if there is extraordinary proof to back it up.
Unexplained objects in our sky are not a
modern phenomenon, nor are they usually
a sign of aliens. It is just that,
something unexplained. And since ancient
times, mankind has had the bad habit of
seeing strange things and wrongfully
assigning them supernatural causes. The
rumblings of thunder were the
displeasure of a god, a comet, a
harbinger of calamity. As we learned
more about the world around us,
supernatural events became explicable.
Lightning became electricity. comets
became balls of ice and rock orbiting
our sun. That said, there are many
accounts that are harder to assign an
explanation to. Many of these stretch
far back in our historical record long
before the first flying machines, and
yet they eerily resemble artificial
craft moving in the sky. Take for
example this newspaper report of the
German city of Nuremberg in 1561.
According to the writer, on the morning
of the 14th of April at 4 to 5:00 a.m.,
many men and women witnessed strange
cresants, spheres, and rods appearing
above the city. These all started to
fight among themselves. The globes flew
back and forth among themselves and
fought vehemently with each other for
over an hour. And when the conflict was
most intense, they became fatigued to
such an extent that they all, as said
above, fell from the sun down upon the
earth as if they all burned, and they
then wasted away on the earth with
immense smoke. After all this, there was
something like a black spear, very long
and thick, cited. The shaft pointed to
the east, the pointed west. The author
went on to ascribe all this to a sign
from God. Likely a warning intended to
encourage the population to repent of
their sins. But to a modern eye, it's
easy to look at the fires coming off the
crashed objects in this image and see a
downed aircraft with a burning fuel
source. And to someone versed in UFO law
or UAP law, unidentified anomalous
phenomena as they are usually known
today in an effort to reduce their
stigma. Spheres, cigar shapes, and giant
black triangles are exceedingly
familiar. UAP can often defy
explanation. In fact, the Pentagon has
recently released a treasure trove of
declassified videos. But while
intriguing, the problem with accounts
like this is that they are not
particularly scientifically rigorous.
For instance, what can you deduce from
this newspaper report? Simply that one
author said a group of people saw
something. Even if everyone was telling
the truth, there is no way to tell that
this wasn't some bizarre weather
phenomenon. Although it's difficult to
know what that weather phenomenon would
be simply because there is no additional
data. The fallen orbs were seemingly not
recovered for study. There were no
additional drawings, and everyone who
witnessed the event is now, of course,
long dead. There's not enough
information to draw any kind of
reasonable conclusions about these
objects or their origins.
Over the years, several alternative
explanations have been offered for these
objects over Nuremberg, ranging from
strange sund dogs to impromptu fireworks
displays. Without more data, there is no
way of proving one explanation over any
other. What you need to prove a claim
like this is a much more rigorous
scientific approach using thousands of
data points taken by modern-day
instrumentation. Preferably thousands of
separate sightings of these objects
would be needed. But that's exactly what
Beatatrice Veroel, a Swedish astronomer
who is part of the Vasco project, has
done in a series of papers published in
the last year.
Her approach was certainly novel. Her
team on the vanishing and appearing
sources during a century of observations
project were initially interested in the
idea of vanishing stars. Stars that had
been formerly documented in star maps in
the 1950s but since then had
disappeared. For their early data, they
looked at digital copies of astronomical
plates taken by the Palomar Observatory,
which opened in 1928, and used surveys
like the Pan Stars data release for the
more recent records. They found about
100 instances of such vanishing stars,
which is certainly interesting in and of
itself, as scientists can now try to
figure out the mechanisms by which these
stars disappeared.
But more interestingly to Villa Royel
was that she found nine light sources in
one plate that suddenly appeared not
present on the astronomical plate from
30 minutes earlier and were gone again 6
days later. These little glints in the
dark called transients by the scientists
were difficult to explain away. Villa
Roel published a paper in 2021 where she
ruled out the most possibilities for
their origins. They were not likely
asteroids or distant galaxies or passing
airplanes or gammaray bursts. She did
note that similar features could be
caused by high energy contamination of
the photographic plates such as
radiation from atomic bomb tests. And
the Panama Observatory in California is
located not far from a former nuclear
testing site in Nevada. But no official
atomic bomb tests were carried out
between 1949 and 1951. So radioactive
contamination was probably not the
culprit. There was however a second
explanation.
Strangely, the profile also matched well
with passing satellites glinting in the
sunlight. However, the first humanmade
satellite Sputnik launched in 1957.
This star map was made in 1950.
So that idea was dead on arrival.
