Fascinating.
"The second paper, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP), specifically looks for signs of possible extraterrestrial artifacts in orbit around Earth, before the first human satellite launch in 1957. The researchers looked, among other things, for instances where multiple flashes of light were along a line or in a narrow band—something that indicates reflections from flat, reflective objects in motion. Two interesting examples were identified, one of which occurred on July 27, 1952, the same night as the notable sightings of UAP in Washington, D.C."
Note that their paper includes p-hacking so this is proto-science rather than science. They didn't find data to match their hypothesis, but they were able to find a hypothesis to match their data.
> Follow-up secondary analyses were then conducted to examine in more granular fashion the timing of the association between nuclear testing and occurrence of transients. Table 2 summarizes the association between occurrence of transients and different time windows relative to nuclear testing, ranging from 2 days before a test until 2 days after a test. The only association that reached statistical significance was for the association in which transients occur 1 day after nuclear testing.
This specific analysis isn’t p-hacking because although they conduct multiple tests, they report all of them rather than just the statistically significant ones.
They should however account for multiple testing. The Bonferroni correction (which is conservative) would set the alpha level to 0.05/5=0.01, for which the 1 day after result is still (just) statistically significant.
I'm glad you called this out. p-hacking can be useful to generate hypotheses, which ought to be then tested (rather than thinking the p-hacked conclusions are just that)
I’m just spitballing here, but could the objects in orbit be parts of the bomb casing? One would assume them to be tumbling and flashing either periodically or in a specific pattern corresponding to their rotation. Or maybe producing a short flash on re-entry.
Spitballing even further, could the objects be explained by a nuclear fireball pushing a mass of atmospheric humidity high enough to form a solid sheet of ice in orbit?
The bomb casing from a successful nuclear detonation would be entirely atomized and instantly vaporized. The exponential runaway of an atomic chain reaction produces so much radiation (read: light, heat, X-rays, and even gamma rays) in the first nanoseconds that literally every chemical bond is ripped apart, plus so many fast-moving neutrons that many nuclei (even not of the initial fissile material) are either fissioned themselves or altered to radioactive isotopes. Because so much EMR is produced so fast, there literally isn't even time for matter to be physically accelerated away before being absolutely soaked in EM. It's possible that some other matter in the vicinity might be intact and blasted away, but anything within the fireball radius of ~100m is absolute toast.
Thank you for this detailed explanation. Given the above, I find it absolutely wild that the closest survivor of Hiroshima was only 170m away (granted he was in a concrete basement). In my head, I always pictured a large area completely obliterated as you described.
"Eiso Nomura (1898-1982) miraculously survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, despite the fact that the explosion occurred in the air right above him.On August 6, 1945, Mr. Nomura was in the basement of the Fuel Hall (now, the Rest House in Peace Memorial Park), about 170 meters southwest of the hypocenter."
Furthering the original question: the myth says Plumbbob launched a manhole cover into orbit, but the truth is slightly less than that, and it wasn't really a manhole cover.
Still, this is what happens when you use a nuclear bonb as a detonating charge at the bottom of a tube...
And it was most probably vaporized, either by blast itself or by rapid compression of air. They estimated if it actually started flying it would have 6x Earth escape velocity (cca 240,000 kmh), no way to survive flight through 100km of atmosphere before reaching semi-vacuum
Was wondering about that but then came across this passage in the paper:
“ The last date on which a transient was observed within a nuclear testing window in this dataset was March 17, 1956, despite there being an additional 38 above-ground nuclear tests in the subsequent 13 months of the study period.” I would expect to see artifacts of the tests themselves continue under that hypothesis. Of course this raises a whole bunch of other questions…
After over a decade of knowing about it, I finally got a copy of Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events by Persinger/Lafrenière last week and was reading about this subject yesterday, but from a book published in 1977. It's blowing my mind to see this here today, but the ultimate source of me even knowing about the above book, Robert Anton Wilson, would not be surprised at all!
A widespread theory among et believers is that nuclear explosions bring the attention of et intelligence around the universe as a sign of sufficiently advanced life to investigate, and that aliens are here to make sure we develop without self-destructing and join the intergalactic world peacefully.
In reality other advanced civilizations elsewhere and elsewhen in our galaxy are as constrained by the speed of light as we are, thus they can't come here as we can't go there.
Isaac Arthur has put it in a way that resonated with me. If you live in a universe that has FTL, it’s scarier in a lot ways. It means the really dangerous bad guys in the other galaxy can reach you. If you live in a world without FTL, it makes things happen really slowly and over generations. That’s not as fun and exciting, but it also severely limits the amount of bad guys that can get to you.
And any bad guy that can even reach you basically means you’re already dead if they so choose.
SPOILER ALERT: Wormholes and warp drives will not work, cannot work, are not physically possible (even though they are "solutions" to the EFE), would not be feasible even if remotely physically possible.
