Chinese Astronauts claim to have heard mysterious knocking sounds in space on three separate occasions. Is there an explanation?
There is hardly a mission in space that has passed without a single strange occurrence. We have often heard confessions from astronauts about unidentified flying objects, strange phenomena, and mysterious whistling or knocking sounds in space.
The story of Yang Liwei, the first Chinese astronaut, is exactly like that, and as you can guess, there is no definite explanation.
Yang Liwei made his 21-hour space flight on October 16, 2003, aboard Shenzhou 5. Strangely, his story did not reach the public domain until 2016 during an interview with China Central Television (CCTV), in which he told about the strange noise he heard during his mission.
According to him, he heard a knock coming from nowhere from time to time.
It was like someone knocking on the hull outside of the ship. And the knocking sound itself was like hitting a wooden hammer on a bucket. The knocking was irregular and appeared and disappeared unexpectedly.
He tried to see the source of this noise, but there was nothing outside. After landing back on Earth, Yang Liwei reported his misfortunes in space and even tried to recreate the exact sound he heard.
He hit metal with various instruments but never achieved the desired result and failed to reproduce the same knocking sound. He also claims to have never heard such a sound on Earth before or in the years since his mission.
Yang Liwei said that he personally warned the astronauts of the next missions about this sound – Shenzhou 6 and Shenzhou 7. As far as we know, there is confirmation that they heard the same sound during their missions in 2005 and 2008, but again – no explanation was found, and the source was “invisible.”
