Dr. Beatriz Villarroel
Appearances
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
There's something that looks like it has been sliding into the ocean. So they found this thing that looked like a crashed UFO or looked like an artificial structure outside the Swedish coast. They found that it was covered in burned biological material, which is really weird because we don't have volcanic activity in that area.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I mean, I don't think he necessarily is a villain, but there's some very interesting coincidences around his name that really make me wonder.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Well, first, I mean, we all know that he was a super famous UFO debunker, if not the most famous UFO debunker. And he helped the US Air Force to debunk the Washington 1952 flap. And two or three months after, he suddenly becomes the director of Harvard Observatory, and he destroys one side of the photographic place. And he doesn't ask...
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
As I understand from the record, she doesn't ask the astronomers to select the plates. No, he asked his secretary to go and throw away one third of the plates. And there's a woman, Dorit Hoffleit, that has been telling about this story in her memoirs. And He started revenging on her later too, as I understood it, that she tried to protect some of the plates.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
He also threw away a number of the logbooks that are keeping the observations and what plates exist. In 1953, Donald Mansell also stopped the astronomers at Harvard to carry out their very famous sky survey where they were monitoring the entire sky since already late 19th century. And he stopped them and they didn't do this survey between 1953 to 1967 for roughly 15 years.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So he also had apparently some more later episodes of plate destruction I've heard.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And suddenly you find that his name is famous for the so-called MJ-12. Majestic 12. And you start wondering, of course. I mean, I can't help it, but it's a lot of coincidences because we also see things on these dates from Mount Palomar.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So do you know that Alan Hynek worked under Menzel at Harvard? So there was this project called Operation Moonwatch held by Fred Whipple. So Fred Whipple was the PhD student of Donald Menzel. And so he created this program where they had this station, like they had 12 stations around the earth with a lot of citizen scientists that were tracking satellites over the sky.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And so Alan Hynek was helping Whipple in this program. And they actually had 36 UFO reports that I think Jacques Vallée published. Found that we now also look through, there are some very interesting things there. So astronomers and amateur astronomers have been seeing UFOs forever. It just has been ignored.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Oh, actually not. So as a kid, I was a very, very curious person. Well, I am still a very, very curious person. But of course, I was very interested in space. So I was very curious about a lot of things. And I think already when I was six or seven, I had written a small little essay about cats in flying saucers. I still like cats as well.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
It seems so fascinating to have been at Harvard in the 1950s. And actually, the same time as Menzel was there, JFK was on the board of overseers for the Astronomy Department. I didn't know that. I found that in Stanton Friedman's notes. So I'm fascinated.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I don't know anything about JFK. All this is outside my speciality. I'm now wildly speculating, freely speculating.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Yeah, I had that essay. I don't remember how long it was. I had also painted the cats and the flying saucers there, so I don't think it changed too much.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So we still have Vasco running, and we are going to be looking for more signatures of satellites for the Vasco project. And hopefully also make a new citizen science project where we look for these signatures. Cool.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Well, we found a lot of transient things that appear and vanish.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Anyway, I simply liked probably this topic already since I was very young and got interested in it.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
If you remember with the Vasco project, when we saw these multiple transients, there were no satellites in the sky. Today, there's loads and loads of space debris. So now what we want to do is that we want to look for this kind of signatures of non-human artifacts. in orbit around the Earth, outside the Earth's atmosphere.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
But we also want to remove all this contamination from human space debris directly when we do our observations so that we get clean data. So to do that, first we have a method that I cannot discuss how we are removing all this space debris. But more importantly, or equally importantly, is that we are hoping to build a network of telescopes
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And by having multiple telescopes, you can determine the distance to an object. And the more telescopes you have, the more accurately you can actually determine this distance in three dimensions so that you can actually...