Admittedly, I'm in the awkward position of being an old industrial physicist, so on the one hand I'd need an explanation with a bit more substance, but on the other, it would probably be over my head. The most I was able to get from the video is that maybe quantum gravity will crack the problem.
It would be really cool if that was true, but I would estimate the odds of quantum gravity enabling superluminal travel or comms as low. Occam's razor and all that.
None of this is falsifiable. It requires understandings of physics we don't have, and we have no way of knowing which hare-brained theories today are correct and useful in the future.
That goes as well for how aliens light-years away can detect nuclear explosions and show up within days to check it out.
"they" dont detect it light years away. from what has been published in the public domain, like in the congressional hearings, there are machines that have been here possibly a very long time. think at least 500 years. theres no indication the "they" behind those machines have ever made contact, or are on this planet, or are even still in existence. but there is something mechanical here that was not made by us.
as far as I know, the very few publicly identified records of speeds we have suggest a really big power source and the probable manipulation of fields we cannot yet (mass/gravity), but nothing breaking the speed of light.
so many people make leaps beyond the evidence we have and then declare them not plausible.
Having read what's in the public domain from the hearings, I'm having trouble squaring these two things:
> there are machines that have been here possibly a very long time. think at least 500 years. theres no indication the "they" behind those machines have ever made contact, or are on this planet, or are even still in existence. but there is something mechanical here that was not made by us.
> so many people make leaps beyond the evidence we have and then declare them not plausible.
Why isn't the first one exactly what you're complaining about in the second statement? Have I missed something?
That doesn't stop hypothetical automated sentinel probes that alien races have seeded the galaxy with as a surveillance net from picking up the atomic blasts and investigating.
To send and then slow a device of meaningful size across ten or hundreds of light years would require an enormous amount of energy, like truly incomprehensible amount. Then a civilization would need to produce them in millions and send to every single rock in the galaxy sector, because nuclear fission blasts are undetectable outside of star system. And then these robots need to function for billions of years continuously without any failure, because who knows which rock and at which time may develop sentient life. And when detection fission decay, such a robot must produce an enormous amount of power, to send a coherent optical signal over the tens of light years of distance. Meaning it has a gigantic power generator and equally impressive emitter. Which means even more mass has to be accelerated and then decelerated initially. And his sentient robot has to stare at a rock for billions of years without degrading electronically and without going insane.
And all that galaxy construction level effort for what? To learn hundreds or thousands of years late, that at rock number 123ABCD a fission has happened? And do what exactly with that useful information? Send extermination fleet? Or a robot with flowers, to pay respects?
People for some reason refuse to comprehend just how hard is it to send a speck of dust over light years of distance, let alone anything meaningful which won't break down in the process.
The reason to do this is not to prevent other civilizations from destroying themselves but to colonize the galaxy. It would still require all that you said (fantastical technology and enormous amounts of time) and then some.
And since the amount of time we're talking about is so large -- larger than the amount of time the beings that create these robotic probes can possibly continue to be alive -- that the only way it could work is if those beings accept robots as acceptable replacements for themselves, or if the probes carry embryos and can terraform planets and raise those embryos to adults and bootstrap a civilization.
Plenty of sci-fi has been written along these likes, like Ursula K Leguin's books, where human-ish beings on any given planet (e.g., Winter) turn out to be sent there from other planets to bootstrap a civilization and they have no memory of it. Or Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds, where there is a robotic probe thing going on, but rather than continue the originating species [redacted to avoid spoilers].
We just went from absurdly insanely hard task, to a task I'd guess a thousand times harder. A communicator and observer probe is almost impossible enough, but to additionally preserve biological tissue for thousands of years in space is even harder than sending pure robot. And then terraforming part is just orders of magnitude harder than that. Communicator probe would be a few thousand tons maybe and packing maybe a few megawatts of onboard power. Lets be generous and give them a thousand times more - a few gigawatts, provided they are magic aliens and stuff. What can you terraform on a few gigawatts? Raise a temperature in a ten meter circle by one degree? Produce a few cubic meters of something from atmosphere? To terraform one would need a giant fleet of giant vessels, all fine tuned for some processes, and then they will work for millennia to change planet a tiny bit. We would notice that kind of operation in the Solar system.
I love LeGuin, Reynolds, and other, sci-fi is practically 90% of what I'm reading. But come on, the whole interstellar stuff is always predicated on very very optimistic assumptions and eventually magic.
Sure, ok, but what would a communicator probe accomplish? It could not communicate back to the origin -- the origin would be long gone. It could only communicate with the civilizations it finds, but to what end?
If any civilization were to build such a thing they would make it perpetuate themselves.
As far as anyone can tell you can't use it transmit information. Their states are mirrored but you can't modify the state of on of the pairs to change the state of the other, that just breaks the entanglement. So all you really have are two particles that happen to be in the same random state at any given time.
