THE PALOMAR LIGHTS — Digger №01 cover. Nine glowing point sources of light beam down toward the silhouette of the Palomar Observatory dome at twilight. Tagline: Something was in our sky — before we put anything there. By @PhillyHarper. A True Story.
1949 USGS Santa Ana 1:250,000 topographic quadrangle.
PALOMAR OBSERVATORY
200-inch Hale · 48-inch Schmidt
San Diego County, California. Five thousand five hundred feet up, on a forested ridge in the Cleveland National Forest, sits the new 200-inch Hale telescope — the largest ever built.
U.S. Geological Survey, Santa Ana sheet, 1:250,000 — surveyed 1949.
Comic-style illustration of Palomar Observatory at twilight, 1950. A truck climbs the winding mountain road toward the silhouetted dome.
Palomar Mountain, California.
November 1949.
Five thousand feet above the orange groves and the Navy airfields of San Diego County, the most ambitious map of the sky ever attempted is about to begin.
Leaflet No. 244, July 1949 — 'A New Celestial Camera Surveys the Universe' by Alice Beach, Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Click to read the original at NASA ADS.
The Monastery at Palomar Observatory — astronomers' communal dining and lodging building at dusk, November 1949.
George Abell is a graduate student. From this observatory he will discover 2,712 galaxy clusters. But tonight, he just needs clear skies.
Split frame: Abell loading the red-sensitive 103a-E plate (left, red light) and the blue-sensitive 103a-O plate (right, blue light) into the Schmidt telescope
George is mapping a patch of sky. Each patch is photographed twice — once on a red-sensitive plate (fifty minutes), once on a blue plate (ten minutes). Two portraits of the same stars, in two colors of light, taken minutes apart.
Split screen: George Abell at the guide telescope controls on the left in his bomber jacket, the crosshair view through the eyepiece showing a centered star on the right
For each exposure, someone must sit at the guide telescope and keep a star centered by hand.

Fifty minutes. In the cold. Night after night, for seven years.
The plate dumbwaiter at Palomar Observatory — wooden mechanical lift carrying the freshly-exposed glass plate XE 325 from the dome down to the darkroom below.
After the exposure, the plate rides a dumbwaiter to the darkroom. Development must happen in absolute blackness. No safelights — the emulsion sees every colour of light.
The plate storage room at Palomar Observatory — floor-to-ceiling wooden cabinets holding glass photographic plates in paper sleeves.
1,872 exposures will be taken; only 936 pairs will pass inspection. The survivors go into drawers where they will sleep for decades…
Plate XE 325 and its blue companion plate from POSS-I, lying in storage. Both labelled XE 325. The red plate carries an anomaly — nine pinpoints of light — that no one has yet noticed.
No one notices at the time, but there's a very strange anomaly…
THE ATOMIC FLASH — 5:15 AM Palomar Mountain at dawn. The dome is closed, the night's work done. On the northeast horizon — a sudden bloom of white-orange light. An atomic flash from the Nevada Test Site, 275 miles away. For a moment, the fir trees cast sharp shadows. Then darkness returns. The sky above is still full of stars.
And in the desert to the northeast, the United States is splitting atoms. The flash from Yucca Flat is visible from the mountain. The astronomers barely notice. They've been watching the sky all night — but looking the other way.
70 years later.

