cautiously until the assessment is complete.
Radio intervention has notably stymied alien-hunting scientists in the past, enough that Chinese astronomers are now eager to rule it out.
In 2019, scientists discovered signals emitted to Earth from Proxima Centauri, the closest star system to our sun (about 4.2 light-years away) and residence to at least one presumably habitable planet.
“These are many narrow-band electrostatic signals that are different from the past, and the team is currently working on further investigation,” Zhang Tongjie, head scientist at Beijing Normal University’s China Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group, told Science and Technology Daily.
“The prospect that the suspicious signal is radio interference is also very significant, and it must be affirmed and ruled out further. This could be a lengthy process.”
Following its release, the report quickly gained traction on the Chinese social media platform Weibo and was picked up by a number of other media outlets.
The reasons behind its abrupt deletion remain unknown.