7 ms·

Unexpected patterns in historical astronomical observations

127 points by XzetaU8 1y ago

SubiculumCode 1y ago
Fascinating. "The second paper, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP), specifically looks for signs of possible extraterrestrial artifacts in orbit around Earth, before the first human satellite launch in 1957. The researchers looked, among other things, for instances where multiple flashes of light were along a line or in a narrow band—something that indicates reflections from flat, reflective objects in motion. Two interesting examples were identified, one of which occurred on July 27, 1952, the same night as the notable sightings of UAP in Washington, D.C." Info about July 27, 1952 UFO/UAP sighting in DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_incident#:~:text=From%20July%2012%20to%2029%2C%201952%2C%20a%20series%20of%20unidentified%20flying&text=The%20most%20publicized%20sightings%20took%20place%20on%20consecutive%20weekends%2C%20July%2019%E2%80%9320%20and%20July%2026%E2%80%9327. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_inci...
- mikkupikku 1y ago
  I get Battle of Los Angeles vibes from this, tbqh.
cluckindan 1y ago
I’m just spitballing here, but could the objects in orbit be parts of the bomb casing? One would assume them to be tumbling and flashing either periodically or in a specific pattern corresponding to their rotation. Or maybe producing a short flash on re-entry. Spitballing even further, could the objects be explained by a nuclear fireball pushing a mass of atmospheric humidity high enough to form a solid sheet of ice in orbit?
- rindalir 1y ago
  Was wondering about that but then came across this passage in the paper: “ The last date on which a transient was observed within a nuclear testing window in this dataset was March 17, 1956, despite there being an additional 38 above-ground nuclear tests in the subsequent 13 months of the study period.” I would expect to see artifacts of the tests themselves continue under that hypothesis. Of course this raises a whole bunch of other questions…
- titzer 1y ago
  The bomb casing from a successful nuclear detonation would be entirely atomized and instantly vaporized. The exponential runaway of an atomic chain reaction produces so much radiation (read: light, heat, X-rays, and even gamma rays) in the first nanoseconds that literally every chemical bond is ripped apart, plus so many fast-moving neutrons that many nuclei (even not of the initial fissile material) are either fissioned themselves or altered to radioactive isotopes. Because so much EMR is produced so fast, there literally isn't even time for matter to be physically accelerated away before being absolutely soaked in EM. It's possible that some other matter in the vicinity might be intact and blasted away, but anything within the fireball radius of ~100m is absolute toast.
  - niwtsol 1y ago
    Thank you for this detailed explanation. Given the above, I find it absolutely wild that the closest survivor of Hiroshima was only 170m away (granted he was in a concrete basement). In my head, I always pictured a large area completely obliterated as you described. "Eiso Nomura (1898-1982) miraculously survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, despite the fact that the explosion occurred in the air right above him.On August 6, 1945, Mr. Nomura was in the basement of the Fuel Hall (now, the Rest House in Peace Memorial Park), about 170 meters southwest of the hypocenter."
    - VonGuard 1y ago
      Furthering the original question: the myth says Plumbbob launched a manhole cover into orbit, but the truth is slightly less than that, and it wasn't really a manhole cover. Still, this is what happens when you use a nuclear bonb as a detonating charge at the bottom of a tube... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
      - kakacik 1y ago
        900kg steel cap is a bit more than manhole :) And it was most probably vaporized, either by blast itself or by rapid compression of air. They estimated if it actually started flying it would have 6x Earth escape velocity (cca 240,000 kmh), no way to survive flight through 100km of atmosphere before reaching semi-vacuum
- keepamovin 1y ago
  These things are i think around 400,000km out in space so no.
myth_drannon 1y ago
Weren't Nazis sending rockets into space by 1945? Soviets and Americans, probably as well. So why is it unexpected to have objects in orbit?
- TheBlight 1y ago
  Try reading the article. You might enjoy it and it will answer your question.
  - myth_drannon 1y ago
    Beyond the date of the first artificial satellite, there is nothing in the article that mentions space debris.
- lutusp 1y ago
  > Weren't Nazis sending rockets into space by 1945? Soviets and Americans, probably as well. No to all, without reservation. The German V-2 didn't go into orbit, and the US and USSR weren't active in large missile activity at all, until long post-war.
  - michaelsbradley 1y ago
    Unless by the early 1950s the US and possibly others were launching objects into orbit, and their doing so has been a closely guarded secret even until now. The nuclear tests would have offered natural PR cover. If we rule out ETs for the sake of argument, and if these weren’t atmospheric effects or artifacts from the nuclear tests themselves, then small objects were in orbit at the time and either they were launched from Earth or the planet happened to be crossing paths with them.
    - lutusp 1y ago
