in fact most of their citations of prior research are largely unrelated to their actual claims (the paper on looking for ancient satellites in orbit was about looking for debris belts around exoplanets, the claim of UFOs being associated with nuclear tests cites a book that only talks about UFOs being reported at missile silos and the like).
Yes, it's not a very long reference list
Edited to add: see
@jdog's post #594 below.
(This post originally said there were just 16 references, but I was thinking of the references cited in a different paper Villarroel co-authored,
"Some Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) May Be Associated with Above-Ground Nuclear Testing and Reports of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena", S. Bruehl, B. Villarroel 2025,
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6347224/v1,
commented on in
post #169)
In "Critical Evaluation of Studies Alleging Evidence for Technosignatures..." the authors strongly imply that Villarroel
et al. weren't sufficiently acquainted with existing literature relevant to their work;
External Quote:
We conducted a review of optical transient searches in photographic plates, in the context of historical searches for the optical counterparts of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). Following two decades of work, even tentative identification of optical flashes required close microscopic analysis of glass plates, which B. Villarroel et al. (2025c) did not perform. This and preceding work (B. Villarroel et al. 2021, 2022; E. Solano et al. 2022,2024) have not heeded the primary lessons from this literature.
Not sure re. Villarroel et al.'s papers about claimed transients, but the "The New Science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena" (link
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06794; thread
New Science of UAP Paper) is essentially an opinion/ discussion piece with 34 cited authors.
IMHO it is equivalent to "We the undersigned believe some UAP are alien craft" with a collection of UFO reports, which are taken at face value and without any critical examination. Old misconceptions and improbable accounts are repeated:
Roswell is mentioned under "Physical Evidence" but its probable cause is not. There was an "incursion" at Malmstrom air force base in 1967. The Ubatuba incident "involved the catastrophic explosion of a UFO". At Council Bluffs "about 11 people, in separate groups, witnessed an event where a hovering object dropped a large mass of molten metal"; but only 5 witnesses were identified; 2 claimed to see a hovering UFO, 3 others claimed to see something fall (but not
from anything), none saw anything drop from a hovering object.
The 34 authors include Villarroel, 4 of the "Critical Evaluation..." authors (Knuth is the lead author of "The New Science..."), Jacques Vallee, Gerald and John Tedesco, Garry Nolan, Ryan Graves; it's almost a "Who's Who" of contemporary UFOlogy.
It's hard not to see the paper as, in part, an attempt to get the names of a large number of "UFOs are alien" believers onto one potentially citable paper, the content of which presents little new thinking and which repeats some dubious claims not because they are likely to be accurate but because, taken at face value, they support the 34 author's beliefs.
