Chinese State Newspaper Posts, Then Swiftly Deletes, Report Claiming to Have Detected Signs of Alien Life
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An official Chinese government newspaper posted, and then swiftly deleted, a report claiming their “Sky Eye” telescope had detected signs of alien civilizations.
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (“FAST”) telescope, nicknamed Tianyan or “Sky Eye,” is the largest filled-aperture radio telescope in the world with a 500 meter (1,640 feet) diameter dish located in the Guizhou province in southwest China. Construction began in 2011 and after several years of testing, it was declared fully operational in January 2020. In September of that year, Sky Eye launched a search for proof of extraterrestrial life.
According to Bloomberg, Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, reported that Sky Eye had detected “narrow-band electromagnetic signals” that “differ[ed] from previous ones captured.”
Zhang Tonjie, the chief scientist of the extraterrestrial search team, was cited in the report saying that the team was investigating the new signals. Zhang mentioned other previous incidences of suspicious signals being detected, including “two sets of suspicious signals in 2020 while processing data collected in 2019,” and “another suspicious signal in 2022 from observation data of exoplanet targets,” Bloomberg reported, adding that he had touted Sky Eye as being “extremely sensitive in the low-frequency radio band,” and therefore able to perform “a critical role in the search for alien civilizations.”
The report did toss a bit of cold water on Elliotts hoping to meet their own Reese’s Pieces-loving alien buddies, acknowledging that the suspicious signals could simply be “some kind of radio interference” and further investigation was needed.
Bloomberg was unable to get Science and Technology Daily to respond to a request for comment regarding why the report was deleted from their website. The story was up long enough to get picked up by several other Chinese media outlets, including other state-run sites, and to start trending on the social media platform Weibo.
A cursory review of the English-language version of Science and Technology Daily finds a predictable assortment of propagandistic articles bragging about the “vitality” of China’s “digital economy” and “innovations” in space exploration, and complaining about SpaceX’s Starlink satellites “blurring the civilian-military line.”