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
eventually go there pick up the object and bring it down to the earth because that's what i would like to do to bring down an actual et probe so that's what exoprobe is about it's about validating a finding verifying it localizing the object and characterizing the nature of it Since the 1960s, we have developed new way of imaging the skies, new technology for imaging the skies.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
molecular biology and dna and i actually started my university studies with a engineering program in molecular biotechnology and then i got super bored well how do you get bored of molecular biotechnology well it's like we were all the time i think it was the particular program i was studying at the university we were all the time repeating the central dogma
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
We don't use photo emulsions anymore like was done in the 50s. Our cameras are much more sensitive. We have also artificial intelligence that can analyze a huge amount of data. We can now digitize the entire sky. That wasn't possible in the 60s. All that was impossible for them that time or extremely difficult. And today you have all the methods you need to look for probes.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So now since Radio SETI has failed, why not going back to the second best idea of those times, which is looking for artifacts and probes from advanced civilizations. And I think that's the route we have to take. And I also believe that instead of looking for anomalies blindly, we should look specifically for artificial non-human objects. That's how I'm thinking. I think it's an error to do
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
We need the actual physical proof, and I don't think any government is willing to release that. But the scientists who had claimed it was just a rock never studied the actual samples. Mm-hmm. And there is no paper and no open data. There's just a claim to the media by those scientists. And I'm just like, this is not a way of analyzing something. Wow.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
UFO projects too open where you look for anything that doesn't match whatever is natural or earthly. I think we need to be much more concrete with what we are looking for. If we're thinking of metallic orbs, you design a project designed for looking for metallic orbs.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Yes, we are looking for either solar reflections that can be short or it can be streaking, or we look for emissions from artificial objects. We simply want to look for these very distinct signatures. And like one discussion I have in a new manuscript that we put out is that I don't like the definition of UAP because it fits almost everything now. It's so broad.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Yes, but even better is flying saucer. Because when you have flying saucer, you directly can see the flying saucer in your head. But when you can see it in your imagination, you can imagine how it would look in your data. That you can directly transfer it to an image in your mind makes it possible to design a scientific experiment. that is very clearly looking for these flying saucers.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Now, I'm not saying that you should only look for flying saucers because we know about the metallic orbs and all these other possible signatures we can look for. But having it so concrete makes it possible to... Also, not only imagine the experiment, but also imagine all the ways how it could fail and all the limitations of your design.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
While when people work with exclusion principle and look for everything that doesn't fit the earthly or the natural, you have so many things you have to test. You can always go on forever and say, and what will you actually prove from that?
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Exactly. So it's a barely falsifiable hypothesis, while if you have the flying saucer, it's a very concrete hypothesis. So I think my feeling is that more science projects have to be working with very concrete hypotheses around the UFO question.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
and how DNA turns into a protein over and over. And I just started wondering about the mysteries of the universe, galaxies, how are galaxies gaining the shapes that we see, the spiral form versus the elliptical forms. I wanted to understand all that while I found myself on a PhD program in astronomy.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Well, you can look all over the electromagnetic spectrum. I'm going to start in the optical, but I think the infrared might be very, very interesting. I've heard a lot of people commenting on that there are many more UFOs in the infrared. However, I'm a little bit skeptical because...
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
our eyes are trained with the optical I mean we are all the time judging an object what it is based on optical light when people look at infrared imagery they don't have that same experience so I think it's much easier to find a UFO simply by the lack of experience it doesn't mean that they are
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
More visible in the infrared, it could just mean that we are worse at identifying objects in the infrared.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I guess we will discover. We will discover. We have to do more infrared surveys and simply search for UFOs in it or search for flying saucers in it, like I'd rather suggest. I think there has been also a certain misdirection when people try to answer the question, what are UFOs? Because you have all these UFO reporting groups that spend... Lots of time trying to say, what are UFOs?
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And they say, oh, no, you know, 3% of the time it's birds and 10% of the time is insects. And, you know, they go on. I think it's an irrelevant question. The only question that should matter is like, are those that would push the edge of science, which is, for example... Are there non-human intelligence on our planet?
