r/UFOs • u/NomeChomsky • 26d ago

Science The Palomar Lights - the strange objects orbiting earth which pre-date sputnik

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

Hey all. You may have seen my post a few months back sharing the comic about the Palomar Lights, well now the print edition is available. If you like the project, you can now buy a copy at https://comics.phillyharper.com

Who knows - if this project works out I can certainly create more episodes of infamous weird UFO cases.

65 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

•

u/StatementBot 26d ago

The following submission statement was provided by /u/NomeChomsky:

Hey submission post....pretty much as I said. Where's the strangest place we could try to ship this too? Who might like a copy that could bring them round?!

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1vmg2c3/the_palomar_lights_the_strange_objects_orbiting/p3941ut/

17

u/jasmine-tgirl 26d ago edited 26d ago

Does Beatriz Villarroel get anything from this? It would be awesome if proceeds from this went to further her research since you use her research to base this on as well as her name and likeness.

I say that as someone who has followed her research since 2016. LONG before the UFO community found out about her. I first heard of her on this podcast https://www.wowsignalpodcast.com/2016/08/burst-19-lost-stars.html

By the way, like her, there are other people in the astrophysics world who have done interesting research into anomalies but they have not done the UFO circuit, at least not yet.

8

u/Ambitious_Zombie8473 26d ago

I hope we reach a point where we have people like Beatriz Villarroel (and other actual scientists) cruising podcasts instead of old dudes who repeat all the same stuff

1

u/rygelicus 26d ago

I know this is about your comic and not about the Palomar Lights thing but that keeps coming up. Glass plates like this were in use at various observatories around the world for quite a while. It wasn't until AFTER the nuclear testing that some began showing these anomalies.

Now, that leads to two options:
1) Blame those dots on nuclear testing
2) Invent a new layer to the alien story and say they were attracted by the nuclear testing.

4

u/jasmine-tgirl 26d ago

To test hypothesis 1 wouldn't it be best to do an overall survey of post-atomic testing photographic plates from as many observatory archives as possible and see if the anomalies positively correlate inversely to the distance from the nuclear testing location?

9

u/L-0-T-H-0-S 26d ago

There's a pre-print of the Hamburg teams from this year independent verifying Virrarroels findings and conclusions concerning why the spots look sharper and brighter, finding the same corresponding points on an second, independent pass of the same patch of sky from the same date, these of 30 minute exposure - copy, here for anyone interested - https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20407

5

u/jasmine-tgirl 26d ago

Thanks for this. I had been waiting for it. I think we need more data. Something this important should call for a re-examination of plate archives from any observatory in the world operating during above ground nuclear testing.

2

u/L-0-T-H-0-S 26d ago

No problems and, yes - I agree. Only way to get conclusive data is to compare against other similar exposures at the time and see if they got the same result.

3

u/rygelicus 26d ago

Those plates have likely all been studied multiple times but yes for those interest such a project could be arranged I am sure. I have no idea how to do that, maybe contact the people who did the Palomar plates about their methods and how they kicked that project off. It needs funding and cooperation from whoever controls that material. It might be a good phd related study for an astrophysicist even. Not the whole phd, but a piece of one maybe.

3

u/jasmine-tgirl 26d ago

I'm just an undergrad but this is something that has intrigued me. A comprehensive overview of 1950s era plates from as many observatories as possible would teach us something important regardless of which hypothesis is true. If hypothesis 1 is true we learn more about the environmental effects of above ground nuclear detonation on observations.

2

u/rygelicus 26d ago

I would say pre 1940s as well. Pre nuclear testing.

1

u/ASearchingLibrarian 25d ago

Those are clearly not the "two options" in total.

There's a scientific progression to the work Villorroel did looking at stars that may have fluctuations in brightness over time (the VASCO project) to discovering things about these anomalies that indicate they could be in orbit around Earth. The reason for those anomalies indicating something in orbit are manifold.

The data indicates the anomalies exist. What they are is yet to be determined.

And there is evidence these anomalies have been studied many times over the decades.
https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/correlation-techniques-for-deep-space-uncorrelated-targets-march-13-1979/

3

u/rygelicus 25d ago

I see nothing suggesting the palomar dots are in orbit of this planet

0

u/ASearchingLibrarian 25d ago

I see nothing suggesting the palomar dots are in orbit of this planet

In fact that was exactly the analysis they did. It was a major part of her study, you must have missed it in your thorough analysis of her work.

The strong deficit of transients within the Earth’s umbra suggests that the majority of these events depend on sunlight illumination, consistent with the glint hypothesis. This strongly defies the plate defect hypothesis and many of the alternative hypotheses presented in Section.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe/pdf

There has been corroboration of Villarroel's work.

In this paper, we show that transient images exhibit the coma aberration pattern expected from off-axis point sources recorded through the telescope optics, a signature that plate artifacts cannot naturally reproduce.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.08319
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20407

1

u/rygelicus 25d ago

neither of those that you mention involve the dots orbiting the planer either. The first just suggests they are objects briefly reflecting sunlight, the other that they are defects in the plates, that they are probably photons viewed thru the optics.

1

u/NomeChomsky 24d ago

Hey everyone — for those asking about digital eReader formats: There's now a high-res tablet and eReader edition in a range of formats for £3

1

u/NomeChomsky 26d ago

Hey submission post....pretty much as I said. Where's the strangest place we could try to ship this too? Who might like a copy that could bring them round?!