The lead author on this paper is a professor of anesthesiology. I think it's fairly safe to describe its conclusion as crank-adjacent, if not outright cranky.
ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
#32Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
#33Transient 'objects' after nuclear tests are quite possibly high energy radiation from the tests themselves. Remember these are on film, and the film is likely removed from its protective housing for some time before, during, and after imaging. (And in many cases protective housing wouldn't help anyway.) I get the sense that this topic is popular because "aliens y'all". It's much more likely to be radiation. It's poss…
They're there before the tests though, and potentially more frequent around nuclear testing calendar days. The argument has never been "these only showed up after a nuclear test."
Two things here: radiation exposure could explain this, since there's a period after exposure and before developing where you can get radiation exposure.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, is that there's a detailed criticism of this line of research available, including evidence against the argument that these are more likely ±1 day of nuclear tests. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21946, and also https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.00497 for a study of plate defect issues.
I think the current paper continuing this line of research should be read cautiously. I don't love discounting ideas out of hand, as these folks clearly have put effort into the analysis. But the rebuttals read as at least as high quality analysis, and "it's aliens" requires a lot of evidence for me to take it seriously.
Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The objects don't appear as streaks, so they are either very, very short flashes (much shorter than 50 min), or they are very far away. Couldn’t be aberrations in equipment, like lenses? Or film development?
As stated in the abstract, the anomalies occur more within a window around a nuclear event.
This precise point has been challenged, FWIW. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21946.
Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
#35This is exactly the kind of research meant to be on preprint servers like arxiv.org
Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
#36What's more interesting is that a third of these plates were destroyed by Donald Howard Menzel without reason or explanation.
From Wikipedia: "During World War II, Menzel was commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy and asked to head a division of intelligence, where he used his many-sided talents, including deciphering enemy codes. Even until 1955, he worked with the Navy improving radio-wave propagation by tracking the Sun's emissions and studying the effect of the aurora on radio propagation for the Department of Defense.[3][4] Returning to Harvard after the war, he was appointed acting director of the Harvard Observatory in 1952, and was the full director from 1954 to 1966. His colleague Dr. Dorrit Hoffleit recalls one of his first actions in the position was asking his secretary to destroy a third of the plates sight unseen, resulting in their permanent loss from the record."
Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
#37"Idk, therefore aliens" is not good science.
Where do they state it is aliens?
Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
#38Awhile ago I built my own ML pipeline to automate scanning these plates, it was very revealing. Beatriz and her team were very helpful. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04810
Did you end up with similar results/conclusions?
Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
#39I read the pre-publishing version of this paper, and there was then and still is a serious problem with their logic, consistent with if not bad faith, something akin to it: Assume for a moment their core hypothesis is correct, there were transient objects captured on film pre-Sputnik in LEO objects. What might we say about their nature? The authors' undisguised implication is "it's aliens" to be blunt; that's their m…
If you want to downvote, I invite an alternate explanation for their behavior and the contextualizing media posture,
which regularly situates what they are willing to say in print, within unsupported and click-bait-worthy speculation.
Another example of bad faith: curve-fitting around what constitutes "nuclear testing."
Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not?
Nobody has ever found the slightest smidgen of evidence of aliens, nor any plausible theory of what aliens would be like. It's about as likely as someone inventing a car that runs on water.
While it's always good to elevate evidence-based knowledge above "woo" or "belief", it's not healthy to close your mind off completely against anything that isn't currently proven. We might know that we don't know a lot of things, but the most interesting thought experiments happen in the area that concerns the things we don't know that we don't know.