Unexpected Patterns in Historical Astronomical Observations
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Researchers found unexpected patterns in historical astronomical observations, sparking debate about possible extraterrestrial artifacts or alternative explanations, with some commenters questioning the methodology and conclusions.
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Info about July 27, 1952 UFO/UAP sighting in DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_inci...
Spitballing even further, could the objects be explained by a nuclear fireball pushing a mass of atmospheric humidity high enough to form a solid sheet of ice in orbit?
"Eiso Nomura (1898-1982) miraculously survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, despite the fact that the explosion occurred in the air right above him.On August 6, 1945, Mr. Nomura was in the basement of the Fuel Hall (now, the Rest House in Peace Memorial Park), about 170 meters southwest of the hypocenter."
Still, this is what happens when you use a nuclear bonb as a detonating charge at the bottom of a tube...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
And it was most probably vaporized, either by blast itself or by rapid compression of air. They estimated if it actually started flying it would have 6x Earth escape velocity (cca 240,000 kmh), no way to survive flight through 100km of atmosphere before reaching semi-vacuum
There is a question on stackexchange with one great answer about this. It probably didn't last a kilometer: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/488151/could-the...
That said, the bomb only exploded at roughly 600m in altitude so still pretty close.
The "artificial sun" created at Hiroshima, the early-stage plasma fireball at 1 ms, is estimated to have been 5 to 10 meters across.
No to all, without reservation. The German V-2 didn't go into orbit, and the US and USSR weren't active in large missile activity at all, until long post-war.
If we rule out ETs for the sake of argument, and if these weren’t atmospheric effects or artifacts from the nuclear tests themselves, then small objects were in orbit at the time and either they were launched from Earth or the planet happened to be crossing paths with them.
Because of the very public competition between the US and the former USSR, any rocket technology successes would have become public very quickly. For example, Alan Shepard's 1961 suborbital flight was rather lame by modern standards and much less than the USSR had already accomplished, but it was front-page news. And after Sputnik launched, late in 1957, heads figuratively rolled among American rocket scientists because we were late in a very public race to orbit.
This doesn't refute the possibility you suggest, it only makes it unlikely.
> If we rule out ETs for the sake of argument, and if these weren’t atmospheric effects or artifacts from the nuclear tests themselves, then small objects were in orbit at the time and either they were launched from Earth or the planet happened to be crossing paths with them.
I like your approach -- don't assume the least likely possibility, consider all the alternatives first. As Carl Sagan liked to say, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
It's too bad that the evidence is so poor. The photographic resolution isn't good enough to either eliminate or accept a number of possibilities.
At least that's what I tell myself. Hard to appreciate the majesty of the universe if we're forever locked into a single star system.
That goes as well for how aliens light-years away can detect nuclear explosions and show up within days to check it out.
as far as I know, the very few publicly identified records of speeds we have suggest a really big power source and the probable manipulation of fields we cannot yet (mass/gravity), but nothing breaking the speed of light.
so many people make leaps beyond the evidence we have and then declare them not plausible.
> there are machines that have been here possibly a very long time. think at least 500 years. theres no indication the "they" behind those machines have ever made contact, or are on this planet, or are even still in existence. but there is something mechanical here that was not made by us.
> so many people make leaps beyond the evidence we have and then declare them not plausible.
Why isn't the first one exactly what you're complaining about in the second statement? Have I missed something?
And all that galaxy construction level effort for what? To learn hundreds or thousands of years late, that at rock number 123ABCD a fission has happened? And do what exactly with that useful information? Send extermination fleet? Or a robot with flowers, to pay respects?
People for some reason refuse to comprehend just how hard is it to send a speck of dust over light years of distance, let alone anything meaningful which won't break down in the process.
And since the amount of time we're talking about is so large -- larger than the amount of time the beings that create these robotic probes can possibly continue to be alive -- that the only way it could work is if those beings accept robots as acceptable replacements for themselves, or if the probes carry embryos and can terraform planets and raise those embryos to adults and bootstrap a civilization.
Plenty of sci-fi has been written along these likes, like Ursula K Leguin's books, where human-ish beings on any given planet (e.g., Winter) turn out to be sent there from other planets to bootstrap a civilization and they have no memory of it. Or Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds, where there is a robotic probe thing going on, but rather than continue the originating species [redacted to avoid spoilers].
I love LeGuin, Reynolds, and other, sci-fi is practically 90% of what I'm reading. But come on, the whole interstellar stuff is always predicated on very very optimistic assumptions and eventually magic.
