A Chinese ship searching for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 picked up a pulse signal in the southern Indian Ocean on Saturday, the state-run media Xinhua said.
The pulse is believed to come from the black boxes on the 239-passenger plane, which next week will enter a month since it disappeared.
The 37.5 kHz signal, "is the standard beacon frequency" that would have belonged to the plane's cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, said Anish Patel, president of pinger manufacturer Dukane Seacom, CNN reported.
"They're identical."
The ship that found the signal, the Haixun 01, detected the pulse about 25 degrees south latitude and 101 degrees east longitude, Xinhua said, according to the BBC.
But "it is yet to be established whether it is related to the missing jet," Xinhua reported.
Flight MH 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 headed for Beijing. Not long after takeoff the plane vanished over the waters between Malaysia and south Vietnam.
An intense multinational search has ensued, surrounded by investigations into the flight's crew, criticism over the Malaysian government's handling of the search, and possible signs of the plane that turned out to be false.
That includes multiple sightings of floating debris that has turned up in the search area in the Indian Ocean. The debris was not confirmed as belonging to flight MH 370.
Experts are remaining skeptical about this latest report of possible evidence.
"We've had a lot of red herrings, hyperbole on this whole search," oceanographer Simon Boxall, who is also a lecturer in ocean and earth science at the University of Southampton, told CNN. "I'd really like to see this data confirmed."
David Soucie, a CNN aviation analyst and airplane accident investigator, is a bit more hopeful about the pulse signal.
"This is a pinger," Soucie told CNN. "I've been doing this a lot of years, and I can't think of anything else it could be."
