ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena | Hacker News Reader

ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena

arxiv.org

73 pointssolarist59 comments

Transient 'objects' after nuclear tests are quite possibly high energy radiation from the tests themselves. Remember these are on film, and the film is likely removed from its protective housing for some time before, during, and after imaging. (And in many cases protective housing wouldn't help anyway.)

I get the sense that this topic is popular because "aliens y'all". It's much more likely to be radiation. It's possible that atomic tests kick luminous particles into the upper atmosphere. But it's not aliens.

When I was a research physicist I spent a lot of time looking at the effects of ionizing radiation in pictures, although mostly in the context of digital images. The mechanisms are a bit different for photo emulsions, but to me the reason I'd discount radiation is because they're specifically filtering for features that exhibit the expected point spread function (which is a geometric property of the telescope's optical assembly itself). I guess you could test by exposing emulsion plates to ionizing radiation and seeing how often you get PSF-like images by chance. Also, their search is for +/- 1 day of nuclear testing, which seems weird. Certainly radiation from fallout wouldn't make sense on the day before testing. It would have been useful to see +1 day and -1 day separately. Or 0-2 days. The way it's chosen makes me suspect they couldn't find a signal in those windows, and therefore it's probably just statistical noise that they've massaged out of the data.

But to me the biggest flag is that these images are from 50 minute exposures. The objects don't appear as streaks, so they are either very, very short flashes (much shorter than 50 min), or they are very far away. The authors interpret this to mean the objects should be in geosynchronous orbit, which doesn't make sense; objects in geosync would still appear to move relative to the star background over the course of 50 min. Yet this is the entire basis for their "shadow deficit" window calculation. You could constrain the duration vs distance by looking at the effect it would have on smearing the PSF, which would be interesting.

Overall it seems pretty unscientific. If you go looking through enough statistically noisy data for signals in enough places, you'll eventually find it.

Yes, 50-minute exposures would certainly rule out geosynchronous; I've used image stacking to look at geo and you get visible movement relative to the star background after even a few seconds. Fifty minutes would be almost 15 degrees of movement relative to the background! This isn't even accounting for the fact that you would need to be looking in a narrow region above above the equator to get something geosynchronous to begin with.

There are other possiblities that are likely: Upper atmosphere tests resulting in transient luminous phenomena. This would be more likey in certain conditions where the sun could reflect off of specular matter (e.g., bits of metal). You would see this most likely within 1-2 hours of sunset or 1-2 hours of sunrise (source: I've used optical equipment to spot satellites professionally).

I'd note that thier pipeline for removing "plate defects" is not based on the PSF but on some vaguely defined "expert review" training. This can, and should, be a quantifiable step.

> The objects don't appear as streaks, so they are either very, very short flashes (much shorter than 50 min), or they are very far away.

Couldn’t be aberrations in equipment, like lenses? Or film development?

As stated in the abstract, the anomalies occur more within a window around a nuclear event.

This precise point has been challenged, FWIW. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21946.

+/- 1 day of nuclear testing because these are old records so dates and times reported might be inaccurate.

  > Overall it seems pretty unscientific.

I'd agree with all your points and add some things to help people better "sniff-test" these kinds of papers.

  1) The paper is suggesting aliens... your suspicion hats should always go on
    - Carl Sagan said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Is the evidence extra-ordinary?
  2) The authors aren't experts
    - Stephen Bruehl: A doctor of Anesthesiology
    - Brian Doherty: "Independent Researcher"[0]
    - Alina Streblyanska: Actually maybe a astrophysics researcher?[1]
    - Beatriz Villarroel: The top Google hit for her is for a UFO wikipedia[2]
  3) Authors don't share affiliations
    - Corresponding author has no domain expertize and no clear affiliation to others.
  4) Authors have hints of metric hacking
    - Villarroel has 8 citations in a paper with only 18[3]
  5) The GitHub repo is dead: https://github.com/dca-doherty/VASCO-ML

None of these things are enough to conclude that the paper is wrong, but they are red flags and don't require actually understanding any of the details of the paper.

