Vanishing Stars: Dr. Villarroel’s search for pre-Sputnik satellites
Dr Beatriz Villarroel is a Swedish astronomer and a member of the Sol Foundation, who has recently published three peer-reviewed papers showing evidence for artificial objects in Earth’s orbit before the launch of Sputnik in 1947. The evidence for these claims, and the correlation with historical UFO reports is notable, both for laying out a path for other researchers to reproduce her work at other observatories and for the way it resists any conventional explanations.
Podcast Show Notes #podcast
- Back in July, Dr. Beatriz Villarroel starting dropping hints about some upcoming UFO-related scientific papers that were in the process of being peer reviewed.
- Villarroel: “We looked where few have dared. And we didn’t find nothing.”
- The UFO community started getting hyped about another serious scientist paying attention to the phenomenon.
- Sol Foundation bio: “Dr. Beatriz Villarroel is a researcher in astronomy at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm. She leads the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations project. The VASCO project searches for vanishing stars with the help of automated methods as well as a citizen science project.”
Transient Research
- Stockholm University: “[Vanishing stars are] short-lived flashes of light captured on photographic plates… that look like stars appearing and disappearing within a single exposure… For a long time, single points of light on astronomical plates have been dismissed as defects, even when they looked like real stars.”
- Scientific American: “[Villarroel’s papers] concern data gathered at the Palomar Observatory in California from 1949 to 1958 for a project called the Palomar Sky Survey, which was one of the first detailed astronomical surveys of the sky. About 2,000 photographic plates were used as part of the survey.”
- SciAm: “Each photographic plate was a glass sheet coated in an emulsion, or a layer of chemicals, that reacted to incoming light, mostly from stars across the sky. This was the main method of recording astronomical images before the advent of digital cameras. Each photographic plate was the size of a vinyl record cover and was physically lifted into and removed from the telescope… [after it] took a 50-minute exposure of the sky”
- SciAm: “The plates were digitized in the 1990s and 2000s… They used image processing software to look for transients—short-lived celestial events, such as stars flaring in brightness or fading from view, that are often associated with extreme astrophysics… They identified more than 107,000 transients.”
- Villarroel: “Today we know that short flashes of light are often solar reflections from flat, highly reflective objects in orbit around the Earth, such as satellites and space debris. But the photographic plates analyzed in VASCO were taken before humans had satellites in space.”
- Stockholm University: “The researchers looked… 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.”
- Villarroel: “Something could be in a narrow band either because it’s tumbling in space when it’s in orbit [resulting in successive] glints… or it could be that you have something that is in a formation.”
- When they went to publish their paper, one of the peer reviewers said: “okay, but you really need to prove that it is solar reflections. So if that’s true, then… they’re going to vanish in the Earth’s shadow.”
Earth’s Shadow
- Villarroel: “ For every transient, we have the coordinate and we also have the time of the observation. So you can calculate if it’s inside the earth shadow or not. If it would be plate defects, you would have no deficit. If it's a hundred percent solar reflections, you will have zero chances there. And if you have a part of them are real and a part of them are plate defects that you'll have a deficit, and you can basically estimate how big a fraction of your objects that seem to be authentic.”
- Villarroel: “We see that there's a deficit of one third. It means that 30 to 35% of the objects we're working with come from solar reflections.”
- Villarroel: “Only something really planar and reflective can give off those transients. Any round or rough body would result in streaks… These flashes that we see are not streaks, they're associated with things that are extremely flat and extremely reflective… I’m thinking mirrors, glass, or polymers.”
- Marik von Rennenkampff, UFO journalist: “ The earliest US government analysis of UAP dating back to the late 1940s and early 1950s all describe ‘metallic’ or ‘light reflecting’ objects.” (He goes on to cite Kenneth Arnold’s original UFO sighting, The 1947 Twining memo, and the 1948 Air Force analysis.) “ It should also be noted that many witnesses described such metallic light reflecting objects exhibiting bizarre, erratic flight characteristics, such as wobbling, oscillating, and flipping.” (Including recently in the Gimbal video.)
Nuclear Tests and UFOs
- Villarroel: “Steve Bruehl and [I] investigated whether pre-Sputnik transients statistically correlate with atomic bomb tests and historical UFO sightings. The answer? Yes — to both.”
