Astrum Space - Why Scientists Think This Is Our Strongest Evidence of Aliens

Episode Date: July 11, 2026

Did we find evidence of aliens in old astronomical records?We might not be alone in the Universe. While combing through data from 1949, scientists spotted something impossible: strange, vanishing lights. They look exactly like satellites, but were documented decades before humanity ever launched anything into space. What could they be? Could this be evidence of advanced alien technology?▀▀▀▀▀▀Astrum's newsletter has launched! Want to know what's happening in space? Sign up here: ⁠https://astrumspace.kit.com⁠A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick.

BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario.

Are we alone? Humanity has long considered itself the single most intelligent species in the cosmos, but are we? In an infinite universe with infinite chances for life to arise, it's unlikely that we are the only ones. I think the average person can accept this logic. Aliens could exist out there, but it's another thing entirely to accept that aliens might be here. It's too uncomfortable to believe that technologically superior craft with intentions unknown could be hovering out there watching us.

At least that was what I thought until recently. Scientists have uncovered signs of metallic, reflective objects in star maps before the first satellites were launched. Is there a logical explanation for their nature and origins? Or are they some of the strongest pieces of ever-eastern? that non-human intelligences have visited our planet. I'm Alex McCulligan and you're watching Astrum. Join me in this video as we explore an extraordinary claim

and see if there is extraordinary proof to back it up. Unexplained objects in our sky are not a modern phenomenon, nor are they usually a sign of aliens. It is just that, something unexplained. And since ancient times, mankind has had the bad habit, of seeing strange things and wrongfully assigning them supernatural causes. The rumblings of thunder were the displeasure of a god, a comet, a harbinger of calamity. As we learned more about the world around us, supernatural events became explicable, lightning

became electricity, comets became balls of ice and rock orbiting our sun. That said, there are many accounts that are harder to assign an explanation to Many of these stretch far back in our historical record, long before the first flying machines, and yet they eerily resemble artificial craft moving in the sky. Take for example this newspaper report of the German city of Nuremberg in 1561. According to the writer, on the morning of the 14th of April at 4 to 5 a.m., many men and women witnessed strange presence. spheres and rods appearing above the city. These all started to fight among themselves.

The globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict was most intense, it became fatigue to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth as if they all burned. And they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. So all this, there was something like a black spear, very long and thick sighted. The shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. The author went on to ascribe all this to a sign from God.

Likely, a warning intended to encourage the population to repent of their sins. But to a modern eye, it's easy to look at the fires coming off the crashed objects in this image and see a downed aircraft with a burning fuel source. to someone versed in UFO law, or UAP law, unidentified anomalous phenomena, as they are usually known today in an effort to reduce their stigma, spheres, cigar shapes, and giant black triangles are exceedingly familiar. UAP can often defy explanation. In fact, the Pentagon has recently released a treasure trove of declassified videos, but while

intriguing, the problem with accounts like this is that they are not particularly scientific rigorous. For instance, what can you deduce from this newspaper report? Simply that one author said a group of people saw something? Even if everyone was telling the truth, there is no way to tell that this wasn't some bizarre weather phenomenon, although it's difficult to know what that weather phenomenon would be, simply because there is no additional data. The fallen orbs were seemingly not recovered for study. There were no additional drawings, and everyone who witnessed the event is now, of course, long dead. There's not enough information to draw any kind of reasonable conclusions about these objects

or their origins. Over the years, several alternative explanations have been offered for these objects over Nuremberg, ranging from strange sun dogs to impromptu fireworks displays. Without more data, there is no way of proving one explanation over any other. So you need to prove a claim like this is a much more rigorous scientific approach using thousands of data points taken by modern day instrumentation. Preferably, thousands of separate sightings of these objects would be needed. But that's exactly what Beatrice Villaruel, a Swedish astronomer who is part of the Vasco

project, has done in a series of papers published in the last year. Her approach was certainly novel. Her team on the vanishing and appearing sources during a century of observations project were initially interested in the idea of vanishing stars, stars that had been formally documented in Star Maps in the 1950s, but since then had disappeared. For their early data, they looked at digital copies of astronomical plates taken by the Palomar Observatory, which opened in 1928, and used surveys like the Pan Stars data release. for the more recent records.

They found about 100 instances of such vanishing stars, which is certainly interesting in and of itself, as scientists can now try to figure out the mechanisms by which these stars disappeared. But more interestingly, to Villa Roel, was that she found nine light sources in one plate that suddenly appeared, not present on the astronomical plate from 30 minutes earlier, and were gone again six days later.

These little glints in the dark called transients by the scientists were difficult to explain a way. Villa Roel published a paper in 2021 where she ruled out the most possibilities for their origins. They were not likely asteroids or distant galaxies or passing airplanes or gamma-ray bursts. She did know that similar features could be caused by high-energy contamination of the photographic plates, such as radiation from atomic bomb tests, and the Palomar Observatory in California is located not far from a former nuclear testing site in Nevada, but no official atomic bomb tests were carried out between 1949 and 1951, so radioactive contamination was probably not the culprit.