If you do understand statistics there's clearly more red flags. The +/- windowing being a pretty big one, since there are much better tools for this (errors don't need to be symmetric! Nor do they need to be uniform!). There's also a pretty big assumption made that cshimmin didn't mention: the paper assumes all nuclear tests are in the public record. But I also assume if you have a strong statistics background then there's a high probability you didn't upvote the post.

[0] The man has effectively no online presence. Google searching his email yields effectively nothing except people posting about this paper in UFO groups (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22briandohertyresearch%40gm...). His linked GitHub also makes him anonymous (https://github.com/dca-doherty/) and his website linked is just about finding day care in Texas. He has one more paper on ArXiv, but it is from a few weeks prior

[1] Found their Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alina-streblyanska-95b2375b/). Their most recent paper is also on UAPs, along with Villarroel. But also, they work for "Society of UAP Studies", which should be a big red flag. Also, they were working as a Post-doc for 12 years, which is a bit insane

[2] https://www.wikidisc.org/wiki/Beatriz_Villarroel and here's here Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_Jc8gm0AAAAJ

[3] I looked at some other papers of hers and they show a similar pattern. This explains her citation count (which is rather low) and h-index (it's better to just click on the references and you'll see it's predominantly her referencing herself):

  - 2602.15171: 9 citations total, 8 are hers
  - "A cost-effective search for extraterrestrial probes in the Solar system" has many more, but still 6 to herself (and 3 to Loeb)
  - Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (Yes, this is in "Nature"): 20 citations, 5 hers
  - Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey: 11/36
  - On the Image Profiles of Transients in the Palomar Sky Survey: 5/5
  - A Civilian Astronomer's Guide to UAP Research: 7/98 (actually not a red flag, but the title sure is...)
  - and so on

Not gonna lie, the first thing I noticed was that the first author was in an anesthesiology department. Your guidelines for sniff-testing are not unreasonable, and can definitely be helpful to people who are unfamiliar with the research area. But I quite intentionally did not appeal to any of those. As a (somewhat) subject matter expert, it's important to _ignore_ things like ad hominem judgement, and instead address the paper on its self-contained merits. And more importantly, to share my assessment of those with the lay public.

I'm glad you did it that way. I hope, my comment works well as an addendum to your type of comment. I don't think would have worked well on its own, nor prior to yours. Especially since nothing I said is an absolute rule that allows one to reject a work. But this paper sure does smell suspicious. I think it's good to have the stronger reasons to be suspicious and then understand some softer flags to navigate in unfamiliar territory.

"Not aliens" seems obvious but shouldn't be a basis for dismissing this either. I feel like sometimes we are so determined to dismiss aliens that we accept any plausible alternative too quickly, when there might be something else more interesting that is neither obvious nor aliens.

Aliens are not plausible.

Agreed, and I don't think you understood my comment.

Perhaps you didn't write what you meant. I read it as we shouldn't think it is obvious that they aren't aliens.

> there might be something else more interesting that is neither obvious nor aliens.

I tend to think there is a really good chance all the "its aliens" phenomena are natural phenomena that we are hundreds of years away from even having the tools to study. Probably like early humans trying to guess what the sun is made of.

https://www.history.com/articles/cottingley-fairies-altered-...

There aren't any wood fairies either.

Why not?

Nobody has ever found the slightest smidgen of evidence of aliens, nor any plausible theory of what aliens would be like. It's about as likely as someone inventing a car that runs on water.

While it's always good to elevate evidence-based knowledge above "woo" or "belief", it's not healthy to close your mind off completely against anything that isn't currently proven. We might know that we don't know a lot of things, but the most interesting thought experiments happen in the area that concerns the things we don't know that we don't know.

When an engineer tells me he built a car that runs on water, he'd better bring some pretty amazing evidence. And no, I'm not going to waste time reading his paper looking for the inevitable flaw, either.

I've heard "evidence" of aliens my entire life. Guess how many panned out. Zero. But that never seems to discourage anyone from believing that an artifact on a photo must have the most implausible explanation ever - aliens!

Where do you draw the line? Time travel? Teleportation? Astrology? Fortune tellers? Razor blade sharpening? Reincarnation?

