The "Sky Eye" telescope has detected something and China claims to have discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Chinese scientists said the country’s massive Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signals of an alien civilization, Business Insider reported.
But there is still much due diligence left to be done, and a scientist involved in the study is now pushing back.

China’s Sky Eye is extremely sensitive to the low-frequency radio band and plays a critical role in the search for alien civilizations.

The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye — the world’s largest radio telescope — differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them. (Image Source: Twitter/ EDNewsChina)

China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which then appeared to have deleted the report and posts about the discovery.

Beijing Normal University researchers discovered “several cases of possible technological traces and extraterrestrial civilizations from outside the earth.” The researchers utilized the only giant single-dish radio telescope left in the world, China’s 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), to make the discovery.

Cosmologist Zhang Tongjie told Science and Technology Daily that the telescope had located “several narrow-band electromagnetic signals different from the past.”

It isn’t clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending on social network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets, including state-run ones.

In an interview with Futurism, SETI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, Dan Werthimer said that the signals are categorically terrestrial and not from an alien civilization. Werthimer coauthored a preprint about the findings.

“The signals that we found so far are all [radio frequency] interference, they’re not from extraterrestrials, they’re from terrestrials,” he said.

“The problem is that when you look for these very weak signals from a distant civilization, you get overwhelmed by the pollution, the radio pollution on Earth,” Werthimer said. “All these television and cell phones and satellites now are getting worse and worse and it’s hard to figure out what’s interference and what might be from a distant civilization.”

In September 2020, Sky Eye, which is located in China’s southwestern 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 observation data of exoplanet targets, Zhang said, according to the report.

China’s Sky Eye is extremely sensitive in the low-frequency radio band and plays a critical role in the search for alien civilizations, Zhang is reported to have said.

The suspicious signals could, however, also be some kind of radio interference and require further investigation, he added.