Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

[Mendel]

There is an official plate list in text format at https://gsss.stsci.edu/skysurveys/SurveyPlateList.txt, but it's for all the sky surveys and would need some cleanup and filtering.

Palomar plates are in there as "Palomar Schmidt," with the emulsion types distinguished in the Survey column as POSSI-E (for Kodak 103a-E red-sensitive emulsion) and POSSI-O (for Kodak 103a-O blue-sensitive emulsion).

I've attached
• PalomarList.txt : subset of the PlateList with just the "Palomar Schmidt" and POSSI entries
• Possi-E-ISOdatetime.txt : ISO timestamps for all POSSI-E entries in the PalomarList
• Possi-E-datecounts.txt : ISO dates, one row per date, with a count of how often that date occurs in the original list

Observations:
• 937 POSSI-E plates, 933 POSSI-O plates
• first plate Nov 19, 1949
• 380 unique dates, 368 dates up to 1957-04-28 inclusive
• Plates in April 1957: 3 on the 28th, 2 on the 29th, 4 on the 30th

A dataset comprising daily data (November 19, 1949 -April 28,1957) regarding identified transients, nuclear testing, and UAP reports was created (n=2,718 days). [...]
Transient data were available for the period November 19, 1949 – April 28, 1957, inclusive.

Why did they omit 2 days?

 

[Ann K]

If there is any correlation with nuclear testing, this might be due to gamma-rays or some other particles directly interacting with the photographic plates.

...which might be plausible AFTER a nuclear test, but certainly not before it.

 

[Eburacum]

...which might be plausible AFTER a nuclear test, but certainly not before it.

To distinguish these two cases would require analysis of the exact time of day each plate was exposed.

 

[Mendel]

To distinguish these two cases would require analysis of the exact time of day each plate was exposed.

We have that data, I posted it. What we don't have is exact times for the Russian tests. Nor do we have complete transient data.

 

[jdog]

If there is any correlation with nuclear testing, this might be due to gamma-rays or some other particles directly interacting with the photographic plates.

I see two issues with that.

First, the radiation from the USSR and Australia tests would have to be coming through ~7,900 miles of planet; (radioactive particles in the air wouldn't arrive for about two weeks).

Second, such radioactive particles would also affect all the undeveloped plates in the observatory (and elsewhere), not just the one in the telescope at the time of the test.

 

[NorCal Dave]

I've attached
• PalomarList.txt : subset of the PlateList with just the "Palomar Schmidt" and POSSI entries
• Possi-E-ISOdatetime.txt : ISO timestamps for all POSSI-E entries in the PalomarList
• Possi-E-datecounts.txt : ISO dates, one row per date, with a count of how often that date occurs in the original list

I looked at the datacounts.txt file, but I'm not sure what I'm seeing. Do any of these files list the actual dates transients were seen, so that they can be compared to the nuclear test dates?

Observations:
• 937 POSSI-E plates, 933 POSSI-O plates
• first plate Nov 19, 1949
• 380 unique dates, 368 dates up to 1957-04-28 inclusive
• Plates in April 1957: 3 on the 28th, 2 on the 29th, 4 on the 30th

The POSSI-O (blue) plates are irrelevant here right? The authors say they only used the POSSI-E red plates to identify transients.

Does the 380 unique dates represent the days a transient was noted? The paper said there were 310 dates out of 2718 that included a transients(s) that could be compared to the nuclear test dates:

Transient data were available for the period November 19, 1949 – April 28, 1957, inclusive. Of the 2,718 days in this period, transients were observed on 310 days (11.4%). In the overall sample, the number of transients per date ranged from 0 to 4,528 (across multiple locations on multiple plates), with 5% trimmed mean = 10.09 and median = 0.0. The distribution of number of transients per date was highly right-skewed (skewness = 10.35) and over-dispersed (variance = 28,938.64).

Lots of numbers!

 

[John J.]

If there is any correlation with nuclear testing, this might be due to gamma-rays or some other particles directly interacting with the photographic plates.

That's an interesting idea. And it's interesting that Villaroel et al. don't consider a direct causal explanation for the supposed correlation between nuclear tests and "transients".

...such radioactive particles would also affect all the undeveloped plates in the observatory (and elsewhere), not just the one in the telescope at the time of the test.

Wish I'd thought of that. I think @jdog's points effectively rule out a direct physical cause theory.

 

[Mendel]

I looked at the datacounts.txt file, but I'm not sure what I'm seeing. Do any of these files list the actual dates transients were seen, so that they can be compared to the nuclear test dates?

No. We don't have transient data. (That's what the other thread is for.)
My numbers are for all of the POSSI-E (red) plates, regardless of whether there are transients on them. My aim is to work out exactly what the likelihood is that a plate was taken near a nuke test, and compare that to the numbers in the paper.

