Fuelling speculation over life beyond Earth, astronomers in China claimed to have detected signals from extraterrestrial civilisations. The signals were picked up by China’s giant Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) measuring five hundred metres. It is also known as Sky Eye; and is the largest radio telescope in the world. Astronomers, from the Beijing Normal University, have made the claims of discovering “several cases of possible technological traces and extraterrestrial civilizations from outside the Earth.”

As previously reported, the claims were made in Science and Technology Daily, which is the official newspaper of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, on June 14. However, the report was soon deleted from the website.

The Sky Eye telescope was employed to look for radio signals in deep space and spot signs of extraterrestrial life in 2019. A year later, researchers analysed the data and said they detected two suspicious narrow-band signals. Another similar signal was spotted in 2022 during a targeted survey of exoplanets.

This kind of narrow-band radio signals are used by human satellites and aircraft and spotting them in deep space could mean that they originated from some alien technology. Zhang Tongjie, head scientist at the China Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group at Beijing Normal University, elaborated that there are several narrow-band electromagnetic signals different from the past, and their team is currently working on further investigation.

Tongjie and his team is planning to rule out any radio interference by repeated observation of the strange signal.

However, the report has now been deleted from the official website and there has been no information behind the reason to remove it. The news has already created quite a buzz and has been reported by several media outlets.

In 2019, scientists had detected a signal beamed at Earth from Proxima Centauri, which is the nearest star system to the sun. Being a narrow-band signal, it caused the scientists to suspect that it came from alien technology.

However, later studies refuted the alien claims and reported that it was instead the result of a malfunctioning human technology.