I don't think you can even tell given only one of the particles in a pair if it is still entangled so you couldn't even destructively send small amounts of information either. It's a neat work around for semihard scifi but the universe is stubbornly resistant to any pathways for anything including information travelling faster than the speed of light.
Quantum entanglement cannot transmit information. Full stop. Let alone FTL.
When you measure an entangled particle that tells you, the observer, the corresponding characteristic of the other particle in the pair, but it will tell no one who has access to the other particle anything at all about what you wanted to say.
This is like transmitting information from you to you about a faraway thing (instantaneously! "FTL", but read on), but it's not useful because what you want to transmit information from you to someone else far away rather than from you to you.
No, because you can only randomly measure the state of your particle and therefore the remote particle. (then lose the entanglement) But you can’t put the particle into a state.
So what if you put each half of split tally stick in a box hidden from view then move them a light year apart and then open your box? You immediately know what's on other stick but you can't change it anyway.
and also the act of viewing the stick destroys it.
This belongs at r/ufos, not on a HN. To anyone who is new to this - one scientist, Beatrice Villarroel, promotes a theory that old photoplates from mid 20th century, show multiple UFOs because there were discrepancies between two pictures taken 50 minutes apart. To prove this, she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures where this is indeed observed. So, she's right?
First of all, in every par she picks arbitrary a tiny fraction, like a few percentages of an area of the plate, without any explanation why the rest of the image is ignored. After looking at the full plates, one can see that there not dozens of suspicious lights but literally thousands of disappearing lights, uniformly spread out across the whole plate, without any pattern or localization. So thousands of alien saucers all across the Earth. You see where this is going? But it gets worse.
Second - in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear. Not a single light out of thousands is breaking the pattern and transitions from empty to light, no, all of them transition from light to nothingness only.
And finally third - these thousands of UFOs on the first plate appear because the first plate uses a brittle and unstable red pigment. I can't quickly find out the source, but one guy did analysis and found out the type of the emulsion used on the first plates in these sets in that decade and said that it was indeed a fragile compound, which is most likely the reason for these thousands of uniformly spread out image defects.
tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.
“Old photographic plates are notoriously temperamental. Dust specks, cosmic rays, emulsion scratches, and scanning artefacts can all mimic stars. Villarroel’s team applied careful filters and cross-checks, but some scientists argue the anomalies could still be defects rather than cosmic revelations.”
It’s not a real debunking — Rational Wiki (now down) was good at debunking things like this which weren’t notable enough to make the Wikipedia — but it’s what I’m able to find about the matter.
I’m of course still skeptical — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — but I think a good debunking needs to be posted online, with footnotes and references.
That's not the post I'm trying to find, unfortunately. That one was on substack I think, but I'm not sure by now.
As for good debunking - come on, it's supposedly thousands of crafts, supposedly in the same orbit (because any other orbit except for GEO would cause them to streak on the long exposure photo), in a random formation all across the sky, supposedly synchronously disappeared all at once, time synced to the photoplate change on a random Earth observatory. Pfff, just typing this out feels like a bad joke. Good proofs or even bad proofs need to be provided first by the ufology community, not vice versa.
> tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.
That's being generous. Some of them know damn well that they are looking at compression artifacts in pictures of Mars and not cities, but they are trying to sell a book.
Would be interesting to know, what they've excluded as potential explanations. Some things like lense effect, changes of light wavelengths of such missing objects etc
My unsupported hypothesis: Gamma radiation from the blast was reaching the film that was being used to take the astronomical observations.
For this to work, though, a few things would have to be true:
1. The film would have to be stored in bulk in a place that would be (mostly) protected from gamma rays from the tests.
2. The film for that night's observations would have to already be not with the rest of the film at the time of the test.
3. The observatory would have to be close enough to the location of the test that the gamma rays would have a chance to reach it.
But maybe it doesn't have to be direct. Maybe it could be gamma rays produced by the fallout, which drifts from the location of the test to at or near the observatory.
Then you have to wonder why no more were observed after March 17, 1956. A change in the character of the film? (Either a change in manufacturing process, or a change in what kind of film was used?)
It's also just a permanent issue for sensitive instruments for scientific experiments. The Cold War bomb testing spree contaminated so much there's a whole demand for metals produced before the first atomic test because of the increased presence of fallout from the tests.
The issue is relegated to only the most sensitive equipment these days but it's a funny little side issue for several years before the test ban had been in place long enough to reduce the elevated levels back to nearly background.
Dots doesn't disappear from Earth's shadow, there are just little bit less of them statistically. And she can't explain that in her paper at all, if those are supposedly objects and not plate defects, then why are they in a place, where objects shouldn't appear.