The telescope often took several plates on one night, so if they took 3 plates, you'd see that date and the number 3 next to it.

 

[Eburacum]

...which might be plausible AFTER a nuclear test, but certainly not before it.

I note that this applies also to the hypothesis that these 'transients' were alien observers; how would alien observers know that nuclear tests were due, before the event? Did they have some sort of advanced warning from the Pentagon and the Kremlin?

 

[Eburacum]

First, the radiation from the USSR and Australia tests would have to be coming through ~7,900 miles of planet; (radioactive particles in the air wouldn't arrive for about two weeks).

On the other hand, why would a geostationary satellite above Palomar be expected to observe a test in Australia or Siberia?

Second, such radioactive particles would also affect all the undeveloped plates in the observatory (and elsewhere), not just the one in the telescope at the time of the test.

Perhaps they bought new batches direct from the makers, or kept plates in a safe? A sensible precaution, since we know cosmic rays affect photographic plates.

I'm reaching here, especially since I don't think that radioactivity would affect plates in this way, unless the tests were very close by. Palomar is 426 km from the Nevada testing site, which is a bit far, but maybe not impossibly so.

 

[jdog]

I note that this applies also to the hypothesis that these 'transients' were alien observers; how would alien observers know that nuclear tests were due, before the event? Did they have some sort of advanced warning from the Pentagon and the Kremlin?

I also have issues with that point, but let me take that back a step -- why would you even look for a correlation between pre-Sputnik transient lights in the sky and nuclear bomb detonations as opposed to, say, missile tests, pre-Sputnik rocket launches, or any other tech-related event?

Here's what it says in the paper:

Possible associations of transients with nuclear weapons testing might be considered for two reasons. From 1951 until the launch of Sputnik in 1957, at least 124 above-ground nuclear tests were conducted by the United States (U.S.), Soviet Union, and Great Britain. In some circumstances, nuclear radiation is known to cause a visible glow (i.e., Cherenkov radiation)5​. Consistent with this concept, glowing "fireballs" in the sky were reported in multiple instances to occur shortly after nuclear tests in locations where significant nuclear fallout was expected6,7​. Based on such observations, we hypothesize that some transients might represent an unrecognized atmospheric effect of nuclear testing. We also considered a very different potential reason for links between nuclear testing and transients. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts and records from the Air Force's Project Blue Book investigation of what are now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) indicate that unusual, apparently metallic objects of unknown origin were reported in the sky on multiple occasions on dates surrounding nuclear weapons tests6​. UAP have often been reported at nuclear power plants and sites involved in nuclear weapons production as well7,8​. We hypothesized that if UAP seen during nuclear tests were metallic, they might reflect sunlight (or possibly emit light directly) and thus appear as transients if they were in geosynchronous orbits immediately before or after their appearance during nuclear testing.

The academic citations:
5) Neamtan, S.M. The Čerenkov effect and the dielectric constant. Physical Rev. 92, 1362-1367(1953).
6) Hastings, R. Flashing sky, killing wind in UFOs & nukes: extraordinary encounters at nuclear weapons sites (2nd​ Edition). 67-95 (Self-Published, 2017).
7) Knuth, K.H. et al. The new science of unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena (UAP). Preprint at: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2502.06794. (2025).
8) Grosvenor, Sean, Larry Hancock, & Ian Porritt. 2025. UAP Indications Analysis 1945-1975 United States Atomic Warfare Complex." Limina - The Journal of UAP Studies 2, https://doi.org/10.59661/001c.131854, (2025)

Though from searching through sources 6-8, none of them actually associate UFO reports with nuclear weapons detonations, only events like missile tests and bomber flights. Hastings could somewhere in his self-published book, but only his introduction is public and it and his extensive website seems to only talk about UFO reports from people at sites like missile silos and bomber bases. But he offers specific dates for his incidents and I don't see why you wouldn't check those dates for correlations...

 

[Eburacum]

I've read a lot of Hasting's work, and even debated with him online a bit; the evidence is very scanty, contains a lot of hearsay and events recalled long afterwards, with errors in dating and location. So checking the dates is not always straightforward.

 

[NorCal Dave]

No. We don't have transient data. (That's what the other thread is for.)
My numbers are for all of the POSSI-E (red) plates, regardless of whether there are transients on them. My aim is to work out exactly what the likelihood is that a plate was taken near a nuke test, and compare that to the numbers in the paper.

The telescope often took several plates on one night, so if they took 3 plates, you'd see that date and the number 3 next to it.

