Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

[jdog]

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I've seen, for example, Avi Loeb updating a 3I/Atlas preprint with a second versioned draft of the same preprint on Arxiv, but the vague description of the Villarroel "companion papers" that were removed makes it sound like they were neither new versions of the previous nuclear correlations paper (which had already been on Arxiv and was later published) or entirely papers being submitted to a journal for publication, just a remix.

 

[NorCal Dave]

It's a good reminder about how unserious these people are.

Just me, but I think Mellon is very serious. There are certainly those in UFOlogy that are grifters and likely a large amount of quasi-grifters, but Mellon seems to really believe this stuff.

I think these Villarreol papers were a very big deal in the UFO world. One can go back through this thread and find some proponents claiming that people on Metabunk should not even dare to question Villarreol's findings. It was all reviewed, published and well beyond anyone here's understanding. We were further told that any attempt to critique any of Villarreol's findings MUST follow from a pre-stated falsifiable hypothesis, even though Villarreol seemed to skip this step.

These papers were touted in and on nearly every UFO media site. Villarreol did the interview circuit and pulled out the Galileo defense. These were full on peer reviewed, published papers that found transients, likely Techno-signatures (UFOs), from back in the '50s. Follow up papers showed definite correlation to these transients and UFO sightings and nuclear testing. These were UFOs, on old plates, linked to reports and the known interest of UFOs for nuclear stuff. These weren't videos on r/UFOs that turned out to be Starlink. This was the real deal. I think these papers were monumental in some circles.

Now the whole basis for them, the transients, has been called into question. And not by the skeptics. Rather it was group of UFOlogist that took Villarreol down, including one of her own collaborators. This could be huge in the UFO world. The recent Trump UFO announcement has glossed over this for now, but this could lead to a big split in the UFO world.

Mellon is definitely in the Skinwalker Ranch aligned camp, with close ties to Elizondo, Puthoff, Davis and TTSA at its beginning, but by and large the UFO/Disclosure community sticks together.

Recall that the paper The New Science of UAP credited Elizondo's own 5 Observables to the DoD, recounted lots of dubious UFO events and was co-authored by many of popular, as well as up and coming UFO people. Everyone from Nolan and Vallee to the Tedescos AND Villarreol were credited as coauthors.

Now the lead author, Kevin Knuth, along with other New Science of UAP coauthors, including Villarreol's collaborator WA Waters, have seriously rebutted Villarreol's main contentions. They went so far as to accuse her of circular reasoning in addition to her not having even a basic understanding of the relevant literature concerning images on the plates. Again, these are not skeptics, these are UFOlogist.

but the vague description of the Villarroel "companion papers" that were removed makes it sound like they were neither new versions of the previous nuclear correlations paper (which had already been on Arxiv and was later published) or entirely papers being submitted to a journal for publication, just a remix.

I think if one is in the Villarreol camp, as Mellon appears to be, then ANY attempt to have any of her work "censored" is cause for concern.

 

[JMartJr]

If "those who care about good science don't like what I'm doing" is a "win", there's little more that needs saying.

That might be omitted from their posts complaining about it. ^_^