Chapter 1

The Vanishing
Three-panel montage of Beatriz Villarroel's research journey: Uppsala University in winter snow; ETH Zurich modern glass laboratory; Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias — white telescope domes above the clouds on Tenerife.
Uppsala  ·  Zurich  ·  The Canary Islands
Dr. Beatriz Villarroel — Swedish physicist turned astronomer, in her laboratory at NORDITA, Stockholm.
Dr. Beatriz Villarroel. A Swedish physicist turned astronomer. From her laboratory at NORDITA in Stockholm, she studies the violent hearts of galaxies — quasars, black holes, things that burn.
A massive star at the moment of supernova explosion — a blinding shockwave bursting outward in concentric rings of fire and electric blue light, debris and gas flung across deep space.
The loud death.
Most massive stars die loud — a supernova so bright it can be seen across galaxies. Light. Heat. A funeral with fireworks.
A massive star at the moment of failed supernova — being drawn inward toward a perfect black event horizon at its center. Light bends around the edge into an Einstein ring. The star's outer layers are sucked in, not blown out.
The quiet death.
But what if one died quiet? Collapsed into a black hole without a flash? It would simply — vanish.
Dr. Beatriz Villarroel sitting in contemplation in her NORDITA office in Stockholm. The idea has crystallised — now she has to commit to it.
If a massive star collapses directly into a black hole — no supernova, no explosion — it would simply vanish from the record. Has anyone actually looked?
She proposes a research project: cross-match the sky as it was photographed in the 1950s with the sky as we see it today — and find the stars that have disappeared into black holes.
Split-frame comparison: a 1950s POSS-I red glass plate on the left with a single bright source circled in red ink, juxtaposed with a modern Pan-STARRS digital image on the right showing the same patch of sky — the circled source is gone.
600 million objects.
She calls the project VASCO — Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations. She writes software to compare each speck of light in the 1950s sky with the sky we see today, looking for the ones that aren't there anymore.
Beatriz Villarroel at her desk at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, late February 2020. On her screen: the digitized scan of Plate XE 325 from Palomar.
Tenerife. Feb 2020.
On her screen: Plate XE 325 — exposed at Palomar on April 12, 1950. The plate that went into the drawer.
Beatriz Villarroel at her desk in Tenerife, leaning forward at her screen with her hand to her mouth. On the monitor: nine bright pinpoints of light clustered together on a 1950s photographic plate. Her office mate looks on. The moment of discovery.
Villarroel I was sitting there with my office mate in Spain... and I was just wondering, "So what is it? What are we seeing?" — Penn State, "My Personal Journey Through the Unknown"
She sees them. Nine pinpoints of light. Clustered together on the red plate — completely absent on the blue companion plate taken thirty minutes earlier.
The actual blink comparison from Plate XE 325. Left: the red exposure showing nine bright pinpoint transients clustered in a small patch of sky. Right: the blue companion plate taken thirty minutes earlier — the exact same patch, but the nine sources are gone. The visual evidence at the heart of the discovery.
Exhibit A — Plate XE 325
Nine sources, clustered in a single patch of sky. Appearing within half an hour on a fifty-minute red exposure. Absent on the blue plate taken just moments before. Absent in every modern survey. Whatever it was — it's gone…
A note from the author
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Beatriz Villarroel turning back over her shoulder to her office mate, animated, the moment of 'we've found something'. The monitor behind her still glows with the nine pinpoints.
Villarroel So what is it? What are we seeing?
Beatriz Villarroel at a whiteboard, ruling out conventional explanations for the nine transients on Plate XE 325. She demonstrates that moving objects (planes, asteroids, satellites) would leave streaks across a 50-minute exposure, not the round pinpoint dots actually observed.
What could they be?
Beatriz Villarroel at a whiteboard, working out the probability that the nine transients on Plate XE 325 could be nine simultaneous supernovae. The calculation arrives at a vanishingly small probability — effectively zero. Conclusion: these are not the vanishing stars she came looking for.
Quietly dying stars?
JUNE 2021 — THE DISCOVERY IS PUBLISHED.
First page of Villarroel et al. 2021, 'Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950', published in Scientific Reports, June 2021.
Read the original paper at nature.com →
THE EVIDENCE
Nine point sources. Nine moments of light, photographed on a single mountain on a single night. Completely gone just moments later. Not there in modern images. Here they are, one by one.
Plate cutout from POSS-I red plate XE 325 showing transient #1, circled in white, on a dark sky field. Other faint stars are visible.
TRANSIENT 1
Plate cutout showing transients #2 and #3 — paired green circles overlapping, marking two adjacent point sources on the dark sky field.
TRANSIENTS 2 & 3
Plate cutout showing transients #4, #5, and #6 — three green circles spread vertically across the dark sky field.
TRANSIENTS 4, 5, 6
Plate cutout showing transients #7 and #8 — two overlapping white circles marking a paired flash on the dark sky field.
TRANSIENTS 7 & 8
Plate cutout showing transient #9 — a single green circle marking one isolated point source on the dark sky field, with a few brighter reference stars visible above.
TRANSIENT 9
Are they satellites? If so — there's a big problem.
— Cutouts from Villarroel et al. (2021), Scientific Reports, CC BY 4.0
From the paper.
"No satellites are known to have existed prior to the Soviet-made Sputnik in 1957 — seven years after the appearance of the transients in the 1950 POSS-I image."
— Villarroel et al. (2021), Scientific Reports, p. 6.  ·  Read on nature.com
SO — WHAT ARE WE DEALING WITH?
A speculative rendering in the spirit of the 2021 paper: Earth's curved limb, the Sun on the horizon, a brilliant specular flash of sunlight glinting off a small object in near-Earth orbit.
"…more likely explained by a Solar system satellite of artificial or natural origin."
— Villarroel et al., Scientific Reports, 2021 — citing a precedent on a similar anomalous transient.
Then comes the response.
Scientific American  ·  2025
Did Astronomers Photograph UFOs Orbiting Earth in the 1950s?
"It looks like we are dealing with something that looks pretty artificial, in a time when there shouldn't be anything there." — Beatriz Villarroel
SPACE.com  ·  SCIENCE
Were unexplained flashes of light in 70-year-old sky surveys caused by UFOs or nuclear testing? Why not both, researchers say.
▶
"VERY EXCITING TIME"  ·  EP. 79
November 2025  ·  with Beatriz Villarroel
"I cannot find any other consistent explanation other than that we are looking at something artificial before Sputnik 1."
"For me, this looks technological — but I may be wrong."
IFLScience
Mystery Of Odd Flashes Documented In Sky Before First Ever Satellite Was Launched Gets Even Odder
Not everyone is convinced.
"The profiles of the transients are too 'pointy' to be above-atmosphere photo-detections. Unless they are very fast, bright flashes — we're talking a tenth of a second."
"There'd be nobody happier than me if they are right. But I suspect they are wrong."
— Dr. Nigel Hambly, Royal Observatory Edinburgh
in Supercluster
Live Science
"No easy explanation": Scientists are debating a 70-year-old UFO mystery as new images come to light.
Scientific American
"Even if this turns out to be some new physical phenomenon, that's super exciting. That would mean we have discovered something new that nobody knew existed."
— Beatriz Villarroel
The Guardian · headline
"It only takes one to be real — and it changes humanity for ever."
— on the case for taking the question seriously.
The paper has done what good science does: it has given the world something it cannot easily explain — and forced everyone, supporters and skeptics alike, to look harder.
After the paper, the search opens up.
She recruits thirty volunteers from six countries — not astronomers, just careful eyes — and teaches them to look. Together they examine fifteen thousand image pairs. The nine on Plate XE 325 weren't a fluke. The catalog grows.
Beatriz Villarroel on a Zoom-style video conference with citizen-science volunteers from six countries. She is teaching them to spot anomalies on POSS-I photographic plates.
QUIET MOMENT — NORDITA at night Villarroel alone in her office at NORDITA. Night. Stockholm city lights through the window. She's looking at the screen but not really seeing it. Thinking.
Villarroel Even if this turns out to be some new physical phenomenon, that's super exciting. That would mean we have discovered something new that nobody knew existed.
"It only takes one to be real and it changes humanity for ever." — The Guardian
A bold claim is not enough. The science has to hold.