Still, Villa Royel and her team felt
like they were on to something. And in
October of 2025, they revealed that they
had gone much deeper on their
investigation of transients.
Releasing two papers over the course of
a few days, Villa Royel's team revealed
that they had found more than 100,000
transients in nearly a decade of Palomar
plates, starting in 1949 and finishing
in 1957.
And this time, Vid Royel's team was
putting their cards on the table. They
speculated that a significant number of
these were metallic reflective objects
in roughly geocynchronous orbits above
Earth, likely of unknown origin, and
they intended to prove it. They used two
main methods to test their hypothesis.
The first was to rule out the
alternative explanations of
contamination and defects on the plates
themselves or of distant stars and other
celestial objects. Veryel wanted to
prove that at least some of these were
real objects orbiting in the sky above
Earth. How to do that? By making use of
the Earth's shadow.
If transients were defects, there was no
reason they would appear in one patch of
the sky more than any other. the same if
they were flaring galaxies or similar
galactic phenomena. But if they were
reflective objects glinting in the
sunlight, they would vanish from view
every time they entered Earth's shadow.
Using statistical analysis, the Vasco
team demonstrated that there was a
significant reduction in the number of
transients in the Earth's shadow
compared to anywhere else. While this
left most of the transients as
background noise, still with the
potential to be stars or defects, 349
of those sightings did appear to be
objects reflecting the sun's light in
the vicinity of the Earth's gravity
well. The second method was to observe
the patterns in behavior of these
transients. And here two mindblowing
things were noted. Firstly, by cross-
refferencing with reported UFO sightings
made by the general public, Villa Royel
demonstrated that transients were more
likely to show up and in greater numbers
on days that UFOs were reported. Each
report correlated with an 8.5% increase
in the number of transients in the
plates. A curious thing as the general
public theoretically had no way of
knowing whether a transient was in space
or not. Villa Roel concluded that
whatever transients were, they were
linked to UFO reports on Earth.
Secondly, there was a 45% uptick in the
number of transients the day after a
nuclear test. Now, this might strike you
as a little strange. After all, if this
was UAP, why would they be more common
after nuclear tests? However, this ties
to something the UAP community has been
talking about for a while now. UAP are
seemingly interested in our nukes.
On the 23rd to the 24th of October 2010,
a cigar- shaped object was allegedly
seen by several groups of servicemen
above FE Warren Air Force Base in
Wyoming, a base that was home to 50
Minuteman 3 nuclear missiles. This would
have been troubling enough, but things
went from disquing to terrifying when
all 50 nuclear missiles suddenly went
offline. This level of dropout had never
happened before. Errors had occurred in
the past with a small number of
missiles, but for 50 to go out of action
at once was unheard of, not to mention a
severe breach in national security. To
be clear, it is a documented fact that
these nukes went out of action. Although
the cigar- shaped UAP was not referred
to in the Air Force's official
narrative, but it would not be
surprising to me to learn that if aliens
were here, they would be a little
concerned about our nukes and perhaps
would be interested in knowing they
could turn them off if they needed to.
And this is not the only UIP story
involving nukes. There is a far more
troubling one allegedly in Soviet
records from 1982 where after hovering
above a Soviet nuclear base for 4 hours,
a UAP turned Soviet intercontinental
missiles on. The missiles started to
launch and could not be shut down until
the UAP left. Only then did the controls
go back to normal. All of this to say,
it is fascinating to see a link in Villa
Roel's papers between her reflective
transients and nuclear testing. While
the anecdotal nuclear stories are
certainly intriguing, this is the first
time such hard data has been used to
establish a correlation.
Of course, there could be other
explanations. with a nuclear detonation.
It's tricky to know all the consequences
that could happen in Earth's atmosphere.
But it seems unlikely to Villa Royel and
seems unlikely to me too that the glints
witnessed in some of these plates were
atmospheric effects from nuclear
fallout. The transients were mostly
observed the day after the nuclear
tests. And it doesn't seem plausible
that such effects could sustain in one
location for nearly 24 hours. Plus, even
the expected visual signature of these
atmospheric disturbances is quite
different from what the transients look
like. So, what are we to conclude from
all of this? Is this actually proof that
metal sources have been orbiting the
Earth since the 1950s and presumably
beyond? It's tricky to apply the same
methods to checking they're still up
there, as there are now thousands of
satellites glinting in the sunlight. And
if a small fraction of them were UAP,
we'd likely never spot them amid the
noise.
