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Are we alone? Humanity has long considered itself the single most intelligent species in the cosmos, but are we? In an infinite universe with infinite chances for life to arise, it's unlikely that we are the only ones. I think the average person can accept this logic. Aliens could exist out there, but it's another thing entirely to accept that aliens might be here. It's too uncomfortable to believe that technologically superior craft with intentions unknown could be hovering out there watching us. At least that was what I thought until recently.
Scientists have uncovered signs of metallic reflective objects in star maps before the first satellites were launched. Is there a logical explanation for their nature and origins? Or are they some of the strongest pieces of evidence that non-human intelligences have visited our planet? I'm Alex Mack Holgan and you're watching Astrum. Join me in this video as we explore an extraordinary claim and see if there is extraordinary proof to back it up. Unexplained objects in our sky are not a modern phenomenon, nor are they usually a sign of aliens. It is just that, something unexplained. And since ancient times, mankind has had the bad habit of seeing strange things and wrongfully assigning them
supernatural causes. The rumblings of thunder were the displeasure of a god, a comet, a harbinger of calamity. As we learn more about the world around us, supernatural events became explicable. Lightning became electricity. Comets became balls of ice and rock orbiting our sun. That said, there are many accounts that are harder to assign an explanation to. Many of these stretch far back in our historical record, long before the first flying machines, and yet they eerily resemble artificial craft moving in the sky.
Take for example this newspaper report of the German city of Nuremberg in 1561. According to the writer, on the morning of the 14th of April at 4:00 to 5:00 a.m., many men and women witnessed strange crescents, spheres, and rods appearing above the city. These all started to fight among themselves. The globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought humanly with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth as if they all burned. And they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this, there was something like a black spear, very long and thick sighted. The sharp pointed to the east.
The point pointed west. The author went on to ascribe all this to a sign from God, likely a warning intended to encourage the population to repent of their sins. But to a modern eye, it's easy to look at the fires coming off the crashed objects in this image and see a downed aircraft with a burning fuel source. And to someone versed in UFO law or UAP law, unidentified anomalous phenomena as they are usually known today in an effort to reduce their stigma, spheres, cigar-shapes, and giant black triangles are exceedingly familiar. UAP can often defy explanation. In fact, the Pentagon has recently released a treasure trove of declassified videos. But, while intriguing, the problem with accounts like this is that they are not particularly scientifically rigorous.
For instance, what can you deduce from this newspaper report? Simply that one author said a group of people saw something. Even if everyone was telling the truth, there is no way to tell that this wasn't some bizarre weather phenomenon. Although it's difficult to know what that weather phenomenon would be, simply because there is no additional data. The fallen orbs were seemingly not recovered for study. There were no additional drawings, and everyone who witnessed the event is now, of course, long dead.
There's not enough information to draw any kind of reasonable conclusions about these objects or their origins. Over the years, several alternative explanations have been offered for these objects over Nuremberg, ranging from strange sun dogs to impromptu fireworks displays. Without more data, there is no way of proving one explanation over any other. What you need to prove a claim like this is a much more rigorous scientific approach using thousands of data points taken by modern-day instrumentation.
Preferably, thousands of separate sightings of these objects would be needed. But, that's exactly what Beatrice Villaruel, a Swedish astronomer who is part of the VASCO project, has done in a series of papers published in the last year. Her approach was certainly novel. Her team on the Vanishing and Appearing Sources During a Century of Observations Project were initially interested in the idea of vanishing stars. Stars that had been formally documented in star maps in the 1950s, but since then had disappeared. For their early data, they looked at digital copies of astronomical plates taken by the Palomar Observatory, which opened in 1928, and new surveys like the Pan-STARRS data release for the more
recent records. They found about 100 instances of such vanishing stars, which is certainly interesting in and of itself, as scientists can now try to figure out the mechanisms by which these stars disappeared. But more interestingly to Villa Roel, was that she found nine light sources in one plate that suddenly appeared, not present on the astronomical plate from 30 minutes earlier, and were gone again six days later. These little glints in the dark, called transients by the scientists, were difficult to explain away. [snorts] Villa Roel published a paper in 2021, where she ruled out the most possibilities for their origins. They were not likely asteroids or distant
galaxies or passing airplanes or gamma-ray bursts. She did note that similar features could be caused by high-energy contamination of the photographic plates, such as radiation from atomic bomb tests, and the Palomar Observatory in California is located not far from a former nuclear testing site in Nevada. But no official atomic bomb tests were carried out between 1949 and 1951, so radioactive contamination was probably not the culprit. There was, however, a second explanation. Strangely, the profile also matched well with passing satellites glinting in the sunlight.
