Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

[jarlrmai]

The idea of saying we think we found these weird transients is fine, it's just then going oh and we for some reason tried to correlate them with some UFO sightings and nuclear tests just seems a step off the bridge to me.

Also with a paper of with the conclusions of this one I might expect some sort of layman's guide to the methods and conclusions for publicity or something.

 

[gargamel]

The idea of saying we found these weird transients is fine, it's just then going oh and we for some reason tried to correlate them with some UFO sightings and nuclear tests just seems a step off the bridge to me

That's why I mentioned the other activites of one of the authors, it just feels off. That was regarding the recent stellar objects here in Sweden, by the way, and during this she also happily retweeted and endorsed another guy who is, shall we say, questionable.*

It just doesn't sit right. If one of the lead researchers is prone to this, I dunno.

* He is a serial UFO BSer and I debunked a bunch of his claims him decades ago, highlighted the scammy nature of his financial schemes etc. Elsewhere, on Swedish sites.

 

[Eburacum]

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.

To explain this, the authors of this paper suggest that the transients last only a fraction of a second; 0.5 second is one figure given.

Such short transients do occur nowadays, and can be observed, but in present day observations of geostationary glints, usually the exposures last 30 seconds or so, which only dilutes the apparent brightness of the glint by a fact of 60, not 6000.

 

[jdog]

A take from X user @SpaceScienceGod:

The problem with the idea of checking other observations from that era for corroboration is that Palomar had the only instrument capable of taking those images in that era, which is why POSS-1 was the first comprehensive sky survey.

A second thing is that no subsequent survey by Palomar or other equipment found any signs of such transients. If there were glinting objects like these in orbit, they should still be there and we should be able to spot them. It might have been easier to see them in a sky not yet filled with satellites, but if those objects were in stable geostationary or geosynchronous orbits 70 years ago they should still be there and should be findable with 2025 technology.

So then you have to come up with some idea of why the glints were there during the survey and never found again in POSS-2 or later surveys using more sophisticated equipment. One could conclude the process was flawed and the original idea of looking for signs of pre-human space debris by studying transients in POSS-1 was intriguing, but a dead end. It's worth studying the photographic processes used to see if they were susceptible to such noise, and maybe try to establish the potential orbits of glinting objects from the survey data and look to see if there is anything there.

Or, you could double down, and argue that some objects were there in the 1950s, but they left.

So this paper comes across as a rationalization.

The choice of looking for a relationship with (only) above-ground nuclear detonations even before they happened is pretty arbitrary. It's not even clearly in the UFO lore they cite as their reason for looking for the association; there's one self-published book by one UFO researcher where most of the stories are about members of the military in later decades seeing UFOs near where weapons were stored, not where they were used. Also, why would the orbiting objects only be in orbit during the (successful) detonations and not generally when weapons were at testing sites, or prepped for tests that were later postponed?

 

[Montauk]

Here's a take from theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder:


Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5Gt-w38GeNc

While I have not viewed it yet, I have some reservations about it. While some here in the past have praised Ms. Hossenfelder for her pursuits, she in recent years has become suspect, as succinctly shown by @yoshy:

I want to reiterate my opposition to recommending Sabine Hossenfelder. I don't think she's reliable on many subjects anymore because she is so engrossed with far-right culture war talking points.

While the Trump regime eviscerates science, Sabine Hossenfelder, a German physicist by training turned science YouTuber, published a video whose thumbnail states in large red letters, "Academia is Communism." And an upcoming book called The War on Science, written by a coalition of grievance-mongers including Lawrence Krauss, Peter Boghossian, and Gad Saad, received a glowing, official endorsement from Hossenfelder: "Higher education isn't what it used to be," she wrote. "Cancel Culture and DEI have caused many to keep their mouths shut. Not so the authors of this book."

Quoting an article, Sabine Hossenfelder Asks If Science Is Dying. It's Not., that itself quotes Ms. Hossenfelder.

So her response should be treated carefully.

 

[MapperGuy]

Here's a take from theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder:


Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5Gt-w38GeNc

While I have not viewed it yet, I have some reservations about it. While some here in the past have praised Ms. Hossenfelder for her pursuits, she in recent years has become suspect, as succinctly shown by @yoshy:

So her response should be treated carefully.

Just watched the entire video, including the ad for her sponsor.

Seems to be rather middle of the road, believes it to be interesting, but not advancing the idea of aliens.

