By Adam Frank, Big Think, August 27, 2026
In October 2025, a group of researchers published a paper in a well-regarded, peer-reviewed astronomical journal claiming the extraordinary: They'd found evidence of objects orbiting the Earth years before the launch of any human-made artificial satellites. In another paper, they also claimed links between when these objects appeared in the sky and the dates of nuclear tests in the 1950s. If any of these results were correct, it'd represent evidence of orbiting
non-human technological artifacts and an indication that whatever "piloted" these artifacts was interested in our nuclear capabilities. It's easy to see why the papers grabbed headlines and interest.
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So, of course, these papers made news. A scientific paper on its own, however, is just a single step in the scientific process. The next step is for the community to pore over the paper and see if the work holds up. Was the data set well prepared? Are the methods used to analyze that data well thought out and mathematically legitimate? Are the conclusions the authors draw from their analysis appropriate, or is there some flaw in the chain of reasoning?
A critique of the VASCO studies
That next step just came in with a new paper called "
Critical Evaluation of Studies Alleging Evidence for Technosignatures in the POSS1 – E Photographic Plates," which was recently accepted by the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA). As the title implies, the authors do not find the VASCO studies convincing.
Before we dive into their critique, one noteworthy thing about the paper is its author list. It includes several working scientists who have been at the forefront of taking UAPs seriously. The lead author is Wesley Watters of Wellesley College. He is an astronomer who has written several papers reviewing UAP sightings and
arguing they deserve a deeper, agnostic analysis. He has also been a member of Avi Loeb's
Galileo Project research team, which wants to study UAPs scientifically. Another author is
Kevin Knuth, a physicist at the University at Albany, SUNY. Knuth published a well-known study of
Navy-pilot UAP sightings exploring whether the trajectories seen by the pilots showed evidence for extreme physics at work. Knuth is also a research affiliate of the Galileo Project. What is striking about the author list is that it represents a group that
cannot be seen as hostile to the basic idea that UAPs are a valid scientific problem or that they might represent technosignatures. This observation tells you nothing about the quality of their analysis and the critique that follows. It does, however, mean this is not a group of scientists with a bias against UAPs as a whole (in my experience, most astronomers do have this bias).
The Watters paper begins with an important historical example. Using photographic plates to look for things in the sky that appear and then disappear is not a new idea. For decades, astronomers tried to use photographic plates to find optical traces of the enigmatic gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), powerful explosions involving massive stars. As Watters and team show, even though a huge effort was put into the project, there were just too many "defects" on the plates that had nothing to do with the sky: problems with the photographic emulsion; dust grains on the plates; pits in the glass plate itself; errors introduced when plate copies were made, as well as other issues. It turns out that separating the defects and other issues from the real things captured by the telescope is incredibly difficult. This is especially true when you need to do it at scale — meaning you want to do statistics with tens or hundreds of thousands of potential transients. For the astronomers looking for GRBs, the photographic plates were simply not up to the job. That seems to be an important lesson for the VASCO project.
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How did their choices of what to use effect their analysis and their claims?
It turns out that these are not easy questions to answer because the VASCO team did not publish the dataset used in this study. That means Watters and company had to go through an exhaustive effort to determine which parts of the POSS-I survey were used and which features were selected to be explored by the VASCO group as
possible transients. Once this work is done, Watters and company go on to show that this analogous dataset is full of irregularities (something also shown in an
earlier paper by Nigel Hambly of the University of Edinburgh).
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Finally, the Watters paper concludes by showing how the whole VASCO project is plagued by a kind of circular reasoning embodied by their overuse of the term "transients" rather than "features." Circular reasoning involves assuming the conclusion of an argument as part of its premises. The VASCO team wants to claim that some features on the POSS-I plates are actual things in the sky that only appear once and then are gone. They use the analysis of the shadow deficit and nuclear tests to claim these are real transients. But there is no independent validation that the bulk of these "transients" are not stuff screwed up on the plates themselves. Thus, the argument doubles back on itself: the shadow-deficit analysis assumes that the plate features are real transient events, and that same analysis is cited as proof that they are real transient events.
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Science and UFO culture
The first thing to note is that this is not the end of the story. Science is like the blues — it's a call-and-response kind of thing. A scientist named Bob publishes a paper. Another scientist named Alice publishes a critique. It's then Bob's job to address those critiques in the next published paper. If that's done well, then the game goes on, and Bob's evidence and arguments get better over time until, perhaps, the scientific community recognizes it as a proven fact and even uses that fact to do the next set of studies. So, the question now is how the VASCO team responds to these criticisms.
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This takes us deeper into the difficulty for scientists attempting to deal seriously with UFO culture. Advocates for the claim that UAPs/UFOs represent technosignatures of alien visitation often complain that scientists ignore the evidence and are unwilling to take the subject seriously.
This was certainly not the case with the VASCO papers. Dr. Villarroel was, for example,
invited to present her results at a meeting of the important Goddard Space Flight Center technosignature lecture series. The meeting was polite, with lots of good discussion.
When, however, scientists find fault with UAP/UFO data — as is the case with the Watters study — they are attacked as "part of the problem" or "government shills." Online and elsewhere, it can get so unpleasant that at some point, a scientist might ask, "Why bother?" Everyone has interesting, fun research projects. Why spend time on this?
In this way, the UAP/UFO community needs to ask itself a difficult question. Does that community want their subject to be part of the actual scientific process — where beliefs can get legitimately challenged — or do they just want to hold on to their beliefs no matter what? There is a word for the second option. It's called religion.
