Fascinating.
"The second paper, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP), specifically looks for signs of possible extraterrestrial artifacts in orbit around Earth, before the first human satellite launch in 1957. The researchers looked, among other things, for instances where multiple flashes of light were along a line or in a narrow band—something that indicates reflections from flat, reflective objects in motion. Two interesting examples were identified, one of which occurred on July 27, 1952, the same night as the notable sightings of UAP in Washington, D.C."
I’m just spitballing here, but could the objects in orbit be parts of the bomb casing? One would assume them to be tumbling and flashing either periodically or in a specific pattern corresponding to their rotation. Or maybe producing a short flash on re-entry.
Spitballing even further, could the objects be explained by a nuclear fireball pushing a mass of atmospheric humidity high enough to form a solid sheet of ice in orbit?
A widespread theory among et believers is that nuclear explosions bring the attention of et intelligence around the universe as a sign of sufficiently advanced life to investigate, and that aliens are here to make sure we develop without self-destructing and join the intergalactic world peacefully.
My unsupported hypothesis: Gamma radiation from the blast was reaching the film that was being used to take the astronomical observations.
For this to work, though, a few things would have to be true:
1. The film would have to be stored in bulk in a place that would be (mostly) protected from gamma rays from the tests.
2. The film for that night's observations would have to already be not with the rest of the film at the time of the test.
3. The observatory would have to be close enough to the location of the test that the gamma rays would have a chance to reach it.
But maybe it doesn't have to be direct. Maybe it could be gamma rays produced by the fallout, which drifts from the location of the test to at or near the observatory.
Then you have to wonder why no more were observed after March 17, 1956. A change in the character of the film? (Either a change in manufacturing process, or a change in what kind of film was used?)
After over a decade of knowing about it, I finally got a copy of Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events by Persinger/Lafrenière last week and was reading about this subject yesterday, but from a book published in 1977. It's blowing my mind to see this here today, but the ultimate source of me even knowing about the above book, Robert Anton Wilson, would not be surprised at all!
Note that their paper includes p-hacking so this is proto-science rather than science. They didn't find data to match their hypothesis, but they were able to find a hypothesis to match their data.
> Follow-up secondary analyses were then conducted to examine in more granular fashion the timing of the association between nuclear testing and occurrence of transients. Table 2 summarizes the association between occurrence of transients and different time windows relative to nuclear testing, ranging from 2 days before a test until 2 days after a test. The only association that reached statistical significance was for the association in which transients occur 1 day after nuclear testing.
This belongs at r/ufos, not on a HN. To anyone who is new to this - one scientist, Beatrice Villarroel, promotes a theory that old photoplates from mid 20th century, show multiple UFOs because there were discrepancies between two pictures taken 50 minutes apart. To prove this, she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures where this is indeed observed. So, she's right?
First of all, in every par she picks arbitrary a tiny fraction, like a few percentages of an area of the plate, without any explanation why the rest of the image is ignored. After looking at the full plates, one can see that there not dozens of suspicious lights but literally thousands of disappearing lights, uniformly spread out across the whole plate, without any pattern or localization. So thousands of alien saucers all across the Earth. You see where this is going? But it gets worse.
Second - in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear. Not a single light out of thousands is breaking the pattern and transitions from empty to light, no, all of them transition from light to nothingness only.
And finally third - these thousands of UFOs on the first plate appear because the first plate uses a brittle and unstable red pigment. I can't quickly find out the source, but one guy did analysis and found out the type of the emulsion used on the first plates in these sets in that decade and said that it was indeed a fragile compound, which is most likely the reason for these thousands of uniformly spread out image defects.
tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.
The example papers [1] [2] [3] [4] have 18 unique co-authors. Also, it's Beatriz.
> she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures
"We base our analysis on the catalog of 298,165 short-duration transients presented in Solano et al. (2022), detected in 200 red POSS-I plates with typical exposure times of 45–50 minutes." [1]
"Of the 2,718 days in this period, transients were observed on 310 days (11.4%)" [2]
"These searches significantly reduced the number of candidates (from 298 165 to 9 395)" [3]
> uniformly spread out across the whole plate
> thousands of uniformly spread out image defects
"we find a strong deficit of transient detections, at the 22 sigma statistical significance level, within the Earth’s umbral shadow" [1]
"we expect N = 1223 transients in shadow out of 106,339 total, corresponding to an expected fraction of fexp = 0.0115±0.00033. However, we observe only N = 349 transients in shadow" [1]
"Plate defects, by contrast, are expected to be randomly shaped and distributed" [1]
> in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear
"transients that appear only in one long exposure and are entirely absent shortly before and after" [1]
"In brief, transients were defined as distinct star-like point sources present in POSS-I E Red images that were absent both in images taken immediately prior to the POSS-I Red image and in all subsequent images." [2]
(*) POSS -- Palomar Observatory Sky Survey
[1] Aligned, multiple-transient events in the First Palomar Sky Survey, 2025, preprint
[2] Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, Scientific Reports, 2025
[3] Discovering vanishing objects in POSS I red images using the Virtual Observatory, 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 515, 1380
[4] A glint in the eye: photographic plate archive searches for non-terrestrial artefacts, 2022, Acta Astronautica, 194, 106
Turns out looking for quotes directly contradicting debunker's statements is a great way to focus while reading a UAP-related scientific paper, thank you.
