From Villarroel, Streblyanska, Bruehl and Geier's "A Response to paper Critical Evaluation of Studies...",
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15171,
usefully quoted by
@NorCal Dave,
post #865, my emphasis:
External Quote:
Finally, the analysis demonstrating that being within a nuclear testing window and having at least one UAP sighted on a given night produced additive effects on the number of observed transients remained highly significant( < 0.001)...
I think this is interesting.
Villarroel
et al. do not appear to suggest that the UFO sightings are sightings of their transients.
As far as I can tell the POSS1 transients have apparent magnitudes far below unaided human perception,
e.g. "A bright triple transient that vanished within 50 min", Solano, Villarroel
et al. 2023,
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/527/3/6312/7457759,
External Quote:
We report on three optically bright, ∼16th mag, point sources within 10 arcsec of each other that vanished within 1 h, based on two consecutive exposures at Palomar Observatory on 1952 July 19 (POSS I Red and Blue).
This is about as bright as Charon (Pluto's largest moon) as viewed from Earth- totally invisible to the naked eye (as is Pluto. As is much larger Neptune). In ideal conditions people with good vision might see magnitude 7 objects, Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_(astronomy)
So (it is implied, I think) either the UFOs are "transients" popping down from orbit, or they're something else, another class of visiting extraterrestrial artefact.
This
might be seen as circular reasoning: Transients being more more frequent at times of UFO reports might be evidence they're exotic tech.
The UFOs are of exotic origin because they're associated with the transients.
There is no persuasive testable evidence that UFOs (as exotic artefacts, or any other type of undescribed phenomenon) exist.
Villarroel
et al.'s papers do not change this (as far as I can tell) unless we accept the reasoning above.
We know that many UFO reports are due to misidentifications. Some are hoaxes or tall stories.
There is no register of
all claimed UFO/ UAP reports AFAIK (and realistically such a register might not be possible).
All sightings taken into account by Villarroel
et al. are
claimed sightings that happen to have been documented and recorded in whatever source(s) the authors used. They are unlikely to be fully comprehensive. [Edited to add, "No single source of UFO reports is likely to be fully comprehensive" might have been clearer.]
Hopefully Villarroel
et al. used a specific, pre-selected source or sources listing UFO reports. If they retrospectively looked for UFO reports for specific days not using pre-selected sources (e.g. by googling), all sorts of confounding factors might arise: One might subconsciously try a little harder to find reports corresponding to the 3-day nuclear test windows or dates of plates identified as having a larger-than-average number of transients. Equally one might (subconsciously) not look for quite as long for reports not on those dates. Speculation; some UFO enthusiasts have been particularly interested in reports associated with nuclear sites, weapons tests etc.; repeated searches/ visits to webpages discussing such reports might make search engine algorithms push those webpages up the list, making them more visible (perhaps unlikely, I don't know).
(1) It would be interesting to know which list(s)/ dataset of UFO reports the researchers used (if any).
(2) It would also be good to know if Villarroel
et al. "filtered" the claimed sightings: some of George Adamski's photos (e.g. the famous Venusian Scout Ship of 1952) are within the relevant timeframe and were widely publicized, but if his reported sightings are among those used by V.
et al., there's a credibility issue. But if Adamski's December '52 encounter
isn't included, it raises the question, what criteria were used?
Who decided, by what means, which reports were "real"?
There are other claimed sightings from the era that stretch credibility or which might be non-events sensationalised by local press (e.g. Farmington 1950). It is almost certain the majority of "genuine" sightings are misidentifications. None has ever been demonstrated to be of an exotic artefact or a novel phenomenon.
If claimed UFOs are actually misidentified balloons, jets etc. and/or hoaxed flying saucers, yet correlate with abundant transients and/ or nuclear tests in V.
et al.'s studies (and I'm genuinely not ruling this out) it would be interesting, but of course it wouldn't support the author's implied hypothesis (that they are causally connected with transients which are themselves ET artefacts). It might suggest a flawed methodology in selecting claimed UFO reports that leads to something like type 1 error.
The authors cannot demonstrate that "their" UFOs are not misidentifications with a peppering of hoaxes.
NICAP has a webpage linking to "UFO Chronologies" for various years including the years of POSS 1,
https://www.nicap.org/chronos/
To get some idea of the number of sightings NICAP recorded, I had a quick look at 1950 and 1956.
The 1950 UFO chronology,
https://www.nicap.org/chronos/1950fullrep.htm. lists approx. 149 different sightings on approx. 113 days that year.
A large majority were from the USA. The 1956 chronology,
https://www.nicap.org/chronos/1956fullrep.htm, lists approx. 122 sightings on around 104 days (a fair number of dates are uncertain) from a considerably wider range of places than 1950.
Whoever compiled these lists probably relied primarily on contemporary (mainly US?) newspaper reports, or other sources that once did.
It might be likely that many more sightings were made/ claimed; maybe not all local newspapers were archived and later digitized for the ease of later researchers, and NICAP / its contributors might not have had the resources to monitor all media outlets or other potential leads.
The Wikipedia article "List of reported UFO sightings",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reported_UFO_sightings#cite_note-9, quotes Martin S. Kottmeyer writing in
Why Statues Weep: The Best of the "Skeptik"
External Quote:
During the United States' initial 1947 wave, over 800 sightings were reported in the news.
.
World Population Review website (
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/ufo-sightings-by-country)
External Quote:
Between 1947 and 1969, the United States reported more than 12,000 different UFO sightings around the country.
-That's an average of more than 545 per year (though no references are given and figures given top of page appear to be from UK press items).
However, it seems
possible that UFO reports are made every every day of the year in the USA alone, and have been since maybe the late 1940s.
If this is the case, it is a problem for finding correlations between days when UFOs are reported and other events- UFOs are seen every day!
Villarroel
et al. would either have to be using a data set of UFO sightings that does not in fact list all known UFO sightings, or would have to use some means to select a subset of sightings which they believe are most relevant to their study.
I think it's possible that if someone looked hard enough (and had sufficient time and resources) they might be able to find a UFO report
somewhere on the vast majority, if not all, of the days (nights) POSS-1 operated. This would have implications for claims that a higher number of transients correlates with days when a UFO is reported.
