Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

[Mendel]

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.

The problem is that the method they chose does not serve the aim you claim it does. The transients they found did nothing to support their hypothesis.

It's like going to summer 2019 hospital records, finding patients with respiratory tract infections, and concluding "it could be Covid". The finding does nothing to support the hypothesis. Predictably so.

The thing they did for those suspected early cases was to access stored specimen samples and test those for viral DNA, because that method can actually discriminate between Covid and non-Covid infections.

It also has the advantage that we know Covid exists.

The Villaroel investigation is like looking at 10-year-old hospital records and musing that these patients might have had an undiscovered disease nobody knows about even today.

If you try this for your doctoral thesis, you're going to get laughed out of med school, because that's not science.

 

[orianda]

The transients they found did nothing to support their hypothesis....

If you try this for your doctoral thesis, you're going to get laughed out of med school, because that's not science.

Your claim that the transients "did nothing to support the hypothesis" misstates what the hypothesis actually was. The authors weren't asserting that pre-Sputnik satellites exist; they were testing whether all candidates could be dismissed as artifacts. Finding repeatable anomalies directly supports that working assumption; it shows the data isn't fully explained by known causes. Whether those anomalies turn out to be mundane or not is a separate question, but the finding itself does support the inquiry.

We obviously do know Covid exists, but that certainty only came after researchers bothered to look. So no, they're not claiming pre-Sputnik satellites exist. They're doing good science: keeping the hypothesis space open long enough for evidence to close it.

(Also, small note — med students don't write doctoral theses, despite what Dr. GPT may have said

 

[Mauro]

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.

One then wonders why they instead closed their hypothesis space to someone at Palomar with paranormal abilities who, being unconsciously scared by the upcoming nuclear tests he remotely sensed, unwittingly impressed the transients by the power of his/her mind. And why discard a priori and without even mentioning them glitches in the Matrix: they had to make an hardware/software update to manage the calculations of all those transuranic elements put together, glitches are surely expected. What about supernatural explanations, I don't know, maybe demoniac entities enjoying the show, so much to give off light transients? We can't assume any of those do not exist without checking.

 

[jarlrmai]

Don't forget time traveling Bigfoot because that one person that posts here with that theory will be upset about his lack of mention.

 

[orianda]

One then wonders why they instead closed their hypothesis space to someone at Palomar with paranormal abilities who, being unconsciously scared by the upcoming nuclear tests he remotely sensed, unwittingly impressed the transients by the power of his/her mind. And why discard a priori and without even mentioning them glitches in the Matrix: they had to make an hardware/software update to manage the calculations of all those transuranic elements put together, glitches are surely expected. What about supernatural explanations, I don't know, maybe demoniac entities enjoying the show, so much to give off light transients? We can't assume any of those do not exist without checking.

Right on cue! I was expecting to debate this on the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I'll take your Palomar psychic challenge — potato/potahto.

That's actually a great illustration of the difference between unbounded speculation and bounded hypothesis testing. Villarroel et al. didn't "close their hypothesis space" to Palomar psychics or demonic light shows; they constrained it to testable natural explanations — instrumental, astronomical, or physical. That's the key difference between science and satire: a hypothesis only earns a place in the model if it can, in principle, be falsified.

And yet, as Kuhn reminded us, entire paradigms have flipped when ideas once dismissed as "absurd" turned out to be right — germs, continental drift, the Big Bang. Reflexive dismissal has a poor track record.

So no, we don't need to test for supernatural agencies, but we do test whether known processes explain the data. When they don't, we flag the anomaly and look deeper. That's how progress happens. (And, I'll add, it's what most skeptics say they want: peer-reviewed, scientifically rigorous work on unknowns rather than Discovery-Channel infotainment.)

And hey...if we start seeing repeatable evidence of Palomar telepaths or flying spaghetti that hides stars on plates, I'll happily revisit my priors.

 

[Mendel]

Finding repeatable anomalies directly supports that working assumption

What repeatable anomaly did they find?
Please humor me.

We obviously do know Covid exists, but that certainty only came after researchers bothered to look.

They "bothered" to look because the doctor noticed a group of patients with symptoms he did not fully understand. The investigation started with evidence that something was there.

The Villaroel investigation does not.

 

[Mendel]

(Also, small note — med students don't write doctoral theses, despite what Dr. GPT may have said

https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ymtdl/
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ymtdl/4305/

Spoiler

 

[Shen]

@orianda
I get what you are saying, but I think you missunderstod my point about considering bizarre hypotheses. What I was trying to say is that I think the authors are right in ruling out 99% (or whatever) of the transients as perfectly normal things. The problem is then that they even throw out the explanation that these could be pre-space flight artificial satellites as being more likely and fitting the evidence better than a number of - in their eyes - unlikely events. My point is that they should be considering a lot more of the really, really unlikely natural explanations and combinations of natural explanations before going with alien satellites. At most, a serious scientist would mention the fact that they somewhat - but absolutely not perfectly - fit in with geostationary satellites glinting in the sun in a couple of short sentences in the discussion, pointing out that this seems incredibly unlikely seeing as it is years before Sputnik 1. While aliens are not the same as going for supernatural explanations, of course, they are damn unlikely. Even so, what really moves the paper over the top is then correlating with UFO events AND nuclear tests.