However, the first human-made satellite, Sputnik, launched in 1957. This star map was made in 1950. So that idea was dead on arrival. Still, Villa Roel and her team felt like they were onto something. And in October of 2025, they revealed that they had gone much deeper on their investigation of transients. Releasing two papers over the course of a few days, Bill Liller and his team revealed that they had found more than 100,000 transients in nearly a decade of Palomar plates starting in 1949 and finishing in 1957. And this time, Bill Liller and his team
was putting their cards on the table. They speculated that a significant number of these were metallic reflective objects in roughly geosynchronous orbits above Earth, likely of unknown origin, and they intended to prove it. They used two main methods to test their hypothesis. The first was to rule out the alternative explanations of contamination and defects on the plates themselves or of distant stars and other celestial objects. Bill Liller wanted to prove that at least some of these were real objects orbiting in the sky above Earth. How to do that?
By making use of the Earth's shadow. If transients were defects, there was no reason they would appear in one patch of the sky more than any other. The same if they were flaring galaxies or similar galactic phenomena. But if they were reflective objects glinting in the sunlight, they would vanish from view every time they entered Earth's shadow. Using statistical analysis, the Vasco team demonstrated that there was a significant reduction in the number of transients in the Earth's shadow compared to anywhere else. While this left most of the transients as background noise, still
with the potential to be stars or defects, of those sightings did appear to be objects reflecting the sun's light in the vicinity of the Earth's gravity well. The second method was to observe the patterns in behavior of these transients. And here, two mind-blowing things were noted. Firstly, by cross-referencing with reported UFO sightings made by the general public, Villarroel demonstrated that transients were more likely to show up and in greater numbers on days that UFOs were reported. Each report correlated with an 8.5% increase in the number of transients in the plates. A curious thing, as the general public theoretically had no way of knowing
whether a transient was in space or not. Villarroel concluded that whatever transients were, they were linked to UFO reports on Earth. Secondly, there was a 45% uptick in the number of transients the day after a nuclear test. Now, this might strike you as a little strange. After all, if this was UAP, why would they be more common after nuclear tests? However, this ties to something the UAP community has been talking about for a while now. UAP are seemingly interested in our nukes. On the 23rd to the 24th of October, 2010, a cigar-shaped object was allegedly seen by several groups of
servicemen above F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, a base that was home to 50 Minuteman III nuclear missiles. This would have been troubling enough, but things went from disquieting to terrifying when all 50 nuclear missiles suddenly went offline. This level of dropout had never happened before. Errors had occurred in the past with a small number of missiles, but for 50 to go out of action at once was unheard of, not to mention a severe breach in national security. To be clear, it is a documented fact that these nukes went out of action, although the cigar-shaped UAP was not referred to in the Air Force's official narrative. But, it would not be surprising to me to learn that if aliens were here, they would be a little concerned about our
nukes, and perhaps would be interested in knowing they could turn them off if they needed to. And this is not the only UAP story involving nukes. There is a far more troubling one allegedly in Soviet records from 1982, where after the hovering above a Soviet nuclear base for 4 hours, a UAP turned Soviet intercontinental missiles on. The missiles started to launch and could not be shut down until the UAP left. Only then did the controls go back to normal. All of this to say, it is fascinating to see a link in Villa Real's papers between her reflected transients and nuclear testing. While the anecdotal nuclear stories are certainly intriguing, this is the first
time such hard data has been used to establish a correlation. Of course, there could be other explanations. With a nuclear detonation, it's tricky to know all the consequences that could happen in Earth's atmosphere. But, it seems unlikely to Villa Real, and seems unlikely to me, too, that the glints witnessed in some of these plates were atmospheric effects from nuclear fallout. The transients were mostly observed the day after the nuclear tests, and it doesn't seem plausible that such effects could sustain in one location for nearly 24 hours. Plus, even the expected visual signature of these atmospheric disturbances is quite different from what the transients look like. So, what are we to conclude from all of
this? Is this actually proof that metal sources have been orbiting the Earth since the 1950s and presumably beyond? It's tricky to apply the same methods to checking they're still up there, as there are now thousands of satellites glinting in the sunlight. And if a small fraction of them were UAP, we'd likely never spot them amid the noise. With that in mind, do we trust the Villa Roel papers? Well, not quite so fast, because unsurprisingly, other scientists have a different opinion on exactly how conclusive Villa Roel's paper actually is.