- Bruehl: “ So out of those 2,700 days, if there's no nuclear test, there's a transient on 11% of those days. But if there's been a nuclear test the day before, then almost 19% of those days have a transient. So that 11 versus 19 is about a 68% increase in risk for a transient, if you've had a nuclear test.”
- Stockholm University: “The number of [transients] increases by an average of 8.5 percent for each report of UAP. When both these reports and nuclear tests coincided, the effects were additive, with more than twice as many flashes of light as on days without either nuclear tests or reports.”
- Marik von Rennenkampff: “ Intriguingly, one of the most statistically significant alignments of transient was captured on July 27th, 1952, which coincides with the second weekend of the well-known and very well-documented. July, 1952 UAP incidents over Washington, DC. When multiple radar facilities, pilots, and ground observers, all saw objects behaving in perplexing ways over the course of two successive weekends.”
Conclusions
- Villarroel, 10/20: “Our papers are peer-reviewed, accepted and published — and they reveal some extraordinary things: First, we find statistically significant correlations between short-lived transients on pre-Sputnik sky plates, UFO sightings, and above-ground nuclear tests. Second, we show a 22 sigma deficit of transients inside Earth’s shadow — consistent with a fraction of these events originating from solar reflections from flat, highly reflective surfaces in orbit before the human Space Age began… Three independent high-level journals — and three independent peer review processes.”
- CERN: “A result that has a statistical significance of five sigma means the almost certain likelihood that a bump in the data is caused by a new phenomenon, rather than a statistical fluctuation… In most areas of science that use statistical analysis, the five-sigma threshold seems overkill. In a population study, such as polls for how people will vote, usually a result with three sigma statistical significance would suffice. However, when discussing the very fabric of the Universe, scientists aim to be as precise as possible… Five sigma is considered the ‘gold standard’ in particle physics because it guarantees an extremely low likelihood of a claim being false.”
- Villarroel: “It's a bigger chance that you get eaten by a black hole tomorrow than that you land on that value by chance.”
Alternate Hypotheses
- Some people suggested that the transients could be spy balloons from Project Mogul or Project Genetrix.
- Villarroel: “During 50 minutes of exposure, that means any balloons would leave streaks in the images, not point sources.”
- Someone else suggested that maybe someone had secretly put satellites up there before Sputnik:
- Dr Hossenfelder: “It’s possible, but it seems highly unlikely to me, that any nation had multiple satellites in the sky before the Russian Sputnik launch. This is because it isn’t all that easy to launch a rocket without anyone noticing, and you can’t do it from anywhere either.”
- Mick West, after the papers passed peer review: “The gold standard of science is not peer review, it is independent replication.”
- Garry Nolan: “Multiple plates showing the same kind of event IS replication. It's peer review of unaltered photographic plates. If you want to replicate it, you can go get the plates and do the same study.”
- Dennis Asberg, co-author on the transient study: “Beatriz showed the phenomenon exists using historical plates from Oct 4, 1954. Now a French observatory record from Oct 3, 1954 shows the same transient behavior. Two observatories on different continents. One phenomenon.” He linked to a video by Simon Holland who claims a French astronomer reached out to him about transients they found in 1954 and pointed him to a French-language news report about it.
- Nolan: “What kind of atmospheric effects might have been created… by nuclear tests themselves that would mimic any of this?”
- Villarroel: “ We were talking about that might be some kind of glowing fireballs or so in the atmosphere. However, they are going to be streaking. If a telescope is tracking the stars, they're going to be seen as streaks, not as point sources.”
- Nolan: “What about cosmic rays? That could explain why you see a correlation with nuclear tests.”
- Villarroel: “Then I wonder why we see a correlation with UFO events? And I also would wonder, why does it vanish in the Earth’s shadow?”
- Villarroel: “Any viable hypothesis for the VASCO transients must explain seven independent observational facts: 1. They have point spread functions similar to stars. With the 1.4 m telescope optics, this means the sources must be hundreds of km away to avoid blurring (i.e., outside the atmosphere) during 45–50 min star-tracking exposures. 2. They are not present in images taken 30 minutes earlier or later. 3. They sometimes appear and disappear in groups. 4. Some are aligned. 5. They correlate in time with nuclear tests. 6. They correlate in time with historical UFO reports. 7. They show a statistically significant deficit inside Earth’s shadow — they literally vanish there.”
