Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Top Astronomer: UFOs Are STILL Here

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

Astrophysicist Beatriz Villarroel found point-like flashes in sky photographs taken before a single satellite existed. Nine of them lit up simultaneously on one 1950s plate. Nothing in orbit could have made them — because nothing was in orbit yet. Beatriz Villarroel leads VASCO, which scanned 600 million objects across 70 years of photographic sky surveys hunting for things that appear, then vanish. We cover: why finding zero vanishing stars pointed at something stranger than what she was looking for, the 8.7-degree deficit in Earth's shadow that a 22-sigma signal says cosmic rays cannot fake, the 68% transient spike clustered around nuclear test dates, how telescope aberration patterns prove these are real photons and not plate defects, and why she now says she fears for her safety. Pre-Sputnik plates may hold evidence of non-human technology in Earth orbit. She wants you to check the math before you decide. Chapters 00:00 It appeared, then it was gone 00:48 The obsession that built VASCO 06:10 What a Palomar glass plate really is 09:16 600 million objects, zero vanishing stars 13:47 Nine flashes, one plate, same instant 21:11 Why asteroids and cosmic rays are ruled out 26:47 The Earth's shadow shouldn't be empty 31:17 The flashes cluster on test dates 40:08 What is actually up there 55:24 Tic-tacs, retrievals, and belief 58:51 The question she didn't want to answer 📄 Want to check the math? Every VASCO paper, the full transcript, and the counterarguments — free: https://BrianKeating.com/bvpod ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Please play responsibly. Reeses knows a thing or two about great-com. combinations. Chocolate and peanut butter, obviously, but there's more than one way to Reese's. From indulgent Reese's big cups with caramel to crunchy Reese's pieces and Reese's miniatures, there's a delicious Reese's for every mood. It's the same combo you love, just with more ways to enjoy it. So whether you're snacking, sharing, or just treating yourself, nothing else is Reese's. This shows we have a population of objects near the earth that have not been discovered until now. There's absolutely no way how they will remember this little circle of 8.7

degrees and only there have a deficit but not outside it. So only reflections can produce that deficits. What do you make of these claims of, you know, tick-tacks and non-human biologics and interdimensional being? I mean, do you think that any of these hold the candle scientifically that meets your rigorous standard? I believe it's true. Aren't they here now? Who has said that they are not here now? Are you worried about your safety? Yes, there have been a number of incidents.

And when did you start Vasco? So it depends on how one defines it. The first tests we did was in 2016, and it was something I was obsessed with an idea since I was a student and I wanted to search for vanishing stars. It had nothing to do with UFOs, but I was super, super interested in vanishing stars. stars. It came from a crazy idea I got when I was writing a fable about a poor depressed quasar and then you know while writing and there at the end and I started wondering but can an object just vanish? Could an object vanish and well I was just a

student at that time and then I got stuck with this thing and I remember I even had a phone conversation with could it have been my Michael Strauss from SDSS and I was asking, hey, can you redo the whole Sloan like one more time so that I get one more like set of a photometry. And I had no idea what I was asking and he was smiling a little bit, you know, when I was asking if they could just do one more time observe the whole sky so that they could compare like different epochs and see if something or a galaxy or whatever had vanished. And that was like, that was the first thing. in 2016, but the group or the network didn't exist until 2017. When together with two senior scientists, we said, okay, let's do it for real. Because in 2016, I had together with two bachelor students,

tried to do a small search in like 1% of the sample provided by the US Naval Observatory, looked for vanishing objects, but then they said, okay, now we need to do the whole sky. And that, my God, that was a challenge. Wow. So what would make you think that there would be things that vanish other than, you know, true transients that like supernovae or novae? Why did you think there might be objects that would disappear and that they would be relevant somehow astronomically? Well, first, failed supernovae. There's a class of like massive stars that are believed that they might be able to collapse into a,

black hole without emitting in a supernova. So that was one of the things. And I was curious about whether that could happen. But then, of course, I was also wondering about just purely fundamental questions. Like, could something just vanish? Has anyone ever looked? And that was maybe the thing that mostly was bugging me. If nobody has ever looked, how can you know that it doesn't happen?

And then we were, when I wrote the paper, we were motivating it a little bit with city questions, like maybe it's a very, very advanced technological civilization, although I was mostly interested in this just fundamental thing. Right. I can't explain it. Sometimes you just get stuck with something without really understanding why. And the transients that you thought you might find originally besides the failed supernovae, I mean, were they like planets? Like astronomy has a very long tradition of looking for things, you know, blinking back and forth between images or photographic plates or now CCDs or CMOS cameras. So did you think you'd find comets and you'd become a prolific, you know, finder of phenomena in our solar system that are interesting,

but maybe not as ground-shaking as aliens or even supernova. Well, I was hoping for the failed supernova. I was mostly hoping to find, you know, a star that is there in all images and beautifully there through, you know, Palomar Survey 1, then the second Palomar Survey in the 80s, 90s, and then one looks today, and it has vanished, and we would maybe even be able to get some beautiful light curve by looking at some sky surveys taking in between. And I was very excited by that particular idea. So we were looking first, and we found nothing, but I found these stupid images, you know, with just one single point source and not again. And then we did this second attempt when I look through 15% of the data. So I had 24,000 candidates. And that's like

three times as many images. And I had nobody who was willing to help me to look through them. And one had to look through them one by one. And then the machine learning people who were supposed to help me, they were doing their work, of course, but they were a little bit slower. And I was growing impatient. Like, come on, we have, somehow we have to do. sift through this data set. So I took these images and one by one I went through all these 24,000

candidates. And of course you take small images because you're not going to use a 6x6 degrees plate. You use small images of 10 by 10 arc minutes or something to look if something vanished in the middle. And I was just hoping to find that vanishing star. I found

hundred of these blinking things that appear and vanish within one image. But I didn't find a single of these objects of the vanishing stars. And I was like, okay, we have to do even more of even bigger catalog. So it was. Now, the instrument that you used is not far from, for me here in San Diego. Mount Palomar is a legendary observatory. It goes back many, many, almost 100 years.