      > Unless by the early 1950s the US and possibly others were launching objects into orbit, and their doing so has been a closely guarded secret even until now. Because of the very public competition between the US and the former USSR, any rocket technology successes would have become public very quickly. For example, Alan Shepard's 1961 suborbital flight was rather lame by modern standards and much less than the USSR had already accomplished, but it was front-page news. And after Sputnik launched, late in 1957, heads figuratively rolled among American rocket scientists because we were late in a very public race to orbit. This doesn't refute the possibility you suggest, it only makes it unlikely. > If we rule out ETs for the sake of argument, and if these weren’t atmospheric effects or artifacts from the nuclear tests themselves, then small objects were in orbit at the time and either they were launched from Earth or the planet happened to be crossing paths with them. I like your approach -- don't assume the least likely possibility, consider all the alternatives first. As Carl Sagan liked to say, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It's too bad that the evidence is so poor. The photographic resolution isn't good enough to either eliminate or accept a number of possibilities.
dvh 1y ago
Do you really think it's ok to put trendline in Fig.2 ?
- scellus 1y ago
  No. In general the statistics look a bit amateurish, which is normal for a scientific paper. I'd actually like reanalyze the data, just out of curiosity. (Those p-values and other things can still be on the right ballpark even if the models and analyses are not top notch. I'm not exactly doubting them, and the results are interesting even without any correlation to UAP sightings or nukes.)
crystaln 1y ago
A widespread theory among et believers is that nuclear explosions bring the attention of et intelligence around the universe as a sign of sufficiently advanced life to investigate, and that aliens are here to make sure we develop without self-destructing and join the intergalactic world peacefully.
- cryptonector 1y ago
  In reality other advanced civilizations elsewhere and elsewhen in our galaxy are as constrained by the speed of light as we are, thus they can't come here as we can't go there.
  - estimator7292 1y ago
    That's our best guess anyway. My bet is that superluminal travel will be possible once we resolve quantum gravity and break all of Einstein's rules. At least that's what I tell myself. Hard to appreciate the majesty of the universe if we're forever locked into a single star system.
    - TrainedMonkey 1y ago
      It would be really cool if that was true, but I would estimate the odds of quantum gravity enabling superluminal travel or comms as low. Occam's razor and all that.
    - RajT88 1y ago
      None of this is falsifiable. It requires understandings of physics we don't have, and we have no way of knowing which hare-brained theories today are correct and useful in the future. That goes as well for how aliens light-years away can detect nuclear explosions and show up within days to check it out.
      - itsanaccount 1y ago
        "they" dont detect it light years away. from what has been published in the public domain, like in the congressional hearings, there are machines that have been here possibly a very long time. think at least 500 years. theres no indication the "they" behind those machines have ever made contact, or are on this planet, or are even still in existence. but there is something mechanical here that was not made by us. as far as I know, the very few publicly identified records of speeds we have suggest a really big power source and the probable manipulation of fields we cannot yet (mass/gravity), but nothing breaking the speed of light. so many people make leaps beyond the evidence we have and then declare them not plausible.
RajT88 1y ago
I didn't realize it, but I saw something about this over the weekend. The article cites the same papers that the author claims were rejected on ARXIV: https://ovniologia.com.br/2025/10/astrophysicist-dr-beatriz-villarroel-denounces-censorship-by-gatekeepers-and-agencies-surrounding-scientific-research-on-the-ufo-phenomenon.html https://ovniologia.com.br/2025/10/astrophysicist-dr-beatriz-...
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
My unsupported hypothesis: Gamma radiation from the blast was reaching the film that was being used to take the astronomical observations. For this to work, though, a few things would have to be true: 1. The film would have to be stored in bulk in a place that would be (mostly) protected from gamma rays from the tests. 2. The film for that night's observations would have to already be not with the rest of the film at the time of the test. 3. The observatory would have to be close enough to the location of the test that the gamma rays would have a chance to reach it. But maybe it doesn't have to be direct. Maybe it could be gamma rays produced by the fallout, which drifts from the location of the test to at or near the observatory. Then you have to wonder why no more were observed after March 17, 1956. A change in the character of the film? (Either a change in manufacturing process, or a change in what kind of film was used?)
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  That wouldn't explain why the effect only disappears for parts of the sky within Earth's shadow.
  - Yizahi 1y ago
