Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

[John J.]

The million-dollar question has never been whether the objects are present on the plates.

I do sort of wonder whether the features on the reproduced images of the plates identified as transients by Solano, Villarroel et al. are actually all present on the original plates, and if some methodological error or reprographic process might have caused an under-representation of such features within Earth's shadow (or an over representation elsewhere) when studying the reproduced images.

 

[JMartJr]

I've always favored the intermittent spouting of space whales, myself.

Reference to:
1) Star Trek
2) Star Wars
3) Futurama
4) Avatar sequels
5) other?

 

[jdog]

Reference to:
1) Star Trek
2) Star Wars
3) Futurama
4) Avatar sequels
5) other?

Add Doctor Who and Pinocchio in Space...

 

[John J.]

I've always favored the intermittent spouting of space whales, myself.

Reference to:
1) Star Trek
2) Star Wars
3) Futurama
4) Avatar sequels
5) other?

6) Unfortunate but apparently happy whale brought into existence by Heart of Gold's infinite improbability drive, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
7) Star Whale in Doctor Who, "new" series 5 ep. 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_Below

Edited to add (8) Extraterrestrial whale in 2000 AD's strip Damnation Station. Encountered in an ocean of an alien planet, but implied to have travelled there from outside our galaxy. The premise of the strip is that a powerful ET civilization in our galaxy, The Host, tolerates our existence as long as (often unwilling or unbalanced) human combatants hunt down and destroy any species entering the galaxy from outside. Dark stuff.

 

[NorCal Dave]

One thing I find rather curious is her claim that "the objects are there and look exactly as they do in the digital images." Well… yes. Has anyone seriously argued otherwise?

Isn't this a response to the Hambly & Blair paper? They suggest some of the transients could be from the digitizing process, something they were actually involved with. At the very least, one would need to eliminate those transients that appear in digital formats, but not on the original plates.

Maybe a bit of a Strawman argument? The basic push back on all of these studies is there are a number of things that could have caused these transients that should be eliminated before going to aliens. Obviously, if a transient is an emulsion defect on the original plate, it would still "look exactly as they do in the digital images" but be useless when trying to correlate aliens being interested in nuclear tests.

 

[Andreas]

Obviously, if a transient is an emulsion defect on the original plate, it would still "look exactly as they do in the digital images" but be useless when trying to correlate aliens being interested in nuclear tests.

Indeed. It will be very interesting to read the upcoming report. One can only hope that it provides a detailed account of how the plates were examined to determine whether the transients were caused by defects. To be honest, however, I suspect that the conclusions will remain open to interpretation.

 

[HoaxEye]

You flagged the right strengths: ML-filtered search, Monte Carlo nulls, etc..

Provenance: yes, the paper doesn't confirm individual objects on the original emulsion. It never claimed to. It's a statistics paper on the high-confidence subset, scoped that way in plain text, with Hambly & Blair cited. That caveat applies to every analysis on the digitized POSS-I material, not to alignments specifically. "Provenance is open, therefore the pattern is fake" is a category error you'd flag in anyone else's argument.

Geography: The longitude clustering is partly geometry, north/south alignments on tracked plates plus Palomar's zenith bias. It's flagged as suggestive. Arguing it isn't a hit, it's agreeing with the caveat.

The part nobody wants to touch is the ecliptic depletion. That's the actual result. Thats the strongest part of the paper.

I don't think that's a category error. "Open provenance" doesn't make the pattern fake by definition. It limits how far the interpretation can be pushed. That matters, because the paper does not stop at "interesting structure in the catalogue" but goes on to discuss geosynchronous altitude, fixed meridians, Hanford, and SAC, even while noting that the longitude effect is partly geometric on sidereally tracked plates.

I also think there's a broader tone issue: the wording tends to sound more settled than the actual evidential position. This paper's title itself is stronger than what the full text warrants once the caveats and correction schemes are read closely.

Yes, the ecliptic depletion is probably the strongest internal result in the paper. What I don't think follows is the stronger claim that this makes the effect robust against photographic/instrumental artefacts in general: the result is still about an ML-selected subset of a copy-derived POSS-I catalogue, not a validation on the original negative.

 

[HoaxEye]

Another recent arXiv that seems worth adding to the pile is @Ivo Busko Fast Astronomical Transients in Archival Photographic Plates: Using optical aberrations as a tool for discerning real images, from plate artifacts. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.08319 (PDF attached)

The interesting part is that it is not another DSS/POSS-I catalogue-statistics paper: Busko uses the APPLAUSE archive and a different telescope/data stream, then argues that a small set of transient images show the local coma aberration expected from off-axis point sources that passed through the telescope optics, which ordinary plate artefacts would not naturally reproduce.