Chapter 2

The Shadow Test
First, the critics.
Dr. Nigel Hambly walking across Bristo Square in front of the iconic dome of McEwan Hall, University of Edinburgh, at dusk. The sandstone dome and copper-green roof of McEwan Hall are lit by a low golden sun.
Edinburgh.
Dr. Nigel Hambly. Royal Observatory Edinburgh. He has a hypothesis — and he can prove it without ever looking at the sky.
The SuperCOSMOS plate-measuring machine at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh — a precision instrument used to digitize historical glass photographic plates from the 1950s sky surveys.
The Scanner
SuperCOSMOS, Edinburgh. The Royal Observatory's plate-measuring machine. It scanned the POSS-I plates at high resolution — and it's the scan Villarroel relies on for the close-up images of her nine transients.
The glass duplicate plates at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh — second-generation contact copies of the original POSS-I plates. Edinburgh's SuperCOSMOS only ever scanned these duplicates; the originals remain at Palomar.
The Copies
But Edinburgh never scanned the originals. They scanned glass duplicates. The originals still sleep in their drawers at Palomar.
Macro close-up of a glass POSS-I duplicate plate, lit at a raking angle. Dust grains, emulsion pinholes, fibres and small contamination spots are visible scattered across the surface — at this resolution, indistinguishable from the recorded stars.
Hambly's argument: some of these "transients" may not be sky at all. They are dust, emulsion holes, fibres — defects in the glass copies, picked up at high resolution and indistinguishable from real stars.
Dr. Nigel Hambly in his laboratory at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, looking directly at the camera. He wants the VASCO team to be right but he suspects they are wrong.
"There'd be nobody happier than me if they are right. But I suspect they are wrong."
— Dr. Nigel Hambly,
Royal Observatory Edinburgh
A two-scene 16:9 panel. Left: Beatriz Villarroel at her desk on the phone, opening one of many letters from press and colleagues stacked across her desk. Right: moments later in the same office, she has turned to her colleague, palm raised, animated — proposing the next move.
Back at Dr. Beatriz's laboratory.
She wants more data — either to shore this up, or to put the artifact problem to bed for good.
HER SOLUTION: A TEST TO PROVE THEY ARE REAL.
By now Villarroel's catalogue has grown well beyond the original nine — over 100,000 short-lived transients picked out of the POSS-I plates.