Got a laugh as the first shot away from her talking head is that of a RADIO telescope. Must have been free video clip....

 

[sigmops]

Just watched the entire video, including the ad for her sponsor.

Seems to be rather middle of the road, believes it to be interesting, but not advancing the idea of aliens.

Got a laugh as the first shot away from her talking head is that of a RADIO telescope. Must have been free video clip....

Some of her videos give the impression that she is providing an in depth analysis and critical peer review of the paper in question. Like she spent a good amount of time understanding the topic and supporting the conclusion of the paper or challenging it.

I didn't get that impression from this video, did you?

Like she mentioned that the author accounts for the Earth's shadow but doesn't seem to care about the methodology. Like she accepts it at face value.

I feel it's a bit of a phoned-in click-bait filler video from her

 

[John J.]

A take from X user @SpaceScienceGod:

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.

If @SpaceScienceGod is hoping that Beatriz Villaroel will keep a bit of distance from the committed UFO believers crowd, or people who make sensational claims, they are out of luck.

She's a co-author, along with 32 others, of "The New Science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (UAP)", preprint submitted to Progress in Aerospace Sciences in April 2025, PDF below.

Co-authors include Gerald and John Tedesco, Garry Nolan, Jacques Vallee. It's basically a comment/ review paper about various known UFO reports and investigations. Where the "New Science" is, is hard to tell. I didn't see any, and it isn't a meta study.

The authors do not challenge the veracity or accuracy of claims they discuss, or consider prosaic explanations, but there's implied criticism of people/ organisations that do.
Among other exciting details, it mentions Luis Elizondo's chiefdom of AATIP, and the $22 million of taxpayer dollars secured for AAWSAP- without mentioning what that $22 million got spent on.

 

[MapperGuy]

If @SpaceScienceGod is hoping that Beatriz Villaroel will keep a bit of distance from the committed UFO believers crowd, or people who make sensational claims, they are out of luck.

She's a co-author, along with 32 others, of "The New Science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (UAP)", preprint submitted to Progress in Aerospace Sciences in April 2025, PDF below.

Co-authors include Gerald and John Tedesco, Garry Nolan, Jacques Vallee. It's basically a comment/ review paper about various known UFO reports and investigations. Where the "New Science" is, is hard to tell. I didn't see any, and it isn't a meta study.

The authors do not challenge the veracity or accuracy of claims they discuss, or consider prosaic explanations, but there's implied criticism of people/ organisations that do.
Among other exciting details, it mentions Luis Elizondo's chiefdom of AATIP, and the $22 million of taxpayer dollars secured for AAWSAP- without mentioning what that $22 million got spent on.

An interesting collection of topics and programs covered. Some old and based on eyewitnesses and some new, like Loeb's Project Galileo which depends on modern video and electronic equipment. Does demonstrate what I see as the problem with modern UFO researchers insisting on treating every generation of UFOology as being of equal validity. Despite the vast changes that technology has introduced into our ability to collect data..

 

[Mendel]

Does demonstrate what I see as the problem with modern UFO researchers insisting on treating every generation of UFOology as being of equal validity.

I don't see where that's wrong?

 

[orianda]

It may be untenable to assume that it must be one of those, without good reasons. But then I would also say it is untenable to assume that it cannot one of those. Why can we assume that all candidates in one exposure cannot all be defects? Why must the number of authentic transients be greater than 0? This sounds similar to flawed logic we see in other cases like the waves of misidentified airplane reports. For example the Wright Patterson AFB mass drone sighting incident where every piece of imagery released (so far) was identified as airplanes, and it was officially acknowledged that many of the sightings were misidentified airplanes, but then it is still insisted that the number of sightings and the length of time it spanned was so large that it must be the case that some of the sightings were authentic drone sightings.

You're misinterpreting the logical structure of that sentence. The paper isn't saying "some must be real." It's saying "we can't assume none are real"...which is a very different claim.

In any detection problem - from exoplanet searches to medical diagnostics - assuming that every candidate is a false positive without examining them is as unscientific as assuming every one is genuine. The correct scientific posture is agnostic: both real and spurious signals may exist in unknown proportion.

The authors' statement isn't "flawed logic," it's the null position in Bayesian inference. Your counterexample (the Wright-Patterson sightings) actually proves the point: you only know the proportion of false vs. true reports after analysis, not before.

Science doesn't pre-decide the answer. It frames hypotheses that reality can falsify.

