I get the sense that this topic is popular because "aliens y'all". It's much more likely to be radiation. It's possible that atomic tests kick luminous particles into the upper atmosphere. But it's not aliens.
But to me the biggest flag is that these images are from 50 minute exposures. The objects don't appear as streaks, so they are either very, very short flashes (much shorter than 50 min), or they are very far away. The authors interpret this to mean the objects should be in geosynchronous orbit, which doesn't make sense; objects in geosync would still appear to move relative to the star background over the course of 50 min. Yet this is the entire basis for their "shadow deficit" window calculation. You could constrain the duration vs distance by looking at the effect it would have on smearing the PSF, which would be interesting.
Overall it seems pretty unscientific. If you go looking through enough statistically noisy data for signals in enough places, you'll eventually find it.
There are other possiblities that are likely: Upper atmosphere tests resulting in transient luminous phenomena. This would be more likey in certain conditions where the sun could reflect off of specular matter (e.g., bits of metal). You would see this most likely within 1-2 hours of sunset or 1-2 hours of sunrise (source: I've used optical equipment to spot satellites professionally).
I'd note that thier pipeline for removing "plate defects" is not based on the PSF but on some vaguely defined "expert review" training. This can, and should, be a quantifiable step.
Couldn’t be aberrations in equipment, like lenses? Or film development?
> Overall it seems pretty unscientific.
1) The paper is suggesting aliens... your suspicion hats should always go on
- Carl Sagan said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Is the evidence extra-ordinary?
2) The authors aren't experts
- Stephen Bruehl: A doctor of Anesthesiology
- Brian Doherty: "Independent Researcher"[0]
- Alina Streblyanska: Actually maybe a astrophysics researcher?[1]
- Beatriz Villarroel: The top Google hit for her is for a UFO wikipedia[2]
3) Authors don't share affiliations
- Corresponding author has no domain expertize and no clear affiliation to others.
4) Authors have hints of metric hacking
- Villarroel has 8 citations in a paper with only 18[3]
5) The GitHub repo is dead: https://github.com/dca-doherty/VASCO-ML
If you do understand statistics there's clearly more red flags. The +/- windowing being a pretty big one, since there are much better tools for this (errors don't need to be symmetric! Nor do they need to be uniform!). There's also a pretty big assumption made that cshimmin didn't mention: the paper assumes all nuclear tests are in the public record. But I also assume if you have a strong statistics background then there's a high probability you didn't upvote the post.
[0] The man has effectively no online presence. Google searching his email yields effectively nothing except people posting about this paper in UFO groups (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22briandohertyresearch%40gm...). His linked GitHub also makes him anonymous (https://github.com/dca-doherty/) and his website linked is just about finding day care in Texas. He has one more paper on ArXiv, but it is from a few weeks prior
[1] Found their Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alina-streblyanska-95b2375b/). Their most recent paper is also on UAPs, along with Villarroel. But also, they work for "Society of UAP Studies", which should be a big red flag. Also, they were working as a Post-doc for 12 years, which is a bit insane
[2] https://www.wikidisc.org/wiki/Beatriz_Villarroel and here's here Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_Jc8gm0AAAAJ
[3] I looked at some other papers of hers and they show a similar pattern. This explains her citation count (which is rather low) and h-index (it's better to just click on the references and you'll see it's predominantly her referencing herself):
- 2602.15171: 9 citations total, 8 are hers
- "A cost-effective search for extraterrestrial probes in the Solar system" has many more, but still 6 to herself (and 3 to Loeb)
- Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (Yes, this is in "Nature"): 20 citations, 5 hers
- Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey: 11/36
- On the Image Profiles of Transients in the Palomar Sky Survey: 5/5
- A Civilian Astronomer's Guide to UAP Research: 7/98 (actually not a red flag, but the title sure is...)
- and so onanother POV is the paper is sloppy in the parts that matter
Machine Learning goes both ways. A chatbot is not predisposed to ruin aliens enthusiast's days. It just does what it is told to do, like repro a paper, and it can tell you the problems in some limited, but globally important, objective way, and it did, and the paper has problems, and they're basic.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, is that there's a detailed criticism of this line of research available, including evidence against the argument that these are more likely ±1 day of nuclear tests. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21946, and also https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.00497 for a study of plate defect issues.