Ok, so we have a list of all the days that photographic plates were taken and the number of plates taken on particular dates. But we don't know which of these plates produced a transient. Correct?

EDIT: I suppose this list could be a list of dates that plates were made and transients were discovered. Not sure if it really changes anything.

Then we can, like you said, at least correlate nuclear test dates to dates photographic plates were produced. I'm not sophisticated enough to write code for this, so I guess I'll be opening a few tabs and comparing.

IF I understand @Mendel correctly, the file he provided, Possi-E-datacounts.txt in post #201 up-thread, is a list of all the dates photographic plates were made and how many plates were made on the specified dates. IF that is correct, then all of the transients that are being correlated with nuclear testing are from plates made on the days listed in this file, right? IF so, one can just look at the dates plates were made and look at dates that nuclear tests took place.

When I did this the old fashioned way, by just looking at the .txt file list and the test dates in post #183, I got 17 hits. That is, 17 dates that photographic plates was made and a nuclear test took place. Listed as follows:

For the USA:

4/7/1951
11/29/1951
3/17/1953
5/19/1953
3/26/1954
3/12/1955
3/22/1955
3/23/1955
4/15/1955
5/15/1955

For the USSR:

9/3/1953
9/8/1953
10/1/1954
10/3/1954
10/5/1954
10/30/1954
11/22/1955

I found no hits for UK testing.

One thing I noticed is that, instead of aliens making it more likely that there was a correlation between transients on plates and nuclear tests, more hits happen when both things are happening a lot. For example in the list of USSR hits above, note that October of 1954 accounts for over 1/2 of the hits. During that month the USSR conducted test on days 1,3,5,8,19,23,26 and 30. In the same month, plates were produced on days 1,2,3,4,5,6, and 30. They were both busy in October of 1954, especially in the early part of the month.

Obviously I was just looking for straight 1 to 1 hits, not days before and after, which IMO was just a form of padding to get the numbers up.

 

[John J.]

Here's what it says in the paper:

Possible associations of transients with nuclear weapons testing might be considered for two reasons. From 1951 until the launch of Sputnik in 1957, at least 124 above-ground nuclear tests were conducted by the United States (U.S.), Soviet Union, and Great Britain. In some circumstances, nuclear radiation is known to cause a visible glow (i.e., Cherenkov radiation)5​.

Cherenkov radiation is fairly well understood (Wikipedia, Cherenkov radiation).
It is caused by charged particles travelling through a dielectric medium faster than light can propagate through that medium (although the speed of those particles is always less than c, the speed of light in a vacuum), and is often observed in nuclear reactors where the fuel rods are underwater.

I'm not sure there is a plausible mechanism whereby a nuclear test could generate visible Cherenkov radiation hundreds or thousands of miles away, excepting perhaps a piece of highly energetic fallout landing in a suitable medium, but as @jdog has pointed out, fallout takes time to travel. Even if this were to occur, it is hard to imagine a situation where a sufficiently large amount of sufficiently energetic airborne fallout, presumably in the form of a "cloud" of radioactive debris, would end up in a suitable medium in the atmosphere (areas of high humidity??) and be bright enough to be observed hundreds or thousands of miles away from the site of detonation, or having travelled hundreds or thousands of miles from the point of detonation. Like most airborne contaminants, fallout disperses, and radioactive decay is a thing.

There are no records whatsoever (AFAIK) of the blue glow of Cherenkov radiation being directly observed in the "normal" environment, even during/ after a nuclear test. We know nuclear tests were closely monitored, and often the detonation sites were surveyed.

The paper continues

Consistent with this concept, glowing "fireballs" in the sky were reported in multiple instances to occur shortly after nuclear tests in locations where significant nuclear fallout was expected6,7​

As @jdog points out, the first in-text reference ([6]) that supposedly supports this claim is for Hastings' self-published UFOs & nukes: extraordinary encounters at nuclear weapons sites 2nd ed., 2017.
The second ([7]) is for Knuth, K.H. et al., "The new science of unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena (UAP)", a pre-print (i.e. yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal); 2025; Villarroel, Garry P. Nolan and the Tedesco brothers feature in a long list of co-authors
(link https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06794; PDF attached below).
The relevant part of this paper is pages 58-65, "UAP and Nuclear Weapons", which in its first para. states

Robert Hastings has been studying UFO incursions at nuclear sites for more than fifty years (since 1973), having interviewed over 150 former and retired military personnel involved in such cases...

...so the first ref. is for Hasting's self-published book, the second ref. is for a piece of work whose relevant part refers to Hasting's self-published book.
(Even allowing for the conventions used in citing references, I'm unhappy that Villarroel doesn't mention that she is a co-author of a paper that she refers to, but in fairness that might not be unusual. Doesn't mean we have to like it- I feel it provides a layer of opacity to the casual reader, who might not realise that the author, in this case Villarroel, is citing something they worked on, not an independent confirmatory source).