If any civilization were to build such a thing they would make it perpetuate themselves.
Not to mention they could send probes closer and further from the galactic center to take advantage of the slower and faster rotation rate to see new stars.
As for the nuclear fission blast I have my doubts. Ham radio folks brag about 1000 miles a watt, in a lossy atmosphere and multiple bounces that reflect less than 1% for each bounce. Using advanced things like tubes of transistors and a copper cable thrown over a tree branch.
Using the 1 watt per 1000 miles the largest nuclear explosion would be 22 light years, and clear line of sight through space is going to transmit quite a bit better than bouncing off the atmosphere then off the ground several times.
An advanced civilization could make say a square km array (which us lowly humans have managed) and would understand nuclear bombs enough to know their likely signature, decay rate, shape of the curve, etc. Much like how astronomers use supernovas as standard candles for distance, despite crazy different red shifts.
Seems quite reasonable for a civilization to keep track of anything going on in their fraction of the galaxy.
"People for some reason refuse to comprehend just how hard is it to send a speck of dust over light years of distance" It's only hard if you are in a hurry, in fact we have 3 rocks come through our solar system from well more than a light year away.
I don't think you can even tell given only one of the particles in a pair if it is still entangled so you couldn't even destructively send small amounts of information either. It's a neat work around for semihard scifi but the universe is stubbornly resistant to any pathways for anything including information travelling faster than the speed of light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick#Split_tally
So what if you put each half of split tally stick in a box hidden from view then move them a light year apart and then open your box? You immediately know what's on other stick but you can't change it anyway.
and also the act of viewing the stick destroys it.
When you measure an entangled particle that tells you, the observer, the corresponding characteristic of the other particle in the pair, but it will tell no one who has access to the other particle anything at all about what you wanted to say.
This is like transmitting information from you to you about a faraway thing (instantaneously! "FTL", but read on), but it's not useful because what you want to transmit information from you to someone else far away rather than from you to you.
And any bad guy that can even reach you basically means you’re already dead if they so choose.
For this to work, though, a few things would have to be true:
1. The film would have to be stored in bulk in a place that would be (mostly) protected from gamma rays from the tests.
2. The film for that night's observations would have to already be not with the rest of the film at the time of the test.
3. The observatory would have to be close enough to the location of the test that the gamma rays would have a chance to reach it.
But maybe it doesn't have to be direct. Maybe it could be gamma rays produced by the fallout, which drifts from the location of the test to at or near the observatory.
Then you have to wonder why no more were observed after March 17, 1956. A change in the character of the film? (Either a change in manufacturing process, or a change in what kind of film was used?)
Also, assuming her hypothesis is correct and she didn't made factual mistakes - to be presented as dots and not streaks, all of these thousands of objects should be in a tiny narrow band in GEO spread out all across the orbit envelope. Where did they disappear in between 50 minutes from red plate to blue plate? And then this somehow repeated every single time in that particular order? An alien armada sitting precisely in a single orbit and then vanishes on a cue from a some lone observatory on Earth, when technician changes plates there? Then again appears all strictly in GEO, then again disappears in 50 minutes after?
Doesn't it look absurd to you?
I'm not an statisastroscienticianist, so I have no idea what that means, but maybe it's significant.
That being said, Kodak discovered nuclear testing was a thing before the public for all the obvious reasons.
Kodak had this issue for sure.
The issue is relegated to only the most sensitive equipment these days but it's a funny little side issue for several years before the test ban had been in place long enough to reduce the elevated levels back to nearly background.
You can compute the PSF from known stars on the same image and run a statistical test, but TBH just visually comparing the transient with a few stars of similar brightness on the same image should put this one to rest.
The brightest stars in all of the images have a clear 4-pointed pattern. The brightest transients _do not_ show this pattern.
This is obviously not definitive, and the fainter stars are harder to eyeball the PSF, but it does provide some evidence to support the hypothesis that the brighter transients could be due to gamma ray exposure of the film rather than flashes in the atmosphere or space.
> Follow-up secondary analyses were then conducted to examine in more granular fashion the timing of the association between nuclear testing and occurrence of transients. Table 2 summarizes the association between occurrence of transients and different time windows relative to nuclear testing, ranging from 2 days before a test until 2 days after a test. The only association that reached statistical significance was for the association in which transients occur 1 day after nuclear testing.
They should however account for multiple testing. The Bonferroni correction (which is conservative) would set the alpha level to 0.05/5=0.01, for which the 1 day after result is still (just) statistically significant.
Not to say there couldn’t be other problems.