    Dots doesn't disappear from Earth's shadow, there are just little bit less of them statistically. And she can't explain that in her paper at all, if those are supposedly objects and not plate defects, then why are they in a place, where objects shouldn't appear. Also, assuming her hypothesis is correct and she didn't made factual mistakes - to be presented as dots and not streaks, all of these thousands of objects should be in a tiny narrow band in GEO spread out all across the orbit envelope. Where did they disappear in between 50 minutes from red plate to blue plate? And then this somehow repeated every single time in that particular order? An alien armada sitting precisely in a single orbit and then vanishes on a cue from a some lone observatory on Earth, when technician changes plates there? Then again appears all strictly in GEO, then again disappears in 50 minutes after? Doesn't it look absurd to you?
- bigbuppo 1y ago
  > "We also find a highly significant (∼22σ) deficit of POSS-I transients within Earth's shadow when compared with the theoretical hemispheric shadow coverage at 42,164 km altitude." I'm not an statisastroscienticianist, so I have no idea what that means, but maybe it's significant. That being said, Kodak discovered nuclear testing was a thing before the public for all the obvious reasons.
apeconmyth 1y ago
After over a decade of knowing about it, I finally got a copy of Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events by Persinger/Lafrenière last week and was reading about this subject yesterday, but from a book published in 1977. It's blowing my mind to see this here today, but the ultimate source of me even knowing about the above book, Robert Anton Wilson, would not be surprised at all!
mcswell 1y ago
Radioactive fallout?
sxp 1y ago
Note that their paper includes p-hacking so this is proto-science rather than science. They didn't find data to match their hypothesis, but they were able to find a hypothesis to match their data. > Follow-up secondary analyses were then conducted to examine in more granular fashion the timing of the association between nuclear testing and occurrence of transients. Table 2 summarizes the association between occurrence of transients and different time windows relative to nuclear testing, ranging from 2 days before a test until 2 days after a test. The only association that reached statistical significance was for the association in which transients occur 1 day after nuclear testing.
- CGMthrowaway 1y ago
  I'm glad you called this out. p-hacking can be useful to generate hypotheses, which ought to be then tested (rather than thinking the p-hacked conclusions are just that)
- astroflection 1y ago
  Had to look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging
- aorist 1y ago
  This specific analysis isn’t p-hacking because although they conduct multiple tests, they report all of them rather than just the statistically significant ones. They should however account for multiple testing. The Bonferroni correction (which is conservative) would set the alpha level to 0.05/5=0.01, for which the 1 day after result is still (just) statistically significant. Not to say there couldn’t be other problems.
  - NedF 1y ago
    [dead]
Yizahi 1y ago
This belongs at r/ufos, not on a HN. To anyone who is new to this - one scientist, Beatrice Villarroel, promotes a theory that old photoplates from mid 20th century, show multiple UFOs because there were discrepancies between two pictures taken 50 minutes apart. To prove this, she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures where this is indeed observed. So, she's right? First of all, in every par she picks arbitrary a tiny fraction, like a few percentages of an area of the plate, without any explanation why the rest of the image is ignored. After looking at the full plates, one can see that there not dozens of suspicious lights but literally thousands of disappearing lights, uniformly spread out across the whole plate, without any pattern or localization. So thousands of alien saucers all across the Earth. You see where this is going? But it gets worse. Second - in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear. Not a single light out of thousands is breaking the pattern and transitions from empty to light, no, all of them transition from light to nothingness only. And finally third - these thousands of UFOs on the first plate appear because the first plate uses a brittle and unstable red pigment. I can't quickly find out the source, but one guy did analysis and found out the type of the emulsion used on the first plates in these sets in that decade and said that it was indeed a fragile compound, which is most likely the reason for these thousands of uniformly spread out image defects. tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.
- strenholme 1y ago
  >I can't quickly find out the source Took me too long, but here’s one: https://thefreaky.net/dr-beatriz-villarroel-and-the-mystery-of-the-pre-sputnik-sky/ https://thefreaky.net/dr-beatriz-villarroel-and-the-mystery-... From that source: “Old photographic plates are notoriously temperamental. Dust specks, cosmic rays, emulsion scratches, and scanning artefacts can all mimic stars. Villarroel’s team applied careful filters and cross-checks, but some scientists argue the anomalies could still be defects rather than cosmic revelations.” It’s not a real debunking — Rational Wiki (now down) was good at debunking things like this which weren’t notable enough to make the Wikipedia — but it’s what I’m able to find about the matter. I’m of course still skeptical — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — but I think a good debunking needs to be posted online, with footnotes and references.
lschueller 1y ago
Would be interesting to know, what they've excluded as potential explanations. Some things like lense effect, changes of light wavelengths of such missing objects etc