This is what is constraining the hypothesis space, as the authors have obviously not gone into this with the aim of exploring and explaining transients, but with the aim of finding evidence for the conclusion they wish to draw.. This is typical of how you should not do data mining.

 

[Montauk]

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).

Feel free to move this if I stray off topic but MonkeeSage posted a similar response to yours on Nolan's tweet. Nolan didn't respond, but one "OliverWood2017" took his place. An interesting exchange that illustrated the false (and sometimes libelous) stereotypes about this forum and West that continue to be propagated by less nuanced UAP commentators, then followed.

[Nolan] is being more than fair. They have an agenda, and it isn't getting to the truth or doing science. West himself even admits it in his book (Editor's Note: No source page number provided for this claim). You still haven't shown even one peer reviewed published paper from any Metabunk debunk team, or from their cult leader West "solving" anything, let alone anything about UAP that I asked for before. I'll wait. Without proper scientific rigor it's not "solved". This is the double standard pseudo-skeptics rely on. West can just say things. For example, do a little song and dance with his flashlight, and claim "solved". Yet not one actual FLIR expert has EVER agreed with West (Editor's Note: no source provided) and his flashlight glare theory for Gimbal [nor this one]. Not one. Ever. They have unanimously disagreed with West. That's never mentioned or even acknowledged in Metabunk though. Blasphemy! Yet West has claimed Gimbal as "solved" in clickbait YouTube videos etc.. Then scientists, who should know better, don't bother digging any deeper, because it's confirmation bias, and it looks "legitimate" at a cursory glance. It looks "similar" to actual science, and so they assume it is. They don't realize the rampant cherry picking, flat out ignoring evidence with a long list of illegitimate reasons for doing so when one is supposedly doing science on the truly unknown, the wild assumptions, the rampant speculations presented as fact, the lack of any actual evidence for their "explanations", ignoring actual experts, etc. West and his Metabunk cult are experts at this dog and pony show to control the narrative and masquerade as science. Preying on people's fear of looking gullible or stupid, and leaning on the stigma surrounding UAP. The number of times West is cited by various scientists, "science" YouTube channels, news stations, and on, and on is horrifying to any rational skeptic who is actually paying attention to UAP, and the mountains of anomalous evidence. One can't just "say things" and call it "solved science". The UAP mystery desperately needs better skeptics.

Then Sage:

If you'd like to see some of the cases that have been solved and what data and methods were used, feel free to have a look around the "Skydentify" forum. You don't even need to sign up to browse. Enjoy!

Wood was not keen on Sage's friendly invitation...

I'm not seeing any peer reviewed published papers there. All I see is mostly easy cases that no one would argue aren't debunked, even the true believers. Those aren't the ones that need scientific rigor. It's the ones where there is legitimate contention. Those need to be given the proper scientific method and rigorous treatment. There are actually lots. This is by design, to avoid any real scientific scrutiny. They "solve" the easy cases, which is no surprise. No one disputes these. MOST UAP events are mundane. No one denies this. Easy to build a reputation of apparent honest skepticism on those. Then throw in the truly shoddy debunks of the important cases, the ones people DON'T agree are debunked, without any scientific rigor at all, and they know most people won't notice how they have been manipulated. People see what appear to be honest debunks in the past, why would this next one be any different. They have succeeded in muddying the waters. By design.It's the truly anomalous events that Metabunk wants to appear solved by throwing them in with these other cases. Makes them look legitimate. But they aren't scientifically rigorous on the important cases that are truly anomalous. Not even close. For the truly anomalous, explanations need careful scrutiny, they to be peer reviewed and published, and the explanations need to be replicable. Just like any other scientific effort it needs to stand up to potential falsifications. For example West constantly talks about glare in FLIR, yet has failed to find any real world examples of this that replicate many UAP events. "Misidentified planes" is a common explanation he uses with zero actual evidence of this, and ignoring evidence that shows it cannot be a misidentified plane. He hopes because people bought it before when it works, and it replicates to the point of no contention, even without scientific rigor, the same will occur when things are a lot more gray, which is when we NEED the rigor. That doesn't cut it. It only takes one event to change the paradigm. There are plenty of events that have not been debunked, that as a result constitute actual evidence, until PROVEN to be mundane. Notice I didn't say proof, of NHI, but evidence, until proven otherwise, nonetheless. The burden of proof goes both ways. There needs to be proper scientific debate through published papers. Not just posts on Metabunk and YouTube videos throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks. Pseudo-skeptics control the narrative. It's what they do. This can be seen all across scientific history. Time and time again. That's why we must ALWAYS be aware of that intellectual trap, if we are ever going to get to the ground truth. We are ALL susceptible to that trap. Pseudo-skeptics with an agenda take advantage of that. West literally admits to being that kind of a pseudo-skeptic in his book along with a long list of actions on his part. The pseudo-skeptics have controlled the narrative long enough. Publish peer reviewed papers on the most anomalous events, explaining them. Or sit down. We should be done, as rational skeptics, accepting this double standard of rigor when it comes to UAP. Something is going on that is a true mystery surrounding UAP. There is something big going on in our govt. about UAP. We MUST get proper answers. A rational skeptic can see that plain as day. This is the only way.