There was, however, a second explanation. Strangely, the profile also matched well with passing satellites glinting in the sunlight. However, the first human-made satellite, Sputnik, launched. in 1957. This star map was made in 1950, so that idea was dead on arrival. Still, Villa Roel and her team felt like they were under something, and in October of 2025, they revealed that they had gone much deeper on their investigation of transients. Releasing two papers over the course of a few days, Villa Roel's team revealed that they had found more than 100,000 transients in nearly a decade of Palomar plates, starting in 1949 and finishing in 1957.

And this time, Vila Ruel's team was putting their cards on the table. They speculated that a significant number of these were metallic, reflective objects in roughly geosynchronous orbits above Earth, likely of unknown origin, and they intended to prove it. They used two main methods to test their hypothesis. The first was to rule out the alternative explanations of contamination and defects on the plates themselves, or of distant stars and other celestial objects. Villarroel wanted to prove that at least some of these were real objects orbiting in the sky above Earth. How to do that? By making use of the Earth's shadow. If transients were defects, there was no reason they would appear in one patch of the sky more than any other.

Same if they were flaring galaxies or similar galactic phenomena, but if they were reflective objects glinting in the sunlight, they would vanish from view every time they entered Earth's shadow. Using statistical analysis, the Vasco team demonstrated that there was a significant reduction in the number of transients in the Earth's shadow compared to anywhere else. While this left most of the transients as background noise, still with the potential to be stars or defects, 349 of those sightings did appear to be objects reflecting the sun's light in the vicinity of the Earth's gravity well.

The second method was to observe the patterns in behavior of these transients, and here two mind-blowing things were noted. Firstly, by cross-referencing with reported UFO sightings made by the general public, Villaruel demonstrated that transients were more likely to show up and to show up. in greater numbers, on days that UFOs were reported, each report correlated with an 8.5% increase in the number of transients in the plates. A curious thing, as the general public theoretically had no way of knowing whether a transient was in space or not. Villa Roel concluded that whatever transients were, they were linked to UFO reports on Earth.

Secondly, there was a 45% uptick in the number of transients the day after a nuclear test. Now, this might strike you as a little strange. After all, if this was UAP, why would they be more common after nuclear tests? However, this ties to something the UAP community has been talking about for a while now. UAP are seemingly interested in our nukes. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, Everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery

and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Here we go. Someone's already claiming this is our year. Someone else said that last year.

year too. A round of Jameson, ginger, and lime arrives at the table. Smooth enough for kickoff, smooth enough for extra time. New friends pulling up a stool. Debates about whether that was a handball. Cheers rising like a roar around the room. Because match days are about the shared moments. How did Jameson to your match day lineup? Jameson, it's what you bring. Please enjoy our products responsibly. On the 23rd to the 24th of October, 2010, a cigar-shaped object was allegedly seen by several groups of servicemen above F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, a base that was home to 50 Minuteman 3 nuclear missiles.

This would have been troubling enough, but things went from disquieting to terrifying, when all 50 nuclear missiles suddenly went offline. This level of dropout had never happened before. Errors had occurred in the past with a small number of missiles, but for 50 to go out of action at once was unheard of, not to mention a severe breach in national security. To be clear, it is a documented fact that these nukes went out of action, although the cigar-shaped UAP was not referred to in the Air Force's official narrative. But it would not be surprising to me to learn that if aliens were here,

They would be a little concerned about that, Nukes, and perhaps would be interested in knowing they could turn them off if they needed to. And this is not the only UAP story involving Nukes. There is a far more troubling one allegedly in Soviet records from 1982, where, after hovering above a Soviet nuclear base for four hours, a UAP turned Soviet intercontinental missiles on. The missiles started to launch and could not be shut down. until the UAP left. Only then did the controls go back to normal. All of this to say,

it is fascinating to see a link in Villa Roel's papers between her reflective transients and nuclear testing. While the anecdotal nuclear stories are certainly intriguing, this is the first time such hard data has been used to establish a correlation. Of course, there could be other explanations. With a nuclear detonation, it's tricky to know all the consequences that could happen in Earth's atmosphere. But it seemed unlikely to Villa Roel, and seems unlikely to me too, that the glints witnessed in some of these plates were atmospheric effects from nuclear fallout. The transients were mostly observed the day after the nuclear tests, and it doesn't seem plausible that such effects could sustain in one location for nearly 24 hours. Plus, even the

expected visual signature of these atmospheric disturbances is quite different from what the the transients look like. So, what are we to conclude from all of this? Is this actually proof that metal sources have been orbiting the Earth since the 1950s and presumably beyond? It's tricky to apply the same methods to checking they're still up there, as there are now thousands of satellites glinting in the sunlight, and if a small fraction of them were UAP, we'd likely never spot them amid the noise. With that in mind, do we trust the Villa Roel papers? Well, not quite so fast, because unsurprisingly, other scientists have a different opinion on exactly how conclusive Villa Roel's paper actually is. Her work was never accepted