None of the examples/ descriptions given in the "UAP and Nuclear Weapons" section of the Knuth et al. paper describe the steady blue glow of Cherenkov radiation:

'Balls of Fire'... Brown quickly found the object, a bright ball of fire... It is suggested that the 'green fireballs' which appeared over Sandia in late 1948... two members of a patrol station southeast of Killeen base witnessed a small inch and a half diameter (4 cm) blinking violet light hovering about six feet off the ground and only about ten to twelve feet away... Five minutes later, four Army men located about two miles away observed a small bright light with a two to four inch metallic cone attached.

The violet light made me pause for thought, maybe an incorrect colour term had been used for a blueish glowing light; but barring an (unrecorded) accident involving the dispersal of fissile material, which caused no illness and required no clean-up that we're aware of, this seems extremely unlikely (and the problem of what dielectric medium might be present in the air to allow for Cherenkov radiation to occur remains).

The 1967 Malmstrom Air Force Base incident (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmstrom_UFO_incident) is mentioned by Knuth et al. as "...the most famous of these events"; the claimed sightings are referred to as "incursions" indicating that the authors take it for granted that a physical object or objects were in fact present. Robert Salas, a 26-year old USAF lieutenant at the time of the incident, claimed over 18 years later to have seen a red UFO (which, he claimed without any supporting evidence, incapacitated a Security Policeman). But the Knuth et al. work doesn't describe Salas' description, which very clearly is not of Cherenkov radiation! Nor do Knuth et al. refer to the USAF report on the incident (which was of interest to the USAF because it involved an electrical/ electronics malfunction which affected the ability to launch a small number of ICBMs for some hours, although of course there was no attempt or intention to actually launch them).
The report, quoted on Wikipedia, stated

Rumors of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) around the area of Echo Flight during the time of the fault were disproven. A Mobile Strike Team, which had checked all November Flight's [launch facilities] on the morning of 16 March 67, were question[ed] and stated that no unusual activity or sightings were observed.

The references used by Villarroel concerning

...glowing "fireballs"

are not "Consistent with this concept" [of Cherenkov radiation].

Citing questionable sources which provide evidence of questionable relevance (i.e. not describing Cherenkov radiation) Villarroel forms a tentative, and frankly implausible, hypothesis linking unproven claims of "fireballs" (etc. etc.), nuclear weapons, Cherenkov radiation and transients.
Having constructed what might be thought of as a distinctly weedy straw man, Villarroel goes on to write

We also considered a very different potential reason for links between nuclear testing and transients.

...and goes on to advance her aliens in geosynchronous orbits theory.

It's almost, "Here's a theory where I link a known physical phenomenon with unusual sightings, which lack evidential support, which do not describe that physical phenomenon. Still reading? Here's an even more interesting theory..."
Sort of paving the way from highly questionable science to pseudoscience.

 

[Gary C]

Agreed. The references to Cherenkov Radiation are not justified in this context. It's another example of a UFOlogist using technical language out of context in order to sound science-y to a lay audience.

 

[Eburacum]

Operation Fishbowl sprayed a lot of radioactive particles into the upper atmosphere, causing artificial auroras. Not exactly Cherenkov radiation, though.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Operation Fishbowl sprayed a lot of radioactive particles into the upper atmosphere, causing artificial auroras. Not exactly Cherenkov radiation, though.

But for the purposes of the paper in question, Operation Fishbowl was a series of 5 high altitude tests, possibly as a sub-set of Operation Storax or Dominic. The nuclear devices were sent up in rockets, between "tens of miles" and "250 miles" and occurred between July 1962 and November 1962. Well outside the time frame for transients.

But pretty cool looking if one doesn't stop to realize what one is seeing.

 

[HoaxEye]

Update: the paper was published today https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-21620-3
Also: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe

Source:
Source: https://x.com/drbeavillarroel/status/1980253179817464108

 

[Carlo]

"Our overall pattern of results is clearly not consistent with the proposition that most transients are due to contamination or defects in photographic plates or scanned images, or to any other local confounds at the observatory itself. Contamination of photographic plates by nuclear fallout produces diffuse fogged spots quite different in appearance than the discrete star-like brightness profiles with point spread functions characteristic of transients"

I don't see any data to support this or even a few pictures to show what the difference looks like. Am I missing it or is it just not included?

 

[HoaxEye]

I don't see any data to support this or even a few pictures to show what the difference looks like. Am I missing it or is it just not included?