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
That's the relevant question to answer, not what are UFOs and what is all falling into that category. So if you say, is there some non-human technology that we see available? That's a relevant question. The relevant question is, of course, also if UFOs have some kind of medical effect on people. Or are they proposing a hazard to pilots or to people on the sea? These are relevant questions.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And I started studying active galactic nuclei, which are galaxies that have lots of light coming from their centra. And I tried to see how different types of active galactic nuclei, and you could see these different types by looking at the spectra. Some had broad emission lines, some had narrow. And how are they related? And I did my PhD on that topic.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
But just the question, what are UFOs? It's too broad.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Yes, I have. So far, not come in the form of direct complaint on my choice of topic from astronomer colleagues. They have been too busy with attacking me for my choice of collaborator. And who is that? So in 2021, when we did this discovery of the nine transients, I published a paper with my colleague Jeff Marcy. So he had been canceled in a sexual harassment scandal in 2015.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And, uh, but he kept on publishing papers and everything kind of, I mean, even if he retired himself, but he still published papers and collaborated with scientists, except for that the same week as we, um, Got our paper accepted into the journal. Suddenly, the National Academy of Sciences decided to kick him out of the National Academy of Sciences. So he was removed from there.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And then Science and Nature published papers about it. And everyone said, who is still collaborating with Jeff Marcy? And we had the paper already accepted. And I remember someone like calling me and saying, don't make any press release because otherwise you're going to get seriously attacked.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So since then I got kicked out of conferences. They find all kinds of ways to like not letting me talk, forgetting my registration. I was had social media attacks. I had like very like, I'm going to work with a scientist because he's fantastic. Yeah. So, and I, like, I believe in human rights and that's my thing that I don't understand that people should be like, um,
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
The idea of that one condemns a person outside of the court. Yeah. In a public court is for me.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
No, nothing like that. So he was, that is for me goes against the human rights. And the second thing is that even if people do something wrong, they still should have a chance for rehabilitation. Right. Why is Jeff Mars is suddenly an exception to all human rights, right? I cannot accept that.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I didn't know him back then. I got to know him much later.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I cannot answer that question. It might have been a coincidence, but it's... Anyway, it happened at the same time, so I have no idea what to answer on this. But I can say that I had a lot of troubles because of my collaboration with Jeff.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
But I will work with him as long as it's productive, as long as it's fun and helps the science. I will keep working with him. And I simply am not going to allow some peer pressure to stop me or force me into giving up my belief into human rights. And that's something that is important to me.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
However, already in my earlier years as a PhD student, was it even maybe in my last year as an undergraduate student, I had, while writing some papers, fable i had started wondering about if a star could vanish or if a galaxy could vanish what do you think sparked that question of could a galaxy vanish Well, I think I was so influenced and fascinated by Halton Arp, Halton Arp's theories.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I think we have to search for more. We have to do the best we can with the scientific projects. We have to attack the data from all directions. And we have to ignore all the setbacks. Because I think actually one of the things that the whole bad episode with all these troubles with the cancel culture taught me is that one has to develop resistance.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
One has to develop a resistance on peer pressure and critique. And I think it maybe even helped me. If I wouldn't have that experience, would I dare to work on UFOs today so openly? It's a question I ask myself. Or did that actually liberate me in some ways that I say, okay, they're always going to complain. Yeah.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So I think that happened to me. I just said, okay, I'm going to do the science I love to do. I love to work on this topic. I don't care if anyone now thinks that I'm touching forbidden land or that I'm saying something that I shouldn't be saying. I know some people are uncomfortable with it. I have the European Crash Retrieval Initiative as a hobby project in my free time.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Well, it's a private citizen-driven initiative Crash retrieval team.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So we have a small database run by Vasco where we take in all the tips and suggestions for possible crash retrievals in Europe. We only stay inside Europe because it's easier from a legal point of view to operate there.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Yeah, we have gotten lots of suggestions for cold cases. But we hope to also get some hot case where someone says, hey, I saw a UFO crash yesterday. Can you come here?
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
We are working on a cold case that I cannot go into details on, but it's super cool. Super scary.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
But I can't comment further on that. But there are some really interesting cases, yes. Wow.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
It's a private group. So it's led by Thomas Bovinder and Alex Torrell in Sweden.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
We are trying to actually stay as independent as possible so that we cannot get under pressure in any way. So far, we are not funded. We are just putting our own private money into if there's something fun that we find. We are looking into some interesting cases and we have something particularly interesting right now. I cannot comment on it.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I hope that we will learn more in the coming year while working on that. And the idea is simply that we don't want to wait for governments to open up about materials or issues. I simply believe that this is a question everyone can work with.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I believe that the only thing you need is some activity that one starts collecting, inquiring about potential UFO crashes and try to see is there anyone who is willing to share material or willing to share knowledge of such a crash. I suspect that there must be quite a number of such crashes in Europe.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Also, and not only those that one discusses, those that one has discussed regarding the United States. Where is the information and what can we learn about all this?