by Archive, a platform for pre-publishing scientific papers so others can review them in advance of an official journal taking them, which is surprising, as Archive accepts a lot of papers. For this, however, the moderators deem Villa Rowell's work to not be sufficiently original or containing enough substantive scholarly research, much to Villa Rowell's personal disappointment and frustration. But they were not alone in this. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of Arrow, the US government's Aldermain Anomily Resolution Office, tasked with investigating UAP, says that he does not agree with the findings,

believing that the better explanation lies in solar flares or high-altitude balloons. That said, he didn't publish a full paper on the subject to back up his suggestion. The ones who did publish a counter paper were Wesley, Andre Waters, and his team, who wrote the catchly titled Critical Evaluation of Studies alleging evidence for technosignatures in the POS 1E photographic plates, which I will point out did get published on archive, and their claims are argued extensively. They point out that the surest way to see if those transatlanticians are also to see if those transatlish Transients were real objects, as opposed to defects, was to get the original POS 1E plates,

not the digitized versions used by Villaroehl, and to use a microscope to evaluate the transients themselves. That way, it would be clear if they were damaged to the plates, as opposed to a captured image. Villa Roel did not do this. Secondly, they questioned the choice in sampling. They found themselves unable to replicate Villa Roel's data set from the total available data, and instead argued that she had seemingly used a broader, less vetted pool of objects for

her statistical analysis. When they applied a more thorough vetting process to remove unwanted noise, they found that a lot of Villa Rowell's observations fell apart. No longer was there a statistical drop in transients when the Earth's shadow came into the picture, a death knell for Villa Roel's UAP conclusions. Also, when they took a closer look at the schedule of the Palomar telescope, they realized that the observatory was more likely to carry out exposures during nuclear test windows, 35% more likely to be exact. But Villarroel did not sufficiently account for this ratio,

throwing off her maths. The uptick in UIP after nukes was turned into an averaging error. There were other arguments made, but these were among the most significant. Villa Roel's results lived and died on statistical analysis, without statistical proof that the objects were indeed vanishing in the shadow of the earth, there was no longer a reason to assume they were reflective objects. And without the argument of a behavioral pattern, there was no longer any reason to think of them as moving with intent. It should be noted that Billa Ruel has replied to Watters' Critique, with the even catchier titled, A Response to Paper, Critical Evaluation of Studies alleging evidence for techno signatures in the POS 1E photographic plates by Watters et al, which archive did

publish. In it, she says that if Watters wanted to know what data set she was using, all he needed to do was send her an email, which just goes to show that scientists can be as passive-aggressive as the next person. But she refutes the argument that her data set was too broad, pointing out that Wattar's more vetted dataset was actually too vetted, not fit for purpose for looking for transients because it deletes most of them. Watter's data set dropped down from about 100,000 transients to just over 5,000. According to Villaruel, that's too small a sample for proper analysis. When it came to the nuclear schedules, Villa Roel did the mass again using the past one data

and ratioed it properly this time, but still says there was an 11% uptake in transients during nuclear test windows, smaller than first thought, but still there. You can almost hear the implied, so there. I wait with much anticipation for the inevitable response paper to a response paper to the critical evaluation of studies alleging evidence for technosignatures in the POS 1E photographic plates by what is et al. It's bound to be a real zinger. So what are we to conclude from all this other than the fact that scientists like to argue?

It's still not clear whether this is the proof that will silence all doubts, but personally I do find it compelling. The idea of searching for UIP in pre-satellite star maps is a clever one, and if these transients, or even a fraction of them, can be confirmed as metallic, reflective objects in the sky above Earth in a time before the human space age, that will be a fascinating result worthy of further study. If they are there, what could they be? Some unforeseen natural phenomenon, like very shiny asteroids, or something genuinely designed? If the latter, that will have profound implications on how we need to view our existence on this pale blue dot we call home.

We like to think of ourselves as the big kid on the playground. What will we do if we realize something much bigger, smarter and older was watching us all along? Feel free to leave your thoughts on this in the comments below. But for now, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time. Astrom isn't just made possible with sponsors and ads. It thrives because of our Patreon. Please join us so we can keep creating more and better videos and making space accessible for everyone. Patreon is where viewers become part of what keeps Astrom running,

the place where people who love space gather to make sure these videos keep coming. You'll get ad-free viewing, early access, and a closer connection to how the channel grows. We're building something steady and long-term, and every new member makes it stronger. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies. Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad-free? Don't worry, we get it. Every $20 ticket could win you $3,000 a month for life

and supports life-saving cancer research at the Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today. Raffle number 155-214. Please play responsibly. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up?

That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.