Decades-Old Flying Saucer Puzzle: Researchers Ponder Newly Revealed Pictures

One night in 1952, five transient objects (blue circles) appeared and disappeared within an hour, archival sky surveys show. Scientists are digging into the decades-old mystery.(Image credit: Villarroel et al. / Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific; Hubble Space Telescope (background))ShareShare by:

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Over 70 years in the past, astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in California captured images of a few star-resembling flashes that showed up and went away in under an hour — years before the introduction of Sputnik 1, the primary satellite, into orbit.

New refereed study revisiting those midcentury celestial plates reveals that these short-lived specks of light, known as transients, emerged on or around dates of Cold War nuclear weapon assessments and corresponded with an increase in prior UFO sightings. Might these occurrences be linked somehow? Investigators are trying to determine.

Although such flickers can sometimes be attributed to natural occurrences such as fluctuating stars, shooting stars, or quirks of equipment, several of the Palomar occurrences exhibit notable characteristics — involving some distinct, pinpoint shapes that appear to align in orderly rows — that the writers of the recent study state contradict recognized natural or instrumental reasons.

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“We’ve excluded a few of the everyday explanations, and it signifies we need to at least consider the chance that these could be manufactured objects originating from elsewhere,” study co-author Stephen Bruehl, an anesthesiologist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee with an interest in UFOs, informed Live Science. Bruehl collaborated on two recent articles with Beatriz Villarroel, an astronomer at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden.

“If it turns out that transients are reflecting artificial objects in orbit — prior to Sputnik — who positioned them there, and what is their reason for appearing interested in nuclear testing?” Bruehl wondered.

Nevertheless, not every scientist shares this interpretation of the images — with several specialists pointing out that technical limitations of the era render the information exceedingly challenging to analyze with any definiteness. Michael Garrett, director of the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in the U.K., who was not a part of the new studies, lauded Villarroel’s group for their innovative employment of archival information but cautioned against interpreting these findings excessively literally.

“My central concern is not the aptitude of the research team but the caliber of the information accessible to them,” he mentioned. Before Sputnik, the information is substandard — specifically the anecdotal UFO, or UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon) reports, which Villarroel’s group acknowledges it did not assess for authenticity.

Vanishing lights in the sky

An illustration of ESA’s Einstein probe detecting a transient X-ray event, likely from an exploding star.

Transient objects constitute a frequent phenomenon in astronomy. Contemporary sky observations like the Zwicky Transient Facility in California and the Pan-STARRS in Hawaii have already recognized thousands of these impermanent events, and the forthcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory is anticipated to detect millions each night over the subsequent decade.

Many of these transients have been successfully associated with recognized astrophysical mechanisms, encompassing sudden flares from comets and asteroids, explosive deaths of stars, fluctuation in accumulating black holes, and neutron-star convergences that generate kilonova afterglows.

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In an effort to discover such occurrences in the pre-space-age heavens, the present research scrutinized digitized images from the initial Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I), conducted spanning from 1949 to 1958. The project hinged upon approximately 2,000 photographic glass plates, each layered with a light-receptive emulsion that reacted to arriving light, preserving a replica of stars, galaxies, and other heavenly entities. These were physically inputted into the Samuel Oschin Schmidt Telescope for 50-minute spans that captured broad segments of the northern skies, and were afterward scanned and transformed into a digital compendium.

Villarroel’s group examined 2,718 days’ worth of observation information and detected transient sky occurrences on 310 nights, featuring as many as 4,528 flashes manifesting on a solitary day across numerous locales but absent from images captured immediately prior to or following the occurrences, and from all following sky observations.

Upon comparing this with the UFOCAT repository of historical UFO reports, the investigators discovered that transients were 45% more probable to transpire within 24 hours of aboveground nuclear tests performed by the U.S., Soviet Union, and Great Britain, and that each additional UAP report on a certain day corresponded to an 8.5% elevation in transients.