First of all, in every par she picks arbitrary a tiny fraction, like a few percentages of an area of the plate, without any explanation why the rest of the image is ignored. After looking at the full plates, one can see that there not dozens of suspicious lights but literally thousands of disappearing lights, uniformly spread out across the whole plate, without any pattern or localization. So thousands of alien saucers all across the Earth. You see where this is going? But it gets worse.
Second - in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear. Not a single light out of thousands is breaking the pattern and transitions from empty to light, no, all of them transition from light to nothingness only.
And finally third - these thousands of UFOs on the first plate appear because the first plate uses a brittle and unstable red pigment. I can't quickly find out the source, but one guy did analysis and found out the type of the emulsion used on the first plates in these sets in that decade and said that it was indeed a fragile compound, which is most likely the reason for these thousands of uniformly spread out image defects.
tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.
Took me too long, but here’s one:
https://thefreaky.net/dr-beatriz-villarroel-and-the-mystery-...
From that source:
“Old photographic plates are notoriously temperamental. Dust specks, cosmic rays, emulsion scratches, and scanning artefacts can all mimic stars. Villarroel’s team applied careful filters and cross-checks, but some scientists argue the anomalies could still be defects rather than cosmic revelations.”
It’s not a real debunking — Rational Wiki (now down) was good at debunking things like this which weren’t notable enough to make the Wikipedia — but it’s what I’m able to find about the matter.
I’m of course still skeptical — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — but I think a good debunking needs to be posted online, with footnotes and references.
https://medium.com/@izabelamelamed/not-seeing-the-star-cloud...
In my opinion it's a pretty damning conclusion. I would love to see some explanation from the ufology crowd :)
To summarize:
• All of these anomalous points of light only appear on one particular film emulsion, 103a-E (sensitive to red light)
• Said points of light do not appear with other emulsions used at the same time (e.g. 103a-F or 103a-O)
• Each plate made with 103x-E emulsion has a lot of these points of “light” all over them, which indicates there was an issue with the emulsion.
Some other links:
https://www.ufofeed.com/141549/some-serious-flaws-in-villaro...
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-o...
As for good debunking - come on, it's supposedly thousands of crafts, supposedly in the same orbit (because any other orbit except for GEO would cause them to streak on the long exposure photo), in a random formation all across the sky, supposedly synchronously disappeared all at once, time synced to the photoplate change on a random Earth observatory. Pfff, just typing this out feels like a bad joke. Good proofs or even bad proofs need to be provided first by the ufology community, not vice versa.
That's being generous. Some of them know damn well that they are looking at compression artifacts in pictures of Mars and not cities, but they are trying to sell a book.
The example papers [1] [2] [3] [4] have 18 unique co-authors. Also, it's Beatriz.
> she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures
"We base our analysis on the catalog of 298,165 short-duration transients presented in Solano et al. (2022), detected in 200 red POSS-I plates with typical exposure times of 45–50 minutes." [1]
"Of the 2,718 days in this period, transients were observed on 310 days (11.4%)" [2]
"These searches significantly reduced the number of candidates (from 298 165 to 9 395)" [3]
> uniformly spread out across the whole plate
> thousands of uniformly spread out image defects
"we find a strong deficit of transient detections, at the 22 sigma statistical significance level, within the Earth’s umbral shadow" [1]
"we expect N = 1223 transients in shadow out of 106,339 total, corresponding to an expected fraction of fexp = 0.0115±0.00033. However, we observe only N = 349 transients in shadow" [1]
"Plate defects, by contrast, are expected to be randomly shaped and distributed" [1]
> in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear
"transients that appear only in one long exposure and are entirely absent shortly before and after" [1]
"In brief, transients were defined as distinct star-like point sources present in POSS-I E Red images that were absent both in images taken immediately prior to the POSS-I Red image and in all subsequent images." [2]
(*) POSS -- Palomar Observatory Sky Survey
[1] Aligned, multiple-transient events in the First Palomar Sky Survey, 2025, preprint
[2] Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, Scientific Reports, 2025
[3] Discovering vanishing objects in POSS I red images using the Virtual Observatory, 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 515, 1380
[4] A glint in the eye: photographic plate archive searches for non-terrestrial artefacts, 2022, Acta Astronautica, 194, 106
Turns out looking for quotes directly contradicting debunker's statements is a great way to focus while reading a UAP-related scientific paper, thank you.
The article cites the same papers that the author claims were rejected on ARXIV:
https://ovniologia.com.br/2025/10/astrophysicist-dr-beatriz-...