The Chinese government’s giant Sky Eye telescope may have shown signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-sponsored Science and Technology Daily, but the report and discovery were removed after publication, reports Bloomberg.

The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by the world’s largest radio telescope Sky Eye differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them, the report said, citing Zhang Tonjie, the Chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.

It isn’t clear why the report was 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, including state-run ones.

In September 2020, Sky Eye was located in China’s southwestern Guizhou province and has a diameter of 500 meters, 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.

Zhang has reported that China’s Sky Eye is extremely sensitive to the low-frequency radio band and plays a critical role in the search for alien civilizations. However, these suspicious signals could be radio interference and need further investigation, he added.

Calls by Bloomberg News to the Science and Technology Daily weren’t answered.