Pre-Sputnik Earth-Orbit Glints | Hacker News Reader

Pre-Sputnik Earth-Orbit Glints

overcomingbias.com

19 pointsqsi19 comments

I don't believe these constitutes evidence of alien technology, but I do believe we should explain such observations (regardless of what it turns out to be: doctored data, natural phenomena,...)

It bothers me that for increasing distances the explanations requier ever bigger or stronger reflectors, but objects much closer to the telescope are not considered. A spec of dust temporarily illuminated (lightning? artificial light? etc.) or myriad of other explanations are not explored.

We should first try to figure out possible explanations by reasoning, but in a worst case scenario, if relating the sensitivity of the old telescope and modern observation proves too tenuous, there is always the last resort of reconstructing the telescope as it used to function, and have a modern telescope observe the same field of view. Then we could relate the statistics from old pictures to currently observed statistics. The whole process should be reproduced, the same film development process,...

This also reminds me of the story of the film manufacturer (was it Kodak?) detecting the start of man-made nuclear radiation levels. At first they thought something was wrong in their manufacturing process.

To improve the likelihood tests for the orbit parameters don't just include the Earth shadow, but also the Moon shadow.

Also, when filtering the imagery for "glints" was the only data used the consecutive imagery taken back then? I.e. are we certain it's not the other way around: a real object (star, comet,...) being obscured? I.e. there are 3 types of imagery to compare: the 2 consecutive images displaying a putative glint, and for example current imagery showing an actual star for example.

> On Earth today, correcting for water, glints are strong indicators of human spaces, due to our many flat reflecting surfaces.

Followed immediately by a picture of water and an icy tree, lol. "Correcting", indeed. "Correcting for expenses, I'm very wealthy!"

> three good LLMs told me we are pretty sure

Ah.

I don't understand why there's so many starving astronomy PhD's and yet HN prefers to read astronomy blogposts written by amateurs asking ChatGPT5 what the astronomers think. Can't HN just link to competent peoples' writing instead?

Because the astronomy PhDs would know these transients on sky surveys are entirely normal, and how we spot asteroids etc. And that our solar system has trillions of little chunks of water floating around it. "This is normal" makes for boring reading.

At first I was interested, then I read their other blog posts...

Does it matter when they link to their source, right at the top, which points to

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394040040_Aligned_m... ?

Anyone can upload papers to ResearchGate.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283268416_Condition...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331977356_The_elect...

Yes, yes. But have read the linked one?

Yes. It much more reponsibly admits the existence of plausible alternative explanations than the blog post does, and its page notes that it may not have been peer reviewed yet.

It also says In this paper, we present the first optical searches for artificial objects with high specular reflections near the Earth. and was published only a few weeks ago.

Give it time?

“the space around Earth generated ~340 glints per hour mostly from brief (<0.04s) glints of sunlight off of at least roughly 6-14cm equivalent ideal circles”

I don’t think this is the smoking gun the author thinks it is. This is near 3 million objects observed per year. Logically how could there not be some conclusive evidence in the decades of observation and launching satellites?

Especially, if they could wink in and out of existence to watch our nuclear explosions, and clearly don't want to be seen if they're aliens, why couldn't they invest in a little black paint?

For the same reasons certain airplanes are painted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-flash_white

Rocks could be potential sources. Crystals that large are by no means rare, with feldspars being the most common on Earth and perhaps on most rocky planets (quartz is well known of course but I think would be rare without the magmatic fractionation that happens due to plate tectonics, which is perhaps unique to Earth in the solar system.)

Volcanic glass (eg obsidian) is also shiny and by no means rare in the solar system.

Many asteroids are also metallic, and perhaps metal crystals or fracture planes could produce reflectors of the right size.

But maybe it’s just aliens.

I just tried to start fact checking, but the referenced dataset at

http://svocats.cab.inta-csic.es/vanish/

doesn't seem to provide the time of recording (unless its the tiny unreadable markings)

How was the analysis done without timestamps on the observations available in the dataset?

It corresponds with this famous UFO sighting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_inci...

I've been watching Ross Coulthart who has been interviewing the main author of the paper. It's aliens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylw_NRxJEgM

> the main author of the paper

Which paper?

The one in the story

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394040040_Aligned_m...

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