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Well, we are doing some active investigations, of course, also looking ourselves for these places, but also hoping that someone will just inform us about something that is new because it's sometimes maybe easier to go to a newly crashed UFO than to try to find it 50 years off.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So Halton Arp was an astronomer who was a super famous astronomer for a very long while who one day observed, he could see like, he found couples of galaxies that were, they looked like they were exchanging gas. But if you looked at their redshifts, which are indicators of distance, they had completely different redshift values.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Well, my guess is that there would be a variety of things, but I first would like to get confirmed a single object before I could even speculate further because we need the actual physical proof. And I don't think any government is willing to release that.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Well, my guess is that, if I'm going to think about a counter reply to that, is that we have been so much as a society marinated in skepticism. And we have been, let's say, if you now would see something that is metallic and a flying saucer, like maybe you'll think this is some waste from industrial waste that is lying there. You will find probably 1000 ways of dismissing that.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And if someone would actually say there seems to be a flying saucer in the garden, you will again think that this is some kind of military project and you shouldn't go to check it out, not to get into trouble. I think we have ways of rationalizing and coming up with counter arguments so effectively that we wouldn't be able to recognize a flying saucer if it even just lied in front of us.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
That's what I think, that there's some sort of programming as well that has been happening.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
which completely went against all the idea of the expanding universe and how we interpret redshift. So when he said this, all astronomers attacked him. So it was the controversy of what we have today with Avi Loeb and Oumuamua, and in the 80s with the non-cosmological redshift or anomalous redshifts, as we call them. Yes. So I was fascinated by that thing.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Absolutely. I really hope we make contact with a benign, kind, and nice civilization. I don't know how likely it is to find such a civilization, but imagine if we find out that we are in touch. How much could we learn as species? How much could we learn from them? What could we learn? What are all the discoveries that we don't have to make, but that we could learn about from them directly?
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I think it would be an amazing opportunity for humanity to actually progress.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
That's a very good question. I must say that I don't know the answer to it, but I'm definitely open about the idea that another civilization might have been interacting with us for thousands or tens of thousands of years or longer. And that they could have brought some influence already into us. And well, our development, I'm open for that. I want to know if it's that way or not.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I want clear answers. I want clear answers with if there are any UFOs or flying saucers that can be seen in astronomical data. I want... uh simple binary answers to whether there are um non-human artificial objects on the earth or in our oceans or buried underground and i want to know of course if there is some non-human biologics that has been um
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
courts or by the humans that are by the military because all these questions can change our understanding of our place in the universe my place in the universe and i would like to get answers within our lifetime i think this is the most pressing and important question i'm with you it's almost like a governor has been placed on fundamental physics and religion our understanding of ourselves and the universe we live in and that governor hopefully will come off
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
It feels that way to me too. I just want to know and I hope that we will get a positive answer soon, either through the disclosure process and for the political movement behind or through science. If that is the case, I just don't know what will be the implications, but I guess we will learn.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Well, there are several ways that they can help us. One is with the ExoPro project. We are always looking for more support to set up more telescopes in New Mexico, where we have our telescope. I think I didn't...
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So the ExoProbe project that I'm having now, we're setting up a network of telescopes because that will allow us to look for such a signature from an extraterrestrial probe or non-human artifact, but also confirm it via multiple telescopes. And once you can see it in at least two telescopes, you can also get the distance to such an object if it's outside the atmosphere where we are looking.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And I wrote an essay based on these ideas. And then somehow I killed off my poor quasar because it was a fable and it vanished at the end of the story. And I started wondering, but hey, has anyone ever searched for galaxies or stars that vanish?
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So we're looking outside the atmospheres with ExoProbe. But in order to localize it well, you need to have at least two that are well separated. And of course, for every additional telescope, there is a running cost coming in and also the cost of the telescope itself. So this is one way that one can be supporting us.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Another thing that I would hope to do in Europe is that we would like to have at some point a conference completely dedicated to non-human artifacts and how to search for them in space, in the atmosphere, underwater, underground, underground. And also these are things that are difficult to organize where we always will appreciate some kind of practical support from
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
to organize it if you have a hole in Europe that we could use for free for the audience and so on. So there's lots of ways one can help.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So usually when we look at galaxies, we can see the redshift. And it's a Doppler shift because the universe is expanding and it's moving away from us.
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This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Exactly. So what then happens is that people use this redshift to calculate the distance through a galaxy. Now the problem would be if you have two interacting galaxies that are completely different redshift, you wouldn't be able to use that as a distance estimator. So I was just curious about that.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Well, because that would question the entire Big Bang idea. So it would completely change all fundaments of physics as we know today, or cosmology rather.