What are they?

If the transients are real — if we're seeing sunlight glinting off actual objects in orbit — we can predict where they shouldn't appear. Earth always casts a shadow into space. Anything reflective inside that shadow has no sunlight available to reflect. It must go dark.
SUN EARTH'S SHADOW PALOMAR GLINT
Sun on the left  ·  Earth in the middle  ·  Satellite in orbit  ·  Palomar watching
So out of a hundred thousand candidate transients, fewer should land inside Earth's shadow than pure chance predicts.

Defects on the plate don't respond to a shadow — but real objects do…
The result  ·  published 2025.

THE SHADOW IS EMPTY.

Two Mollweide all-sky maps. Top: every transient candidate spread across the whole sky. Bottom: the subset that fall inside the strip of sky where Earth's shadow lies — far fewer dots.
Villarroel & Bruehl, PASP 137, 104504 →
Expected from geometry
1.15 %
Observed in shadow
0.328 %
Statistical significance
21.9 σ

In plain language: out of every thousand transients, you'd expect about eleven to land inside Earth's shadow by chance. Only three actually do. More than three times fewer than the sky should contain.

The 21.9 σ figure is statistician-speak for this is not a coincidence. The chance of getting a deficit this big from random data is, for all practical purposes, zero.

The conclusion is hard to escape: these flashes are real, reflective objects orbiting the Earth.

Back to Edinburgh.
Dr. Nigel Hambly in his office at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, looking down at a printout showing the all-sky shadow-test scatter plot. The spires of Edinburgh and a deep purple sky fill the stone-framed window behind him.
"I don't have an explanation for that."
— Dr. Nigel Hambly,
Royal Observatory Edinburgh
Read the source interview at Supercluster →