Her work was never accepted by archive, a platform for pre-publishing scientific papers so others can review them in advance of an official journal taking them, which is surprising as archive accepts a lot of papers. For this, however, the moderators deemed Villa Roel's work to not be sufficiently original or containing enough substantive scholarly research, much to Villa Roel's personal disappointment and frustration. But they were not alone in this. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of AARO, the US government's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office tasked with investigating UAP, says that he does not agree with the findings, believing that the better explanation lies in solar flares or high-altitude balloons.
That said, he didn't publish a full paper on the subject to back up his suggestion. The ones who did publish a counter paper were Wesley Andre Waters and his team, who wrote the catchily titled Critical Evaluation of Studies Alleging Evidence for Technosignatures in the POSS 1E photographic plates, which I will point out did get published on archive. And their claims are argued extensively. They point out that the surest way to see if those transients were real objects, as opposed to defects, was to get the original POSS 1E plates, not the digitized versions used by Villa Roel, and to use a microscope to evaluate the transients themselves.
That way, it would be clear if they were damaged the plates as opposed to a captured image. Villarruel did not do this. Secondly, they questioned the choice in sampling. They found themselves unable to replicate Villarruel's data set from the total available data, and instead argued that she had seemingly used a broader, less vetted pool of objects for her statistical analysis. When they applied a more thorough vetting process to remove unwanted noise, they found that a lot of Villarruel's observations fell apart. No longer was there a statistical drop in transients when the Earth's shadow came into the picture, a death knell for Villarruel's UAP conclusions.
Also, when they took a closer look at the schedule of the Palomar telescope, they realized that the observatory was more likely to carry out exposures during nuclear test windows, 35% more likely to be exact. But Villarruel did not sufficiently account for this ratio, throwing off her math. The uptick in UAP after nukes was turned into an averaging error. There were other arguments made, but these were among the most significant. Villarruel's results lived and died on statistical analysis. Without statistical proof that the objects were indeed vanishing in the shadow of the
Earth, there was no longer a reason to assume they were reflective objects. And without the argument of a behavioral pattern, there was no longer any reason to think of them as moving with intent. It should be noted that Villarruel has replied to Waters' critique with the even catchier titled "A Response to Paper Critical Evaluation of Studies Alleging Evidence for Technosignatures in the POSS-1E Photographic Plates by Waters et al.", which arXiv did publish. In it, she says that if Waters wanted to know what data set she was using, all he needed to do was send her an email, which just goes to show that scientists can be as passive-aggressive as the next person. But she refutes the argument that her
data set was too broad, pointing out that Waters' more vetted data set was actually too vetted, not fit for purpose for looking for transients because it deletes most of them. Waters' data set dropped down from about 100,000 transients to just over 5,000. According to Villa Roel, that's too small a sample for proper analysis. When it came to the nuclear schedules, Villa Roel did the math again using the POSS 1 data and ratioed it properly this time, but still says there was an 11% uptick in transients during nuclear test windows. Smaller than first thought, but still there. You can almost hear the implied, "So there."
I await with much anticipation for the inevitable response paper to a response paper to the critical evaluation of studies alleging evidence for techno signatures in the POSS 1 e photographic plates by Waters et al. It's bound to be a real zinger. So what are we to conclude from all this other than the fact that scientists like to argue? It's still not clear whether this is the proof that will silence all doubts, but personally, I do find it compelling. The idea of searching for UAP in pre-satellite star maps is a clever one. And if these transients, or even a fraction of them, can be confirmed as metallic reflective objects in the sky above Earth in a time before
the human space age, that will be a fascinating result worthy of further study. If they are there, what could they be? Some unforeseen natural phenomenon like very shiny asteroids? Or something genuinely designed? If the latter, that will have profound implications on how we need to view our existence on this pale blue dot we call home. We like to think of ourselves as the big kid on the playground. What will we do if we realize something much bigger, smarter, and older was watching us all along. Feel free to leave your thoughts on this in the comments below. But for now, thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.
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