I suppose the "discrete star-like brightness profiles with point spread functions characteristic of transients" is the evidence. I don't agree. These plates are known to have a large number of defects. Emulsion flaws are probably most common. I checked randomly selected POSS-II (red) plates and some much older plates from one European observatory, and couldn't find that many defects/transients. Sample size was very small, so of course this isn't conclusive.

 

[gargamel]

Character assassination isn't my kind of deal but one of the authors of this doesn't appear to apply any scientific rigour whatsoever in her comments on alleged UFO-stuff elsewhere.

 

[Mauro]

I accept bets on the article undergoing the same fate as Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001 (published on Science), if not the fate of water memory (published on Nature) or polywater.

 

[Kyle Ferriter]

Quoting from: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe

Moreover, the temporal correlations between the 1950s transients and both the Washington 1952 UFO events and 124 U.S., Soviet, and British nuclear weapons tests deserve serious attention. Even if individual events remain uncertain, Bruehl & Villarroel (2025) shows statistically significant correlations between subsets of the transient sample in Solano et al. (2022) and historical nuclear activity and aerial anomalies. This alone contradicts the idea that the entire sample consists of plate defects.

They seriously undermine the entire paper by trying to shoehorn in some association to very selectively-chosen alleged UFO sightings and newsworthy nuclear events. I think this reasoning very clearly worse than the work in the rest of the paper and it makes no sense for it to be included. This is a paper about analysis of transients and how to distinguish between plate defects and likely real physical objects. They should be focusing on methodology validity and establishing that what they did actually works to identify physical objects in the sky and to discriminate between defects and physical objects.

While it is possible to compute the fraction of each photographic plate that lies in Earth's shadow for any given orbital altitude, not all heights are equally meaningful for our analysis. At low altitudes (e.g., below ∼10,000 km), Earth's shadow may cover large fractions of the plates, making any deficit or surplus hard to interpret. While plate defects do not respond to the position of Earth's shadow, the diagnostic power of this test depends on the assumption that the shadow is randomly placed with respect to plate geometry and artifact distribution. When the shadow covers a large portion of the plate (e.g., >50%), this assumption breaks down, and even a random distribution of artifacts will naturally yield an overdensity in the shadowed region. In such cases, the test becomes less sensitive to systematic avoidance, making small shadow coverages (e.g., <5%–10%) more reliable.

Moreover, reflective objects in low orbits tend to move rapidly and would often appear as streaks rather than point-spread-function (PSF)-like transients. Since our sample only includes PSF-like detections, it is physically unlikely that many of them originate from low Earth orbits, where glints would need to be extremely short-lived (on the order of milliseconds). Nir et al. (2021) show that most sub-second flares are glints of sunlight reflected from satellites in geosynchronous and graveyard orbits. For these reasons, we focus our main analysis on altitudes where less than 5% of the field is typically shadowed—regions where the shadow behaves approximately randomly, and where reflective glints, if present, would be both detectable and physically plausible.

I'm trying to understand why they did this. At first, it doesn't really make sense to me why they would filter to only plates with less than 5% shadow coverage at their proposed altitudes. Or why it would matter if shadow locations within the plates analyzed are random. The shadow of the Earth is fundamentally not random so why would that be a criteria you would use to prefilter the data? This sounds like more p hacking and prefiltration of plates to exclude ones that do not support their hypothesis. If you're looking at a plate that's looking at the night sky and there's a ton of artifacts in it, these facts need to be included in the math, right? You can't just exclude it. They have been going around citing this 22sigma computation for "deficit of transients in earth's shadow". But they intentionally excluded plates which show a bunch of candidate transients in Earth's shadow.

 

[AmberRobot]

I suppose the "discrete star-like brightness profiles with point spread functions characteristic of transients" is the evidence. I don't agree. These plates are known to have a large number of defects. Emulsion flaws are probably most common. I checked randomly selected POSS-II (red) plates and some much older plates from one European observatory, and couldn't find that many defects/transients. Sample size was very small, so of course this isn't conclusive.

Presumably the PSF of the telescope is a well-understood function. How closely would one expect these "emulsion flaws" to emulate a stellar PSF?

 

[MapperGuy]

More than a little late to bring this up I know...

"deficit of transients in earth's shadow"

But the terminology used by these 'researchers' bothers me because it seems like an attempt to conceal what they are investigating from casual observers.
"Transients" is a fine word, but what they really mean is ALIEN SPACECRAFT WATCHING EARTH. Does not apply here hopefully, but use of the term transients might lead casual reviewers who saw the title to think that there is some 'real science' here. Hiding the fact they are just looking for flying saucers.

