China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which appears to have deleted the report and publications related to the discovery.
The report, quoting the chief scientist of the extraterrestrial civilization research team, Zhang Tongjie, revealed that the narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye - the world's largest radio telescope - differ from the previous signals captured, and the team is examining them further. The telescope was manufactured by Peking Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.
It is not clear why the report was apparently removed from the Science and Technology Daily - the official newspaper of China's Ministry of Science and Technology - although the news had already been reported on social network Weibo and reported by other media, including state-run ones.
In September 2020, the Sky Eye telescope, located in Guizhou Province, southwest China, with a diameter of 500 meters, was officially launched in search of extraterrestrial life.
Zhang said the team detected two sets of strange signals in 2020 while processing data collected in 2019, and found another suspicious signal in 2022 from observational data of exoplanet targets.