The analysis, featured Oct. 20 in the publication Scientific Reports, characterizes these as “associations surpassing randomness” amid transients, nuclear experimentation, and UAP reports. A supplementary investigation the group published Oct. 17 in the publication Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific proposes that several transients materialized in aligned clusters and diminished by approximately 30 percent in sky segments within Earth’s umbral shadow — a pattern the writers contend is most accurately explained by sunlight reflecting off unidentified reflective entities in elevated, potentially geosynchronous, orbit.

Based on the investigators, this outcome mirrors lasting hypotheses that extraterrestrial beings may be lured to human nuclear operations, even though the writers underscore that the information does not substantiate any causal connection.

But perhaps the contrary holds true? An extra direct clarification, some specialists assert, is that the flickers, and perhaps certain reported UFOs, were by-products of the nuclear explosions in themselves. Michael Wiescher, a nuclear astrophysicist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, informed Scientific American that such explosions can deposit metallic detritus and radioactive dust into the upper atmosphere, where they might present as brief, star-resembling outbursts of light via a telescope.

Villarroel and Bruehl stated they contemplated that likelihood but countered that radiation-triggered luminescence or fallout pollution would yield blurred smudges or streaks, not the star-resembling spots observed on Palomar’s sky plates. Furthermore, assuming the flashes were fragments of bomb casings propelled into orbit, those entities would need to ascend approximately 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) over Earth, where contemporary geostationary satellites are stationed, to seem motionless over a 50-minute duration.

Such a prospect seems improbable “absent a miracle occurring,” Bruehl conveyed to Live Science. “There’s no effortless clarification for what these transients are and what their incentive is to appear at nuclear tests.”

The imperfect past

Astronomer Edwin Hubble looks through a telescope at Palomar Observatory in 1949.

A variety of other astronomers propose that the enigma probably resides not in the skies but in flawed photographic plates and records of the era susceptible to error.

Robert Lupton, an astronomer at Princeton University who formulates algorithms to extract interpretation from optical information and was not associated with the papers, highlighted that astronomy possesses a lengthy background of misinterpreting apparent alignments — encompassing initial arguments regarding quasars, when astronomers formerly assumed their apparent groupings in the skies signified they were physically linked, only to subsequently discern they were arbitrary alignments.

“The element that’s challenging is discerning what the anomalies in the information genuinely resemble, and the quantity of other peculiar occurrences we might have witnessed,” Lupton communicated to Live Science. “I reasoned that employing pre-Sputnik information was astute, yet difficult.”

Evident alignments comparable to those witnessed in the Palomar Observatory information may originate from imperfections in the photographic substance in itself, expressed Nigel Hambly, a survey astronomer at the University of Edinburgh in the U.K. who scrutinized this concern in a 2024 paper. Deceptive linear attributes, he explained, can arise from normal sources — diffraction spikes from dazzling stars that seem like lines, dust, hair, and other particles adhered to the emulsion that simulate aligned transients. Occasionally, imperfections introduced during the duplication or digitization of aged photographic plates can additionally construct such artifacts, he stated.

These complications are remarkably typical when scientists labor with reproductions as opposed to the originals, as transpired with Villarroel’s group, due to the fact that flaws can persist through successions of reproductions, Hambly clarified.

A turning point in UFO studies?

Mainstream interest in UFOs was recently revived after several high-profile inquiries into U.S. Navy videos that purported to show unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

Scientists consulted for this narrative concur that separate analyses are vital, and several proposed reexamining the comparable historical information and alternative archives of scanned plates from observatories operational prior to 1957, preferentially from the Northern Hemisphere and featuring complete, time-series images comparable to those from the Palomar Mountain. Reanalyzing the initial Palomar plates themselves and undertaking a microscopic “judicial” analysis could aid in determining whether the communicated transients genuinely manifest on the originals or were inputted subsequently, Hambly incorporated.

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