Psience Quest

It appears that astronomers may have accidentally captured the transient brilliant light emitted by large "mother ship" UFOs during one notable UFO "flap" that occured in Washingtom DC in 1952.

From https://thedebrief.org/the-vanishing-sta...-ufo-wave/ :

Quote:"In the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project, our team has been dedicated to the search for celestial objects that (exhibited the major anomaly that they) vanished over the span of 70 years. (Images taken by several advanced very large-aperature telescopes were used for this search).

(Great effort was put into elimination of a number of remotely possible conventional explanations, like stellar variability, large man-made satellites, flare stars, asteroids, and objects simply just not present either in Gaia EDR3 or Pan-STARRS (the initial star surveys used in the investigation) but present in other astronomical surveys). 
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....our exploration has led us to a more intriguing discovery: several images where multiple star-like objects appear in a single snapshot of the sky, never to be seen again. In a specific instance, nine faint objects looking like stars were visible in an image captured on April 12, 1950, during a 50-minute exposure. However, they were absent in the image taken just 30 minutes earlier and in another image from six days later. We searched through all available archives in an attempt to locate the nine objects. We directed the world’s largest optical telescope, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, with its 10.4-meter aperture, to the locations where the transients had been. Nothing was found. The objects had simply vanished.
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To find further evidence of artificial objects outside Earth’s atmosphere, one can search for multiple transients that, additionally, are also aligned. Satellite reflections can manifest as either a single flash or a sequence of consecutive flashes falling on a line, depending on variables like geometry, rotational speed, and the dimensions of our field of view. The exclusive use of pre-Sputnik catalogs further ensures that only non-human objects are included.
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Then we executed (a) search. We identified two candidates that were statistically significant and had unlikely alignments of transients and an additional three statistically weaker candidates (in total 5 candidates). Our best candidate, Candidate 5, had a probability of p ~ 0.0001 to exist by chance.
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....our team continued its search efforts. One year ago, my colleague presented the team with a case that he had uncovered during the automated searches. The image showed three bright and beautiful objects looking just like stars in a POSS-I image from the 19th of July 1952 that appeared and vanished within a plate exposure. The three bright objects seemed as real as Betelgeuse itself. We explored a gravitational lensing hypothesis, considering the possibility that a massive foreground object could bend the passing light so that three images appear only to vanish moments later. Perhaps, a supermassive black hole located just a few light-years from Earth, with a mass ten times that of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, could explain the triple transient? We (are) not convinced.
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Let us have a closer look at the time period of the observations. July 1952 was a very special month in Washington D.C. Between July 12th and July 29th, 1952, a multitude of UFO sightings occurred over Washington D.C. in the United States involving radar-visual sightings in simultaneous observations, and even circumstances where a Navy pilot was authorized to shoot down an object (with some debris collected). The highest number of sightings took place during two weekends: July 19th – 20th and the weekend of July 26th – 27th, 1952.
An official record from the National Archives of Australia reveals that while the average monthly number of UFO reports of sightings between 1948 and 1951 was 15 per month, there were approximately 536 reports in July 1952.
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This is where things get fun. The three transients we found were, indeed, observed on the night of July 19th, 1952, which coincided with the first weekend of the Washington UFO flyovers – a coincidence first noticed by my friend David Altman. As scientists, we recognize that coincidences will occur from time to time, no matter how remarkable they may seem. Yet, I couldn’t help but wonder about whether any of the five top candidates in our previous 2022 arXiv paper could have been observed during the Washington flyovers.
Indeed, our absolute top candidate (Candidate 5, with a mere 0.0001% probability) was observed on July 27th, 1952, aligning with the second weekend.
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What types of events might lead to the detection of multiple transients in plates from the same period? One possible explanation is that these transients are indeed UFOs. Another hypothesis is that high-altitude atomic bomb tests could have generated aurora-like phenomena over Washington. ....Occam’s razor suggests that the first hypothesis requires less of a stretch.
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There is undoubtedly a compelling necessity for exploring this mystery. With a bit of luck, maybe we can find statistical support for a connection between historical UFO sightings and multiple transients in photographic plates.