It almost killed the director, the original director of it, just getting the 200-inch mirror up the mountain. But there are other instruments there, too. There's a 48-inch camera. And why don't you talk about the instrumentation? What was used? What is a photographic plate for my viewers who are under 50? They're not going to get this.

You don't even have much experience. You're so much, much younger than I am. But tell me, what is a photographic plate? What was the ideal characteristic of this instrument that really stood out to you to use it? Well, if to be fair, it was something much simpler. I didn't even think about photographic plates when we used this. I just was searching for a digitized catalog of the sky that was as old as I could find it, because I wanted to have some hundred years in between.

I only got 70 years. But then, so the photographic plates, they are these big, big glass plates. They are heavy. I have never actually worked with them myself. I've seen one once in Sonnenberg Observatory when I was visiting them. They're big, they're heavy. I wouldn't lift it. and they have an photographic emulsion on top

and they have different type of emotion if you look in the red light, if you look in the blue light, they have like silver halides, crystals there that are reacting if you have photons that hit it. So they are using this big plates with emulsion at the telescope.

So the good thing about it is that you can actually observe a big patch of the sky. And they are much less sensitive to cosmic rays than are, CCDs for example because they are they are even less sensitive than the eye to cosmic rays these kind of emotions and so these photographic plates were used in astronomy a lot in the past to wash the sky and like they had a long exposure time so very often you had like

50 minutes or you could some blue place had only 10 minutes today with ccds you can take of course an image just in enough in a few seconds so and with a see most cameras, you can even take several images per second of the sky. So it's a totally different technology than the modern one of the sky. So yeah, historic things. Yeah, no, and they're treasures. I do have a plate. I'll put in a cut of it from Margaret Burbage is one of the pioneering astronomers of the 20th century. Came up with a fundamental paper explaining why we exist as and have the composition in our bodies that we do because the Big Bang can't produce most of the elements in our bodies. It makes a lot of the hydrogen and other elements, but nothing really that we can

sink our teeth into, so to speak. So talk about Vasco. First of all, what's the acronym stand for? What does the pipeline actually do when it gets a plate, compares it to something new or two different plates within the same survey? What does it do? What does it mean? So Vasco is the vanishing and appearing sources during a center of observations project. And that's the one that we started in 2017, one year after the first test that I did as a PhD student. So what's it actually doing? Well, it was this project that was supposed to search for this failed supernovae and all kind of funny objects that I was hoping to find. And what it did is that essentially we are comparing the sky from the early 50s.

with the sky as it looks today. And so one can use digitized images. And this is what we have been doing. So originally we used the US Naval Observatory Catalog and later like used images from DSS, etc. In like in 2019 or 2020 I got in touch with the Spanish Virtual Observatory with Enrique Solano who has like created lots of catalogs like digitized catalogs. And so what he did then is he went directly to the source material to the Palomar survey,

and he fetched all these terabytes of data and started comparing pixel by pixel to the sky as it looks today with Pan Stars, like 70 years later. And he was doing that at the same time as we still were processing this data from US Naval Observatory catalogs and comparing also again with Pan Stars. But there we had a same thing. citizen science project. So we had two parallel efforts to analyze the same data. The citizen science project where we had an interface where a lot of students and young astronomers and children and actually also professional astronomers were going there and looking for the vanishing stars that we were hoping to find. And then we had this automated process with a very super, like, well, very advanced thing that Enrique Solano developed. And both,

We're searching for vanishing stars. And so we actually went through something like 600, yeah, I think something like 600 million objects with the automated analysis that Enrique did. We did all that, the whole Northern Hemisphere and even more. 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. And we found zero vanishing stars. I mean, zero. The failure, right? Yeah, I mean, we did report it. Maybe the theoretical astronomers that are believing in failed supernovae were not as excited. But instead, we found all these like thousands and thousands of objects that appear and vanish within a plate exposure. And initially we were thinking, okay, maybe it's some M dwarf flares, maybe it's some kind of, maybe it's optical afterglows to gamma.

bursts and that was the initial thought so we were writing about all the possibilities i also i think in 2019 yeah it was 2019 we were also including the seti possibilities because i had a figure i remember the referee was uh was telling me to tone down the aliens in the and then i felt compelled to include a to do the opposite of course and i included a figure one with a green little alien in it as one of the possibilities and there the referee gave up and just approved it. Well, we also included all the other changes. But, you know, it was very like early for me. And then we had this, I had through this visual vetting of 24,000 candidates alone during three months, you know, you get crazy after that. I promise you. It's working to get a little

And so I had this table two there, and then there were 100, like, coordinates that I identified as interesting with this single images that could have been, M-warflares, whatever. And the really interesting thing didn't come in that paper. It came when I decided to look through that table yet one more time. And we suddenly discovered that one of these images had nine objects appearing and vanishing at the same time, but in a small... image and we were like what is that were there segments like if you if you look at a transient

were they all basically the same like there'd be some blurring or smudging I mean obviously some things like you know we'll talk about cosmic rays later of course we'll talk about you know asteroids and planetary objects and near earth objects that do come and go perhaps

or you know bolides or meteorodes and things like that but what was the characteristic of these transients. Let's say, let's stipulate that they are, you know, some, some sort of technology, although obviously we're going to talk about that. It's contested. But let's say it was, would that have the exact same transient, you know, behavior in a photographic emulsion as it would say in a Seymost camera or similar advanced camera? What would you, what do you actually see? Like, what, can you describe them for the people that are listening? What do they look like?