 

[FatPhil]

Here's a take from theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder:
...
So her response should be treated carefully.

"I don't have a strong opinion about this one way or the other" is hardly a "take".

 

[flarkey]

You're misinterpreting the logical structure of that sentence. The paper isn't saying "some must be real." It's saying "we can't assume none are real"...which is a very different claim.

In any detection problem - from exoplanet searches to medical diagnostics - assuming that every candidate is a false positive without examining them is as unscientific as assuming every one is genuine. The correct scientific posture is agnostic: both real and spurious signals may exist in unknown proportion.

The authors' statement isn't "flawed logic," it's the null position in Bayesian inference. Your counterexample (the Wright-Patterson sightings) actually proves the point: you only know the proportion of false vs. true reports after analysis, not before.

Science doesn't pre-decide the answer. It frames hypotheses that reality can falsify.

So basically you are saying that when the author says "A reasonable working assumption is that both populations are present in some unknown proportion" - after analysis it may be that the proportion of transients is 0%...?

 

[HoaxEye]

A take from X user @SpaceScienceGod:

Some good advice from this X user. However, Dr. Villarroel and many others directly speak about ET UFOs and Aliens now.

Example 1, Reality Check with Ross Coulthart on YouTube:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKXq-QQ9FUw


When asked to speculate what these objects are, Villarroel speaks about perhaps something made by prior human civilisation (!) or NH/ET/UFO probes. This doesn't leave much room for other, more prosaic explanations.

Among others, Garry Nolan attacked @Mick West and Metabunk: "Metabunk has "solved" nothing. You misunderstand the meaning of data, evidence, conclusion, proof (solved)."

Source: https://x.com/GarryPNolan/status/1981115144726868102


He also posted that Metabunk is "...a loose collection of non-scientific lay people. In my opinion, it's a third rate Facebook forum".

These papers seem to empower ufologist to speak about UFO/ET hypothesis as if they are now scientifically proven facts, which is not the case.

 

[FatPhil]

Among others, Garry Nolan attacked @Mick West and Metabunk: "Metabunk has "solved" nothing. You misunderstand the meaning of data, evidence, conclusion, proof (solved)."

He also posted that Metabunk is "...a loose collection of non-scientific lay people. In my opinion, it's a third rate Facebook forum".

Nice of him to just go straight in with an /ad hominem/. And provide no data demonstrating how we're wrong, and how often. I think our hit rate at converting claims of the non-mundane into verifiable mundane happenstances, be that planes or lampshades, is pretty damn good. What hit rate would he consider second rate? And what would we need to hit the top tier? Can he name some of these second tier and top tier groups of people so that we can objectively do a numerical comparison of our hit rates compared to theirs.

Super happy that he's happy to distance himself though, his insult works both ways.

 

[flarkey]

One thing that's really confusing me about this paper is the the suggestion that these transients are in geosynchronus orbits - but they say there is a correlation with UFOs seen in the atmosphere by members of the public on or close to the date of Nuclear tests. Are they suggesting that these objects are zipping down to get a closer look at historically significant Earthly activities? If so, did any of the plates pick up an image of the glowing plasma generated by their atmospheric re-entry? Now that would be an amazing scientific discovery.

I guess not.

 

[Mendel]

In any detection problem - from exoplanet searches to medical diagnostics - assuming that every candidate is a false positive without examining them is as unscientific as assuming every one is genuine. The correct scientific posture is agnostic: both real and spurious signals may exist in unknown proportion.

There are crumbs on my table. They could be from the bread I ate earlier, or someone might have secretly entered my home, ate their bread at my table, and left without me noticing. That means I can't assume the crumbs on the table are my own: both my crumbs and the intruder's crumbs may exist in unknown proportion.

Do you see the flaw with that argument?

Harriet Hall coined the term tooth fairy science for efforts to examine something that hasn't been established to be there: it's like keeping statistics on how much money the tooth fairy leaves under children's pillows. It can't tell you anything about the tooth fairy if that fairy does not exist.

The fact that Villaroel claims to have found a random correlation is not enough to establish that the phenomenon is real.

Had someone observed these transients at the time, their prediction would need to have been that, with better sensors, these observations would be replicated, and more data on these orbital objects collected. However, this has failed to occur.

I need to believe in the unknown intruder at my breakfast table to propose examining a proportion, because there's no evidence the intruder was ever there; same as the tooth fairy scientists believe in the tooth fairy.