Chapter 3

The Bomb and the Lights
A four-panel 1950s montage. Top left: a mushroom cloud rises over the Nevada desert as soldiers in trenches watch — 'Operation Ranger, January 1951.' Top right: the 48-inch Palomar dome under a star-filled sky. Middle: two newspaper strips — 'ATOMIC TESTS CONTINUE IN NEVADA' and 'PALOMAR MAPS THE HEAVENS.' Bottom: well-dressed couples on a Las Vegas hotel rooftop at dawn, drinks in hand, watching a distant blast on the horizon — the 'Atomic Cocktail' era.
The atomic cocktail parties of 1952.
A 1950s comic-style night scene: a vast mushroom cloud rising over the Nevada desert, glowing red and orange against a starlit sky. A bright streak in the upper right hints at a transient flash.
Picture-in-picture inset: Beatriz Villarroel at her desk, thinking — connecting the test dates with the transient counts in her head.
Dr. Villarroel had noticed something.
The plates with the most transients seemed to be the ones taken close to the days the United States detonated atomic weapons. A hunch. She needed help to test it.
A two-scene 16:9 panel. Left: Dr. Stephen Bruehl in his Vanderbilt office, pulling a hard drive marked 'TRANSIENT DATA' from a padded mailer; printouts from Villarroel scattered across the desk. Right: moments later, the same office, Bruehl at his monitor running the statistical analysis on the data.
Nashville. Vanderbilt University.
Dr. Stephen Bruehl. Clinical psychologist — expert at pulling signal from noise. He studies pain: the fuzzy, noisy human kind. Villarroel sends him a drive — 2,718 nights of transient data. She wants him to test her hunch.
HE PUTS HER HUNCH UNDER A MICROSCOPE.
A dynamic comic-book montage of Stephen Bruehl analysing the transient data. Top: a close-up of his wide eyes behind glasses surrounded by floating equations and Greek letters. Bottom-left: Bruehl at his computer in his white lab coat. Bottom-right: a monitor showing a heartbeat-style line that spikes above four mushroom-cloud icons along the x-axis labelled TRANSIENT ACTIVITY.
HER HUNCH WAS RIGHT.
On a typical Palomar night with no nearby nuclear bomb test, transients show up on about 11% of nights.
The day after a test, that jumps to 18.5%.
Same instrument. Same plates. Same observers. The bombs are the only variable.
THE SHADOW FILTER
Then they ran it again, but this time only on the transients that had passed Villarroel's shadow test. The ones that look like real, reflective objects.
The signal more than doubles.
IRR = 3.527  ·  95% CI 2.80–4.45  ·  p < 0.0001
Doherty (2026) — sunlit-only replication →
SUN EARTH'S SHADOW PALOMAR GLINT
Side-profile portrait of Dr. Stephen Bruehl in his lab coat, hand to chin in thought, against a deep blue halftone background.
"The magnitude of the association between these flashes of light and nuclear tests was surprising — as was the very specific time at which they most often occurred: namely, the day after a test."
— Dr. Stephen Bruehl,
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
ONE DATE KEPT TURNING UP.
While searching the plates, Villarroel and her team kept finding transients on a particular night — including a triple flash that vanished within fifty minutes on a single plate. The plate was exposed at Palomar, 08:52 UT, July 19 1952.
“Apparently, in 1952, during two consecutive weekends — on the 19th of July and the 27th of July — there was the most famous UFO sighting probably during the last hundred years over Washington. And it was so big that even the US Air Force had to make a special press conference.”
— Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, Penn State chapter, "My Personal Journey Through the Unknown"
Washington National Airport, the radar room, 11:40 PM, Saturday July 19 1952. Two air traffic controllers — Edward Nugent at the scope, his supervisor Harry Barnes leaning over his shoulder — stare at a green CRT showing a map of the eastern US. Seven orange blips cluster over Washington DC. Cigarette smoke curls between them.
THE WASHINGTON UFO INCIDENT · JULY 19, 1952
Nugent Here's a fleet of flying saucers for you.
A two-scene 16:9 panel. Left: Senior controller Harry Barnes in profile, face lit green by the radar scope, watching the cluster of blips. Right: Airman William Brady in the Andrews tower, lit orange, eyes wide, watching what he describes as a ball of fire trailing a tail outside his window.
Barnes · National Airport We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed… their movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft.
Airman Brady · Andrews AFB An object which appeared to be like an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail… unlike anything I had ever seen before.
The cockpit of an F-94 Starfire at night. Lt. William Patterson, helmet and oxygen mask on, eyes wide, hand on the stick. Through the canopy: three bright white glows hovering. Cockpit instruments lit green and red.
Albert Chop · USAF Press Lt. Patterson radioed for instructions when the objects surrounded his fighter. Nobody answered. Because we didn’t know what to tell him.
A 1952 news-strip comic from the National Archives, titled 'Saucers over Washington, D.C.'. Multiple flying saucers drawn above the U.S. Capitol dome. Below: Captain C.S. Pierman in his airliner cockpit ('There's one... and there it goes!') and Harry Barnes at the radar describing the objects accelerating from 130 mph to nearly 500 mph in under 4 seconds.
Contemporary 1952 news comic, "Saucers Over Washington, D.C."
U.S. National Archives, public domain. The Air Force did not permit photographs of the actual radar scopes that night.

Quotes via Project Blue Book / E.J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956). Wikipedia summary →
Inside the Palomar dome, July 1952. The 48-inch Schmidt camera open to a starlit sky, dark mountains visible through the dome slit. A lone observer in red light at the control console — calm, focused, working through a 50-minute exposure.
Palomar Mountain, California.
The same night.
2,500 miles west. Same sky. The 48-inch Schmidt camera was running a fifty-minute red exposure. The observer had no radio to Washington. He didn't know what had just been photographed.
A hand slides a glass photographic plate into a wooden archive drawer. Faintly visible on the plate: nine bright pinpoints clustered in a triangle. The drawer is one of hundreds in a wall of identical drawers. The image will sit there, unread, for seven decades.
No one noticed. No one would — for seventy years.
THE SAME NIGHT, AT 08:52 UT.
Three pinpoints of light. One photographic plate. Vanished within fifty minutes. The Palomar archive logged them. The newspapers logged what flew over the White House later that night. Same date.
Figure 2 from Solano, Villarroel et al. (2024). Four 3×3 arcmin POSS-I plate cutouts of the same patch of sky. Top-left: 19 July 1952 8:52 UT, red plate, showing the triple transient just above center. Top-right: same field, blue plate 56 minutes later — gone. Bottom-left: 14 September 1952 red plate — still gone. Bottom-right: 14 September 1952 blue plate — still gone.
Top-left: the triple flash, just above center.
Top-right: 56 minutes later. Gone.
Bottom row: two months later. Still gone.
Solano, Villarroel et al. — "A bright triple transient that vanished within 50 minutes" →
MNRAS 527, 6312 (2024). Figure 2.
TEN DAYS LATER · THE PENTAGON

Major General John Samford addresses the press.