Also, assuming her hypothesis is correct and she didn't made factual mistakes - to be presented as dots and not streaks, all of these thousands of objects should be in a tiny narrow band in GEO spread out all across the orbit envelope. Where did they disappear in between 50 minutes from red plate to blue plate? And then this somehow repeated every single time in that particular order? An alien armada sitting precisely in a single orbit and then vanishes on a cue from a some lone observatory on Earth, when technician changes plates there? Then again appears all strictly in GEO, then again disappears in 50 minutes after?
> "We also find a highly significant (∼22σ) deficit of POSS-I transients within Earth's shadow when compared with the theoretical hemispheric shadow coverage at 42,164 km altitude."
I'm not an statisastroscienticianist, so I have no idea what that means, but maybe it's significant.
That being said, Kodak discovered nuclear testing was a thing before the public for all the obvious reasons.
The problem with that impressive 100500σ figure, is that she refuses to provide code which she supposedly used to supposedly prove that Earth shadow has some influence on these dots on the images made from photo plates. I.e. this 22σ figure is a "pinky promise" level "science".
The earths shadow effect lowered the transients by about 33%, which does provide evidence for physical reflection accounting for 1/3rd of the effect. To my mind, gamma ray-like exposure on the film is an extremely plausible explanation for the other 66%.
It occurs to me that the gamma ray hypothesis has a fairly easy check. Light sources pass through the telescope’s optics (typically mirrors or occasionally lenses) which leads to a characteristic “point spread function” for point sources like stars. If it were an errant gamma ray exposure directly on the film, it’s extremely unlikely to have the PSF of the standard light sources.
You can compute the PSF from known stars on the same image and run a statistical test, but TBH just visually comparing the transient with a few stars of similar brightness on the same image should put this one to rest.
The brightest stars in all of the images have a clear 4-pointed pattern. The brightest transients _do not_ show this pattern.
This is obviously not definitive, and the fainter stars are harder to eyeball the PSF, but it does provide some evidence to support the hypothesis that the brighter transients could be due to gamma ray exposure of the film rather than flashes in the atmosphere or space.
No. In general the statistics look a bit amateurish, which is normal for a scientific paper. I'd actually like reanalyze the data, just out of curiosity. (Those p-values and other things can still be on the right ballpark even if the models and analyses are not top notch. I'm not exactly doubting them, and the results are interesting even without any correlation to UAP sightings or nukes.)
> Weren't Nazis sending rockets into space by 1945? Soviets and Americans, probably as well.
No to all, without reservation. The German V-2 didn't go into orbit, and the US and USSR weren't active in large missile activity at all, until long post-war.
Unless by the early 1950s the US and possibly others were launching objects into orbit, and their doing so has been a closely guarded secret even until now. The nuclear tests would have offered natural PR cover.
If we rule out ETs for the sake of argument, and if these weren’t atmospheric effects or artifacts from the nuclear tests themselves, then small objects were in orbit at the time and either they were launched from Earth or the planet happened to be crossing paths with them.
Fascinating. "The second paper, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP), specifically looks for signs of possible extraterrestrial artifacts in orbit around Earth, before the first human satellite launch in 1957. The researchers looked, among other things, for instances where multiple flashes of light were along a line or in a narrow band—something that indicates reflections from flat, reflective objects in motion. Two interesting examples were identified, one of which occurred on July 27, 1952, the same night as the notable sightings of UAP in Washington, D.C."
Info about July 27, 1952 UFO/UAP sighting in DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_inci...
I get Battle of Los Angeles vibes from this, tbqh.
Note that their paper includes p-hacking so this is proto-science rather than science. They didn't find data to match their hypothesis, but they were able to find a hypothesis to match their data.
> Follow-up secondary analyses were then conducted to examine in more granular fashion the timing of the association between nuclear testing and occurrence of transients. Table 2 summarizes the association between occurrence of transients and different time windows relative to nuclear testing, ranging from 2 days before a test until 2 days after a test. The only association that reached statistical significance was for the association in which transients occur 1 day after nuclear testing.
This specific analysis isn’t p-hacking because although they conduct multiple tests, they report all of them rather than just the statistically significant ones.
They should however account for multiple testing. The Bonferroni correction (which is conservative) would set the alpha level to 0.05/5=0.01, for which the 1 day after result is still (just) statistically significant.
Not to say there couldn’t be other problems.
[dead]
Had to look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging
I'm glad you called this out. p-hacking can be useful to generate hypotheses, which ought to be then tested (rather than thinking the p-hacked conclusions are just that)
I’m just spitballing here, but could the objects in orbit be parts of the bomb casing? One would assume them to be tumbling and flashing either periodically or in a specific pattern corresponding to their rotation. Or maybe producing a short flash on re-entry.
Spitballing even further, could the objects be explained by a nuclear fireball pushing a mass of atmospheric humidity high enough to form a solid sheet of ice in orbit?
