Now, does anyone have any reply of substance?
Having read your blog for years, including your recent one about the transients, as they are called, I'd respond that the over all claim made by Villarreol et.al is a bit more complex than just a red spectral class starts appearing on the red sensitive plate and not appearing onto the blue sensitive plate. While it's true they seemed to have used only digital scans of the red sensitive plates, or more likely digital scans of analog copies of the original plates, the various claims are not just that the supposed transients don't appear on the corresponding blue plates. Rather, they only appear on the scans of the plates from '50s and not on subsequent star catalogs or even in other Palomar plates from later dates. so, whether the transients appear or don't on the blue plates is irrelevant as they didn't really look at them as far as I can tell.
In addition, they make the claim that these transients are somehow related to the earths shadow. My understanding is that the claim is IF these transients represent actual physical objects in space, the original plates captured their momentary reflections. Therefore, IF they are real objects, more of them would appear out of the shadow as opposed to something like scratches and damage that would be spread across the shadow and non-shadow areas equally.
I'm in no way saying any of this is accurate and there are a number of problems identified up-thread by various members, including but not limited to, the variation in the amount of transients used for the various claims, the lack of public data and the overall complexity of the software pipeline that was used to identified the various transient datasets, which doesn't appear to have been shared. All of the supposed "reproducebility" involves various people just reusing the same data that was produced via the original pipeline.
I don't think many people outside of UFO circles are convinced these transients are even real, aside from errors, scratches and other similar defects, let alone the notion that the Palomar team unknowingly captured "alien techno-signatures".
However, IF as you describe in your blog Villarreol presented side by side scans of contemporaneous red and blue plates and suggested the transients were alien because they don't appear on the blue plates, than that's a bit different from the overall claim as I think many of us understand it. IF she did this to in effect "dumb down" the claim and make it easier to understand for a general audience in a quick news blurb, than the critique you gave is warranted.