Sage, again being concise and courteous:

I disagree with your starting premise that "easy" cases don't need scrutiny. Science should be practiced in every case. It takes work to find data and apply analysis to identify causes, and folks at metabunk are doing that work, such as here.

Wood again:

Not peer reviewed. Not scientifically rigorous. Not an official debunk. In fact not a single Metabunk could be considered an official debunk of anything. I was being generous above by limiting the rigor to the events that are contested. But if you want to insist in thinking Metabunk is somehow reliable in their "skepticism" and does not have an agenda, then I insist that they publish, or they are not debunking anything. Just saying something is debunked without peer review is NOT how science is done.

Then finally, Sage:

You are welcome to participate! If you see any deficits or errors in an analysis presented there, it would be great if you bring them up in the relevant threads. Sign up is free.

All in all, I think this exchange shows one of the best things I've learned from being on this forum. That being...always be understanding, friendly, and composed with dealing with hostile individuals such as Wood.

Bravo to you, MonkeeSage

 

[Eburacum]

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.

Calculating this again, the reduction in brightness would be 9.4 magnitudes, not 10.4. That is to say, a transient with magnitude +1 (brighter than Antares) would appear to be magnitude +10.4, which is a difference of 9.4.

 

[FatPhil]

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.

If you're doing that, then you're not doing egregious cherry-picking, which is one of the strongest complaints about their paper.

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.

Absolute nonsense. You start with the consensus prior, which, because a whole load of science has already been performed, is about as far from agnostic as it's possible to be. You're only agnostic about complete unknowns, and there's very little, if anything, that's completely unknown nowadays.

 

[orianda]

Absolute nonsense.

OK, you better deliver with an opener like this

You start with the consensus prior

Only when there is a consensus that's relevant to the specific question. Bayesian practice uses informative priors in well-characterized domains, in exploratory problems (like classifying POSS-I anomalies), you typically use weakly-informative/agnostic priors and let the data do the tightening.

Which, because a whole load of science has already been performed, is about as far from agnostic as it's possible to be.

That's a category mistake. You're confusing the maturity of science as a whole with knowledge of this particular signal class. It's fine to start with a skeptical prior that most detections are mundane; it's not fine to bake in a near-zero prior that forbids the existence of real transients before you've even looked.

You're only agnostic about complete unknowns

That's backwards. Agnostic (or weakly-informative) priors are for partially known problems where evidence is incomplete or noisy—exactly the setting for candidate transients. If you reserve agnosticism only for "complete unknowns," you've designed a philosophy that prevents discovering anything new.

and there's very little, if anything, that's completely unknown nowadays

Tell that to dark energy, fast radio bursts (pre-2007), or H. pylori and ulcers before 1984. I do not know a single working scientist who would make this claim.

 

[Shen]

Feel free to move this if I stray off topic but MonkeeSage posted a similar response to yours on Nolan's tweet. Nolan didn't respond, but one "OliverWood2017" took his place. An interesting exchange that illustrated the false (and sometimes libelous) stereotypes about this forum and West that continue to be propagated by less nuanced UAP commentators, then followed.



Then Sage:


Wood was not keen on Sage's friendly invitation...


Sage, again being concise and courteous:


Wood again:


Then finally, Sage:


All in all, I think this exchange shows one of the best things I've learned from being on this forum. That being...always be understanding, friendly, and composed with dealing with hostile individuals such as Wood.

Bravo to you, MonkeeSage

I mean, how would you get a peer-reviewed paper published on proving that something is not an alien space craft when there is no actual evidence that it would be? Which scientific discipline would it even belong to? The burden of evidence lies entirely on the poepl.wantint to prove that it is aliens.

The only somewhat working analogy that I can think of is that there are occasional medical papers that show that various quack cures don't work. These can be beneficial as they might prevent some people from trying them. These can however never be actual, full-scale randomized trials as you would never get ethical permission to run such a trial as there is no reasonable mechanism of action and it would be dangerous to patients and waste time and money. That's why there are no large, randomized trials comparing crystals and avocado vs chemotherapy and radiation therapy as a cancer treatment. For UFO/UAP-related things this is of course a different story as no patients are involved, but compared to doing something constructive and scientifically worthwile with available funding, I just don't see how you would motivate debunking various mundane events that UFO-believers think are suspicious.