That makes it a potentially useful independent line of evidence that at least some historical "transients" were produced by real light entering the telescope, not just generic local blemishes on the plate. But the paper is also quite a bit more cautious than some of the social-media framing around it: Busko explicitly says the results are preliminary, that the method is still largely visual, that the goal is not a statistically rigorous analysis yet, and that the argument only invalidates the plate-artifact hypothesis "at least for these transients" rather than for all reported cases

So, interesting paper: absolutely yes, independent and potentially important, yes. "Final nail in the coffin" for contamination-based hypotheses in general, no

 

[HoaxEye]

So, interesting paper: absolutely yes, independent and potentially important, yes. "Final nail in the coffin" for contamination-based hypotheses in general, no

Villarroel on X:

Source: https://x.com/DrBeaVillarroel/status/2064285561653727309

PhD astronomer and former NASA engineer Ivo Busko has single-handedly driven a final nail into the coffin of the contamination-based hypotheses (e.g. plate defects and cosmic rays) proposed to explain the VASCO transients.

Again: the paper doesn't support claims like this

 

[jarlrmai]

I think the author has posted here before and maybe could offer their insight @Ivo Busko

 

[Brian Dunning]

Funny, I just finished a show on this. Damn it was a lot of research, and I got to talk to the folks at the secure archives where the original glass plates are stored. Super crazy fun research project.

I found early on that there was no point following Bruehl & Villarroel down their statistical analysis rabbit hole — that entire branch is a red herring.

I hadn't previously realized that Villarroel had been beating this drum for years, and that the debunks were already 100% thorough a year before Bruehl & Villarroel wrote their two papers that went viral in the mass media and brought this to the attention of the larger UFOlogy community.

It was pretty funny that Villarroel's published response to Hambly & Blair lectured them on their own glass plates — maybe she didn't realize that Edinburgh holds the ACTUAL glass plates that her SuperCOSMOS scans had been made from!!! Hambly & Blair had direct access and were able to examine them microscopically, and using emulsion holes from outside the image area as controls, proved beyond any reasonable doubt that's all that her "transients" were. As I said in the show, she brought a knife to a gunfight on that one!!

 

[NorCal Dave]

Again: the paper doesn't support claims like this

Maybe not, but will Busko say that publicly on X, directly challenging Villarreol?

 

[Gary C]

Funny, I just finished a show on this. Damn it was a lot of research, and I got to talk to the folks at the secure archives where the original glass plates are stored. Super crazy fun research project.

I found early on that there was no point following Bruehl & Villarroel down their statistical analysis rabbit hole — that entire branch is a red herring.

I hadn't previously realized that Villarroel had been beating this drum for years, and that the debunks were already 100% thorough a year before Bruehl & Villarroel wrote their two papers that went viral in the mass media and brought this to the attention of the larger UFOlogy community.

It was pretty funny that Villarroel's published response to Hambly & Blair lectured them on their own glass plates — maybe she didn't realize that Edinburgh holds the ACTUAL glass plates that her SuperCOSMOS scans had been made from!!! Hambly & Blair had direct access and were able to examine them microscopically, and using emulsion holes from outside the image area as controls, proved beyond any reasonable doubt that's all that her "transients" were. As I said in the show, she brought a knife to a gunfight on that one!!

LInk?

 

[jarlrmai]

Perhaps these microscopic investigations can be made public?

 

[Andreas]

Funny, I just finished a show on this. Damn it was a lot of research, and I got to talk to the folks at the secure archives where the original glass plates are stored. Super crazy fun research project.

Wonderful! I'm looking forward to it. Here in Sweden, Villarroel is frequently featured in the media, making all sorts of claims without ever facing critical questioning. Journalists often struggle to understand her assertions and therefore tend to simply quote her rather than challenge them.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Perhaps these microscopic investigations can be made public?

They should be in the Hambly and Blair paper, right? IIRC, one of the arguments was that H&B only looked at a few plates and only in a few areas.

 

[JMartJr]

They should be in the Hambly and Blair paper, right? IIRC, one of the arguments was that H&B only looked at a few plates and only in a few areas.

Which might be a way of saying "they looked at a representative sample and learned enough," but saying it in a way that minimizes what they did?