The bomb casing from a successful nuclear detonation would be entirely atomized and instantly vaporized. The exponential runaway of an atomic chain reaction produces so much radiation (read: light, heat, X-rays, and even gamma rays) in the first nanoseconds that literally every chemical bond is ripped apart, plus so many fast-moving neutrons that many nuclei (even not of the initial fissile material) are either fissioned themselves or altered to radioactive isotopes. Because so much EMR is produced so fast, there literally isn't even time for matter to be physically accelerated away before being absolutely soaked in EM. It's possible that some other matter in the vicinity might be intact and blasted away, but anything within the fireball radius of ~100m is absolute toast.
Thank you for this detailed explanation. Given the above, I find it absolutely wild that the closest survivor of Hiroshima was only 170m away (granted he was in a concrete basement). In my head, I always pictured a large area completely obliterated as you described.
"Eiso Nomura (1898-1982) miraculously survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, despite the fact that the explosion occurred in the air right above him.On August 6, 1945, Mr. Nomura was in the basement of the Fuel Hall (now, the Rest House in Peace Memorial Park), about 170 meters southwest of the hypocenter."
Furthering the original question: the myth says Plumbbob launched a manhole cover into orbit, but the truth is slightly less than that, and it wasn't really a manhole cover.
Still, this is what happens when you use a nuclear bonb as a detonating charge at the bottom of a tube...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
900kg steel cap is a bit more than manhole :)
And it was most probably vaporized, either by blast itself or by rapid compression of air. They estimated if it actually started flying it would have 6x Earth escape velocity (cca 240,000 kmh), no way to survive flight through 100km of atmosphere before reaching semi-vacuum
> no way to survive flight through 100km of atmosphere before reaching semi-vacuum
There is a question on stackexchange with one great answer about this. It probably didn't last a kilometer: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/488151/could-the...
He was 170m away from the location the bomb exploded over, not 170m away from the explosion.
That said, the bomb only exploded at roughly 600m in altitude so still pretty close.
There is no single accepted definition of "fireball" like the Kármán line where outer space begins, and even that is just a convention.
The "artificial sun" created at Hiroshima, the early-stage plasma fireball at 1 ms, is estimated to have been 5 to 10 meters across.
Was wondering about that but then came across this passage in the paper: “ The last date on which a transient was observed within a nuclear testing window in this dataset was March 17, 1956, despite there being an additional 38 above-ground nuclear tests in the subsequent 13 months of the study period.” I would expect to see artifacts of the tests themselves continue under that hypothesis. Of course this raises a whole bunch of other questions…
These things are i think around 400,000km out in space so no.
After over a decade of knowing about it, I finally got a copy of Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events by Persinger/Lafrenière last week and was reading about this subject yesterday, but from a book published in 1977. It's blowing my mind to see this here today, but the ultimate source of me even knowing about the above book, Robert Anton Wilson, would not be surprised at all!
A widespread theory among et believers is that nuclear explosions bring the attention of et intelligence around the universe as a sign of sufficiently advanced life to investigate, and that aliens are here to make sure we develop without self-destructing and join the intergalactic world peacefully.
In reality other advanced civilizations elsewhere and elsewhen in our galaxy are as constrained by the speed of light as we are, thus they can't come here as we can't go there.
Isaac Arthur has put it in a way that resonated with me. If you live in a universe that has FTL, it’s scarier in a lot ways. It means the really dangerous bad guys in the other galaxy can reach you. If you live in a world without FTL, it makes things happen really slowly and over generations. That’s not as fun and exciting, but it also severely limits the amount of bad guys that can get to you.
And any bad guy that can even reach you basically means you’re already dead if they so choose.
Doesn't FTL also imply time travel - which probably isn't a good thing?
I think wormholes and warp sort of get around it by having the FTL traveler moving slower that light in their pocket/hole through space.
SPOILER ALERT: Wormholes and warp drives will not work, cannot work, are not physically possible (even though they are "solutions" to the EFE), would not be feasible even if remotely physically possible.
Not really. But it does imply weird things. Sabine Hossenfelder did a video on this.
FTL means the bad guys have already reached you.
There is also some folks that suggest that they are already here. Including an awful lot of high profile people within the defence sectors.
It means you see nothing interesting then a shockwave and here they are.
And here they were, because FTL travel implies eliminating the distinction between "before" and "after."
Not really: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-jIplX6Wjw&pp=ygUKc2FiaW5lI...
Admittedly, I'm in the awkward position of being an old industrial physicist, so on the one hand I'd need an explanation with a bit more substance, but on the other, it would probably be over my head. The most I was able to get from the video is that maybe quantum gravity will crack the problem.
Isn't this ruling out outlier observations given our model, rather than evaluating our model given outlier observations?
That's our best guess anyway. My bet is that superluminal travel will be possible once we resolve quantum gravity and break all of Einstein's rules.