Slightly off-topic: Years ago while browsing in a university libraries astronomy section I found a book with a title something like: "Magnetic Structures in the Jovian Atmosphere". Skimming through it, trying to figure out what it was about , was interesting because the author was using terminology they had made up for describing these 'structures'. Eventually however I figured out what these structures were, thousand mile long alien interstellar spacecraft floating in Jupiters atmosphere. But the terms ALIEN and SPACECRAFT were not used anywhere I saw. I don't know if the book was a joke or not, but if the term 'magnetic structures' were removed and replaced with alien spacecraft I don't thing the book would have been purchased and put in the astronomy section.

This all strikes me as using obscuring terminology to confuse potential reviewers and sound more scientifical.

 

[jdog]

Update: the paper was published today https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-21620-3
Also: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe

Source:
Source: https://x.com/drbeavillarroel/status/1980253179817464108

Meh. The published paper doesn't seem to have addressed the issues of the preprint.

The statistical calculations aren't necessarily wrong, but the underlying dates involved don't seem to rigorously represent what the authors infer they represent.

The sky survey was neither continuous nor a representative random sample of the sky during the testing period. And given the seasonal gaps and workweek schedule, the survey likely oversamples the times of year and days of week during which nuclear tests were conducted (as noted upthread), which dramatically reduces the significance of the correlation.

The whole "association with nuclear testing" aspect still seems spurious, since they didn't correct for the actual times and time zone differences of the tests. By arbitrarily assigning the testing to the day of, the day before and the day after a test (ignoring time zone differences, where the tests in Russia and Australia are across the international date line), and crediting the instance of a transient to a whole day rather than a specific time, they've given themselves leeway to, for example, associate a test conducted at 12:01 a.m. Saturday in Kazakhstan with a transient at 11:59 p.m. Sunday in San Diego, 61 hours later. (24 hours of Saturday, 24 hours of Sunday, plus a 13-hour offset for the time zone.)

How often this might have happened isn't clear, since the authors didn't release their data. We do know from their discussion of methods that they didn't control for the date variance, or explain why they included the day before tests occurred. (The only rationale for that is UFO lore and the lore sources they cite don't associate sightings with detonations, only nuclear facilities and presence of weapons.)

 

[Ann K]

We need a large banner to hang outside their office window, saying "Correlation is not causation".

 

[HoaxEye]

Took some time to realize that the PASP paper (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe) directly addresses the Hambly & Blair criticism (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.00497). I was expecting to see something like this in the Nature paper, at minimum mentioning the Hambly & Blair research. That is a major gap in the Nature paper.

Although the PASP paper addresses criticism by Hambly & Blair, there's no systematic review of POSS-II plate images. They seem to suggest that these interesting transients disappeared right after launch of Sputnik, and are therefore not visible in POSS-II and later images. How convenient. It would be more stronger hypothesis if they would talk about 1980s, because there was no huge increase in satellites before that.

I hope Hambly & Blair will address the PASP paper. Someone clearly needs to analyze the original plate scans vs. DSS/SSS copies. Also, POSS-I vs. POSS-II transient rates should be compared. This could bring end to the debate about the emulsion flaws. Maybe they should also take balloon launches like Skyhook into account. It would be more logical to search for prosaic explanations like emulsion defects and balloons before jumping into UFO/ET conclusions - which some of the authors and ufologist are already openly promoting on social media, podcasts and pretty soon in media interviews. These papers actually do not show any evidence of ET/UFO or ET probes. They are simply "asking questions", but scientifically.

 

[Eburacum]

Took some time to realize that the PASP paper (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe) directly addresses the Hambly & Blair criticism (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.00497).

It does this by saying that star images on a 50 minute exposure would be fuzzy, but a transient lasting a fraction of a second would be sharp. Yes, but so would a plate anomaly. So Handley and Blair's criticism is not refuted; it remains the case that these anomalies are overwhelmingly more likely to be flaws in the plate rather than alien satellites. To quote the PASP paper:

Thus, profile sharpness alone cannot conclusively distinguish between artifact and astrophysical origin.

Note as well that any transient longer than a second or so would show a line, not a dot - and all these lines would be precisely aligned with the rotation of the telescope as it compensates for Earth's rotation. But there Is no evidence for such extended lines. So somehow all these NTA satellites are specifically configured to only glint for a fraction of a second. These satellites must be very strange shapes, too; they have tiny reflective surfaces that are only visible for a fraction of a second, but rarely rotate so that the glints are visible at regularly spaced intervals. One imagines a large black sphere with a tiny hand mirror glued to the side.

Any glint from a real object that lasted 0.5 seconds (the figure suggested in the paper) would be reduced in apparent brightness by a factor of 6000 (0.5 seconds over 50 minutes). This would result in a decrease in the apparent brightness on the plate by a factor of 10.4 magnitudes, not 9 magnitudes as stated in the paper.