One can go to /r/UFOs and see plenty of "interesting thought experiments" happening in that area, and while that might be entertaining, it isn't compelling.

I think closing one's mind off 99.999% to "it's aliens" is perfectly healthy and justified. When you remove the folklore, memes, psyops and apply Occaam's Razor to the "evidence" and sort out mistaken natural phenomena, misinterpreted data, classified but terrestrial technology and outright hoaxes, you aren't left with much of anything, and certainly nothing definite. There is no reason to assume the phenomenon mentioned in the linked paper demonstrates the presence of alien spacecraft but the UFO community is going to run with it anyway.

Call me when David Grusch comes through with that "catastrophic disclosure" we were promised or when Lue Elizondo can tell the difference between a starship and a chandelier. This is just Bob Lazar and Majestic-12 all over again.

... wouldn't this be a slight smidgen of evidence?

Nope

Plenty of evidence has been found. For one, the US government has leaked/released a video showing instant acceleration of a flying object. Nothing on earth can do that.

You're heaping one implausibility (aliens) in with another implausibility (violating the laws of physics) making the combined plausibility indistinguishable from zero.

It's not necessary for me to debunk your theory. It is incumbent upon you to prove it valid.

Sorry to bring the bad news.

I think you just did the thing, but with his comment

They're there before the tests though, and potentially more frequent around nuclear testing calendar days. The argument has never been "these only showed up after a nuclear test."

Two things here: radiation exposure could explain this, since there's a period after exposure and before developing where you can get radiation exposure.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, is that there's a detailed criticism of this line of research available, including evidence against the argument that these are more likely ±1 day of nuclear tests. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21946, and also https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.00497 for a study of plate defect issues.

I think the current paper continuing this line of research should be read cautiously. I don't love discounting ideas out of hand, as these folks clearly have put effort into the analysis. But the rebuttals read as at least as high quality analysis, and "it's aliens" requires a lot of evidence for me to take it seriously.

no, i think it's worse than that, and it's right in the study: "the nuclear correlation is just a function of which days Palomar was observing on... even that is not statistically significant. It's just noise." - https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-o...

another POV is the paper is sloppy in the parts that matter

Machine Learning goes both ways. A chatbot is not predisposed to ruin aliens enthusiast's days. It just does what it is told to do, like repro a paper, and it can tell you the problems in some limited, but globally important, objective way, and it did, and the paper has problems, and they're basic.

Chatbots are certainly not objective. There are countless articles are this that and the other bias with them. The whole sycophancy blowup or their basic inability to choose a fair random number without assistance should clearly demonstrate that they have many implicit biases. The distribution of answers chatbots give to questions is being constantly and deliberately tweaked by their developers.

What's more interesting is that a third of these plates were destroyed by Donald Howard Menzel without reason or explanation.

From Wikipedia: "During World War II, Menzel was commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy and asked to head a division of intelligence, where he used his many-sided talents, including deciphering enemy codes. Even until 1955, he worked with the Navy improving radio-wave propagation by tracking the Sun's emissions and studying the effect of the aurora on radio propagation for the Department of Defense.[3][4] Returning to Harvard after the war, he was appointed acting director of the Harvard Observatory in 1952, and was the full director from 1954 to 1966. His colleague Dr. Dorrit Hoffleit recalls one of his first actions in the position was asking his secretary to destroy a third of the plates sight unseen, resulting in their permanent loss from the record."

The lead author on this paper is a professor of anesthesiology. I think it's fairly safe to describe its conclusion as crank-adjacent, if not outright cranky.

Wake up sheeple!

Oh.. uh hold on a second... removes anesthesia mask from patient

Wake up sheeple!

https://xkcd.com/1013/

If the transients occur immediately following the nuclear explosions but not before them, then the correlation together with the earth shadow deficit suggests that the transients are caused by reflective debris produced by the nuclear explosions. I don't know how feasible it would be for this debris to survive the explosion and be blasted above the atmosphere to glint in the sunlight at night, but there is the case of the missing manhole cover from one of the Operation Plumbbob tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#Missing_ste...

