Chinese scientists claimed they discovered aliens, article deleted a few hours later

No sooner announced than denied? According to a report published on Tuesday 14 June on the Science and Technology Daily website, the Chinese state media dedicated to science, astronomers from Beijing Normal University may have discovered ‘several cases of possible technological traces and extraterrestrial civilisations’. The discovery was reportedly made thanks to data collected by the giant Sky Eye telescope, located in Guizhou province.

This information was deleted only a few hours after it was published, but it did not escape the attention of the many specialised media who were quick to relay it.

Aliens identified by Chinese astronomers?

The report mentioned narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by the telescope, which differed from previous ones captured. As these signals are usually only used by human aircraft and satellites, they could have been produced by extraterrestrial technology.

As reported by Universe Today, Zhang Tongjie, chief scientist of the Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group at Beijing Normal University, said in the article (which has since been deleted):

These are several different narrow-band electromagnetic signals from the past, and the team is currently working on further investigation,

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. This may be a long process.

A misinterpretation?

The Chinese Sky Eye, the world's largest single-dish radio telescope with an aperture of 500 metres in diameter, is also extremely sensitive to low-frequency radio bands, and is probably destined to play a key role in the search for extraterrestrial civilisations in the future, explains the scientist.

But this sensitivity could also lead to misinterpretation, making simple ‘radio interference’ appear to be real signals. This could explain why the researchers at Beijing Normal University deleted the article.

Built in 2016 in the southern Chinese province of Guizhou, the telescope officially began searching for extraterrestrial life forms in September 2020 as part of the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) programme.

The team in charge of this search had already detected two sets of suspicious signals in 2020 when processing the data collected in 2019. They detected another in 2022 data from observations of exoplanets, which are planets outside the Solar System.

This article was translated from Gentside FR.

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