So what we saw was nine objects that looked just like. stars like any kind of stars in the plates. And when I manually tried to look at the brightness profile, so what we astronomers do to separate something that is round and is a round dirt, because you can have bubbles, you can have plate defects that are round and also are star-like. So what you do is to look at the brightness profile for a star of a certain magnitude and compare to the brightness profile of another, of a real star that you know is real

and that is there in multiple catalogs. And this camera, sorry to interrupt you, Baciers, but the camera has a support for the secondary, right? So it must have some diffraction spikes or some telltale sauce for point source function, the point spread function. And what you're saying is that the point spread function looked identical for these objects

as for a true point source like a star, right? Exactly. So it just compared, and it looked identical, and I was comparing to the stars that had similar magnitude, So they just looked identical to me when I was measuring. Now, later we learned that there are some statistical differences, but when you just manually were trying to look at it, then it looks very similar for, like, if you compare one and one.

What is the new phenomena that you said you found statistically looks different when you examine it statistically? So today, and actually that's thanks to some of the critics, if you take a big sample of these transients, and you compare it to a big sample of the stars, see that they are slightly, not much, but a little bit sharper and more narrowed the brightness profiles than they are of the real stars. And that fits very well with what happens if you have a very short flash, because then you have less of time for atmospheric turbulence to disturb

the profile, so then it is slightly more narrow. I want to just highlight something you just said. You said, thanks to my critics. And I I just thought of where I heard that exact same sentence before, and it was in my conversation with Nobel Prize winner, John Mather. John Mather won the Nobel Prize for co-leading the Kobe Cosmic Background Explorer, FIRAS experiment that determined that the CMB is a blackbody, despite all my haters and critics. And I have my own trolls out there, Beatrice.

You're not the only one who has haters and trolls, okay, my friend. So I have a lot of people that hate that, oh, I just talk up the, the Big Bang so much and I make up this fact that it's a black body, but it's not, it's not a black body. Only carbon can make a black body or metallic hydrogen. There's a lot of nonsense I have to debunk a lot of times, okay? But what John Mather and his team found was that the CMB is not only a black body, it's the most perfect black body that you could possibly imagine, signifying a long period of thermal equilibrium with high optical depth and uniform absorption and emission. Now, why do you?

he said that? He told me in the interview I did with him six years ago, seven years ago, that he was very thankful to his critics. And I've heard that many times, actually from the late Ray Weiss at MIT, who won the Nobel Prize for LIGO. They say your critics sometimes reveal some of the shortcomings of your argument, and by hearing them, it can make them stronger. Now, obviously, you can go overboard. You can have people that are malicious, malevolent and do things as trolls do, and they're not interested in the light, they're interested in the heat. But I always like to point out we have a lot of young scientists that listen to this program,

Beatrice, and I always love to highlight when a scientist says something that's particularly important that can help guide the career and the choices and even the emotions of a scientist as he or she starts off young. So thank you for that explanation. And for being candid and honest and having the integrity that a good scientist should have. So I really do appreciate that. led you to something even better, you know, than if the critics didn't exist, you know, so thanks, thanks to the critics. So one of the things that's fascinating to me is that it's kind of,

you know, I often have thought about light when I'm, when I'm out on the beach with my kids late at night and they're looking at a star and I'll say to them, like, we don't know if that star is still there, you know, it could be gone, right? It could have vanished. I like to visualize it as like this tube of light that's coming to us, you know, from this vast, this cosmic distances, right? But it's also a time capsule. It's like light is storing this information encoding this, you know, hologram, if you will, of information about not only the source, but of the material between us and that source or when that source is, but you're doing something even more impressive because you're using this, it's a time capsule in space and a time capsule

in time to be redundant because it's really sampling a different world. Like that world doesn't exist anymore. There's no way to recreate the pre-Sputnik world. Let's talk about that. So the first plates come from 1952. Is that right? It comes from 1949 or? 1939. Okay. So if you see a star-like flash that's truly a transient that doesn't repeat, that disappears in shadows and has other strange properties that you're going to discuss, the implication is that it can't be man-made or human-made, right? Because the first human-made object that we know about, okay, there could have been other ones, right, but is Sputnik, which was launched in Red October and 1957, right? So, and it didn't have solar panels on it.

When were the first solar panels deployed in space? Oh, I have no idea, I'm afraid. I think it was probably in the early mid-1960s, perhaps. I mean, it was actually a relatively fortuitous invention that you could get solar energy around that time as we were in space and needing to have not bring up big battery packs with us. So if you have two different plates, you know, plate A and plate B, same patch of sky, and minutes later, the flash of light disappears. Let's talk about what this flash of, the dynamics of flashes of light.

Everyone's seen the stars at night and they twinkle, right? That's because of turbulence. But you're saying you use that fact that they didn't have adaptive optics, they didn't have atmospheric correction. You can use that to discriminate between. between natural and artificial or transient versus non-transient? How do you use the atmospheric blurring blending to further refine the case that these are perhaps technology? Well, it was a little bit simpler or a little more complicated at that at the same time.

The interesting thing that pointed us towards the technological possibility was not the shape of them, because that came later, that came later, but that they were a group of them appearing and vanishing at the same time. And if it would have been asteroids moving, then if you would compare, let's say, within half an hour, you know the exposure time is 50 minutes. And we always have two plates that are taken like one after the other. If it would have been an asteroid that would move so fast that it would be there in one plate and not there in the other, it would have been streaking.

