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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 cen

by 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.
- Yizahi 1y ago
  That's not the post I'm trying to find, unfortunately. That one was on substack I think, but I'm not sure by now. As for good debunking - come on, it's supposedly thousands of crafts, supposedly in the same orbit (because any other orbit except for GEO would cause them to streak on the long exposure photo), in a random formation all across the sky, supposedly synchronously disappeared all at once, time synced to the photoplate change on a random Earth observatory. Pfff, just typing this out feels like a bad joke. Good proofs or even bad proofs need to be provided first by the ufology community, not vice versa.
- Yizahi 1y ago
  Finally found the post I was looking for: https://medium.com/@izabelamelamed/not-seeing-the-star-cloud-for-the-stars-a010af28b7d6 https://medium.com/@izabelamelamed/not-seeing-the-star-cloud... In my opinion it's a pretty damning conclusion. I would love to see some explanation from the ufology crowd :)
  - strenholme 1y ago
    Thank you. Also mirrored at: https://archive.today/20250825091916/https://medium.com/@izabelamelamed/not-seeing-the-star-cloud-for-the-stars-a010af28b7d6 https://archive.today/20250825091916/https://medium.com/@iza... To summarize: • All of these anomalous points of light only appear on one particular film emulsion, 103a-E (sensitive to red light) • Said points of light do not appear with other emulsions used at the same time (e.g. 103a-F or 103a-O) • Each plate made with 103x-E emulsion has a lot of these points of “light” all over them, which indicates there was an issue with the emulsion. Some other links: https://www.ufofeed.com/141549/some-serious-flaws-in-villaroels-transient-paper/ https://www.ufofeed.com/141549/some-serious-flaws-in-villaro... https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-observatory-sky-survey.14362/page-10 https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-o...
- dylan604 1y ago
  Can you rule out or confirm the emulsion issue just from a print? Would you not need access to the original negative?
RajT88 1y ago
> tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history. That's being generous. Some of them know damn well that they are looking at compression artifacts in pictures of Mars and not cities, but they are trying to sell a book.
robinzfc 1y ago
> one scientist, Beatrice Villarroel The example papers [1] [2] [3] [4] have 18 unique co-authors. Also, it's Beatriz. > she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures "We base our analysis on the catalog of 298,165 short-duration transients presented in Solano et al. (2022), detected in 200 red POSS-I plates with typical exposure times of 45–50 minutes." [1] "Of the 2,718 days in this period, transients were observed on 310 days (11.4%)" [2] "These searches significantly reduced the number of candidates (from 298 165 to 9 395)" [3] > uniformly spread out across the whole plate > thousands of uniformly spread out image defects "we find a strong deficit of transient detections, at the 22 sigma statistical significance level, within the Earth’s umbral shadow" [1] "we expect N = 1223 transients in shadow out of 106,339 total, corresponding to an expected fraction of fexp = 0.0115±0.00033. However, we observe only N = 349 transients in shadow" [1] "Plate defects, by contrast, are expected to be randomly shaped and distributed" [1] > 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 "transients that appear only in one long exposure and are entirely absent shortly before and after" [1] "In brief, transients were defined as distinct star-like point sources present in POSS-I E Red images that were absent both in images taken immediately prior to the POSS-I Red image and in all subsequent images." [2] (*) POSS -- Palomar Observatory Sky Survey [1] Aligned, multiple-transient events in the First Palomar Sky Survey, 2025, preprint [2] Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, Scientific Reports, 2025 [3] Discovering vanishing objects in POSS I red images using the Virtual Observatory, 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 515, 1380 [4] A glint in the eye: photographic plate archive searches for non-terrestrial artefacts, 2022, Acta Astronautica, 194, 106 Turns out looking for quotes directly contradicting debunker's statements is a great way to focus while reading a UAP-related scientific paper, thank you.

by Yizahi 1y ago

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.

Yizahi 1y ago
That's not the post I'm trying to find, unfortunately. That one was on substack I think, but I'm not sure by now. As for good debunking - come on, it's supposedly thousands of crafts, supposedly in the same orbit (because any other orbit except for GEO would cause them to streak on the long exposure photo), in a random formation all across the sky, supposedly synchronously disappeared all at once, time synced to the photoplate change on a random Earth observatory. Pfff, just typing this out feels like a bad joke. Good proofs or even bad proofs need to be provided first by the ufology community, not vice versa.
Yizahi 1y ago
Finally found the post I was looking for: https://medium.com/@izabelamelamed/not-seeing-the-star-cloud-for-the-stars-a010af28b7d6 https://medium.com/@izabelamelamed/not-seeing-the-star-cloud... In my opinion it's a pretty damning conclusion. I would love to see some explanation from the ufology crowd :)
- strenholme 1y ago
  Thank you. Also mirrored at: https://archive.today/20250825091916/https://medium.com/@izabelamelamed/not-seeing-the-star-cloud-for-the-stars-a010af28b7d6 https://archive.today/20250825091916/https://medium.com/@iza... To summarize: • All of these anomalous points of light only appear on one particular film emulsion, 103a-E (sensitive to red light) • Said points of light do not appear with other emulsions used at the same time (e.g. 103a-F or 103a-O) • Each plate made with 103x-E emulsion has a lot of these points of “light” all over them, which indicates there was an issue with the emulsion. Some other links: https://www.ufofeed.com/141549/some-serious-flaws-in-villaroels-transient-paper/ https://www.ufofeed.com/141549/some-serious-flaws-in-villaro... https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-observatory-sky-survey.14362/page-10 https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-o...
dylan604 1y ago
Can you rule out or confirm the emulsion issue just from a print? Would you not need access to the original negative?

RajT88 1y ago

> tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history. That's being generous. Some of them know damn well that they are looking at compression artifacts in pictures of Mars and not cities, but they are trying to sell a book.

robinzfc 1y ago

> one scientist, Beatrice Villarroel The example papers [1] [2] [3] [4] have 18 unique co-authors. Also, it's Beatriz. > she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures "We base our analysis on the catalog of 298,165 short-duration transients presented in Solano et al. (2022), detected in 200 red POSS-I plates with typical exposure times of 45–50 minutes." [1] "Of the 2,718 days in this period, transients were observed on 310 days (11.4%)" [2] "These searches significantly reduced the number of candidates (from 298 165 to 9 395)" [3] > uniformly spread out across the whole plate > thousands of uniformly spread out image defects "we find a strong deficit of transient detections, at the 22 sigma statistical significance level, within the Earth’s umbral shadow" [1] "we expect N = 1223 transients in shadow out of 106,339 total, corresponding to an expected fraction of fexp = 0.0115±0.00033. However, we observe only N = 349 transients in shadow" [1] "Plate defects, by contrast, are expected to be randomly shaped and distributed" [1] > 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 "transients that appear only in one long exposure and are entirely absent shortly before and after" [1] "In brief, transients were defined as distinct star-like point sources present in POSS-I E Red images that were absent both in images taken immediately prior to the POSS-I Red image and in all subsequent images." [2] (*) POSS -- Palomar Observatory Sky Survey [1] Aligned, multiple-transient events in the First Palomar Sky Survey, 2025, preprint [2] Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, Scientific Reports, 2025 [3] Discovering vanishing objects in POSS I red images using the Virtual Observatory, 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 515, 1380 [4] A glint in the eye: photographic plate archive searches for non-terrestrial artefacts, 2022, Acta Astronautica, 194, 106 Turns out looking for quotes directly contradicting debunker's statements is a great way to focus while reading a UAP-related scientific paper, thank you.