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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."

Info about July 27, 1952 UFO/UAP sighting in DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_inci...

I get Battle of Los Angeles vibes from this, tbqh.
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 specific analysis isn’t p-hacking because although they conduct multiple tests, they report all of them rather than just the statistically significant ones.

They should however account for multiple testing. The Bonferroni correction (which is conservative) would set the alpha level to 0.05/5=0.01, for which the 1 day after result is still (just) statistically significant.

Not to say there couldn’t be other problems.

Had to look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging
I'm glad you called this out. p-hacking can be useful to generate hypotheses, which ought to be then tested (rather than thinking the p-hacked conclusions are just that)
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?

The bomb casing from a successful nuclear detonation would be entirely atomized and instantly vaporized. The exponential runaway of an atomic chain reaction produces so much radiation (read: light, heat, X-rays, and even gamma rays) in the first nanoseconds that literally every chemical bond is ripped apart, plus so many fast-moving neutrons that many nuclei (even not of the initial fissile material) are either fissioned themselves or altered to radioactive isotopes. Because so much EMR is produced so fast, there literally isn't even time for matter to be physically accelerated away before being absolutely soaked in EM. It's possible that some other matter in the vicinity might be intact and blasted away, but anything within the fireball radius of ~100m is absolute toast.
Thank you for this detailed explanation. Given the above, I find it absolutely wild that the closest survivor of Hiroshima was only 170m away (granted he was in a concrete basement). In my head, I always pictured a large area completely obliterated as you described.

"Eiso Nomura (1898-1982) miraculously survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, despite the fact that the explosion occurred in the air right above him.On August 6, 1945, Mr. Nomura was in the basement of the Fuel Hall (now, the Rest House in Peace Memorial Park), about 170 meters southwest of the hypocenter."

Was wondering about that but then came across this passage in the paper: “ 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.” I would expect to see artifacts of the tests themselves continue under that hypothesis. Of course this raises a whole bunch of other questions…
These things are i think around 400,000km out in space so no.
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!
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.
In reality other advanced civilizations elsewhere and elsewhen in our galaxy are as constrained by the speed of light as we are, thus they can't come here as we can't go there.
Isaac Arthur has put it in a way that resonated with me. If you live in a universe that has FTL, it’s scarier in a lot ways. It means the really dangerous bad guys in the other galaxy can reach you. If you live in a world without FTL, it makes things happen really slowly and over generations. That’s not as fun and exciting, but it also severely limits the amount of bad guys that can get to you.

And any bad guy that can even reach you basically means you’re already dead if they so choose.

That doesn't stop hypothetical automated sentinel probes that alien races have seeded the galaxy with as a surveillance net from picking up the atomic blasts and investigating.
Isn't this ruling out outlier observations given our model, rather than evaluating our model given outlier observations?
Is Anyone here educated enough to tell if quantum entanglement could (hypothetically) be used to transmit information faster than light?
That's our best guess anyway. My bet is that superluminal travel will be possible once we resolve quantum gravity and break all of Einstein's rules.

At least that's what I tell myself. Hard to appreciate the majesty of the universe if we're forever locked into a single star system.

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?)

https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/nuclea...

Kodak had this issue for sure.

It's also just a permanent issue for sensitive instruments for scientific experiments. The Cold War bomb testing spree contaminated so much there's a whole demand for metals produced before the first atomic test because of the increased presence of fallout from the tests.

The issue is relegated to only the most sensitive equipment these days but it's a funny little side issue for several years before the test ban had been in place long enough to reduce the elevated levels back to nearly background.

That wouldn't explain why the effect only disappears for parts of the sky within Earth's shadow.
Dots doesn't disappear from Earth's shadow, there are just little bit less of them statistically. And she can't explain that in her paper at all, if those are supposedly objects and not plate defects, then why are they in a place, where objects shouldn't appear.

Also, assuming her hypothesis is correct and she didn't made factual mistakes - to be presented as dots and not streaks, all of these thousands of objects should be in a tiny narrow band in GEO spread out all across the orbit envelope. Where did they disappear in between 50 minutes from red plate to blue plate? And then this somehow repeated every single time in that particular order? An alien armada sitting precisely in a single orbit and then vanishes on a cue from a some lone observatory on Earth, when technician changes plates there? Then again appears all strictly in GEO, then again disappears in 50 minutes after?

Doesn't it look absurd to you?

> "We also find a highly significant (∼22σ) deficit of POSS-I transients within Earth's shadow when compared with the theoretical hemispheric shadow coverage at 42,164 km altitude."

I'm not an statisastroscienticianist, so I have no idea what that means, but maybe it's significant.