It wouldn't have left a point source. And the same if you would have some kind of meteorite, it would have been streaking. If it would have been a very slow asteroid that created such a transient, then you would have seen the point source both in the first image and in the second image. But this thing that you see the point source there in one image, but not half an hour earlier or later, and you never see it again, it points towards that you're having some kind of flash. And when you have multiple of them, let's say you have 10 of them within 10 arc minutes,

then you know you also have some kind of you have some kind of synchronicity or synchronous behavior and what that means is that you can set our limits just from the speed of light of how far they have to be and you know it's going to have to be inside the inner solar system so you're watching some objects inside the inner solar system of course I'm adding a parenthesis we were also considering that there may be some very advanced technological civilizations or shooting lasers and they're are perfectly communicating with us and pointing in us. And it comes at different times or whatever. But the problem is that we actually even use the largest telescope in the world,

optical telescope in the world in Canada Islands, pointed at those things, and we found nothing there. So that hypothesis is totally off the table. So we... That's optical setting. That's my colleague, Shelley Wright, here at ECSD, works on photo avalanche detectors for extremely rapid burst of light. that could signify extraterrestrial technology.

So that's a very fruitful avenue of her research. So exactly, she does beautiful work. And we tested this thing and it didn't work out. So now we're stuck with inner solar system objects and there are multiple of them. And then there's nothing in the sky today that we know of that produces that signature except for satellites and flat surfaces, solar panels.

And today when you look at the sky, You see thousands and thousands of this kind of transience, only with an ached eye. You don't even need a telescope, but just with an naked eye. You see thousands of them over the sky every hour. And then you see something that looks like a signature of the stuff that you see on the sky today. And you see it in this place from the 50s. And the most one thing I remember in 2022 when we did this alignment paper because we started thinking, okay, so let's find better examples.

because this one might still be, maybe there's some kind of contamination that produces all this. We were wondering, like maybe some kind of atomic bomb tests. We had two different hypotheses, like some kind of contamination that produces this, versus that we are seeing reflections of something very flat, very artificial in orbit around Earth. And these were our two leading ideas that we landed in after, that we did an exclusion method and excluded all the other things. And then I was thinking, like, a better way of searching for it is to look for alignments as well. We found this some alignments, and we posted the first preprint.

And then one of these satellite experts writes to me a very annoyed email, like, oh, you're just seeing satellites. And I'm writing back, there were no satellites in my name. Thank you for proving my point. What about, I mean, just outlandish, but we use. for adaptive optics, we use artificial stars, and those are done with lasers,

and yes, the laser wasn't invented as far as we know in 1957 or so. But, you know, who knows? What if there were, you know, kind of broadcast, you know, came from the Earth, from terrestrial, from actually on the Earth, bouncing, because that was around the time where we developed the first communication satellite,

so Xcelar, that came very soon after. Not in 1957 or 195049, but who knows? What if there was some mazer, activity or there was some strange, you know, like defense programs. Would they not produce artificial star-like point-like exactly like what you see? I mean, possibly, but they wouldn't vanish in their shadow, which is later what to see for a big fraction of our objects, and that's where it gets fun. Let's talk about the – we already mentioned how your critics have

improved your work. Let's let Beatrice be her own harsh referee for a moment. You've got these three claims, the nuclear test correlation, the 22-sigma Earth-Shadow deficit, and And the techno signature. There are two different ways of watching it, 22, 7.6. So, and the techno signature. So if you're a mean referee, you know, your referee number two, how do you rank them? What would you stake your reputation on, each of them? Let's give the strongest argument first.

What do you think is the most strong argument for these being techno signatures? So there are those, can I only mention my team's discoveries or can I also mention the other people I mean you like to work with it? Well, the first, well, the earth shadow deficit, I think, is really beautiful to work with. And, I mean, we see a big deficit of this trance is in the earth shadow. By the way, when we did this test, I didn't expect that result. You can't imagine the feeling when you get that result. And you start redoing it over and over, and no matter what you do, yeah, you still see that deficit in the earth shadow.

it's yeah so that's the first thing I would say then of course the transient nuclear correlation I find super super fascinating and explain quantitatively that's something like 50% more transients in a few-day window or something like that is it like it's 68% more transient within plus minus one day actually the new paper that we have now the machine learning paper led by Stephen Brule where they have cleaned up so what they've done there is try to clean up this sample from all the plate defects because all the critics are worried about the plate defects. They think that they might be creating this weird correlations.

I don't know how plate defects would sense where is the earth shadow. Apparently they're self-conscious. But when you clean away the plate defects, all these correlations get even stronger. And the funny part there is that they find those strong correlation one day before the nuclear test. And then one gets really confused because then of course someone could say, or maybe it's just because you're already sending up some balloons or whatever. And I mean, just to observe the nuclear tests is like one way. But yeah, if you read a machine learning paper that Steve Brule is leading,

it's a fascinating result. So that is also super cool. And then the third, I would say, and a really important discovery, is the one by Ivo Busco that he posted one week ago, where he actually essentially shows that some of these transients have to be real. Because first, again, he sees the same slightly narrower shapes of these transients than the normal stars, which are indicative of that they are actually fast flashes, not normal object. But he also shows that they come from light passing through the optics,

because sometimes these telescopes, especially if you have a shitty telescope, not the perfect telescope, but you have slightly faulty optics, they produce these aberrations and, I mean, commas, like shapes that are of the distorted light. And all the stars have these ugly shapes rather than a perfect PSF. And you can see the directionality of them and all kind of weirdnesses of them. You can measure it. And it shows that these transients have the same aberrations as the real stars, which of course totally kills, I mean, the hypothesis of that plate defects are responsible for all the transients

or that cosmic rays are responsible for all the transients. Yes, we know that among 107,000 candidates there's a lot of dirt there. There will be plate defects, bubbles, hairs, cosmic rays, everything. But the important part is that a significant fraction of this population have, I mean, are produced by light that possible. through the telescope and they are vanishing in the earth's shadow. This shows we have a population of objects near the earth that have not been discovered until now. I find it fascinating. So obviously it's extremely fascinating.

