ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena

  > Overall it seems pretty unscientific.

  1) The paper is suggesting aliens... your suspicion hats should always go on
    - Carl Sagan said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Is the evidence extra-ordinary?
  2) The authors aren't experts
    - Stephen Bruehl: A doctor of Anesthesiology
    - Brian Doherty: "Independent Researcher"[0]
    - Alina Streblyanska: Actually maybe a astrophysics researcher?[1]
    - Beatriz Villarroel: The top Google hit for her is for a UFO wikipedia[2]
  3) Authors don't share affiliations
    - Corresponding author has no domain expertize and no clear affiliation to others.
  4) Authors have hints of metric hacking
    - Villarroel has 8 citations in a paper with only 18[3]
  5) The GitHub repo is dead: https://github.com/dca-doherty/VASCO-ML

If you do understand statistics there's clearly more red flags. The +/- windowing being a pretty big one, since there are much better tools for this (errors don't need to be symmetric! Nor do they need to be uniform!). There's also a pretty big assumption made that cshimmin didn't mention: the paper assumes all nuclear tests are in the public record. But I also assume if you have a strong statistics background then there's a high probability you didn't upvote the post.

[0] The man has effectively no online presence. Google searching his email yields effectively nothing except people posting about this paper in UFO groups (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22briandohertyresearch%40gm...). His linked GitHub also makes him anonymous (https://github.com/dca-doherty/) and his website linked is just about finding day care in Texas. He has one more paper on ArXiv, but it is from a few weeks prior

[1] Found their Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alina-streblyanska-95b2375b/). Their most recent paper is also on UAPs, along with Villarroel. But also, they work for "Society of UAP Studies", which should be a big red flag. Also, they were working as a Post-doc for 12 years, which is a bit insane

[2] https://www.wikidisc.org/wiki/Beatriz_Villarroel and here's here Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_Jc8gm0AAAAJ

[3] I looked at some other papers of hers and they show a similar pattern. This explains her citation count (which is rather low) and h-index (it's better to just click on the references and you'll see it's predominantly her referencing herself):

  - 2602.15171: 9 citations total, 8 are hers
  - "A cost-effective search for extraterrestrial probes in the Solar system" has many more, but still 6 to herself (and 3 to Loeb)
  - Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (Yes, this is in "Nature"): 20 citations, 5 hers
  - Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey: 11/36
  - On the Image Profiles of Transients in the Palomar Sky Survey: 5/5
  - A Civilian Astronomer's Guide to UAP Research: 7/98 (actually not a red flag, but the title sure is...)
  - and so on

I think closing one's mind off 99.999% to "it's aliens" is perfectly healthy and justified. When you remove the folklore, memes, psyops and apply Occaam's Razor to the "evidence" and sort out mistaken natural phenomena, misinterpreted data, classified but terrestrial technology and outright hoaxes, you aren't left with much of anything, and certainly nothing definite. There is no reason to assume the phenomenon mentioned in the linked paper demonstrates the presence of alien spacecraft but the UFO community is going to run with it anyway.

Call me when David Grusch comes through with that "catastrophic disclosure" we were promised or when Lue Elizondo can tell the difference between a starship and a chandelier. This is just Bob Lazar and Majestic-12 all over again.