127 points by XzetaU8 1y ago

Fascinating. "The second paper, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP), specifically looks for signs of possible extraterrestrial artifacts in orbit around Earth, before the first human satellite launch in 1957. The researchers looked, among other things, for instances where multiple flashes of light were along a line or in a narrow band—something that indicates reflections from flat, reflective objects in motion. Two interesting examples were identified, one of which occurred on July 27, 1952, the same night as the notable sightings of UAP in Washington, D.C." Info about July 27, 1952 UFO/UAP sighting in DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_incident#:~:text=From%20July%2012%20to%2029%2C%201952%2C%20a%20series%20of%20unidentified%20flying&text=The%20most%20publicized%20sightings%20took%20place%20on%20consecutive%20weekends%2C%20July%2019%E2%80%9320%20and%20July%2026%E2%80%9327. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_inci...

mikkupikku 1y ago
I get Battle of Los Angeles vibes from this, tbqh.

cluckindan 1y ago

I’m just spitballing here, but could the objects in orbit be parts of the bomb casing? One would assume them to be tumbling and flashing either periodically or in a specific pattern corresponding to their rotation. Or maybe producing a short flash on re-entry. Spitballing even further, could the objects be explained by a nuclear fireball pushing a mass of atmospheric humidity high enough to form a solid sheet of ice in orbit?

