China said its giant Sky Eye telescope could have detected signals from alien civilisations, according to a report in the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which later appeared to have deleted the report and publications about the discovery.

The narrowband electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye, the world’s largest radio telescope, differ from those previously captured and are being further investigated by the team, according to the report, citing Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of a search team for extraterrestrial civilizations co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of California, Berkeley.

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It is unclear why the report was apparently removed from the website of Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s science and technology ministry, although the news had already started trending on the Weibo social network and was picked up by others. media. including state ones.

In September 2020, the Sky Eye, which is located in southwest China’s Guizhou Province and has a diameter of 500 meters (1,640 feet), officially launched a search for extraterrestrial life. The team detected two sets of suspicious signals in 2020 while processing data collected in 2019, and found another suspicious signal in 2022 from exoplanet target observation data, Zhang said, according to the report.