However, if my scientific endeavour requires me to believe on faith that what I'm examining exists, I belong in the theology department, not physics.

We have white dots all over these plates, in the shadows, on days without nuclear tests; the blue plates were not analysed. We don't need orbital objects to explain "a proportion" of these white dots; "flaws in the emulsion" explains them all. Apply Occam's razor. There is no way to establish that some of these white dots are not flaws in the emulsion.

Why would sky catalogue photos correlate with UFO reports? Both require clear nights! (Neither requires UFOs.)

 

[jarlrmai]

One thing that's really confusing me about this paper is the the suggestion that these transients are in geosynchronus orbits - but they say there is a correlation with UFOs seen in the atmosphere by members of the public on or close to the date of Nuclear tests. Are they suggesting that these objects are zipping down to get a closer look at historically significant Earthly activities? If so, did any of the plates pick up an image of the glowing plasma generated by their atmospheric re-entry? Now that would be an amazing scientific discovery.

I guess not.

Yeah it's all very

Step 1: Transients
Step 2: ????
Step 3: UFO sightings

I think at this point I am tired of this, I am not an astrophysicist, this paper apparently has world shaking implications, it shouldn't be just presented as "this science = aliens and unless you are an astrophysicist you don't get to ask any questions."

I'd expect a similar approach to that taken by the CERN OPERA collaboration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly

The preprint of the research stated "[the observed] deviation of the neutrino velocity from c (the speed of light in vacuum) would be a striking result pointing to new physics in the neutrino sector" and referred to the "early arrival time of CNGS muon neutrinos" as an "anomaly".[10]​ OPERA spokesperson Antonio Ereditato explained that the OPERA team had "not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement".[3]​ James Gillies, a spokesperson for CERN, said on September 22 that the scientists were "inviting the broader physics community to look at what they [had] done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements".[11]​

 

[Mendel]

P.S. If I was uncharitable, I'd say the essence of the paper is an attempt to lead the public into a logical fallacy.

(i) Satellites flare (A), these flares can be photographed as points of light (B): A => B
(ii) we see transient points of light: B is true
(iii) therefore, A is true.

But (iii) is illogical and does not follow from (i) and (ii).

(1) a secret intruder at my breakfast table leaves crumbs
(2) there are crumbs
(3) therefore I had a secret intruder

sounds logical (it's not!) to the layperson until you realize these crumbs were left by me.

 

[flarkey]

I'd say the logical fallacy here is an argument from incredulity...

(i) Some astronomical plates have defects.
(ii) The defects usually have the characteristic X.
(iii) I've found defects with the characteristic Y.
(iv) I don't know how defects can have characteristic Y.
(v) Aliens!

 

[Mauro]

P.S. If I was uncharitable, I'd say the essence of the paper is an attempt to lead the public into a logical fallacy.

(i) Satellites flare (A), these flares can be photographed as points of light (B): A => B
(ii) we see transient points of light: B is true
(iii) therefore, A is true.

But (iii) is illogical and does not follow from (i) and (ii).

(1) a secret intruder at my breakfast table leaves crumbs
(2) there are crumbs
(3) therefore I had a secret intruder

sounds logical (it's not!) to the layperson until you realize these crumbs were left by me.

Affirming the consequent

 

[HoaxEye]

One thing that's really confusing me about this paper is the the suggestion that these transients are in geosynchronus orbits - but they say there is a correlation with UFOs seen in the atmosphere by members of the public on or close to the date of Nuclear tests. Are they suggesting that these objects are zipping down to get a closer look at historically significant Earthly activities? If so, did any of the plates pick up an image of the glowing plasma generated by their atmospheric re-entry? Now that would be an amazing scientific discovery.

I guess not.

>Are they suggesting that these objects are zipping down to get a closer look at historically significant Earthly activities?

Here's how I read them:
- Scientific Reports paper: transients were present during nuclear tests. Paper is cautious and prioritises correlation over causation
- PASP paper: transients were observing nuclear tests. Sunlit bias and alignments probably imply intentional placement

It's confusing. I don't understand why they were so cautious about overall wording, because they clearly meant "it's aliens". Perhaps they feared rejection by Scientific Reports or PASP, or both.

