Historical Star Catalogs: Clues to Artificial Satellites Before Sputnik?

Unusual points of light in images of the pristine night sky before the dawn of the space age have occurred noticeably more frequently in connection with nuclear weapons tests and UFO sightings. This is a central finding of a new study by astronomer Beatriz Villarroel, who has long been researching seemingly disappearing or only temporarily appearing points of light in historical images. In the most extensive analysis to date, she now establishes a connection to the UFO phenomenon. Another research paper examines the light sources themselves and suggests that they apparently behave like artificial satellites—only long before Sputnik.

Villarroel from Stockholm University has been searching for years for objects that appear in astronomical images and not in others. To this end, she launched the “Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations” (VASCO) project, which is now also responsible for what are arguably the most spectacular hypotheses to date. These are based on digitized images of the night sky taken between 1949 and 1957, i.e., before artificial satellites were first launched into Earth orbit. The research group found more than 100,000 points of light on these images that look like stars but are only visible in individual frames.

Two studies on one phenomenon

For one study, Villarroel, together with a professor of anesthesiology from Vanderbilt University in the USA, investigated whether there is a temporal correlation between the appearance of the points of light and events on Earth. The study was recently published in the renowned journal Scientific Reports. It states that the probability of such temporary points of light appearing was 45 percent higher on days before and after nuclear weapons tests. Even when UFO sightings were reported on Earth, the probability of such points of light increased—but only by 8.5 percent. In interviews with the astronomer, the question is now raised whether this does not indicate that artificial objects were observing humanity.

The second analysis was published in the publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and is dedicated to the points of light themselves. The significantly larger research group led by Villarroel determined whether and how often the lights appear in a row, which would indicate an object in motion. One example accordingly fits a particularly high-profile UFO sighting in Washington, D.C. The group also found that the light signals occurred noticeably less frequently when objects potentially responsible for them were in Earth's shadow in orbit. Thus, they could not have reflected sunlight there.

No natural explanation

Stockholm University now further explains that individual points of light in old images were long dismissed as defects, even if they looked like real stars. Villarroel now also admits that in many cases it is likely to be noise. However, there seems to be “a real population of phenomena that correlate with nuclear weapons tests or UFO sightings and are absent in Earth's shadow.” Such reflections could not be attributed to asteroids or dust. These would leave long streaks in images with 50 minutes of exposure time. Points of light, on the other hand, must originate from flat objects that briefly reflect sunlight as a flash.

Villarroel has been searching for points of light in old images for years, for which there is no equivalent in modern star catalogs. Right from the beginning, the aim was to identify possible traces of extraterrestrial intelligence, in line with the so-called third law of Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So far, however, the astronomer has focused on classifying the points as vanished stars. The idea that they are instead artificial satellites that were orbiting the Earth before the dawn of the space age is new. It remains to be seen what her colleagues will find out now when reviewing the spectacular claims.

(mho)