However, with increasing belief in conspiracy theories the need for and interest in serious debunking might actually rise to a level where it does make sense to fund such studies. I doubt, though, that people like Wood here above would be more amenable to Mike West if he was Mike West, professor of aerospatial identification at Harvard and published his findings in Nature. Wood would rhen switch his argumentation to the scientific establishment being biased against UAP believers...

 

[FatPhil]

(Also, small note — med students don't write doctoral theses, despite what Dr. GPT may have said

I love your confidence, because confident and wrong - with an added splash of misplaced snark - is my favourite combination of attributes on the internet.

MDs with a research component absolutely exist, and no, I'm not thinking of MD-PhDs.

https://njms.rutgers.edu/admissions/MD_Thesis.php : "The M.D. with Thesis Program offers a unique opportunity to NJMS medical students to conduct original research of excellent quality during their Medical School training."
https://medicine.yale.edu/md-program/research/mdthesis/ : "All students at Yale School of Medicine engage in research and are required to write an MD thesis during medical school."

Some have even asked "Do We Need More Structured MD Thesis Programs?":

Conducting a Medical Doctorate (MD) thesis is desired by the majority of medical students. However, the needed scientific competencies are not regularly implemented in medical education. To support students during their MD thesis, a graduate college was implemented. The present study aims to investigate the impact of this structured MD thesis program on the outcome of the MD thesis and the further scientific career.

-- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11496407/

 

[Shen]

I love your confidence, because confident and wrong - with an added splash of misplaced snark - is my favourite combination of attributes on the internet.

MDs with a research component absolutely exist, and no, I'm not thinking of MD-PhDs.

https://njms.rutgers.edu/admissions/MD_Thesis.php : "The M.D. with Thesis Program offers a unique opportunity to NJMS medical students to conduct original research of excellent quality during their Medical School training."
https://medicine.yale.edu/md-program/research/mdthesis/ : "All students at Yale School of Medicine engage in research and are required to write an MD thesis during medical school."

Some have even asked "Do We Need More Structured MD Thesis Programs?":

Conducting a Medical Doctorate (MD) thesis is desired by the majority of medical students. However, the needed scientific competencies are not regularly implemented in medical education. To support students during their MD thesis, a graduate college was implemented. The present study aims to investigate the impact of this structured MD thesis program on the outcome of the MD thesis and the further scientific career.

-- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11496407/

Very off-topic, but no an MD (as it is used in the US) is not a PhD. Med students write the equivalent of a master thesis (i.e. one semester of research), which is what this talks about. A PhD thesis takes at least four years of full time research work, which is on the same level as going through med school.

 

[FatPhil]

That's a category mistake. You're confusing the maturity of science as a whole with knowledge of this particular signal class.

I'm not. Reread what I said without that false assumption in your head, and you might be able to extract what I actually wrote from the words you read.

For what you have said to be strictly true, it must be that no-one ever has examined those plates before.

 

[FatPhil]

Very off-topic, but no an MD (as it is used in the US) is not a PhD.

What in what I wrote made you think that an MD is a PhD?!? Look at my second paragraph again.

 

[FatPhil]

That's backwards. Agnostic (or weakly-informative) priors are for partially known problems where evidence is incomplete or noisy—exactly the setting for candidate transients. If you reserve agnosticism only for "complete unknowns," you've designed a philosophy that prevents discovering anything new.

You're using language differently from me. To me, an agnostic prior is a uninformative prior, not a weakly informative prior. The clue's in the negation, and "weak" certainly isn't a negation, in fact, it's quite the opposite.

And, no, there's nothing about an agnostic prior that prevents discovery. I know nothing about the result of the coin I'm about to flip. P(p)=1 for 0<=p<=1, the ultimate agnostic prior. After 30 flips I got 25 heads. I have discovered that it's probably biased.

 

[Shen]

What in what I wrote made you think that an MD is a PhD?!? Look at my second paragraph again.

I missed that sentence, sorry. But the argument holds. An MD thesis is not what you would call a research thesis, which is what the original poster meant. The system in most of the world is that all university degrees require a thesis project as part of the education, and I think we assumed that the US wasn't an exception.

 

[FatPhil]

I missed that sentence, sorry. But the argument holds. An MD thesis is not what you would call a research thesis, which is what the original poster meant. The system in most of the world is that all university degrees require a thesis project as part of the education, and I think we assumed that the US wasn't an exception.

Who cares what I call it - Yale and Rutgers call it research, and they're the ones running the programs, so they should know. You appear to have missed *the entirety* of my post.
Sure, there's an order of magnitude between a semester-long research project and a multi-year research project, but we're not quantifying, we're classifying. These research projects are effectively training in how to do research to prepare you for a follow-up research degree. But @Mendel's point still stands - if you were to be sloppy in that training, you'd also get slapped for it.

 

[Mauro]

Right on cue! I was expecting to debate this on the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I'll take your Palomar psychic challenge — potato/potahto.

That's actually a great illustration of the difference between unbounded speculation and bounded hypothesis testing.