I think, you know, just to, again, in the spirit of, you know, steel, sharpened steel, you know, pushing back with respect that, you know, I mean, the first with the, with the, you know, reflective deficit. I think that the nuclear test correlation to me is the most, you know, kind of disturbing, not really because I'm, you know, worried about, you know, something being suppressed or hidden, but what could possibly be the correlation factor rather, or causative factor? I mean, there's a lot of things that happen in correlation that aren't causative. So what's your best model for the nuclear test correlation function? So if we remove all the other, If we just remove all the other observation, you can always say that it could be maybe it's cosmic rays or something, or maybe it is high energy particles from the atomic bombs. You could say that if you ignore everything else. The problem is that we have, or not we, but another independent scientist, a nuclear engineer who has a retired nuclear engineer called Kevin Kahn, he played around with the sample and discovers an anti-correlation with geomagnetic storm activity, which, to total,

totally disagrees with the cosmic rays. Of course some people will say and argue, but maybe if you have higher solar activity, you're going to block them, you're going to somehow shield the Earth from cosmic rays. But again, they're different kind of cosmic rays. There are cosmic rays that you're going to get from the sun, a lot of particles that are going, they're going to be low energy.

And then you're going to have high energy galactic. And even if you have a lot of high energy galactic that are blocked out, you still also have a lot of low energy, low energy ones and which ones are most likely to produce a transient on the plate. It's not the galactic ones that are blocked. Is the low energy ones that are going to most likely produce, if I think correctly, a point source on the photographic plate because they are simply easier, or they easier could do something on the plate while the high energy are just going to pass

through the photographic plate? And then you're not expecting an anti-correlation. You're going to expect a correlation between the solar activity and the number of transients. We see the opposite. Hmm. Maybe I'm thinking wrongly here. Quick thing before we go on. If you're getting something out of these conversations, you can get closer to them.

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It happens every month at the office hours level. That's at $20. So please do consider joining the links are below. Yeah, let me just summarize what I understood. Again, this is not my field, but I did talk to Avi Loeb this past week on a live stream for other purposes, including his new program that he's initiating with scientists and philosophers and skeptics and all sorts of interesting people, not all scientifically, you know, oriented or not all with the same level of credentials that, say, you know,

you have, but nevertheless quite astounding that he's been able to put it together. And he claims the following. He claims that 60,000 cosmic rays hit a plate, you know, basically in an exposure at that time, and that 10 of them or so land basically perpendicular, which would make them look enough like a point source that someone could mistake it. So he's saying that that accounts for the entire candidate population by that mechanism. So before we get to the modulation, he has a claim about that that we discussed as well. all. And I'm summarizing he's not here to defend himself, but I hope, like, we can, we can, you know, shed some light, no pun intended on it. So how do you respond to that? Why is he potentially wrong about that? Well, first, I think he was expecting a correlation. And then I pointed it out in his medium essay, and then he changed the essay, and then he's expected suddenly an anti-correlation. So I think there was a little bit of, maybe it was a, we misunderstood each other or something like that when we were.

No, you're right. He does say that it's an anti-correlation due to what are called corona-mass. And that's after I pointed it out. Yes. After I refuted his previous argument, then he changed his media. I didn't know that. I didn't know that, but I'm just looking at the data that's on the, what on his medium page now. Yeah. Yeah, and what we talked about on Monday.

He didn't mention that. No, but that's totally fine. He updated the medium-sadam. But I think he is considering all cosmic rays like coming, like, he's considering this, um, he's considering this, um, Like if they are all galactic, he ignores all the low energy cosmic rays that you get from the sun. And I think that one has to consider what is more likely to leave a point source. Of course, you're going to have the direction will matter, but also the higher the energy, the more likely is going to pass through.

Also another thing to consider is that CCDs and photographic plates react like differently. And very often, if you have some high energy particles or anything, you're going to have diffuse radiation or you're going to have, a lot of streaks and all over, but to get a perfect point source, it's probably going to be much easier with a low energy. That's what I think. But I suspect that neither me nor Avia have been working on this enough to actually be able to model what is more likely to produce the perfect point source.

But I suspect that it's more likely those particles that are associated with the sun activity. So I would expect a correlation rather than an anti-correlation that way. I wouldn't put them all together. I would separate by energy levels and try to model that. Yeah, I guess the argument, as I understood for Monday, was him saying, you know, that the modulation by the sun affects the cosmic ray flux from the galaxy. And that active sun, you know, mass ejection in the direction of the Earth, you know, potentially, or even if it's omnidirectional, will then suppress, you know, global.

but then where we're sitting it introduces this anisotropy which is directly being you know anti-correlated with the Sun Earth axis which means that it would be in the show it would appear to come from the shadow because you have basically have the shield that's being modulated either up or stronger or weaker but then there's a second paper by this Hambley and Bear team as I understand Edinburgh peer reviewed you know they're independent of Ravi of you they looked at nine of the transients and they said that he could find these round stellar-like profiles, but they said they were attributable to what are called

emulsion flaws. So that's a different team. So how do you respond in that? They did, they concluded it could be emotional flaws based on that they were slightly narrower. That was the argument and because they found so many narrower things on the plate. Of course, a number of objects, you can't say that if it's 10 of them or if it's 500, that just by citing the number, you can't say that it's emulsion. defects. Of course, they might be emulsion defects, but they used that it's so many, and there are many that are narrow that is most likely emulsion defects. However, there's somebody who actually at the archive looked at them with microscope. And if you look

at them with microscope, again, this like this nine or eight out of the nine transients are looking like they're round, they're slightly sharper and rounder, but they look like on the digitized place. So how are you going to separate that from transients that are appearing due to flashes? Because you have here so-called ambiguity. Or I mean, it can be either or because both transients associated with short flashes would produce narrow profiles, as well as hypothetically plate defects. And to separate these two, and if you can't do it with a microscope, then you need population statistics. And I think that's why the Earth's shadow is so important.