- Villarroel: “No natural or instrumental explanation proposed so far accounts for all seven properties at once. Many experts offer explanations that account for one of the seven points — but are falsified when tested against the others. [The] balloon hypothesis fails already at the first point. Brief flashes also get quickly diluted by the 50-minute exposure. Plate defects won’t correlate with nuclear tests, historical UFO reports, or vanish in Earth’s geometric shadow at 42 000 km altitude. Each alignment is statistically evaluated against randomness. The heavily contrived alternatives suggested by some experts… were already falsified (or falsifiable) by the data. At present, the only hypothesis consistent with the full set of observations is that of artificial objects in high-altitude orbits, pre-Sputnik. And I believe a significant fraction (1/3rd) of these transients are such.”
Non-Human Tech?
- Villarroel: “These… results raise a bold question. And yes… you know which.”
- V: “My scientific conclusion from this work we’ve been doing is that we see something that shouldn’t be there in these images from the early 1950s. Something that happens to look very flat and very reflective and in high orbits, probably. And that’s my scientific point of view. And if you ask me about my personal, I’m going to say I think it’s artificial and not ours.”
- Ross Coulthart: “Are we talking… about the possibility of a non-human technology that was surveilling this planet at that peak moment in UFO history?”
- V: “I can not find any other consistent explanation other than that we are looking at something artificial before Sputnik 1… I don't find any other way of looking at this data… If I take the pieces together: that some of them fall on a line; our best cases happen during the Washington DC flap, by coincidence; there's temporal correlations with the nuclear bomb tests and with UFO sightings. And on top of it, there's a huge deficit in the shadow of the earth… For me, this looks technological, but I may be wrong. Maybe there's a new physical phenomenon that they haven't...that nobody knows about yet. But, to me, it looks very high tech.”
References
Papers
- Bruehl, Villarroel: Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena
- Villarroel: Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey
- Villarroel: A Cost-Effective Search for Extraterrestrial Probes in the Solar System
- Villarroel: A glint in the eye: Photographic plate archive searches for non-terrestrial artefacts
Interviews
- Sol Foundation: Dr. Beatriz Villarroel with Dr. Garry Nolan: UAP Detected in Orbit Before Satellites
- American Alchemy: Top Astronomer: “I Found 100,000 UFOs Above Earth!” (ft. Beatriz Villarroel)
- News Nation: Astronomer's new data finds possible nonhuman intelligence in space
- News Nation: Data showing possible nonhuman intelligence passes peer review
Articles
- Stockholm University: Unexpected patterns in historical astronomical observations
- Phys.org: Scientists use Earth's shadow to hunt for alien probes
- Scientific American: UFOs Are Just One Explanation for Mysterious Patterns in Old Telescope Data
- Astronomy.com: Did aliens watch 1950s nuclear tests? ‘Maybe,’ studies say
References
- Villaroel: “The pattern is there, and it cannot be explained away as random noise.”
- Godier: “The most compelling UAP evidence ever found, hiding in plain sight.”
- Villarroel: “We didn’t find nothing.”
- Villarroel: “Pre-Sputnik transients statistically correlate with atomic bomb tests and UFO sightings.”
- Villarroel: “Clear deficit of transients in the Earth’s shadow demonstrates they’re sunlight glints.”
- Villarroel: “These two articles are preprints under peer review.”
- Villarroel: “We continue to see a robust deficit in Earth shadow.”
- Villarroel: “For me, this looks technological, but I may be wrong.”
- Villarroel: “A method to look for emissions from alien probes using earth’s shadow.”
- Villarroel: “These latest results raise a bold question. And yes… you know which.”
- Villarroel: “Balloons would leave streaks in the images, not point sources.”
- Nolan: “Multiple plates showing the same kind of event IS replication.”
- Villarroel: “Any hypothesis for the transients must explain seven independent observational facts.”
- Asberg: “Now a French observatory shows the same transient behavior.”
Episode 79, posted on