At least that's what I tell myself. Hard to appreciate the majesty of the universe if we're forever locked into a single star system.
It would be really cool if that was true, but I would estimate the odds of quantum gravity enabling superluminal travel or comms as low. Occam's razor and all that.
None of this is falsifiable. It requires understandings of physics we don't have, and we have no way of knowing which hare-brained theories today are correct and useful in the future.
That goes as well for how aliens light-years away can detect nuclear explosions and show up within days to check it out.
"they" dont detect it light years away. from what has been published in the public domain, like in the congressional hearings, there are machines that have been here possibly a very long time. think at least 500 years. theres no indication the "they" behind those machines have ever made contact, or are on this planet, or are even still in existence. but there is something mechanical here that was not made by us.
as far as I know, the very few publicly identified records of speeds we have suggest a really big power source and the probable manipulation of fields we cannot yet (mass/gravity), but nothing breaking the speed of light.
so many people make leaps beyond the evidence we have and then declare them not plausible.
Having read what's in the public domain from the hearings, I'm having trouble squaring these two things:
> there are machines that have been here possibly a very long time. think at least 500 years. theres no indication the "they" behind those machines have ever made contact, or are on this planet, or are even still in existence. but there is something mechanical here that was not made by us.
> so many people make leaps beyond the evidence we have and then declare them not plausible.
Why isn't the first one exactly what you're complaining about in the second statement? Have I missed something?
All the UFO talk is a distraction. You're welcome.
That doesn't stop hypothetical automated sentinel probes that alien races have seeded the galaxy with as a surveillance net from picking up the atomic blasts and investigating.
To send and then slow a device of meaningful size across ten or hundreds of light years would require an enormous amount of energy, like truly incomprehensible amount. Then a civilization would need to produce them in millions and send to every single rock in the galaxy sector, because nuclear fission blasts are undetectable outside of star system. And then these robots need to function for billions of years continuously without any failure, because who knows which rock and at which time may develop sentient life. And when detection fission decay, such a robot must produce an enormous amount of power, to send a coherent optical signal over the tens of light years of distance. Meaning it has a gigantic power generator and equally impressive emitter. Which means even more mass has to be accelerated and then decelerated initially. And his sentient robot has to stare at a rock for billions of years without degrading electronically and without going insane.
And all that galaxy construction level effort for what? To learn hundreds or thousands of years late, that at rock number 123ABCD a fission has happened? And do what exactly with that useful information? Send extermination fleet? Or a robot with flowers, to pay respects?
People for some reason refuse to comprehend just how hard is it to send a speck of dust over light years of distance, let alone anything meaningful which won't break down in the process.
The reason to do this is not to prevent other civilizations from destroying themselves but to colonize the galaxy. It would still require all that you said (fantastical technology and enormous amounts of time) and then some.
And since the amount of time we're talking about is so large -- larger than the amount of time the beings that create these robotic probes can possibly continue to be alive -- that the only way it could work is if those beings accept robots as acceptable replacements for themselves, or if the probes carry embryos and can terraform planets and raise those embryos to adults and bootstrap a civilization.
Plenty of sci-fi has been written along these likes, like Ursula K Leguin's books, where human-ish beings on any given planet (e.g., Winter) turn out to be sent there from other planets to bootstrap a civilization and they have no memory of it. Or Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds, where there is a robotic probe thing going on, but rather than continue the originating species [redacted to avoid spoilers].
We just went from absurdly insanely hard task, to a task I'd guess a thousand times harder. A communicator and observer probe is almost impossible enough, but to additionally preserve biological tissue for thousands of years in space is even harder than sending pure robot. And then terraforming part is just orders of magnitude harder than that. Communicator probe would be a few thousand tons maybe and packing maybe a few megawatts of onboard power. Lets be generous and give them a thousand times more - a few gigawatts, provided they are magic aliens and stuff. What can you terraform on a few gigawatts? Raise a temperature in a ten meter circle by one degree? Produce a few cubic meters of something from atmosphere? To terraform one would need a giant fleet of giant vessels, all fine tuned for some processes, and then they will work for millennia to change planet a tiny bit. We would notice that kind of operation in the Solar system.
I love LeGuin, Reynolds, and other, sci-fi is practically 90% of what I'm reading. But come on, the whole interstellar stuff is always predicated on very very optimistic assumptions and eventually magic.
Sure, ok, but what would a communicator probe accomplish? It could not communicate back to the origin -- the origin would be long gone. It could only communicate with the civilizations it finds, but to what end?
If any civilization were to build such a thing they would make it perpetuate themselves.
Is Anyone here educated enough to tell if quantum entanglement could (hypothetically) be used to transmit information faster than light?
As far as anyone can tell you can't use it transmit information. Their states are mirrored but you can't modify the state of on of the pairs to change the state of the other, that just breaks the entanglement. So all you really have are two particles that happen to be in the same random state at any given time.