I think the current paper continuing this line of research should be read cautiously. I don't love discounting ideas out of hand, as these folks clearly have put effort into the analysis. But the rebuttals read as at least as high quality analysis, and "it's aliens" requires a lot of evidence for me to take it seriously.
From Wikipedia: "During World War II, Menzel was commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy and asked to head a division of intelligence, where he used his many-sided talents, including deciphering enemy codes. Even until 1955, he worked with the Navy improving radio-wave propagation by tracking the Sun's emissions and studying the effect of the aurora on radio propagation for the Department of Defense.[3][4] Returning to Harvard after the war, he was appointed acting director of the Harvard Observatory in 1952, and was the full director from 1954 to 1966. His colleague Dr. Dorrit Hoffleit recalls one of his first actions in the position was asking his secretary to destroy a third of the plates sight unseen, resulting in their permanent loss from the record."
On the papers, it doesn't mean that it must be aliens, but weird phenomena.
Assume for a moment their core hypothesis is correct, there were transient objects captured on film pre-Sputnik in LEO objects.
What might we say about their nature?
The authors' undisguised implication is "it's aliens" to be blunt; that's their motivation for this work.
Consequently they put effort (which may not be noted in the final published papers...) into the question of whether they could make any meaningful inference about the geometry and spectral properties of their "transients," their interest (of course) was that if they could make a meaningful argument for regular geometry, they had the story of the century in effect.
These efforts failed totally.
A natural inference might be, among the reasons this might be, is that the objects (remember we are assuming they exist) do not have such characteristics. The primary reason that would be true is if they were naturally occurring objects.
I looked this up and was surprised to learn that there are currently estimated to be on the order of a million small objects in the inner solar system.
So: the entire hypothesis hinges on "significant correlation with nuclear testing." Because otherwise, once can reasonably assume that transient traces of objects—when they are actually traces of objects—would in a quotidian way presumably be caused by some of these million objects.
Or so say I.
There is no end of peculiar and provacative history and data in UFOlogy, and even more murk; one needs to tread very carefully to not go down (or, be led down) to false conclusions, disinformation, and the like.
The authors of this paper seem singularly disinterested in that caution.
which regularly situates what they are willing to say in print, within unsupported and click-bait-worthy speculation.
Another example of bad faith: curve-fitting around what constitutes "nuclear testing."
A cost-effective search for extraterrestrial probes in the Solar system
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/546/2/staf1158/822188...
*Not an actual quote
Anyone who has read any amount of history from this time should know that this is very simply not possible.
This statment is unfalsifiable in the same way that "I'm a six-legged alien from Venus typing this message from orbit" is unfalsifiable. It's just flat nonsense.
With an implied subtext: "We aren't going to show why it's aliens, but trust us, we're experts."
I think closing one's mind off 99.999% to "it's aliens" is perfectly healthy and justified. When you remove the folklore, memes, psyops and apply Occaam's Razor to the "evidence" and sort out mistaken natural phenomena, misinterpreted data, classified but terrestrial technology and outright hoaxes, you aren't left with much of anything, and certainly nothing definite. There is no reason to assume the phenomenon mentioned in the linked paper demonstrates the presence of alien spacecraft but the UFO community is going to run with it anyway.
Call me when David Grusch comes through with that "catastrophic disclosure" we were promised or when Lue Elizondo can tell the difference between a starship and a chandelier. This is just Bob Lazar and Majestic-12 all over again.
I've heard "evidence" of aliens my entire life. Guess how many panned out. Zero. But that never seems to discourage anyone from believing that an artifact on a photo must have the most implausible explanation ever - aliens!
Where do you draw the line? Time travel? Teleportation? Astrology? Fortune tellers? Razor blade sharpening? Reincarnation?
It's not necessary for me to debunk your theory. It is incumbent upon you to prove it valid.
There aren't any wood fairies either.