If you understand why you put paranormal powers, the Matrix and supernatural entities into the unbounded speculations, you may possibly understand why I put 'alien satellites' in the same category. Hint: all the evidences we have argue for a near-to-nihil probability for paranormal, the Matrix and the supernatural. All the evidences we have argue for a near-to-nihil probability of visiting aliens (go figure for alien satellites monitoring nuclear tests on Earth, often from the opposite side of the planet, and only for a limited period of time after which they disappeared). Yes, supernatural entities are much more near-to-nihil than aliens, but both near-to-nihil they are.

Villarroel et al. didn't "close their hypothesis space" to Palomar psychics or demonic light shows; they constrained it to testable natural explanations — instrumental, astronomical, or physical. That's the key difference between science and satire: a hypothesis only earns a place in the model if it can, in principle, be falsified.

Do you think psychic powers or supernatural entities are not testable? If people could routinely move objects by the power of their mind, that would be pretty much testable (I'd even bet we'd have a specific branch of physics with nice equations for this). If supernatural entities commonly appeared and, say, made people levitate in the air that would be very much testable. Villaroel et al. just constrained their hypothesis space to the hypothesis they liked more, exactly the opposite of an open-minded approach.

By the way, the paranormal hypothesis I stated before perfectly explains why the transients disappeared in later obervations (the psychic died, or he/she got used to nuclear tests and did not get so upset anymore...). It naturally explains the data much better than Villaroel at al.'s. The Matrix glitches do the same: once the hardware/software update was in place and debugged the glitches disappeared. So neat!

And yet, as Kuhn reminded us, entire paradigms have flipped when ideas once dismissed as "absurd" turned out to be right — germs, continental drift, the Big Bang. Reflexive dismissal has a poor track record.

Oh yes, surely that happens! But.. they are famous cases because they are so rare. The overwhelming majority of ideas have been rejected (even those who were not 'absurd' at all, ie.: Earth is flat). What you said is just a form of the Galileo gambit.

So no, we don't need to test for supernatural agencies,

I agree of course, but ask yourself: why we don't have to bother with supernatural explanations? Do we need to test for psychics powers? For the Matrix? For extradimensional Bigfoots? For aliens who succeeded in sending a fleet of satellites to Earth across the light-years because with their hyper-advanced remote sensing capability they had somehow seen we were preparing nuclear tests and for some strange reason they wanted to observe them from Earth orbit (why not go on using their remote sensing facilities?), after which for some other strange reason they were not interested anymore and left?

but we do test whether known processes explain the data. When they don't, we flag the anomaly and look deeper. That's how progress happens. (And, I'll add, it's what most skeptics say they want: peer-reviewed, scientifically rigorous work on unknowns rather than Discovery-Channel infotainment.)

And I cannot agree with you more. Just, where should one look deeper? What's more (overwhelmingly) probable, a difficult-to-pin-down instrumentation problem, ie. see 2011 OPERA faster-than-light neutrino anomaly, perytons (fast radio transients detected at the Parkes Observatory, later tracked down to the opening of a microwave oven nearby), or a constellation of alien satellites with the bizarre characteristics as above?

And hey...if we start seeing repeatable evidence of Palomar telepaths or flying spaghetti that hides stars on plates, I'll happily revisit my priors.

And the same will do I if we start seeing repeatable evidence of visiting aliens (or of psychic powers, for that matter).

 

[Mendel]

What repeatable anomaly did they find?
Please humor me.

More specifically:
For something to "test" as abnormal, you need to establish what "normal" is: the "null hypothesis".

In this case, our normal is that transients are caused by defects in the photographic emulsion. This is established because they improved the emulsion, and saw less transients.

So the question is, does Villaroel establish that normal in one of the newer papers? In the older paper, she does not.

A way to do this would be to assume that defects are randomly distributed across each plate, and to check that the assumption is valid. Then the anylysis from the paper should be run as control over a similar, random data set, and establish a normal for "linear" transients.

It should also be examined how sensitive the nuclear test analysis is to the arbitrarily chosen +/-1 day date interval. And that analysis should be run on a "per plate" basis, as opposed to a "per date" approach.

If there is no "normal" to test against, "abnormal" is just incredulity.

 

[Mendel]

I missed that sentence, sorry. But the argument holds. An MD thesis is not what you would call a research thesis, which is what the original poster meant. The system in most of the world is that all university degrees require a thesis project as part of the education, and I think we assumed that the US wasn't an exception.

I already linked examples. Why do you insist on correcting others without once checking if it isn't you who's wrong?
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ymtdl/4295/ "This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of current genetic testing guidelines for patients with thoracic aortic aneurysms." Clearly research, for a MD thesis, now I called it "doctoral thesis", D in MD stands for doctor. And all of this is off topic, because my point would also be true for any other kind of research (e.g. dissertations), except I think the rhetorical mistake I used for my argument would've been a rookie mistake.

 

[Mendel]

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).

This is instutionalized science.
But science doesn't have to institutionalized to be valid.
And we're certainly open to having our work reviewed.