With that in mind, do we trust the Villa
Royale papers? Well, not quite so fast,
because unsurprisingly, other scientists
have a different opinion on exactly how
conclusive Villa Royel's paper actually
is. Her work was never accepted by
archive, a platform for pre-publishing
scientific papers. so others can review
them in advance of an official journal
taking them which is surprising as
archive accepts a lot of papers for this
however the moderators deem Villa Roel's
work to not be sufficiently original or
containing enough substantive scholarly
research much to Villa Roel's personal
disappointment and frustration but they
were not alone in this sea Kirkpatrick
the former head of Arrow the US
government's all domain anomaly
resolution office tasked with
investigating UAP He says that he does
not agree with the findings, believing
that the better explanation lies in
solar flares or high alitude balloons.
That said, he didn't publish a full
paper on the subject to back up his
suggestion. The ones who did publish a
counter paper were Wesley Andre Waters
and his team who wrote the catchly
titled critical evaluation of studies
alleging evidence for techno signatures
in the boss onee photographic plates
which I will point out did get published
on archive and their claims are argued
extensively. They point out that the
shest way to see if those transients
were real objects as opposed to defects,
was to get the original POS 1E plates,
not the digitized versions used by Villa
Roel, and to use a microscope to
evaluate the transients themselves. That
way, it would be clear if they were
damaged to the plates as opposed to a
captured image. Villa Roel did not do
this. Secondly, they questioned the
choice in sampling. They found
themselves unable to replicate Villa
Roel's data set from the total available
data and instead argued that she had
seemingly used a broader, less vetted
pool of objects for her statistical
analysis. When they applied a more
thorough vetting process to remove
unwanted noise, they found that a lot of
Villa Royel's observations fell apart.
No longer was there a statistical drop
in transients when the Earth shadow came
into the picture. A death nail for Villa
Royel's UAP conclusions. Also, when they
took a closer look at the schedule of
the Palomar telescope, they realized
that the observatory was more likely to
carry out exposures during nuclear test
windows, 35% more likely to be exact.
But Villa Roel did not sufficiently
account for this ratio, throwing off her
maths. The uptake in UIP after nukes was
turned into an averaging error. There
were other arguments made, but these
were among the most significant. Bill
Roel's results lived and died on
statistical analysis. Without
statistical proof that the objects were
indeed vanishing in the shadow of the
Earth, there was no longer a reason to
assume they were reflective objects. And
without the argument of a behavioral
pattern, there was no longer any reason
to think of them as moving with intent.
It should be noted that Villa Royel has
replied to what is critique with the
even catchier titled a response to paper
critical evaluation of studies alleging
evidence for techno signatures in the
POS 1E photographic plates by Waters at
all which archive did publish in it. She
says that if Waters wanted to know what
data set she was using, all he needed to
do was send her an email, which just
goes to show that scientists can be as
passive aggressive as the next person.
But she refuts the argument that her
data set was too broad, pointing out
that W's more vetted data set was
actually too vetted, not fit for purpose
for looking for transients because it
deletes most of them. W's data set
dropped down from about 100,000
transients to just over 5,000. According
to Villa Royel, that's too small a
sample for proper analysis. When it came
to the nuclear schedules, Villa Royel
did the math again using the pass one
data and ratioed it properly this time,
but still says there was an 11% uptake
in transients during nuclear test
windows. Smaller than first thought, but
still there. You can almost hear the
implied so there.
I wait with much anticipation for the
inevitable response paper to a response
paper to the critical evaluation of
studies alleging evidence for techno
signatures in the POS 1E photographic
plates by Waters Ed. It's bound to be a
real zinger.
So what are we to conclude from all
this? Other than the fact that
scientists like to argue, it's still not
clear whether this is the proof that
will silence all doubts, but personally,
I do find it compelling. The idea of
searching for UAP in pre-satellite star
maps is a clever one. And if these
transients, or even a fraction of them,
can be confirmed as metallic reflective
objects in the sky above Earth in a time
before the human space age, that will be
a fascinating result worthy of further
study. If they are there, what could
they be? Some unforeseen natural
phenomenon like very shiny asteroids or
something genuinely designed? If the
latter, that will have profound
implications on how we need to view our
existence on this pale blue dot we call
home. We like to think of ourselves as
the big kid on the playground. What will
we do if we realize something much
bigger, smarter, and older was watching
us all along? Feel free to leave your
thoughts on this in the comments below.
But for now, thanks for watching and
I'll see you next time.
something steady and long-term, and
every new member makes it stronger.