Dr. Stephen Bruehl actually says something about the approach in a recent podcast interview (at around 19:48):

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex0Kbhm61sU

"There are things we might want to say or interpretations we may might want to make of the data, but if you want to get stuff into a scientific journal, you have to use this language that is very unexciting. You have to be very careful about not over-interpreting the data. You know, ruling out all possible explanations of things..."

 

[Mendel]

I don't understand why they were so cautious about overall wording, because they clearly meant "it's aliens".

I expect it's an outcome of Nature's peer review.

 

[HoaxEye]

I expect it's an outcome of Nature's peer review.

The language is almost same in pre-print version. They only had to make minor changes and additions.

 

[sigmops]

I expect it's an outcome of Nature's peer review.

Which paper was published in Nature? Nevermind I see it now.

The article titled "Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena" was published in the journal "Scientific Reports" which is owned by Nature's parent company.

My understanding is that Scientific Reports(SR) does not have the same peer review process as Nature. Wikipedia claims SR is the largest journal by number of published articles implying a low bar to be published

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports

 

[HoaxEye]

Which paper was published in Nature?

The article titled "Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena" was published in the journal "Scientific Reports" which is owned by Nature's parent company.

My understanding is that Scientific Reports(SR) does not have the same peer review process as Nature. Wikipedia claims SR is the largest journal by number of published articles implying a low bar to be published

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports

Good point. Nothing was published in Nature. Sci Rep (SR) or Scientific Reports is part of Nature Portfolio, which is part of Springer Nature. The other paper was published in PASP (Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific).

One example of criticism towards SR: https://scholarlycritic.com/when-ed...om-scientific-reports-by-springer-nature.html - mentioning "complete editorial failure"

 

[jdog]

Good point. Nothing was published in Nature. Sci Rep (SR) or Scientific Reports is part of Nature Portfolio, which is part of Springer Nature. The other paper was published in PASP (Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific).

One example of criticism towards SR: https://scholarlycritic.com/when-ed...om-scientific-reports-by-springer-nature.html - mentioning "complete editorial failure"

In some venue Villarroel also complained that the paper first got a desk rejection by the editors at some other journal, meaning they thought it either didn't fit their subject area, wasn't of sufficient significance to publish, or wasn't good enough to bother with peer review.

 

[MyMatesBrainwashed]

In some venue Villarroel also complained that the paper first got a desk rejection by the editors at some other journal, meaning they thought it either didn't fit their subject area, wasn't of sufficient significance to publish, or wasn't good enough to bother with peer review.

Possibly relevant...

Source: https://x.com/DrBeaVillarroel/status/1980881426313544145

 

[HoaxEye]

Possibly relevant...

I think the ArXiv noise started later, after both papers were published. Villarroel and her peers argues ArXiv rejection reflects UFO/UAP stigma. I'm unsure if that's the case.

- There are multiple similar pre-prints by Villarroel et al. in ArXiv already: https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=Villarroel,+B Maybe ArXiv moderators did a simple search and noticed there are similar papers already, and rejected the new ones.
- ArXiv does not perform peer-reviews

But if these two papers were rejected earlier by some publication, ArXiv might base their decision on that. Note: I don't know if these two papers were offered to some other publication and got rejected. Villarroel et al. have produced quite many papers so it's bit difficult to keep track of all.

 

[Eburacum]

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

This only applies to geostationary satellites which are in equatorial orbits. Quite a few GEO satellites are in inclined orbits, so they move away from the equatorial band in order to pass over a particular geographical area at regular intervals. Some of these would pass into the Earth's shadow at different times of the year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_orbit#Elliptical_and_inclined_geosynchronous_orbits
Note; many of the GEO satellites in inclined orbits are decommissioned, or 'parked'.

Villaroel seems to be assuming that these alien geostationary satellites are in a broad tangle of orbits that wander quite far away from the equator, thereby reducing the amount of time they would be resident over a particular area. But it does mean they would enter Earth's shadow at a range of different times.

 

[Mendel]

Possibly relevant...

Now, both of our accepted and peer-reviewed papers — in PASP and Scientific Reports — have been rejected from arXiv server: in one case I was told to replace an older work; in the other, that the research was "not of interest" to arXiv.

This means they considered one of the older papers a preprint of the published paper. Which is not a rejection!
So there's some spinning of the truth involved to keep the "UFO stigma" narrative going.

 

[Montauk]

Among others, Garry Nolan attacked @Mick West and Metabunk: "Metabunk has "solved" nothing. You misunderstand the meaning of data, evidence, conclusion, proof (solved)."