Although "identify aircraft from photos" is not really research science.

 

[Shen]

I already linked examples. Why do you insist on correcting others without once checking if it isn't you who's wrong?
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ymtdl/4295/ "This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of current genetic testing guidelines for patients with thoracic aortic aneurysms." Clearly research, for a MD thesis, now I called it "doctoral thesis", D in MD stands for doctor. And all of this is off topic, because my point would also be true for any other kind of research (e.g. dissertations), except I think the rhetorical mistake I used for my argument would've been a rookie mistake.

I don't know where I have "insisted" on this before. No US MD would ever claim to have a doctoral degree or to have done a doctoral thesis, and any PhD would be quite upset than an MD is called a doctoral degree. And it's not just terminology. An MD is not a doctor, an MD is a physician, i.e. a person with a medical degree. A doctor is a PhD or equivalent. For some reasons the US calls physicians medical doctors, instead of just using "doctor" as a courtesy title at most as in the rest of the world. A doctoral thesis is a synonym for a PhD thesis, and if you just say thesis you mean a PhD thesis. What you are refeering to is a master project, or a Master of Science thesis. Otherwise, you could call any Master of Science/Philosophy/etc a a doctoral degree just because a thesis is required.

 

[HoaxEye]

I wanted to understand better why the transients identified by Villarroel et al. are not present in any star catalogs (or transient databases) using POSS-I data and/or images. I think this was interesting so I decided to share what I learned.

This is what they did with Guide Star Catalog (GSC) which was built from digitized POSS-I plates for HST pointing (1980s)
- Objects were detected on both blue and red plates
- A matching algorithm compared positions within a tolerance (typically a few arcseconds).
- If an object appeared on both plates, it was accepted as real.
- If it appeared on only one plate, it was flagged as a probable artifact

The classification was biased to prevent the use of a non-stellar object as a guide star. False objects due to artifacts around halos and diffraction spikes of bright stars were identified and corrected

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guide_Star_Catalog

This turns out to be a scientific method used widely. Of course there are other ways to detect and remove defects from catalogs, but the blue/red correlation method remains valid for static sky catalogs.

This method was invented before the GSC, and is used widely.

Attached is the "The Automated Plate Scanner Catalog of the Palomar Sky Survey. I. Scanning Parameters and Procedures", 1993., quote:

The APS Catalog of the Palomar Sky Survey will include only matched images, those that appear on both the blue and red plates. This match requirement will avoid the problem of deciding on the reality of images near the plate limit. It also eliminates plate flaws, and scratches from the Catalog. This means that many faint stars, mostly red, will not be included in the Catalog.

Villarroel et al. chose not to use this scientific method. It's not because of an error, they chose to do so. But I wonder if that's something any astronomer would actually do.

I attached another paper I found along the way. "TESTING SCHMIDT PLATES FOR ASTROMETRIC PURPOSES", 1986. This relates to creation of GSC for the Hubble Space Telescope. Possible interesting finding is that Schmidt plates were rarely used for high-precision astrometry due to field curvature (plates bent during exposure, measured flat) and due to systematic errors near plate edges.

About the field curvature: the focal surface of a Schmidt telescope is not flat, but curved. During exposure, plates are bent to match this curvature. After exposure, plates are flattened for scanning. This means the glass and emulsion could experience elastic deformation. As a result, there could be more artefacts like small bubbles that would look like (faint) stars. I couldn't find out how common these artefacts are, but just wanted to mention one possible additional source for POSS plate defects.

 

[Gary C]

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.

And wouldn't repeating their analysis with the blue plates from the same study and exposed in the same time frame be the first thing you should do to establish the likely orbital distance of these alleged artificial objects? Getting a second photo to calculate parallax and begin to constrain possible orbits is planetary astronomy 101.

One of the most powerful components of the scientific method is empiricism. If no one can reproduce your result but you, you become a foot note, not a new paradigm.

 

[John J.]

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?

That's an interesting and useful idea. I think it's unlikely that we will find a substantial set of comparable images to those produced by the National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.
NGS-POSS used the Samuel Oschin telescope, a large (largest at the time?) Schmidt camera that could capture wide fields of view, and had a limiting magnitude of approx. 22.
If the supposed transients are caused by an object reflecting sunlight, would the location of the telescope be a factor? Maybe a reflection of sunlight from a facet of the object would only be visible across a very narrow arc.
It might be difficult to rule out specific NGS-POSS "transients" for those reasons.

That said, other large telescopes would have been used to take photographs, although often with a narrower field of view. The chances of any photographing the same area of sky as the Samuel Oschin at the same time must be low. But, allowing for the relative sizes of the fields of view, images from other telescopes capturing light sources of similarly low magnitude might enable us (well, someone else!) to establish if "transients" were detected with a frequency like that reported (by Villaroel et al.).
Importantly, the claimed correlation between transients and specific dates could be tested.