I don't think you can even tell given only one of the particles in a pair if it is still entangled so you couldn't even destructively send small amounts of information either. It's a neat work around for semihard scifi but the universe is stubbornly resistant to any pathways for anything including information travelling faster than the speed of light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
Quantum entanglement cannot transmit information. Full stop. Let alone FTL.
When you measure an entangled particle that tells you, the observer, the corresponding characteristic of the other particle in the pair, but it will tell no one who has access to the other particle anything at all about what you wanted to say.
This is like transmitting information from you to you about a faraway thing (instantaneously! "FTL", but read on), but it's not useful because what you want to transmit information from you to someone else far away rather than from you to you.
No, because you can only randomly measure the state of your particle and therefore the remote particle. (then lose the entanglement) But you can’t put the particle into a state.
All of human knowledge and observation so far points to the fact that we can't break the light barrier
my poor understanding of it is that it's like a split tally stick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick#Split_tally
So what if you put each half of split tally stick in a box hidden from view then move them a light year apart and then open your box? You immediately know what's on other stick but you can't change it anyway.
and also the act of viewing the stick destroys it.
This belongs at r/ufos, not on a HN. To anyone who is new to this - one scientist, Beatrice Villarroel, promotes a theory that old photoplates from mid 20th century, show multiple UFOs because there were discrepancies between two pictures taken 50 minutes apart. To prove this, she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures where this is indeed observed. So, she's right?
First of all, in every par she picks arbitrary a tiny fraction, like a few percentages of an area of the plate, without any explanation why the rest of the image is ignored. After looking at the full plates, one can see that there not dozens of suspicious lights but literally thousands of disappearing lights, uniformly spread out across the whole plate, without any pattern or localization. So thousands of alien saucers all across the Earth. You see where this is going? But it gets worse.
Second - in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear. Not a single light out of thousands is breaking the pattern and transitions from empty to light, no, all of them transition from light to nothingness only.
And finally third - these thousands of UFOs on the first plate appear because the first plate uses a brittle and unstable red pigment. I can't quickly find out the source, but one guy did analysis and found out the type of the emulsion used on the first plates in these sets in that decade and said that it was indeed a fragile compound, which is most likely the reason for these thousands of uniformly spread out image defects.
tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.
>I can't quickly find out the source
Took me too long, but here’s one:
https://thefreaky.net/dr-beatriz-villarroel-and-the-mystery-...
From that source:
“Old photographic plates are notoriously temperamental. Dust specks, cosmic rays, emulsion scratches, and scanning artefacts can all mimic stars. Villarroel’s team applied careful filters and cross-checks, but some scientists argue the anomalies could still be defects rather than cosmic revelations.”
It’s not a real debunking — Rational Wiki (now down) was good at debunking things like this which weren’t notable enough to make the Wikipedia — but it’s what I’m able to find about the matter.
I’m of course still skeptical — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — but I think a good debunking needs to be posted online, with footnotes and references.
Finally found the post I was looking for:
https://medium.com/@izabelamelamed/not-seeing-the-star-cloud...
In my opinion it's a pretty damning conclusion. I would love to see some explanation from the ufology crowd :)
Thank you. Also mirrored at: https://archive.today/20250825091916/https://medium.com/@iza...
To summarize:
• All of these anomalous points of light only appear on one particular film emulsion, 103a-E (sensitive to red light)
• Said points of light do not appear with other emulsions used at the same time (e.g. 103a-F or 103a-O)
• Each plate made with 103x-E emulsion has a lot of these points of “light” all over them, which indicates there was an issue with the emulsion.
Some other links:
https://www.ufofeed.com/141549/some-serious-flaws-in-villaro...
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-o...
Can you rule out or confirm the emulsion issue just from a print? Would you not need access to the original negative?
That's not the post I'm trying to find, unfortunately. That one was on substack I think, but I'm not sure by now.
As for good debunking - come on, it's supposedly thousands of crafts, supposedly in the same orbit (because any other orbit except for GEO would cause them to streak on the long exposure photo), in a random formation all across the sky, supposedly synchronously disappeared all at once, time synced to the photoplate change on a random Earth observatory. Pfff, just typing this out feels like a bad joke. Good proofs or even bad proofs need to be provided first by the ufology community, not vice versa.
> tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.
That's being generous. Some of them know damn well that they are looking at compression artifacts in pictures of Mars and not cities, but they are trying to sell a book.
I didn't realize it, but I saw something about this over the weekend.
The article cites the same papers that the author claims were rejected on ARXIV:
https://ovniologia.com.br/2025/10/astrophysicist-dr-beatriz-...
Would be interesting to know, what they've excluded as potential explanations. Some things like lense effect, changes of light wavelengths of such missing objects etc
Radioactive fallout?
My unsupported hypothesis: Gamma radiation from the blast was reaching the film that was being used to take the astronomical observations.