Would be interesting to know, what they've excluded as potential explanations. Some things like lense effect, changes of light wavelengths of such missing objects etc
14 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 34.0 ms ] threadInfo about July 27, 1952 UFO/UAP sighting in DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_inci...
Spitballing even further, could the objects be explained by a nuclear fireball pushing a mass of atmospheric humidity high enough to form a solid sheet of ice in orbit?
The article cites the same papers that the author claims were rejected on ARXIV:
https://ovniologia.com.br/2025/10/astrophysicist-dr-beatriz-...
For this to work, though, a few things would have to be true:
1. The film would have to be stored in bulk in a place that would be (mostly) protected from gamma rays from the tests.
2. The film for that night's observations would have to already be not with the rest of the film at the time of the test.
3. The observatory would have to be close enough to the location of the test that the gamma rays would have a chance to reach it.
But maybe it doesn't have to be direct. Maybe it could be gamma rays produced by the fallout, which drifts from the location of the test to at or near the observatory.
Then you have to wonder why no more were observed after March 17, 1956. A change in the character of the film? (Either a change in manufacturing process, or a change in what kind of film was used?)
> Follow-up secondary analyses were then conducted to examine in more granular fashion the timing of the association between nuclear testing and occurrence of transients. Table 2 summarizes the association between occurrence of transients and different time windows relative to nuclear testing, ranging from 2 days before a test until 2 days after a test. The only association that reached statistical significance was for the association in which transients occur 1 day after nuclear testing.
First of all, in every par she picks arbitrary a tiny fraction, like a few percentages of an area of the plate, without any explanation why the rest of the image is ignored. After looking at the full plates, one can see that there not dozens of suspicious lights but literally thousands of disappearing lights, uniformly spread out across the whole plate, without any pattern or localization. So thousands of alien saucers all across the Earth. You see where this is going? But it gets worse.
Second - in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear. Not a single light out of thousands is breaking the pattern and transitions from empty to light, no, all of them transition from light to nothingness only.
And finally third - these thousands of UFOs on the first plate appear because the first plate uses a brittle and unstable red pigment. I can't quickly find out the source, but one guy did analysis and found out the type of the emulsion used on the first plates in these sets in that decade and said that it was indeed a fragile compound, which is most likely the reason for these thousands of uniformly spread out image defects.
tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.
The example papers [1] [2] [3] [4] have 18 unique co-authors. Also, it's Beatriz.
> she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures
"We base our analysis on the catalog of 298,165 short-duration transients presented in Solano et al. (2022), detected in 200 red POSS-I plates with typical exposure times of 45–50 minutes." [1]
"Of the 2,718 days in this period, transients were observed on 310 days (11.4%)" [2]
"These searches significantly reduced the number of candidates (from 298 165 to 9 395)" [3]
> uniformly spread out across the whole plate
> thousands of uniformly spread out image defects
"we find a strong deficit of transient detections, at the 22 sigma statistical significance level, within the Earth’s umbral shadow" [1]
"we expect N = 1223 transients in shadow out of 106,339 total, corresponding to an expected fraction of fexp = 0.0115±0.00033. However, we observe only N = 349 transients in shadow" [1]
"Plate defects, by contrast, are expected to be randomly shaped and distributed" [1]
> in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear
"transients that appear only in one long exposure and are entirely absent shortly before and after" [1]
"In brief, transients were defined as distinct star-like point sources present in POSS-I E Red images that were absent both in images taken immediately prior to the POSS-I Red image and in all subsequent images." [2]
(*) POSS -- Palomar Observatory Sky Survey
[1] Aligned, multiple-transient events in the First Palomar Sky Survey, 2025, preprint
[2] Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, Scientific Reports, 2025
[3] Discovering vanishing objects in POSS I red images using the Virtual Observatory, 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 515, 1380
[4] A glint in the eye: photographic plate archive searches for non-terrestrial artefacts, 2022, Acta Astronautica, 194, 106
Turns out looking for quotes directly contradicting debunker's statements is a great way to focus while reading a UAP-related scientific paper, thank you.