July 29, 1952 · Largest Pentagon press conference since World War II
“We have received and analyzed reports from credible observers of relatively incredible things.”
— Maj. Gen. John A. Samford, USAF Director of Intelligence · July 29, 1952
THE SAME EVENING’S PAPER.
The full front page of The Evening Star, Washington D.C., Tuesday July 29, 1952. Lead stories cover the Democratic convention loyalty rule and Iran. Lower right: a story headlined 'Those Flying Things May Prove To Be Only Weather Balloons,' the Air Force's response to the Washington UFO sightings of the previous weekend.
THE EVENING STAR · WASHINGTON, D.C.
JULY 29, 1952
Close-up clipping of the Evening Star front page, July 29 1952: the article headlined 'Those Flying Things May Prove To Be Only Weather Balloons' with the subhead 'New Unidentified Objects Sighted on Airport Radar Screen Today.'
The official explanation: temperature inversions. Weather balloons. Misidentified stars. Nothing to see.
Source: Library of Congress, Chronicling America → Public domain.
SO — WHAT ARE WE DEALING WITH?
Four years on, the data tightens. The Earth-shadow holds. The nuclear-test correlation holds. In podcasts and press interviews, she starts to say what she thinks it is.
A speculative render: a weathered tin can drifting in near-Earth orbit, catching a brilliant sunlight glint against the dark of space — illustrating Villarroel's analogy that the transients could be mundane reflective objects.
“Let's say ET sent something two hundred thousand years ago and forgot a can of Coca-Cola in space… and at some point we see these little glints.”
— Beatriz Villarroel, podcast interview, 2025.
A speculative render: a small, flat, mirror-finish object in high Earth orbit catching the Sun, producing a sharp point-source flash. Earth's limb visible far below.
“You don't get that kind of solar reflections from round objects… only if something is very flat and very reflective and reflects the sunlight with a short flash.”
— Beatriz Villarroel, EarthSky, October 2025.

Epilogue

Where is the story now?
Black-and-white portrait of Brian Doherty, an independent researcher in Dallas, Texas.
INDEPENDENT REPLICATION
Brian Doherty
Dallas, Texas. Independent researcher.
Statistical analysis · data analytics.
No university, no lab, no funding. He pulled down the dataset, wrote his own code from scratch, and ran every test independently. The findings held up — both the nuclear-test correlation and the Earth-shadow deficit.
Brian Doherty's signed Replication Statement (2026). He confirms that the Bruehl & Villarroel 2025 nuclear-test correlation holds (p < 0.0001) using negative binomial regression and permutation testing, and that the Earth shadow methodology from Villarroel et al.'s PASP paper also replicates.
Doherty (2026), arXiv:2604.00056 →
Code on GitHub →
Photograph of Ivo Busko, an independent researcher (formerly Space Telescope Science Institute) who replicated the transient detections in the Hamburg APPLAUSE archive.
ANOTHER ARCHIVE, ANOTHER CONTINENT
Ivo Busko
Independent researcher · formerly STScI
Hamburg APPLAUSE archive
Maybe it was only Palomar. Maybe one telescope, one mountain, one drawer of plates. Busko looked at a different archive entirely — the digitised plates from the Hamburg Observatory’s Schmidt camera, mid-1950s. He found the same narrow, star-like flashes. Different telescope. Different continent. Same signature.
Busko (2026), arXiv:2603.20407 →
"Searching for Fast Astronomical Transients in Archival Photographic Plates"
Photograph of Kevin Cann, an independent researcher with a US Navy reactor-operations background who has published on the geomagnetic-storm dependence of the POSS-I transients.
WHEN MAGNETIC STORMS HIT
Kevin Cann
Independent researcher
Former US Navy reactor operator (USS South Carolina)
Cann asked a different question: what happens when Earth’s magnetic field gets battered? He cross-referenced the transient dates with the geomagnetic Kp index. The flashes drop sharply during strong magnetic storms. Then, twenty-five to forty-five days later — once the field has calmed and the plasma has refilled — they surge back to roughly three times baseline.
A camera defect can’t care about Earth’s magnetic field. But something trapped in that field can.
Cann (2026), arXiv:2604.04950 →
"Geomagnetic storm suppression of photographic plate transient detections in the POSS-I archive"
Hero portrait of Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, looking calmly toward the camera. Behind her: a faint composite of plate XE 325, a Palomar dome, and the night sky.
Villarroel I cannot find any other consistent explanation other than that we are looking at something artificial before Sputnik 1. For me, this looks technological. But I may be wrong.
"It's a Very Exciting Time" podcast, Episode 79 · November 2025 →
Portrait of Phil Harper, author of The Palomar Lights.
About the author

I'm Phil. I make Digger Comics.