rindalir 1y ago
Was wondering about that but then came across this passage in the paper: “ The last date on which a transient was observed within a nuclear testing window in this dataset was March 17, 1956, despite there being an additional 38 above-ground nuclear tests in the subsequent 13 months of the study period.” I would expect to see artifacts of the tests themselves continue under that hypothesis. Of course this raises a whole bunch of other questions…
titzer 1y ago
The bomb casing from a successful nuclear detonation would be entirely atomized and instantly vaporized. The exponential runaway of an atomic chain reaction produces so much radiation (read: light, heat, X-rays, and even gamma rays) in the first nanoseconds that literally every chemical bond is ripped apart, plus so many fast-moving neutrons that many nuclei (even not of the initial fissile material) are either fissioned themselves or altered to radioactive isotopes. Because so much EMR is produced so fast, there literally isn't even time for matter to be physically accelerated away before being absolutely soaked in EM. It's possible that some other matter in the vicinity might be intact and blasted away, but anything within the fireball radius of ~100m is absolute toast.
- niwtsol 1y ago
  Thank you for this detailed explanation. Given the above, I find it absolutely wild that the closest survivor of Hiroshima was only 170m away (granted he was in a concrete basement). In my head, I always pictured a large area completely obliterated as you described. "Eiso Nomura (1898-1982) miraculously survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, despite the fact that the explosion occurred in the air right above him.On August 6, 1945, Mr. Nomura was in the basement of the Fuel Hall (now, the Rest House in Peace Memorial Park), about 170 meters southwest of the hypocenter."
  - VonGuard 1y ago
    Furthering the original question: the myth says Plumbbob launched a manhole cover into orbit, but the truth is slightly less than that, and it wasn't really a manhole cover. Still, this is what happens when you use a nuclear bonb as a detonating charge at the bottom of a tube... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
    - kakacik 1y ago
      900kg steel cap is a bit more than manhole :) And it was most probably vaporized, either by blast itself or by rapid compression of air. They estimated if it actually started flying it would have 6x Earth escape velocity (cca 240,000 kmh), no way to survive flight through 100km of atmosphere before reaching semi-vacuum
keepamovin 1y ago
These things are i think around 400,000km out in space so no.

myth_drannon 1y ago

Weren't Nazis sending rockets into space by 1945? Soviets and Americans, probably as well. So why is it unexpected to have objects in orbit?

TheBlight 1y ago
Try reading the article. You might enjoy it and it will answer your question.
- myth_drannon 1y ago
  Beyond the date of the first artificial satellite, there is nothing in the article that mentions space debris.
lutusp 1y ago
> Weren't Nazis sending rockets into space by 1945? Soviets and Americans, probably as well. No to all, without reservation. The German V-2 didn't go into orbit, and the US and USSR weren't active in large missile activity at all, until long post-war.
- michaelsbradley 1y ago
  Unless by the early 1950s the US and possibly others were launching objects into orbit, and their doing so has been a closely guarded secret even until now. The nuclear tests would have offered natural PR cover. If we rule out ETs for the sake of argument, and if these weren’t atmospheric effects or artifacts from the nuclear tests themselves, then small objects were in orbit at the time and either they were launched from Earth or the planet happened to be crossing paths with them.
  - lutusp 1y ago
    > Unless by the early 1950s the US and possibly others were launching objects into orbit, and their doing so has been a closely guarded secret even until now. Because of the very public competition between the US and the former USSR, any rocket technology successes would have become public very quickly. For example, Alan Shepard's 1961 suborbital flight was rather lame by modern standards and much less than the USSR had already accomplished, but it was front-page news. And after Sputnik launched, late in 1957, heads figuratively rolled among American rocket scientists because we were late in a very public race to orbit. This doesn't refute the possibility you suggest, it only makes it unlikely. > If we rule out ETs for the sake of argument, and if these weren’t atmospheric effects or artifacts from the nuclear tests themselves, then small objects were in orbit at the time and either they were launched from Earth or the planet happened to be crossing paths with them. I like your approach -- don't assume the least likely possibility, consider all the alternatives first. As Carl Sagan liked to say, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It's too bad that the evidence is so poor. The photographic resolution isn't good enough to either eliminate or accept a number of possibilities.

dvh 1y ago

Do you really think it's ok to put trendline in Fig.2 ?

scellus 1y ago
No. In general the statistics look a bit amateurish, which is normal for a scientific paper. I'd actually like reanalyze the data, just out of curiosity. (Those p-values and other things can still be on the right ballpark even if the models and analyses are not top notch. I'm not exactly doubting them, and the results are interesting even without any correlation to UAP sightings or nukes.)