As well as these incredibly dim anomalies that last a fraction of a second, we should also see a selection of longer transients, 1 or more seconds in length, which would show an easily recognisable signature of elongation parallel to the Earth's rotation. But we don't.

Not to mention glints from satellites in much closer orbits - if you want to observe events on the surface of a planet, a network of spy satellites in low Earth orbit would give a much clearer view than a grid thirty-five thousand kilometres away.

 

[HoaxEye]

It does this by saying that star images on a 50 minute exposure would be fuzzy, but a transient lasting a fraction of a second would be sharp. Yes, but so would a plate anomaly. So Handley and Blair's criticism is not refuted; it remains the case that these anomalies are overwhelmingly more likely to be flaws in the plate rather than alien satellites. To quote the PASP paper:


Note as well that any transient longer than a second or so would show a line, not a dot - and all these lines would be precisely aligned with the rotation of the telescope as it compensates for Earth's rotation. But there us no evidence for such extended lines. So somehow all these NTA satellites are specifically configured to only glint for a fraction of a second. These satellites must be very strange shapes, too; they have tiny reflective surfaces that are only visible for a fraction of a second, but rarely rotate so that the glints are visible at regularly spaced intervals. One imagines a large black sphere with a tiny hand mirror glued to the side.

Any glint from a real object that lasted 0.5 seconds (the figure suggested in the paper) would be reduced in apparent brightness by a factor of 6000 (0.5 seconds over 50 minutes). This would result in a decrease in the apparent brightness on the plate by a factor of 10.4 magnitudes, not 9 magnitudes as stated in the paper.

As well as these incredibly dim anomalies that last a fraction of a second, we should also see a selection of longer transients, 1 or more seconds in length, which would show an easily recognisable signature of elongation parallel to the Earth's rotation. But we don't.

Not to mention glints from satellites in much closer orbits - if you want to observe events on the surface of a planet, a network of spy satellites in low Earth orbit would give a much clearer view than a grid thirty-five thousand kilometres away.

Thank you @Eburacum, good comments! I agree: Hambly & Blair criticism is not refuted, but it is "addressed" or "answered". What I wanted to say is that prior to this, Villarroel et al. ignored criticism by Hambly & Blair almost fully, but now they attempted to refute or provide alternative hypothesis in PASP paper. But you are right, the criticism was not refuted.

 

[Mendel]

Not to mention glints from satellites in much closer orbits - if you want to observe events on the surface of a planet, a network of spy satellites in low Earth orbit would give a much clearer view than a grid thirty-five thousand kilometres away.

no, you see, these satellites are in geosynchronous orbits so they can do long-term observations without the orbit decaying, but they only show up right when a nuclear test is about to happen

 

[jdog]

no, you see, these satellites are in geosynchronous orbits so they can do long-term observations without the orbit decaying, but they only show up right when a nuclear test is about to happen

Not to mention showing up on the wrong side of the planet to see the detonations in Australia and Russia.

 

[flarkey]

Note as well that any transient longer than a second or so would show a line, not a dot - and all these lines would be precisely aligned with the rotation of the telescope as it compensates for Earth's rotation. But there Is no evidence for such extended lines. So somehow all these NTA satellites are specifically configured to only glint for a fraction of a second. These satellites must be very strange shapes, too; they have tiny reflective surfaces that are only visible for a fraction of a second, but rarely rotate so that the glints are visible at regularly spaced intervals. One imagines a large black sphere with a tiny hand mirror glued to the side.

I had thought about this too. There doesn't seem to be any consideration given for the direction of the transients. Even if they are very short-duration bright glints, the direction and length of the 'joined-up' line should be consistent.

Additionally the "Association of transients with UAP sightings" assumes the validity of the UAP Witness Report Data and doesn't consider the potential for misidentifications or un-identification of prosaic and known phenomena. The UFOCAT database is undoubtedly littered with false positives and will skew any statistical correlation. I'm really surprised that they havent even made an assumption here say "lets assume 50% of these are valid". They've assumed a 100% validity.

 

[HoaxEye]

Interesting theory by Anton Petrov:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFGiDyAx0F4


-> it is possible that photographic plates were contaminated by nuclear fallout. Note: I still think the emulsion defects are most likely explanation, but there could be several others.

 

[Robert Sheaffer]

So were they looking for spots that appeared during one exposure but not the other?

No, the red and blue exposures were to determine the color of each star, from which astronomers can calculate a lot about it. There are many stars that would appear bright on the red plate, but faint or invisible on the blue; and vice-versa.

 

[Robert Sheaffer]

While that could explain it if the difference were small but very statistically significant, it's isn't small, I don't think it can explain this effect size.