That being said, Kodak discovered nuclear testing was a thing before the public for all the obvious reasons.

The problem with that impressive 100500σ figure, is that she refuses to provide code which she supposedly used to supposedly prove that Earth shadow has some influence on these dots on the images made from photo plates. I.e. this 22σ figure is a "pinky promise" level "science".
The earths shadow effect lowered the transients by about 33%, which does provide evidence for physical reflection accounting for 1/3rd of the effect. To my mind, gamma ray-like exposure on the film is an extremely plausible explanation for the other 66%.
It occurs to me that the gamma ray hypothesis has a fairly easy check. Light sources pass through the telescope’s optics (typically mirrors or occasionally lenses) which leads to a characteristic “point spread function” for point sources like stars. If it were an errant gamma ray exposure directly on the film, it’s extremely unlikely to have the PSF of the standard light sources.

You can compute the PSF from known stars on the same image and run a statistical test, but TBH just visually comparing the transient with a few stars of similar brightness on the same image should put this one to rest.

Following up on this, I eyeballed the images in this one: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe

The brightest stars in all of the images have a clear 4-pointed pattern. The brightest transients _do not_ show this pattern.

This is obviously not definitive, and the fainter stars are harder to eyeball the PSF, but it does provide some evidence to support the hypothesis that the brighter transients could be due to gamma ray exposure of the film rather than flashes in the atmosphere or space.

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.

>I can't quickly find out the source

Took me too long, but here’s one:

https://thefreaky.net/dr-beatriz-villarroel-and-the-mystery-...

From that source:

“Old photographic plates are notoriously temperamental. Dust specks, cosmic rays, emulsion scratches, and scanning artefacts can all mimic stars. Villarroel’s team applied careful filters and cross-checks, but some scientists argue the anomalies could still be defects rather than cosmic revelations.”

It’s not a real debunking — Rational Wiki (now down) was good at debunking things like this which weren’t notable enough to make the Wikipedia — but it’s what I’m able to find about the matter.

I’m of course still skeptical — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — but I think a good debunking needs to be posted online, with footnotes and references.

Finally found the post I was looking for:

https://medium.com/@izabelamelamed/not-seeing-the-star-cloud...

In my opinion it's a pretty damning conclusion. I would love to see some explanation from the ufology crowd :)

Can you rule out or confirm the emulsion issue just from a print? Would you not need access to the original negative?
That's not the post I'm trying to find, unfortunately. That one was on substack I think, but I'm not sure by now.

As for good debunking - come on, it's supposedly thousands of crafts, supposedly in the same orbit (because any other orbit except for GEO would cause them to streak on the long exposure photo), in a random formation all across the sky, supposedly synchronously disappeared all at once, time synced to the photoplate change on a random Earth observatory. Pfff, just typing this out feels like a bad joke. Good proofs or even bad proofs need to be provided first by the ufology community, not vice versa.

> one scientist, Beatrice Villarroel

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.

> tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.

That's being generous. Some of them know damn well that they are looking at compression artifacts in pictures of Mars and not cities, but they are trying to sell a book.

I didn't realize it, but I saw something about this over the weekend.

The article cites the same papers that the author claims were rejected on ARXIV:

https://ovniologia.com.br/2025/10/astrophysicist-dr-beatriz-...

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
Radioactive fallout?
Weren't Nazis sending rockets into space by 1945? Soviets and Americans, probably as well. So why is it unexpected to have objects in orbit?
Try reading the article. You might enjoy it and it will answer your question.
Beyond the date of the first artificial satellite, there is nothing in the article that mentions space debris.
None of those rockets attained anything like orbital speed.
Iron Sky is just a movie...as far as we can tell.
> Weren't Nazis sending rockets into space by 1945? Soviets and Americans, probably as well.

No to all, without reservation. The German V-2 didn't go into orbit, and the US and USSR weren't active in large missile activity at all, until long post-war.

Unless by the early 1950s the US and possibly others were launching objects into orbit, and their doing so has been a closely guarded secret even until now. The nuclear tests would have offered natural PR cover.

If we rule out ETs for the sake of argument, and if these weren’t atmospheric effects or artifacts from the nuclear tests themselves, then small objects were in orbit at the time and either they were launched from Earth or the planet happened to be crossing paths with them.

Do you really think it's ok to put trendline in Fig.2 ?
No. In general the statistics look a bit amateurish, which is normal for a scientific paper. I'd actually like reanalyze the data, just out of curiosity. (Those p-values and other things can still be on the right ballpark even if the models and analyses are not top notch. I'm not exactly doubting them, and the results are interesting even without any correlation to UAP sightings or nukes.)