crystaln 1y ago

A widespread theory among et believers is that nuclear explosions bring the attention of et intelligence around the universe as a sign of sufficiently advanced life to investigate, and that aliens are here to make sure we develop without self-destructing and join the intergalactic world peacefully.

cryptonector 1y ago
In reality other advanced civilizations elsewhere and elsewhen in our galaxy are as constrained by the speed of light as we are, thus they can't come here as we can't go there.
- estimator7292 1y ago
  That's our best guess anyway. My bet is that superluminal travel will be possible once we resolve quantum gravity and break all of Einstein's rules. At least that's what I tell myself. Hard to appreciate the majesty of the universe if we're forever locked into a single star system.
  - TrainedMonkey 1y ago
    It would be really cool if that was true, but I would estimate the odds of quantum gravity enabling superluminal travel or comms as low. Occam's razor and all that.
  - RajT88 1y ago
    None of this is falsifiable. It requires understandings of physics we don't have, and we have no way of knowing which hare-brained theories today are correct and useful in the future. That goes as well for how aliens light-years away can detect nuclear explosions and show up within days to check it out.
    - itsanaccount 1y ago
      "they" dont detect it light years away. from what has been published in the public domain, like in the congressional hearings, there are machines that have been here possibly a very long time. think at least 500 years. theres no indication the "they" behind those machines have ever made contact, or are on this planet, or are even still in existence. but there is something mechanical here that was not made by us. as far as I know, the very few publicly identified records of speeds we have suggest a really big power source and the probable manipulation of fields we cannot yet (mass/gravity), but nothing breaking the speed of light. so many people make leaps beyond the evidence we have and then declare them not plausible.

RajT88 1y ago

I didn't realize it, but I saw something about this over the weekend. The article cites the same papers that the author claims were rejected on ARXIV: https://ovniologia.com.br/2025/10/astrophysicist-dr-beatriz-villarroel-denounces-censorship-by-gatekeepers-and-agencies-surrounding-scientific-research-on-the-ufo-phenomenon.html https://ovniologia.com.br/2025/10/astrophysicist-dr-beatriz-...

AnimalMuppet 1y ago

My unsupported hypothesis: Gamma radiation from the blast was reaching the film that was being used to take the astronomical observations. For this to work, though, a few things would have to be true: 1. The film would have to be stored in bulk in a place that would be (mostly) protected from gamma rays from the tests. 2. The film for that night's observations would have to already be not with the rest of the film at the time of the test. 3. The observatory would have to be close enough to the location of the test that the gamma rays would have a chance to reach it. But maybe it doesn't have to be direct. Maybe it could be gamma rays produced by the fallout, which drifts from the location of the test to at or near the observatory. Then you have to wonder why no more were observed after March 17, 1956. A change in the character of the film? (Either a change in manufacturing process, or a change in what kind of film was used?)

jandrewrogers 1y ago
That wouldn't explain why the effect only disappears for parts of the sky within Earth's shadow.
- Yizahi 1y ago
  Dots doesn't disappear from Earth's shadow, there are just little bit less of them statistically. And she can't explain that in her paper at all, if those are supposedly objects and not plate defects, then why are they in a place, where objects shouldn't appear. Also, assuming her hypothesis is correct and she didn't made factual mistakes - to be presented as dots and not streaks, all of these thousands of objects should be in a tiny narrow band in GEO spread out all across the orbit envelope. Where did they disappear in between 50 minutes from red plate to blue plate? And then this somehow repeated every single time in that particular order? An alien armada sitting precisely in a single orbit and then vanishes on a cue from a some lone observatory on Earth, when technician changes plates there? Then again appears all strictly in GEO, then again disappears in 50 minutes after? Doesn't it look absurd to you?
bigbuppo 1y ago
> "We also find a highly significant (∼22σ) deficit of POSS-I transients within Earth's shadow when compared with the theoretical hemispheric shadow coverage at 42,164 km altitude." I'm not an statisastroscienticianist, so I have no idea what that means, but maybe it's significant. That being said, Kodak discovered nuclear testing was a thing before the public for all the obvious reasons.