And also one more thing to think about. When we talk about the earth shadow, we don't talk about the night side. We mean specifically the geometric shadow at 42,000 kilometers altitude, which is 8.7 degrees. And when cosmic rays enter into the atmosphere, I mean, you have all this scattering and you have all the secondary particles, there's absolutely no way how they will remember this little circle of 8.7 degrees and only there have a difference. but not outside it. So I think that's something very important to remember that we're not talking about just looking at low Earth orbit. We're talking about this shadow at 42,000. How is any cosmic ray going to remember the geometry there? It's not going to do that because of all the scattering. So only reflections can produce that deficit.

So I have some questions from my audience as well. Someone named Cybarus says Beatt Thank you for your dedicated work, these vanishing objects for the past seven years. Given the pre-Sputnik timing and your assessment that these appear to be reflective or metallic objects rather than stars, what do you consider it to be the most likely explanation? Well, I think there is something very flat and very reflective in orbit around the Earth. Now, if I also, because there are different ways how you can view this problem. You can view it as that you have a mix of different phenomena. There might be one population that is reflective, another population that is correlating with cosmic race,

a third one that is anti-correlating with geomagnetic storm activity, or it can be all exactly the same population. For example, Brian Doherty, he wrote a paper and he looks at it, and he sees that if you actually focus on the sunlit transients and remove the others, the nuclear correlation gets even stronger, which argues for that it's actually the same population of objects producing the different features. And if I look at that, I'm sorry, but I find it hard not to attribute it to something artificial. And I will be straight. That's what I think. I wasn't born with some political vene, so I will just say it straightly.

also is even more interesting. He also, Brian Doherty, he, he does this beautiful machine learning and cleans up the data from all the plate defects. And he sees also that they are avoiding the ecliptic. So obviously they don't behave like your average asteroid. And also in a new paper we are working on, we are seeing that they are all clustering around the equator. And it's even more interesting. We try to, like in this new paper, we're trying to look at at the sizes and all the typical of typical features of the objects and they are so similar to the objects reported by astronomers today when they look at space trash it's just that then we see maybe one transient per square degree per hour and today you have 1.7 per square degree per hour but it

seems to be very similar type of objects so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say other than another question from the audience could it be like a pulsar that you know was a transient pulsar very bright flash briefly and then just is no longer aligned with the earth anymore no it wouldn't be because it had to see groupings of them and they are synchronized and that doesn't agree if i can just like speculate you would have one single example of a let's say of a triple But we would have all the other transients, but we would have an empty sky, but somewhere we would see three transins at the same time appearing and vanishing. We could be discussing gravitational lensing by a supermassive black hole. That's a possibility if you have one single. Maybe there's an super massive black hole in the Milky Way we didn't know about, but when you have so many as we do, then you're running into trouble. So then there are people that are a little less, you know, kind of supportive of it. And that is, well, let's go to this recent paper, which I believe is either published or appeared in the archive by Waters at all.

And, you know, they talk about the clustering and they talk about the nuclear test correlation. But they claim this one thing which I found, you know, kind of noteworthy is they talk about, they call it. data hygiene that you rely on this dataset V, and that skipped some of the scan artifact removal steps. And Waters estimates 91% of those features belong to a set that wasn't distinguished from catalog object. Can you explain what he's claiming, or they're claiming rather? And then what is your response to this, to this? Oh, I'd love to talk about. This is fun. So the first thing that they do is that they say, if you have a plate defects in your sample, you cannot do statistics. You need to have a validated data set.

And here I find this super fascinating because A, I mean, you look in the particle accelerators. It's not like you're going to have all that when you search for Higgs boson, you only save the Higgs boson and throw away everything else. I mean, statistics, you know you work with dirt samples, but the most important is if your dirt or contamination is somehow dependent on the variable you're testing or not. And of course we know that defects are not going to be tracking the sun, earth geometry and follow where is the earth shadow. The defects don't know this. They might be assembled on the edges of the plates, but they are not going to be tracking the earth shadow.

So it actually doesn't matter. So that's the first thing. I think there's a confusion today between traditional statistical inference and like statistical or traditional hypothesis testing with machine learning, like, massing learning. like machine learning based research where people talk about validating samples and people have started conflating the two. So that's the first thing.

The second, we have actually tried to remove all the plate defects. But now it gets even more fun. So Waters used a data set that was public. They didn't email us. They could have sent an email to us and asked about if this data was good or not, they used a sample of 5,000 transients reported in Solano at all 2022. The problem is that these weren't just normal transients.

These were those a data set created to search specifically for vanishing stars, where a lot of additional criteria were added. Essentially, we did not only look for things that flashed, but one also removed anything that existed in any, catalog, astronomical catalog across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, which creates a beautiful hole, if I may show you, if screen sharing works. There is this, so if you look at our, like, at the two datasets, there is the original one of 107,000. It has its artifacts, etc., but like some stripes, empty stripe, but in general, it's a fairly homogeneous data set. The sky surveyed, by the plates, it's like all plates in the northern hemisphere are covered. Then you look at the sample used by waters and there is this big hole.

