Chinese state media announced it may have detected signs of alien life via one of its state-of-the-art radio telescopes - before mysteriously deleting any trace of the report.
The now deleted announcement by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily claimed the world’s largest radio telescope, called Sky Eye, had picked up electomagnetic signals that differed from anything they had seen before.
The report cited 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.
Although the article was swiftly deleted it had already started trending on social network Weibo and had been picked up by other media outlets, reports Bloomberg.
The report suggested they had found "several cases of possible technological traces and extraterrestrial civilizations from outside the earth".
It is unclear why the piece was deleted but social media sites are abuzz with speculation.
The massive Sky Eye is located in China's Guizhou province and has a diameter of 500 meters. In September 2020 it launched a search for extraterrestrial life.
The team picked up two sets of interesting signals in 2020 while processing data collected in 2019, and found another suspicious signal in 2022 while examining exoplanets, Zhang said in the report.
Sky Eye focuses on n the low-frequency radio band and plays a critical role in the search for alien civilizations, according to Zhang
Before the star gazers get too excited he did suggest the signals could be some kind of radio interference and further investigation will be needed.
In the history of humans, no evidence of extraterrestrial life has ever been discovered.
Despite this, our ever expanding understanding of the universe and its immense scale has increasingly led many scientists to believe there is a possibility of life.
Although no evidence exists, reports of aliens have frequently appeared over the years.
A former US Homeland Security officer recently revealed the strange things he saw while working at the Mexican-American border - including what he's certain were UFOs.
Newly released video and testimony from a former Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent revealed multiple encounters with "aerial objects" appearing to manoeuvre "well beyond the capabilities of a conventional aircraft", the Debrief reports.
The footage has left some veteran pilots scratching their heads and questioning nature of these objects.
Other long running mysteries still perplex rational thinkers about what actually happened.
Three decades ago 62 pupils claimed they saw a disc-shaped craft land from the sky and stop in a field outside their school in Zimbabwe.
The case has fascinated UFO enthusiasts because of the large number of witnesses who all claim to have seen the same thing.
Most UFO sightings tend to occur in the West and this one in Africa also helped garner more of the world’s attention when it happened.
Even 28 years after the incident happened many of the children maintain that they did see a UFO on September 16, 1994.
