China Confirms Receiving Possible Alien Signals From Other Planets; Deletes Report Next Day

The world's largest radio telescope may have detected signs of alien life, Chinese authorities revealed this week in a report that was later deleted.

China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), also known as Sky Eye, picked up "several cases of possible technological traces and extraterrestrial civilizations from outside the Earth," according to a report published Tuesday in Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of the country's Ministry of Science and Technology.

In the report, a team of researchers, headed by the Beijing Normal University, explained that the narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by FAST differed from ones that had been previously captured, according to the New York Post.

While FAST's discovery started trending on the Chinese social media network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets, the original Science and Technology Daily report had apparently been removed from the newspaper's website by Wednesday. It was unclear why the report was taken down.

FAST, which is located in China’s southwestern Guizhou province, started a program to look for alien life back in September 2020. A team detected two sets of suspicious signals that year while processing data collected in 2019, and another one was found this year.

There is a "very high" possibility that the signals could have been radio interference, according to Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.

Dan Werthimer, the Marilyn and Watson Alberts SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) chair in the astronomy department and space sciences lab at UC Berkeley, also concluded that the signals were from radio interference, Space.com reported.

"These signals are from radio interference; they are due to radio pollution from Earthlings, not from ET. The technical term we use is RFI - radio frequency interference. RFI can come from cell phones, TV transmitters, radar, satellites, as well as electronics and computers near the observatory that produce weak radio transmissions," said Werthimer, who works with Beijing Normal University SETI researchers.

"All of the signals detected by SETI researchers so far are made by our own civilization, not another civilization. It's getting hard to do SETI observations from the surface of our planet. Radio pollution is getting worse, as more and more transmitters and satellites are built. Some radio bands have become impossible to use for SETI," he added.

The suspicious signals detected by FAST are currently being investigated, according to Zhang.