Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey
Scholarly journal article
"Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey" and "Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena" are two companion papers published in October 2025 in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and Scientific Reports, respectively. The principal authors of the two papers were astronomer Beatriz Villarroel and clinical psychologist Stephen Bruehl.
The authors of the two papers contended that their research indicated the potential presence of UFOs orbiting the Earth in the 1950s. Their conclusions or research methodology were met with wide skepticism, and criticized by physicists including Michael Wiescher, Nigel Hambly, Kevin Knuth, and others.
Background
In the 1950s, San Diego's Mount Palomar Observatory photographed the northern sky in small sections. Subsequent research observed that some features present in the Palomar survey did not appear in later surveys. The difference was generally attributed to faults in the Palomar Observatory's glass photographic plates. In a 2021 paper, Beatriz Villarroel and several co-authors concluded the plate fault explanation for the Palomar artifacts was unlikely. Their conclusion was disputed in a critique paper published in 2024 which reasserted that the transients were artefacts resulting from the procedure used to copy the Palomar plates.
Content
"Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena", published in Scientific Reports, and its companion paper, "Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey", published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, studied digital scans of the original Palomar photographic glass plates and determined that the frequency of the transients increased around the time of nuclear tests and civilian UFO sightings.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.