Source: https://x.com/GarryPNolan/status/1981115144726868102

Think I just found my favorite reply to this tweet:

 

[Shen]

Let's see if I understand correctly.

The photographic plates are exposed during a certain - pretty long - period of time. Is the telescope and camera array (a) stationary during this time or does it (b) track a fixed location of the sky?

If (a) then stars and other background objects should appear as streaks, but geostationary satellites should appear as bright dots. If (b) then stars should appear as dots but geostationary satellites should appear as streaks. Under what situation could both stars and geostationary satellites appear as dots? I just don't get the geometry of the argument.

Do they mean that the alleged satellite is giving off a strong burst of light during a very short time period which makes it look like a point source? Either by reflection or artificial light. In that case, how can they draw any conclusion as to its distance and orbit? I mean, it's supposed to be not just a satellite but a geostationary satellite. Couldn't an aircraft or weather/spy balloon just as well give off a short burst of light from a much lower altitude. Or a bolide or other meteorite coming in at a certain angle? Or for that matter things like the various types of odd high altitude lightning

Assuming that the argument that it is something in a geostationary orbit (or at least altitude) that is being detected and that the light given off is some kind of reflection flare, what rules out transient natural satellites that later disappear through burning up in the atmosphere? Are they simply not reflective enough? Seeing as the transients belong to a very rare group of transients with special characteristics, what is ruling out an especially reflective chunk of ice?

 

[jarlrmai]

Yes the theory resolves around the assumption that every satellite observed was glinting, strong analysis of the implications of this would seem to be useful, we've discussed some options for investigation.

Albedo requirement for the glint magnitude and duration.
is there any pattern of glints or are they variable across all transients
etc
Tracking the same transient across the full plate etc

 

[John J.]

Actually, Metabunk and its members have solved lots of cases where photos, eyewitness accounts etc. initially appeared to indicate that something strange was going on. Just look through the forum (perhaps we need a better way of tagging "Solved" or "Probably solved" threads).
Nolan, to his credit, gave a prosaic explanation for the "Starchild skull", but I'm not aware of him ever being the first person to give a prosaic explanation for a UFO sighting, even though it seems to be a subject he spends considerable time on.

He [Garry P. Nolan] also posted that Metabunk is "...a loose collection of non-scientific lay people. In my opinion, it's a third rate Facebook forum".

I guess we (Metabunk members) have the disadvantage that most of us are not academics getting a salary to do research in the things we discuss here. We do what we do here because we want to find out the truth about extraordinary claims and we dislike bunk.
We value the truth (to be a bit melodramatic).
Most of us understand the importance of testable evidence, and the need for hypotheses to be falsifiable.
(In passing, lay people have made some important contributions to human knowledge. I recall hearing about some clerk in the Swiss patent office writing some useful physics papers in 1905).

We don't have a "party line" that Earth cannot be visited by aliens, but perhaps most of us, at present, don't find the claimed evidence of alien visitation- which would be a discovery of momentous importance- at all convincing. In that, we are probably in the company of the overwhelming majority of astronomers, astrophysicists, archaeologists, biologists, defence officials...

Most of us have some antipathy to those who peddle bunk (not people who make honest mistakes or have unusual experiences that might seem to them inexplicable). Promoters of bunk do not value the truth, they value their own agendas at the expense of the truth and the public's understanding of what is real.

Again, I guess most of us take the publishing of a paper in a peer-reviewed journal* as some indication of scientific respectability, all other things being equal. (I know I do much of the time). We are also aware that sometimes, work with mistaken conclusions gets published; sadly so do deliberately fraudulent papers.

I'm sure many academics/ researchers are proud to get their work published in a peer-reviewed journal, and rightly so.

One of Garry Nolan's published papers which touches upon extraordinary claims is
"Improved instrumental techniques, including isotopic analysis, applicable to the characterization of unusual materials with potential relevance to aerospace forensics", Garry P. Nolan, Jacques F. Vallee, Sizun Jiang and Larry G. Lemke, Progress in Aerospace Sciences Vol. 128, 1 January 2022, PDF of the paper as published viewable here.

As well as brief descriptions of some investigative techniques whose potential use in aerospace forensics the authors fail to demonstrate or discuss in any way, and for which they provide no new insights, the authors conduct a "case study", spectrographically examining samples of slag-like material found at the site of a small fire in a park in Council Bluffs, Iowa in 1977 which some have associated with a UFO sighting.