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This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So there are no samples of that object because it was so hard so they couldn't get a piece out of it. So I still think it's something that should be analyzed because it might be possibly the best candidate and non-human artifact that you can find. Wow. And I really believe that we need to seriously study this kind of objects.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So I'm going to show you some like contradictions in how I were thinking when I was younger. So as an undergraduate student, I was in Sweden and I one day heard about this fascinating discovery that a team of divers had done called the Baltic Sea Anomaly. So they found this thing that looked like a crashed UFO or looked like an artificial structure outside the Swedish coast.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
It looked like a Millennium Falcon that had just crashed into the deep seas. Wow. I was super fascinated. And I was like, oh, my God, can there have been aliens coming to visiting on Earth? Later, when I started working with these searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, which we did through the project by looking for vanishing objects…
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
That's when I started wondering about the UFO question as well, which I, until then, didn't want to touch.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I don't know about that, but I know that they did super interesting investigations of it. I think they found that it was covered in burned biological material, which is really weird because we don't have volcanic activity in that area. Plus, I don't think they even said it was a crashed UFO. I think their idea is that this is an artificial structure.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And they don't know what it is, but some kind of artificial structure. And there's something that looks like it has been sliding into the ocean. Sadly, Fox News went out with saying that this is just a rock. But the scientist who had claimed it was just a rock never studied the actual samples. And there's no paper and no open data. There's just a claim to the media by those scientists.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And I'm just like, this is not a way of analyzing something. So there are no samples of that object because it was so hard so they couldn't get a piece out of it. So I still think it's something that should be analyzed because it might be possibly the best candidate and non-human artifact that you can find. And I really believe that we need to seriously study this kind of objects.
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This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
I hope these two guys will get all the support they can to actually study it and research it.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So we were looking for these vanishing stars. And so now people talk about vanishing stars sometimes in different ways than I talk about them. So we had access to these catalogs, like lots of imagery from 1950, and also a catalog called the US Navy Catalog. And then we had images of the sky as it looks today. And so we were comparing these images from the early 50s to images as it looks today.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And I was hoping to see this perfect sparkling star that you can find in multiple images that one day vanishes. But before you find that, you find lots of candidates and things that you see in the 50s that have vanished, but you don't know if it's a beautiful star or if it's something else. I had this image where you could see multiple stars appearing and vanishing, which is completely crazy.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Because one thing to have one transcend, but when you have several of them happening in a small space at the same time, you really start wondering. So I started studying this phenomenon. I showed it to my colleagues. And we all started investigating it.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
We had this guy at Gran Telescopio Canaria, one of my friends, who actually pointed the world's largest optical telescope, a 10.4 meter telescope, to the positions of all these nine objects or eight of them or something like that. And there was nothing left. Because we were hoping to see like, you know, we were really hoping to see some kind of counterpatch there.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And you said, oh, maybe there were nine lasers or whatever. There's nothing like that. And then we started wondering, so what can actually cause this thing? And there's no astrophysical explanation. So we started looking at various kind of instrumental explanation and all of them have.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
You're not going to get several of them in a small space at the same time.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
wow so this just didn't match anything just like perfect anomaly basically it's not explained although today you can have that in the sky because today you have lots of satellites that sometimes are blinking you have lots of space garbage and then short reflections just happen due to i mean because you have solar reflections sure the problem is that that would have this is from 1950s
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And that's how I became interested. And I got an idea of that one of the ways how I can also search for more such examples by looking for those that are lying along a line or in a narrow band.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So my friend Lars helped me to develop the statistics to properly see how many do need at least in a line in order to or in a narrow band in order to say that even if you have this kind of transits also their positioning is anomalous and that they are kind of not randomly placed but they are aligned or so. And we had two such examples that are statistically significant.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And one is five objects on a narrow band. And it's from the 27th of July, 1952. My colleague Enrique found these three stars that triple transient. And this one is from the 19th of July, 1952. And it's super beautiful. And then my colleague, Dave Altman, who is the media manager for Vasco, he said, do you know what happened on 19th of July 1952? No, I wasn't around.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
We used this naval observatory catalog initially, or I used them initially, but later we just went directly to the Mount Palomar images.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
The three are just randomly placed and the five are along a narrow band.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
they look like garden variety stars we will we actually now are re-exploring whether they look identical to the garden variety stars or if there might be some small tiny difference because you can expect slight differences if you have short flashes depending on the shorter they are the more they might be concentrated interesting so and um have you seen any vanishing stars since 1952 have you have you combed through the record since then or
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
We have a lot of single transients, but what I actually want to do is to look at more cases of multiple transients. We have some more cases when we were looking for these alignments that we just ignored because we were looking for alignments.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
So we take images from Mount Palomar from the early 50s, and then we look at the same positions in new images from Pan-STARRS.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
Exactly. And then we use these images from Hawaii and we compare the same spot just 70 years later and see how something vanished. It was actually quite fun. There was an expert in satellites that contacted me when he saw our paper where we're looking for these alignments. And I found these two particularly interesting cases.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
And he wrote me something like, but come on, you have just found satellites. Haven't you thought about that? And I wrote back, did you look at what year these satellites are from? They're kind of before Sputnik.
American Alchemy
This Astronomer Has Detected UFOs!
It was quite fun. And you can't imagine how often some astronomers actually make that kind of comment. Aren't you just having satellite links?