View attachment 83124

In general, they're claiming a roughly 30% deficit of transients in the earth's shadow. Could the magnetotail do something like that? I wouldn't expect so.

Generally I'd like to see more discussion of the shadow deficit in this thread. It's the most interesting, most well evidenced claim being made.

If an object is in geosynchronous orbit, it only passes into the earth's shadow around the time of equinox. As Grok explains,

"Frequency of Eclipses

• Twice per year: Geosynchronous satellites encounter eclipse seasons around the equinoxes (approximately March 20–21 and September 22–23). During these periods, the Sun crosses the Earth's equatorial plane, aligning with the satellite's orbital plane.
• Each eclipse season lasts about 45 days, centered around the equinoxes (roughly 22–23 days before and after each equinox).
• Within each season, eclipses occur daily when the satellite passes through Earth's shadow, typically near local midnight at the satellite's longitude.

Duration of Each Eclipse

• The duration of an eclipse depends on the satellite's position relative to the Earth's shadow (umbra and penumbra).
• Maximum duration: The longest eclipse occurs at the peak of the season (near the equinox), lasting up to 72 minutes (approximately 1 hour and 12 minutes).
• Variation: The duration is shorter at the start and end of the eclipse season, gradually increasing to the maximum and then decreasing. Near the edges of the season, eclipses may last only a few minutes.
• The Earth's shadow consists of the umbra (full shadow, no direct sunlight) and penumbra (partial shadow, reduced sunlight). Most of the eclipse duration is spent in the umbra, with brief transitions through the penumbra."

I wonder if the authors took this into account?

 

[Robert Sheaffer]

I don't think there anything that requires these to be geostationary, or in any particular orbit.

All the transients, as far as I know, are just one-off flashes in one position. There are no repeats (although there are some clusters, but possibly Texas Sharpshooter style)

A satellite in non-geosynchronous orbit would leave a streak rather than a point of light.

 

[FatPhil]

A satellite in non-geosynchronous orbit would leave a streak rather than a point of light.

Are the telescopes not moving over time? If not, all the stars will be streaks. And if they are tracking the stars, the geosynchronous satellites will be streaks too, at least whilst they're reflecting the up-to-half-a-degree of sun in their view.

 

[Robert Sheaffer]

I had thought about this too. There doesn't seem to be any consideration given for the direction of the transients. Even if they are very short-duration bright glints, the direction and length of the 'joined-up' line should be consistent.

Additionally the "Association of transients with UAP sightings" assumes the validity of the UAP Witness Report Data and doesn't consider the potential for misidentifications or un-identification of prosaic and known phenomena. The UFOCAT database is undoubtedly littered with false positives and will skew any statistical correlation. I'm really surprised that they havent even made an assumption here say "lets assume 50% of these are valid". They've assumed a 100% validity.

Supposedly, the transients don't show any direction of motion; they're just perfect round dots. Which is odd, since even satellites in geosynchronous orbit ought to streak a little. A geosync satellite moves eastward in its orbit at the rate of about 1 degree every four minutes, so that it appears to hover over a fixed spot on earth. The earth rotates under it, so that the stars appear to be moving about one degree every four minutes in the opposite direction (westward). And the camera, of course, is following the stars.

 

[Montauk]

A take from X user @SpaceScienceGod:

After listening to Dr. Bruehl, I have more confidence in the research he co-sponsored with Dr. Villarroel and this paper we've been talking about for a while. It seems pretty clear to him what are the strengths and weaknesses of this research, and doesn't sensationalize like others on this app and even Dr. Villarroel herself at times through the promotion of questionable UFOx grifters. He understands that this research will need to be verified outside their data set, and that it's critical that they do.

I've never had an issue with this paper or method they published, talking with other astronomers the idea of looking at observations this old and confirming it with the shadow of the Earth is sound and quite clever. It's the sensationalism and people who deny science, yet invoke it when it's convenient for them, and misrepresent it for their own narrative. This doesn't prove that Aliens exist in any definitive way. However, it does prove that IF they do exist, it will be in the scientific observations using tools laid out like in this publication, that we will find proof IF it's there.

Replicating this using other observations of the same time period from other observatories, is critical as it proves that the method is consistent and will validate that these observations from Palomar are accurate. It was clear to me that Dr. Bruehl understood this and was not being disingenuous in anyway about it.

As excited as @DrBeaVillarroel may be, I would recommend she be wary on who she interviews with, and how her and Dr. Bruehl presents this research under some of these influencers who are trying to sensationalize it, as it could hurt their efforts. But I understand there is a fine line when promoting for funding.

This is only the beginning. Keep going.