Although finding nothing other-worldly about the material, or anything that corroborates the claims of two sets of identified witnesses, the authors go on to discuss why a UFO might want to dump approx. 35-50 lbs (around 15.8 to 22.7 kg) of melted metal.
They hypothesise that liquid metals used in a propulsion system, maybe the use of magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) generators, might be the answer:

Assuming a working fluid of aluminum-27 plus some percentage of phosphorus-31 (solitary stable isotopes of their respective elements) Roser speculated that depleted fluid might need to be occasionally ejected: "This discarded material would contain Al-27, P-11, iron from the original melt or housing erosion, plus isotopes of nuclei close to aluminum and phosphorus such as Mg, Na, Si and S." (Iron and Silicon were indeed found in our Council Bluffs samples, but the other elements were not present).

(My emphasis).

But hang on- the authors found aluminium 27 in all of their 5 tested samples. It might be the most abundant element present.

(See also their table "Fig. 8. A. Table of primary elements and their isotopes with ion counts for subsamples 1, 3, and 5", page 10.)

Nolan et al. conduct a case study examining the composition of a material, in a paper supposedly discussing investigative techniques for use in aerospace forensics, and can't remember that aluminium is a major constituent of their material?
How on earth does that happen? Presumably all four authors read the paper before it was submitted- and not one of them noticed?

The paper contains a number of other errors, questionable claims and examples of inadequate citations (I'm sure none were meant to be misleading), discussed in the "Is "Improved Instrumental Techniques...", Nolan, Vallee, Jiang, Lemke 2022 a useful paper?" thread.
Indeed, their assertion

Similarly, liquid metal designs have been proposed for magneto- hydrodynamic (MHD) generators for the decomposition of toxic wastes and for superconducting airborne platforms [46]

(their italics) cites a paper which makes no such proposal, and which contains no mention of liquid metal whatsoever,
"System Considerations for Airborne, High Power Superconducting Generators", H. L. Southall, C. E. Oberly, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, 15 (1) 1979, PDF viewable at the above link.

But Nolan, Vallee et al.'s "Improved instrumental techniques..." got published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Are there things we can learn from this? Possibly yes. Does the paper itself forward our understanding of UFO reports? Probably not.
Is the paper of use to those who might actually conduct forensic examination of aerospace artefacts? It seems very unlikely.
Does Metabunk challenge bunk and sometimes find the real reasons for things that might be mistaken as evidence of something extraordinary? Yes.


*With some exceptions- not all peer-reviewed journals are equal.

 

[jdog]

There are journals where you can publish papers where you've identified a new species, but I'm struggling to think of where you'd publish corrections of someone's claimed identifications in social media posts.

Would The Journal of Corrected Misperceptions have a recurring column on "Hoofbeats that yet again turned out to be from horses, not unicorns."

 

[Shen]

There are journals where you can publish papers where you've identified a new species, but I'm struggling to think of where you'd publish corrections of someone's claimed identifications in social media posts.

Would The Journal of Corrected Misperceptions have a recurring column on "Hoofbeats that yet again turned out to be from horses, not unicorns."

View attachment 85277

The good thing about them actually publishing something is that you can then potentially get both Letters to the Editor and papers exploring alternative solutions published, as verifying or falsifying published scientific papers is a valid area of investigation.

As a scientist by profession - but not in astronomy or aerospace - what I object to in this published paper is that the explanation arrived at, i.e. pre-space age artificial satellites in geostationary orbits, is in itself so incredibly unlikely that you have to take that into account when looking into alternative solutions. In fact, almost any other solution, no matter how unlikely or contrived, should be considered. In a case like this, you can't really argue that only an unlikely series of events that happen to coincide by pure unlikely chance refutes a "normal" explanation. Even bizarre explanations must be seriously considered.

To use an analogy from medical research, various conditions can sometimes - very rarely - give rise to very nontypical symptoms and drugs can sometimes - also very rarely - have no typical effects. When you combine this with patients with multiple medical conditions on multiple drugs, you can get really strange interactions between symptoms and treatments. As an example, if you data mine a database of hospital records I am very certain that you would find some patients with all the typical symptoms of covid-19 years before covid-19 even existed. And yes, while you could then draw the conclusion that covid-19 existed years before it was actually discovered, the much, much more likely explanation is that an atypical case of some other existing virus happened to precisely match covid-19. A responsible scientific author then writes this in the discussion, and makes it clear that they do not know what the cause of these symptoms might be, but that it might possibly be, say, a combination of flu and a fungal infection, or whatever. What the authors of the transient paper is doing is the astronomical equivalent of not only trying to match these covid-19ish cases with sightings of suspicious Chinese agents in the same country (or continent) as the cases, but implying that there is time travel involved...