I write The Digger on Substack — and this comic is a new format I'm trialling.

If you liked it, follow me on Twitter, on Substack, or buy me a Ko-fi.

Twitter  ·  @phillyharper → Substack  ·  philharper.substack.com →
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The whole record

References & further reading

Everything cited, plus the wider corpus this comic was built from. The science holds because the receipts hold.

Peer-reviewed papers & preprints

  • Villarroel, B. et al. (2021). "Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950." Nature Scientific Reports 11, 12794. nature.com
  • Villarroel, B. & Bruehl, S. (2025). "Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey." The Earth-shadow test. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 137, 104504. IOP · ADS
  • Bruehl, S. & Villarroel, B. (2025). "Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena." Nature Scientific Reports 15, 34125. nature.com
  • Solano, E., Villarroel, B. et al. (2024). "A bright triple transient that vanished within 50 minutes." MNRAS 527, 6312. academic.oup.com
  • Hambly, N. C. & Blair, M. (2024). "On the Image Profiles of Transients in the Palomar Sky Survey." The skeptical critique. RASTI 3, 732023.
  • Villarroel, B. et al. (2025). Response to Hambly & Blair on POSS-I transient image profiles. The authors' reply. arXiv:2507.15896. arxiv.org
  • Independent replication (2026). "Independent Replication of Nuclear Test–Transient Correlations and Earth Shadow Deficit in POSS-I Photographic Plates." arXiv:2604.00056. arxiv.org
  • Villarroel, B. et al. (2026). "Statistically Significant Linear Alignments Among High-Confidence Transient Candidates on POSS-I Photographic Plates." arXiv:2605.01190. arxiv.org
  • "Geomagnetic storm suppression of photographic plate transients" (2026). arXiv:2604.04950. arxiv.org
  • Watters, W., Dominé, L., Little, B., Pratt, K. & Knuth, K. (2026). "Critical Evaluation of Studies Alleging Evidence for Technosignatures in the POSS1-E Photographic Plates." A skeptical reanalysis arguing the shadow deficit and nuclear-test correlations do not survive proper scrutiny. Villarroel and collaborators have published a detailed response disputing the reanalysis on methodological grounds. arXiv:2601.21946. arxiv.org
  • Villarroel, B. et al. (2020). "The Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project. I." Astronomical Journal 159, 8. The VASCO methodology paper.
  • Monet, D. G. et al. (2003). "The USNO-B Catalog." The source list VASCO cross-matches against. Astronomical Journal 125, 984.
  • Hambly, N. C. et al. (2001). "The SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey — I. Introduction and description." MNRAS 326, 1279. The high-resolution scan used for the close-up images.

Press coverage

  • Cooper, K. & Kim, L. (Dec 16, 2025). "The Palomar Lights: Did ET Watch Our Nuclear Tests?" Supercluster. supercluster.com
  • O'Callaghan, J. (Oct 28, 2025). "Did Astronomers Photograph UFOs Orbiting Earth in the 1950s?" Scientific American. scientificamerican.com
  • Anderson, P. S. (Oct 29, 2025). "Transient flashes in '50s sky plates still puzzle scientists." EarthSky. earthsky.org
  • Anderson, N. (Apr 10, 2026). "Mysterious Flashes in 1950s Skies Linked to Nuclear Tests and UAP Sightings: Study." Sci.News. sci.news
  • Friscourt, B. (Apr 13, 2026). "Science, Stigma, and the Search for Truth." Sentinel News. sentinel-news.org
  • "'No easy explanation': Scientists are debating a 70-year-old UFO mystery as new images come to light." Live Science. livescience.com
  • "It only takes one to be real and it changes humanity for ever: what if we've been lied to about UFOs?" The Guardian (Jan 2024). theguardian.com
  • "Were unexplained flashes of light in 70-year-old sky surveys caused by UFOs or nuclear testing? Why not both, researchers say." Space.com. space.com
  • "Mystery Of Odd Flashes Documented In Sky Before First Ever Satellite Was Launched Gets Even Odder." IFLScience. iflscience.com
  • Ventura, T. "Beatriz Villarroel's UAP Research: Disappearing Stars and Nuclear-Test Correlations." Medium / Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference. medium.com
  • Vanderbilt Health News (May 7, 2026). "The truth is out there, and Stephen Bruehl is bringing the scientific method to finding it." Vanderbilt University Medical Center. news.vumc.org