And that big hole by itself produces excess in the earth's shadow, simply because a lot wasn't observed. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing, they don't even have the time stamps. And that's a whole story by itself. I don't know if I should tell it or... Well, what is the timestamp of? What does it stamp of? What is it stamping? You need the time of the observations.

That wasn't included in the dataset either. So they're trying to do some detective work. And the question is if they did it correctly or not, because the initial, a famous plot that was sent to me earlier forgets the cosinous deck factor when estimating a parameter that they use for, for like deducing the times. So maybe even the times aren't correct either. So both a big hole,

the times are not correct. And then, or maybe, I don't really know, they are trying to say that they didn't do the error, but they are citing the figure in their knowledgements. So essentially, so the question is, is it right or not? I don't know. And the third problem is that we have actually looked with machine learning at the number of defects in their so-called aggressively filtered sample versus ours.

And their sample isn't cleaner. It's just 20 times smaller. And if you have 20 times smaller sample, it's also a lot more difficult to see statistical correlations. So, I mean, it's a big mess. They just used a completely wrong sample, and that's where it went wrong. And the claim that they make that you have to normalize the number of telescope observation nights, basically, that it's basically an imprint or an artifact of the excess correlation with around nuclear testates is just an artifact of some maybe timing or Nyquist sampling.

We have tested that and addressed it in the commentary. That's not even if you normalize it correctly, you still have actually a correlation. It stays and it even gets stronger. It's stronger, phenomenal. Wow. Okay. Now the other, another thing that they bring up is,

and I hope you don't mind me asking these questions. I'm not great. I'm happy to talk about it actually. Yeah, because I mean, my audience is super technical and they're going to appreciate this, But they're also going to like the fact that you're framing us like Richard Feynman. You're looking for evidence. You're not looking for feels or beliefs or wishes or dreams and fairy tales, right?

You really want this to be done scientifically accurately, and then we can come to the interpretation. So there's an argument about spatial correlation features that pile up at the plate corners and edges, and they form pockets of voidance where you don't find the physical samples from optical sources that go through the telescope. pipeline. Are these features that people that you agree on? I mean, are they right about this claim? Well, if they are talking about the big hole in spatial distribution, it's only in their sample because they use the one that was completely made for a different purpose. So, but if they're talking about that they might be plate defects, yeah, edges might have more, more defects. But at the same time, they are not going to be influencing a deficit in the earth shadow.

So it's irrelevant for the question. You just, you just. just need to think about, is a defect going to somehow walk around on the plate to follow, like, where is the earth shadow? Because the earth shadow is moving. One claim that I found kind of resonant with some thoughts I had was the precedent that comes from gamma-ray bursts from the, you know, 70s or whatever. A satellite was designed to look for nuclear test-band violations on Earth, and they ended up catching these extremely energetic explosions in deep space at high red shift. So it took 20 years and they basically looked at a million archival plates also from Palomar, and they never really confidently confirmed a single optical

transient because the emulsion effects would mimic star-like flashes. So it was too confusing, I guess. So why is it, how can you make the case that your search is different? Why is it Well, Iowa Busco just did what they couldn't do. Too bad his name wasn't Vasco. Can you get him to change his name to Vasco, please? Yeah, well, he showed that it goes through the telescope optics, thanks to this operation commas. They didn't think of that, but he thought of it. It took a couple of more decades, just because someone didn't manage to do it in the 70s doesn't mean that someone can't do it 50 years later and gets a good idea.

And I hope also got that a good idea. And I think that's beautiful. He did what they haven't managed to do before. And also, in those times, they didn't work with big catalogs. They worked with like one by one of objects. They took a microscope maybe. They used a what is it called, this magnifying glass. And they looked one by one and they maybe said, oh, we can't say, we can't separate it.

It could be plate defects. But today we have population statistics. We have all this digitization of the surveys, machine learning, big computers. It allows us to do population statistics in a way they couldn't do in those times. and that's the beautiful thing of progress and of like all these new tools we have today and I want to be fair to Waters I may have misspoken

it's not a published paper it's just a pre-print and that's fine a lot of things get handled wrong and then they get handled a better way maybe you're going to comment maybe the editor referee etc just as people have corrected you by criticizing you you may criticize him and correct him and benefit him right so this could make it all better

for the sake of heaven, as he'd like to say. Okay, now I want to take a big... Say again? We have a commentary online in response to them. Oh, you do? Okay, great. I'll put a link to that in the notes below. So let's just take a big step back.

We just had this movie come out in America called Disclosure Day. We've had multiple disclosures, you know, from the Trump administration. We've had Avi Lowe, you know, volunteer to take up his eighth job at the White House now, apparently, according to Avi at least. I'm trying to get confirmation from my sources and media in the White House myself. But for now, I trust him and we'll see how it comes out. Okay. So let's just say there's 100,000 of these things and 99,999 are fake. Okay, they're just artifacts.

They're just something, you know, a flock of shiny birds and some swamp gas or like there was, there was a laser. You know, we didn't know about the lasers. What's that? I'm imagining seagulls with tinfoil. Yes, yes. Okay. So let's say there was, you know, some laser and a tinfoil.

is shot out of a laser with a covered out of a seagull. Okay, but let's say of all those 999,999, they're all wrong. Waters, you know, Avi Loeb, everyone could rule it up, but there's one that's real. We can't explain it, Beatrice. That's history, right? So what would that mean? What would that do for our, you know, perception of where things fall in the cosmos? Well, I think it's going to make us much more humble because we as humans have our reason

to unite in some ways because it shows that we are not the only ones, I mean, not only that we are not the only ones in the universe, we are not even alone here on earth. I mean, it has to bring some humility, even to those of us who are not too much. No, but it's, I think it's going to be amazing, actually. And of course, I would be curious, like, what else do they know? What could we learn from this other civilization? It would be amazing, really amazing. It doesn't guarantee that we are safe, of course, because we can't guess the intentions.