For this to work, though, a few things would have to be true:
1. The film would have to be stored in bulk in a place that would be (mostly) protected from gamma rays from the tests.
2. The film for that night's observations would have to already be not with the rest of the film at the time of the test.
3. The observatory would have to be close enough to the location of the test that the gamma rays would have a chance to reach it.
But maybe it doesn't have to be direct. Maybe it could be gamma rays produced by the fallout, which drifts from the location of the test to at or near the observatory.
Then you have to wonder why no more were observed after March 17, 1956. A change in the character of the film? (Either a change in manufacturing process, or a change in what kind of film was used?)
https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/nuclea...
Kodak had this issue for sure.
It's also just a permanent issue for sensitive instruments for scientific experiments. The Cold War bomb testing spree contaminated so much there's a whole demand for metals produced before the first atomic test because of the increased presence of fallout from the tests.
The issue is relegated to only the most sensitive equipment these days but it's a funny little side issue for several years before the test ban had been in place long enough to reduce the elevated levels back to nearly background.
That wouldn't explain why the effect only disappears for parts of the sky within Earth's shadow.
Dots doesn't disappear from Earth's shadow, there are just little bit less of them statistically. And she can't explain that in her paper at all, if those are supposedly objects and not plate defects, then why are they in a place, where objects shouldn't appear.
Also, assuming her hypothesis is correct and she didn't made factual mistakes - to be presented as dots and not streaks, all of these thousands of objects should be in a tiny narrow band in GEO spread out all across the orbit envelope. Where did they disappear in between 50 minutes from red plate to blue plate? And then this somehow repeated every single time in that particular order? An alien armada sitting precisely in a single orbit and then vanishes on a cue from a some lone observatory on Earth, when technician changes plates there? Then again appears all strictly in GEO, then again disappears in 50 minutes after?
Doesn't it look absurd to you?
> "We also find a highly significant (∼22σ) deficit of POSS-I transients within Earth's shadow when compared with the theoretical hemispheric shadow coverage at 42,164 km altitude."
I'm not an statisastroscienticianist, so I have no idea what that means, but maybe it's significant.
That being said, Kodak discovered nuclear testing was a thing before the public for all the obvious reasons.
The problem with that impressive 100500σ figure, is that she refuses to provide code which she supposedly used to supposedly prove that Earth shadow has some influence on these dots on the images made from photo plates. I.e. this 22σ figure is a "pinky promise" level "science".
The earths shadow effect lowered the transients by about 33%, which does provide evidence for physical reflection accounting for 1/3rd of the effect. To my mind, gamma ray-like exposure on the film is an extremely plausible explanation for the other 66%.
It occurs to me that the gamma ray hypothesis has a fairly easy check. Light sources pass through the telescope’s optics (typically mirrors or occasionally lenses) which leads to a characteristic “point spread function” for point sources like stars. If it were an errant gamma ray exposure directly on the film, it’s extremely unlikely to have the PSF of the standard light sources.
You can compute the PSF from known stars on the same image and run a statistical test, but TBH just visually comparing the transient with a few stars of similar brightness on the same image should put this one to rest.
Following up on this, I eyeballed the images in this one: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe
The brightest stars in all of the images have a clear 4-pointed pattern. The brightest transients _do not_ show this pattern.
This is obviously not definitive, and the fainter stars are harder to eyeball the PSF, but it does provide some evidence to support the hypothesis that the brighter transients could be due to gamma ray exposure of the film rather than flashes in the atmosphere or space.
Do you really think it's ok to put trendline in Fig.2 ?
No. In general the statistics look a bit amateurish, which is normal for a scientific paper. I'd actually like reanalyze the data, just out of curiosity. (Those p-values and other things can still be on the right ballpark even if the models and analyses are not top notch. I'm not exactly doubting them, and the results are interesting even without any correlation to UAP sightings or nukes.)
Weren't Nazis sending rockets into space by 1945? Soviets and Americans, probably as well. So why is it unexpected to have objects in orbit?
Try reading the article. You might enjoy it and it will answer your question.
Beyond the date of the first artificial satellite, there is nothing in the article that mentions space debris.
None of those rockets attained anything like orbital speed.
Iron Sky is just a movie...as far as we can tell.
> Weren't Nazis sending rockets into space by 1945? Soviets and Americans, probably as well.
No to all, without reservation. The German V-2 didn't go into orbit, and the US and USSR weren't active in large missile activity at all, until long post-war.
Unless by the early 1950s the US and possibly others were launching objects into orbit, and their doing so has been a closely guarded secret even until now. The nuclear tests would have offered natural PR cover.
If we rule out ETs for the sake of argument, and if these weren’t atmospheric effects or artifacts from the nuclear tests themselves, then small objects were in orbit at the time and either they were launched from Earth or the planet happened to be crossing paths with them.