apeconmyth 1y ago

After over a decade of knowing about it, I finally got a copy of Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events by Persinger/Lafrenière last week and was reading about this subject yesterday, but from a book published in 1977. It's blowing my mind to see this here today, but the ultimate source of me even knowing about the above book, Robert Anton Wilson, would not be surprised at all!

mcswell 1y ago

Radioactive fallout?

sxp 1y ago

Note that their paper includes p-hacking so this is proto-science rather than science. They didn't find data to match their hypothesis, but they were able to find a hypothesis to match their data. > Follow-up secondary analyses were then conducted to examine in more granular fashion the timing of the association between nuclear testing and occurrence of transients. Table 2 summarizes the association between occurrence of transients and different time windows relative to nuclear testing, ranging from 2 days before a test until 2 days after a test. The only association that reached statistical significance was for the association in which transients occur 1 day after nuclear testing.

CGMthrowaway 1y ago
I'm glad you called this out. p-hacking can be useful to generate hypotheses, which ought to be then tested (rather than thinking the p-hacked conclusions are just that)
astroflection 1y ago
Had to look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging
aorist 1y ago
This specific analysis isn’t p-hacking because although they conduct multiple tests, they report all of them rather than just the statistically significant ones. They should however account for multiple testing. The Bonferroni correction (which is conservative) would set the alpha level to 0.05/5=0.01, for which the 1 day after result is still (just) statistically significant. Not to say there couldn’t be other problems.
- NedF 1y ago
  [dead]

Yizahi 1y ago

This belongs at r/ufos, not on a HN. To anyone who is new to this - one scientist, Beatrice Villarroel, promotes a theory that old photoplates from mid 20th century, show multiple UFOs because there were discrepancies between two pictures taken 50 minutes apart. To prove this, she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures where this is indeed observed. So, she's right? First of all, in every par she picks arbitrary a tiny fraction, like a few percentages of an area of the plate, without any explanation why the rest of the image is ignored. After looking at the full plates, one can see that there not dozens of suspicious lights but literally thousands of disappearing lights, uniformly spread out across the whole plate, without any pattern or localization. So thousands of alien saucers all across the Earth. You see where this is going? But it gets worse. Second - in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear. Not a single light out of thousands is breaking the pattern and transitions from empty to light, no, all of them transition from light to nothingness only. And finally third - these thousands of UFOs on the first plate appear because the first plate uses a brittle and unstable red pigment. I can't quickly find out the source, but one guy did analysis and found out the type of the emulsion used on the first plates in these sets in that decade and said that it was indeed a fragile compound, which is most likely the reason for these thousands of uniformly spread out image defects. tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.

strenholme 1y ago
>I can't quickly find out the source Took me too long, but here’s one: https://thefreaky.net/dr-beatriz-villarroel-and-the-mystery-of-the-pre-sputnik-sky/ https://thefreaky.net/dr-beatriz-villarroel-and-the-mystery-... From that source: “Old photographic plates are notoriously temperamental. Dust specks, cosmic rays, emulsion scratches, and scanning artefacts can all mimic stars. Villarroel’s team applied careful filters and cross-checks, but some scientists argue the anomalies could still be defects rather than cosmic revelations.” It’s not a real debunking — Rational Wiki (now down) was good at debunking things like this which weren’t notable enough to make the Wikipedia — but it’s what I’m able to find about the matter. I’m of course still skeptical — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — but I think a good debunking needs to be posted online, with footnotes and references.

lschueller 1y ago

Would be interesting to know, what they've excluded as potential explanations. Some things like lense effect, changes of light wavelengths of such missing objects etc