You know, there's a lot of people that try to guess whether they are benevolent or whether they are evil. And I just say, we have no data. Yeah, we have no information to make any qualified guess. I mean, aside from this, what do you think is the evidence for highly technologically advanced life forms outside of the earth? Do you feel like ignore your work? Okay, I need you to do that. But what do you think is, I mean, do you, what do you make of these, you know, claims of, you know, Tic Tacs and non-human biologics and interdimensional being?

I mean, do you think that any of these hold the candle scientifically that meets your rigorous standards? Let's say like this. I think there's a lot of evidence that is not accessible to scientists because there are really credible people and a lot of credible people who are talk about. about crash retrievals and there is, I believe that what is being said there is most, I mean, I believe it's true. I do find a difficulty in that we cannot judge any evidence because there's no evidence out there for us as scientists, which is a problem and which is why I prefer to do my own stuff. If they are not going to give me the evidence, I will do my own searches. We even have

this European crash retrieval initiative that we started, where we have been requesting the public to give us tips for crashed saucers. Because for me, it's not enough that someone tells me that they are, even if I believe them, I still want to see the evidence before I state that this is the case. You can have an excellent, I mean, all the excellent leads, but I still want to have it in my hands before I say there are crashed saucers there. I'm a pilot and I fly little planes, you know, propellers around. But, you know, they're not very stealthy. And certainly not to have, you know, I want to be seen by the air traffic controller,

so I don't hit another plane. These objects, they weren't doing much to hide. Let's say stipulate that all of them are extraterrestrial technology. It seems like they, A, wanted to be found or didn't care if they were seen, which seems kind of dangerous, especially if they're avoiding nuclear tests, you know, maybe if they're detected, they could get shot down. So it seems like maybe their judgment's not so great, or maybe they're bad drivers. I don't really know.

Or maybe sensitive because you see that there are fewer of them during geomagnetic storm, higher geomagnetic storm activity. Maybe they are very fragile. And the other question I have is, what happened to them? Like, why aren't they here now? Who has said that they are not here now? I see lots of these things in the sky still. I mean, there are papers that are reporting the same kind of flashes.

So I think they might be here. I think there's a lot of UFO report. even if most of it, like 97% of all the UFO reports are just like misidentifications, you still have some 3% that can't be explained and can't be explained despite access to data. And you still have cases like the Nimitz case that are highly fascinating. You still have the Washington flap that you can't just explain away just like that. I think it's a highly credible case. The problem, again, with all these really interesting high quality cases,

is that it's classified. Once it's something is really good, it gets classified, and we scientists can't access it. Well, that's where, you know, I think Avi is coming into play and wanting to declassify it based on his relationships with powerful congresswomen like Anna Polina Luna here in the United States. I've just one last topic before we wrap it up. I know it's super late for you, and I really appreciate you.

Another viewer on my channel, I gave, if you're a member of the channel, you can ask questions of my guest. And I like to do that to engage my audience with a brilliant scientist. So this person, I was going to say this entity, but their name is entity unknown, which I was going to use for one of my kids' names, but I decided against it. So entity unknown says the following, Beatrice. He says, stay safe. Are you worried about your safety?

Yes. Why is that? I don't want to explain all the details, but there have been a number of incidents. And it's, let's say, I do have support for it. Okay. Well, I want you to stay safe. I want you to visit here. I want to take you to Mount Palomar.

You'll come along with me and my kids. We love to go camping and hang out up there, and we'll collect some special, special, let's say, non-technological artifacts like pine cones and rocks and things. things like that. I'd love to give you and actually give you one of the plates that I collected from my late great colleague Margaret Burbage. I think she'd be proud to know you. And of course, my friend and colleague, Shelley Wright, would love to talk with you. And we have a lot to talk about. So I think let us think of this as the first of many conversations, okay? Absolutely. Thank you so much. Be well. Thank you for joining us.

I know you all found Beatrice as fascinating as I do. And if you want to see more of her, let me know in the comments. Would you like me to moderate a debate between her, Avi Loeb and Michael Shermer noted skeptic. And also, click here and watch the video I just did with Avi Loeb. Hey there, you cosmic beauties. I've got three gifts waiting for you at Brian Keating.com slash cosmic. First, you'll get a free copy of Flatland, the little book that inspired me to become a scientist

and still shapes how physicists think about higher dimensions and the nature of reality. Second, you'll be entered into a monthly drawing to win a genuine meteorite from outer space, 4.3 billion years old, older than the Earth. And finally, you'll discover your cosmic personality. With a short quiz that points you towards books, videos, resources, and ideas

paler to your cosmic curiosity about life, intelligence, and the universe itself. Go to briancaging.com slash cosmic. It's all free, and I'll see you next time on Into the Impossible. Hey there, you cosmic beauties. I've got three gifts waiting for you at Brian Keating.com slash cosmic. First, you'll get a free copy of Flatland. The little book that inspired me to become a scientist

and still shapes how physicists think about higher dimensions and the nature of reality. Second, you'll be entered into a monthly drawing to win a genuine meteorite from outer space, 4.3 billion years old, older than the Earth. And finally, you'll discover your cosmic personality with a short quiz that points you towards books, videos, resources, and ideas tailored to your cosmic curiosity about life, intelligence, and the universe itself. Go to briancating.com slash cosmic.

It's all free, and I'll see you next time on Into the Impossible.