 

[orianda]

So basically you are saying that when the author says "A reasonable working assumption is that both populations are present in some unknown proportion" - after analysis it may be that the proportion of transients is 0%...?

I am indeed! The "unknown proportion" could absolutely turn out to be 0% once the data are analyzed. The authors aren't assuming there must be real transients; they're just refusing to assume there can't be.

In statistical reasoning, you always start with an agnostic prior, open to any proportion between 0% and 100%, and let evidence constrain it. The logical error would be pre-deciding that the true proportion is zero before testing. That's why their phrasing is methodologically sound. It's not faith that some are real ... it's a refusal to close the hypothesis space prematurely.

 

[MapperGuy]

The good thing about them actually publishing something is that you can then potentially get both Letters to the Editor and papers exploring alternative solutions published, as verifying or falsifying published scientific papers is a valid area of investigation.

As a scientist by profession - but not in astronomy or aerospace - what I object to in this published paper is that the explanation arrived at, i.e. pre-space age artificial satellites in geostationary orbits, is in itself so incredibly unlikely that you have to take that into account when looking into alternative solutions. In fact, almost any other solution, no matter how unlikely or contrived, should be considered. In a case like this, you can't really argue that only an unlikely series of events that happen to coincide by pure unlikely chance refutes a "normal" explanation. Even bizarre explanations must be seriously considered.

To use an analogy from medical research, various conditions can sometimes - very rarely - give rise to very nontypical symptoms and drugs can sometimes - also very rarely - have no typical effects. When you combine this with patients with multiple medical conditions on multiple drugs, you can get really strange interactions between symptoms and treatments. As an example, if you data mine a database of hospital records I am very certain that you would find some patients with all the typical symptoms of covid-19 years before covid-19 even existed. And yes, while you could then draw the conclusion that covid-19 existed years before it was actually discovered, the much, much more likely explanation is that an atypical case of some other existing virus happened to precisely match covid-19. A responsible scientific author then writes this in the discussion, and makes it clear that they do not know what the cause of these symptoms might be, but that it might possibly be, say, a combination of flu and a fungal infection, or whatever. What the authors of the transient paper is doing is the astronomical equivalent of not only trying to match these covid-19ish cases with sightings of suspicious Chinese agents in the same country (or continent) as the cases, but implying that there is time travel involved...

Another good thing about them publishing is there is now justification for others to expend time and effort in examining the issue. Until there is something 'in print' people are not going to do that work, because the original authors might at the last minute decide not to publish at all.

Perhaps some dedicted astronomer will take a big picture look at this. For example, while this was a unique set of collects, is everyone sure there wasn't some other intrument active at the time that just might have collected these transients? Until a sample of potential candidates collects are reviewed can you be sure they might not have captured at least some of these transients? The original authors might not have been fully diligent in their search for other telescopes, it would not be in their interest to find others who should have found the transients but did not. Would ruin their whole study.

 

[orianda]

Even bizarre explanations must be seriously considered.

This line makes your critique interesting, because you also seem to be arguing the opposite: that we should treat extraordinary hypotheses as effectively ruled out before testing. Those two positions can't both hold.

Your covid analogy is good, but it bakes in that asymmetry. Consider a small tweak: if we were to data-mine ALL hospital records, not just a few, we'd almost certainly find patients who matched the full covid-19 symptom profile years before 2019. The correct scientific move wouldn't be to dismiss those cases as impossible, but to test whether they hinted at an earlier or related pathogen. That's how discovery often works ...HIV likely circulated for most of a century before identification, and SARS-like coronaviruses long predated the pandemic. Sometimes the improbable signal is simply the first glimpse of something real.

That's the posture Villarroel et al. are taking. They're not asserting that pre-Sputnik satellites must exist. They're saying we shouldn't assume they can't without checking. Their dataset is the astronomical equivalent of scanning every hospital record, not cherry-picking a few coincidences. The responsible thing to do isn't to pre-emptively close the hypothesis space, but to let the evidence constrain it.