Maybe Beatriz Villaroel will persuade her fellow astronomers to attempt to replicate her findings (or at least find supporting evidence).
(If the incidence of "transients" reported by Villaroel is supported by other retrospective studies, it wouldn't rule out film defects/ damage from external sources as a possible cause; perhaps many plates at that time had similar issues regardless of where they were manufactured or used).

 

[HoaxEye]

And wouldn't repeating their analysis with the blue plates from the same study and exposed in the same time frame be the first thing you should do to establish the likely orbital distance of these alleged artificial objects? Getting a second photo to calculate parallax and begin to constrain possible orbits is planetary astronomy 101.

One of the most powerful components of the scientific method is empiricism. If no one can reproduce your result but you, you become a foot note, not a new paradigm.

>And wouldn't repeating their analysis with the blue plates

They did check all blue plates, separated by some 30 minutes from corresponding red plates. Transients cannot be seen in the subsequent blue plate pictures - or in any other sky picture taken after they allegedly vanished.

 

[Shen]

>And wouldn't repeating their analysis with the blue plates

They did check all blue plates, separated by some 30 minutes from corresponding red plates. Transients cannot be seen in the subsequent blue plate pictures - or in any other sky picture taken after they allegedly vanished.

How then can they then draw any conclusions at all about about the altitude of the transients?

Also, it's kind of funny reasoning. They are now interpreting the fact that they see it on only one plate as evidence that it's a quick, strong transient light which they see as evidence for it being an alien satellite. If they HAD seen it om both plates they would have interpreted it as evidence for it being a real object in orbit, which they would have interpreted as evidence for it being an alien satellite. That's the beauty of having the conclusion ready before you have the data, or rather looking for results that proves your conclusion.

 

[John J.]

Also, small note — med students don't write doctoral theses

Um, most do in Germany. It's seen as necessary that a doctor of medicine shows an ability to independently assess scientific evidence.
Some German people are surprised to find out that there isn't a similar requirement in e.g. Anglophone countries, where "doctor" is a profession, not someone who has a(n academic) doctorate. (I don't know but I'd guess this is the reality in most countries outside Germany).

The US qualification "MD" is widely seen as a professional degree but not academically equivalent to a PhD,

In [UK, Ireland, some other] countries, the equivalent professional degree to the North American, and some others' usage of MD is still typically titled Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery.

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

 

[Shen]

Um, most do in Germany. It's seen as necessary that a doctor of medicine shows an ability to independently assess scientific evidence.
Some German people are surprised to find out that there isn't a similar requirement in e.g. Anglophone countries, where "doctor" is a profession, not someone who has a(n academic) doctorate. (I don't know but I'd guess this is the reality in most countries outside Germany).

The US qualification "MD" is widely seen as a professional degree but not academically equivalent to a PhD,

In [UK, Ireland, some other] countries, the equivalent professional degree to the North American, and some others' usage of MD is still typically titled Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery.

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

They write a thesis project, not a doctoral thesis. Under the Bologna process rules, all higher educational degrees in Europe, both bachelor and master, require a thesis. A physicians medical degree thesis is exactly the same as any other master thesis, it is not a doctoral thesis. A physician with an medical degree, i.e. a practicing medical professional (an Ärzt in German) does not have doctorate, although they may of course pursue doctoral studies, but only when they have finished their time as med students.

 

[sigmops]

Transients cannot be seen in the subsequent blue plate pictures - or in any other sky picture taken after they allegedly vanished.

Does that mean that there were zero transients found on the blue plates?

Or that the specific transients on the red plates that were chosen for analysis were not found on the blue plates. However the blue plates did have a unique set of their own transients?

 

[Eburacum]

Swinging back to a much earlier post by HoaxEye

Possibly interesting note: I found an earlier study where Villarroel was co-author: Discovering vanishing objects in POSS I red images using the Virtual Observatory (September 2022): https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/515/1/1380/6607509?login=false They covered a lot of data in this study. They found 298 165 sources from POSS-I plates, did reduction rounds based on various criteria, and ended up with 5399 sources. When there's large amount of data, selecting only few of them as ET UFOs looks weird. They haven't explained why only few sources out of 5399 are noteworthy.

They have chosen a very small dataset from a much larger dataset, consisting of a quarter of a million anomalies; the selection process used should be a subject for very close examination. If these plates are covered in anomalies (which seems to be the case) it could be easy to find alignments and spurious correlations.

 

[HoaxEye]

Does that mean that there were zero transients found on the blue plates?

Or that the specific transients on the red plates that were chosen for analysis were not found on the blue plates. However the blue plates did have a unique set of their own transients?