Interviews, podcasts & lectures

  • Villarroel, B. (2023). "Why we should search for alien artifacts." TEDx Zurich. youtube.com
  • Villarroel, B. "My Personal Journey Through the Unknown: Navigating Vanishing Stars, UAPs, Stigma and Controversies in the Astronomy Community." Penn State (Curiosity, Controversy, Courage chapter). psu.pb.unizin.org
  • "Very Exciting Time" Ep. 79 (Nov 2025). With Beatriz Villarroel. veryexcitingtime.com
  • Tim Ventura Interviews. "Are These the First Images of UAP in Orbit? With Dr. Beatriz Villarroel." YouTube. youtube.com
  • "Did We Find UAP in Earth's Orbit? Beatriz Villarroel." YouTube. youtube.com
  • "Breakthrough UAP Discovery in Astronomy Data with Dr. Beatriz Villarroel." YouTube. youtube.com
  • American Alchemy podcast. "Top Astronomer: 'I Found 100,000 UFOs Above Earth!' (ft. Beatriz Villarroel)." podscan.fm
  • Psicoactivo Podcast #534. "Dr. Beatriz Villarroel spots 100k transients around Earth from the Menzel years" (Spanish). spotify.com
  • UAPedia. "Beatriz Villarroel: How Archival Astronomy Is Redefining UAP Research." uapedia.ai

Primary sources & archives

  • Beach, A. (Jul 1949). "A New Celestial Camera Surveys the Universe." Leaflet No. 244, Astronomical Society of the Pacific. NASA ADS
  • Ruppelt, E. J. (1956). The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Doubleday. Source for Project Blue Book quotes (Nugent, Barnes, Brady, Patterson, Chop).
  • "1952 Washington, D.C. UFO incident." Wikipedia. wikipedia.org
  • "Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey" (article). Wikipedia. wikipedia.org
  • The Evening Star, Washington D.C. (Jul 29, 1952). "Those Flying Things May Prove To Be Only Weather Balloons." Library of Congress, Chronicling America. loc.gov
  • "Saucers Over Washington, D.C." (1952). Contemporary news-strip comic. U.S. National Archives. Public domain.
  • Samford, Maj. Gen. J. A. (Jul 29, 1952). USAF press conference, Pentagon. Largest Pentagon press briefing since World War II. Archival film clip in the comic.
  • POSS-I plates: The First Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (1949–1958). Originals: Palomar Observatory, Caltech. Glass duplicates: Royal Observatory Edinburgh. Digitisations: USNO Flagstaff (PMM, used in USNO-B / DSS) and SuperCOSMOS.
  • APPLAUSE archive — photographic plate digitisations. Hamburger Sternwarte. Source for the FITS plates used in this project.
  • Kp/Ap geomagnetic index, 1932–present. GFZ Helmholtz Centre Potsdam.

Independent analysis & replication code

  • Doherty, B. (Jan 19, 2026). Independent Replication Statement — confirms the Bruehl & Villarroel (2025) nuclear-test correlation (p < 0.0001) and the Earth-shadow methodology from Villarroel & Bruehl (2025, PASP). arXiv:2604.00056. arxiv.org
  • Sinkkonen, S. Bayesian hurdle negative-binomial reanalysis of the Bruehl & Villarroel transient–nuclear-test dataset. Hierarchical models with latent random walk to control for temporal autocorrelation.
  • Busko, I. plateanalysis — Python notebooks for archival photographic-plate analysis (APPLAUSE-compatible). Source of the methodology used to identify vanishing point sources.

Villarroel's public speculation — curated quotes

  • Coca-Cola can analogy — "Let's say ET sent something two hundred thousand years ago and forgot a can of Coca Cola in space… and at some point we see these little glints." Tim Ventura interview, 2025.
  • The physical specification — "very flat and very reflective and reflects the sunlight with a short flash." EarthSky, Oct 2025.
  • The strongest public statement — "The only hypothesis currently consistent with the full set of observations are artificial objects in high-altitude orbits prior to Sputnik." Supercluster, Dec 2025.
  • The Hambly comeback — "Why the 'plate defects' are avoiding the Earth's shadow?" Sentinel News, Apr 2026.
END
Based on peer-reviewed research published 2020–2026.
All quotes attributed to their original sources.
The Palomar Lights — a story told in data, glass, and light.
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