Awhile ago I built my own ML pipeline to automate scanning these plates, it was very revealing. Beatriz and her team were very helpful.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04810

Did you end up with similar results/conclusions?

The transients were pretty easy to replicate yes. The nuclear testing stuff was pretty inconclusive but they have a much better curated collection of plates that aren't available yet.

One of the authors, Beatriz Villarroel, has been interviewed on this topic several times. She has never said "its aliens". She just says its interesting and warrants investigation. She is also a little stunned that nobody has investigated pre-sputnik transients before.

The "diminish significantly in Earth's shadow" part makes me think it's sunlight glinting off spyplanes. The B-47 was shiny.

From Beatriz Villarroel -I guessed it without opening the link-, right?

On the papers, it doesn't mean that it must be aliens, but weird phenomena.

I read the pre-publishing version of this paper, and there was then and still is a serious problem with their logic, consistent with if not bad faith, something akin to it:

Assume for a moment their core hypothesis is correct, there were transient objects captured on film pre-Sputnik in LEO objects.

What might we say about their nature?

The authors' undisguised implication is "it's aliens" to be blunt; that's their motivation for this work.

Consequently they put effort (which may not be noted in the final published papers...) into the question of whether they could make any meaningful inference about the geometry and spectral properties of their "transients," their interest (of course) was that if they could make a meaningful argument for regular geometry, they had the story of the century in effect.

These efforts failed totally.

A natural inference might be, among the reasons this might be, is that the objects (remember we are assuming they exist) do not have such characteristics. The primary reason that would be true is if they were naturally occurring objects.

I looked this up and was surprised to learn that there are currently estimated to be on the order of a million small objects in the inner solar system.

So: the entire hypothesis hinges on "significant correlation with nuclear testing." Because otherwise, once can reasonably assume that transient traces of objects—when they are actually traces of objects—would in a quotidian way presumably be caused by some of these million objects.

Or so say I.

There is no end of peculiar and provacative history and data in UFOlogy, and even more murk; one needs to tread very carefully to not go down (or, be led down) to false conclusions, disinformation, and the like.

The authors of this paper seem singularly disinterested in that caution.

If you want to downvote, I invite an alternate explanation for their behavior and the contextualizing media posture,

which regularly situates what they are willing to say in print, within unsupported and click-bait-worthy speculation.

Another example of bad faith: curve-fitting around what constitutes "nuclear testing."

Assuming what you say is true then couldn't that be validated by making additional observations in the present day? Since we'd assume some sort of statistical distribution for such objects. Is there any reason that would be unrealistic?

That was the era of above ground testing. Is it possible that some of these tests kicked pieces of metal into LEO? Though I suppose that those orbits would see streaks, not point sources, in the photographs when you have an hour exposure.

"Now, we're not saying its aliens but coincidentally here's a recent paper authored by some of us:"*

A cost-effective search for extraterrestrial probes in the Solar system

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/546/2/staf1158/822188...

*Not an actual quote

This is exactly the kind of research meant to be on preprint servers like arxiv.org

> For example, is it possible that unknown to the public there were multiple launches of artificial satellites long before Sputnik with some launches timed to coincide with U.S. nuclear tests? Or rather, do the current findings represent detection of a non-human technosignature? Due to data limitations, such hypotheses cannot be subjected to falsification.

This is why we need better education in this country.

Anyone who has read any amount of history from this time should know that this is very simply not possible.

This statment is unfalsifiable in the same way that "I'm a six-legged alien from Venus typing this message from orbit" is unfalsifiable. It's just flat nonsense.

This actually _is_ falsifiable; I've written before that you can determine whether the point-spread function of the transients match the PSF of stars. If not, then it does not come from outer space, it's an issue with the film, i.e., radiation.

"Idk, therefore aliens" is not good science.

Where do they state it is aliens?

Not saying...

I’m too out of the loop I guess — can you please tell me what you’re not saying? As thanks, I won’t tell you what I am saying :P

"Not saying it's aliens but, it's aliens"

That's what I meant.

With an implied subtext: "We aren't going to show why it's aliens, but trust us, we're experts."

It's too large to write in the margin of this book...

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