No transients were found on the blue plates by Villarroel et al. They claim to have found 107,875 transients in POSS-I red plates. But they concentrate on group of 5 transient candidates (in PASP paper):

ID	transients	Plate ID	Centroid RA (J2000)	Centroid Dec (J2000)	Date (UT)
CN1	9	POSS-I Red (1953-06-15)	18:45:30.0	+35:20:00	1953 Jun 15
CN2	5	POSS-I Red E0123	22:10:15.2	+42:45:12	1951 Sep 22
CN3	3	POSS-I Red (1954-03-08)	05:30:45.8	+15:10:30	1954 Mar 08
CN4	6	POSS-I Red E0456	14:20:05.1	-05:30:45	1955 Nov 12
CN5	4	POSS-I Red (1952-07-19)	21:18:10.0	+48:12:30	1952 Jul 19

The p<0.01 probability that transients are confined to sunlit sky allegedly supports high-altitude objects, as GEO, but this is a hypothesis.

They claim transients are in aligned patterns. The aligned patterns are detected through a geometric analysis of transient positions. The Monte Carlo simulation tests whether these positions form a linear band compared to random distributions. Some "aligned patterns" looks bit iffy to me.

They also use Point Spread Function (PSF) that describes the shape and intensity distribution of point-like sources (these could be stars or e.g. UFOs).

CN1 is explicitly noted as near nuclear test date. And CN5 coincides with the Washington, D.C. UAP wave.

Note: having studied dozen or so POSS-I red plate images manually using Aladin app, it's really easy to find these dots they call "transients". The 107K number is probably correct. And it's very hard to find any transients from POSS-I blue plates, but according to Hambly and Blair, there are plate defects in those, too.

I have also looked at POSS-II red plate images manually, and found no dots that could be called as transients. They used better Kodak emulsion in POSS-II...

My dataset size is way to small to make conclusions. Manual inspection takes a lot of time. There are over 89 million real objects found from POSS-I alone. Any detailed analysis would need software supported by AI/machine learning. This kind of software doesn't seem to be available to public.

 

[NorCal Dave]

This is what they did with Guide Star Catalog (GSC) which was built from digitized POSS-I plates for HST pointing (1980s)
- Objects were detected on both blue and red plates
- A matching algorithm compared positions within a tolerance (typically a few arcseconds).
- If an object appeared on both plates, it was accepted as real.
- If it appeared on only one plate, it was flagged as a probable artifact

So, what Villareal et al was trying to do had been more or less done in the '80s? Both red and blue plates were analyzed and potential flaws, scratches and glitches were identified as such.

Or that the specific transients on the red plates that were chosen for analysis were not found on the blue plates. However the blue plates did have a unique set of their own transients?

The red plates were known to have a high level of anomalies due to the problematic emulsion. Something this paper fails to mention is that when the emulsion was changed, the number of anomalies went down. The red emulsion was a known problem, even now:

Actually Villareal does note that while a number of transients were associated with nuclear tests, this stopped happening in 1956:

The last date on which a transient was observed within a nuclear testing window in this dataset was March 17, 1956, despite there being an additional 38 above-ground nuclear tests in the subsequent 13 months of the study period.

Which is also when a new emulsion was used for the red plates. When the red emulsion was updated in ~1956, the transients disappeared. I know, correlation is not causation.

 

[HoaxEye]

So, what Villareal et al was trying to do had been more or less done in the '80s? Both red and blue plates were analyzed and potential flaws, scratches and glitches were identified as such.

Yes but in different context. One I mentioned earlier, GSC, is an astronomical catalogue of objects. They were not looking for transients. But they did use the blue/red correlation method to clean the catalogue of errors such as plate defects. All transients identified by Villarroel et al. would have been automatically removed from GSC as errors like plate defects, because they are present in red plate images only.

 

[HoaxEye]

Reminder: because time flies and new people have joined the conversation, here's a link to my earlier post concerning the term "transients" https://www.metabunk.org/threads/tr...servatory-sky-survey.14362/page-4#post-350606
I think that Villarroel et al. should have used some other word, because transients are business-as-usual in astrophysics/astronomy, and they have never been about aliens

 

[Montauk]

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".

Found another funny one:

This guy's whole bit seems to be, he's still obsessed and offended by Mick's outdated and later revised seagull theory for that one NYT video (I can't recall which one). They also promote the false "Mick cut the audio" claim which is sadly still a meme in their true believe community. Their posting history consists of cherry picking of clips and tweets from Mick, ad hominem, and hurtful gifs. Par for the course in UAP discussion on X.

 

[MapperGuy]

Reminder: because time flies and new people have joined the conversation, here's a link to my earlier post concerning the term "transients" https://www.metabunk.org/threads/tr...servatory-sky-survey.14362/page-4#post-350606
I think that Villarroel et al. should have used some other word, because transients are business-as-usual in astrophysics/astronomy, and they have never been about aliens

I think the use of that term was quite deliberate.
Call what you are seeing 'transients', publish, wait for another astronomer to say "yes, by golly those are transients".
Quote that other astronomer but substitute "alien spacecraft', yielding the headline "Astronomer Says I Found Alien Spacecraft".
When that other astronomer objects just say "But it should have been obvious to you all along that is what I thought they were..".
Using "obscuring terminology" to sneak things passed hurried reviewers must happen from time to time.