Thousands of potential UFOs spotted in 1950s photos — before satellites even dotted the sky: studies

A pair of new peer-reviewed scientific papers claim to have detected the presence of UFOs in photographs taken in the 1950s.

Astronomer Beatriz Villarroel from the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics claimed in two papers that “transients” — fleeting star-like objects of unknown origin — which appear in “historic photographic plates” of the night sky could represent visitors from a far-off planet.

“We speculate that some transients could potentially be [unidentified aerial phenomena] in Earth orbit that, if descending into the atmosphere, might provide the stimulus for some [unidentified aerial phenomenon] sightings,” the paper published in Nature’s Scientific Reports claimed.

There was a “small positive correlation” between UAP sightings and transients that was “well beyond chance,” she argued in the paper published on Oct. 20.

Researchers analyzed roughly 2,000 photographic plates which were taken between 1949 to 1958 at the Palomar Observatory in California for one of the first detailed astronomical surveys of the sky, called the Palomar Sky Survey, Scientific American reported.

Significantly, these photos were taken before any man-made satellites or other crafts were orbiting the Earth and present in the sky, the paper published on Oct. 17 in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific claimed.

These vinyl-record-sized plates were the main method of recording astronomical images that were used to create the Hubble Guide Stars Catalog — and is still in use by NASA today.

Villarroel and her team used machine learning and imaging processing software to analyze the brightness of the objects captured by the plates to determine that there were 107,000 transient lights — which look like, but which are not, fixed stars in the night sky.

Some of those transients were deemed to be errors or aberrations on the plates, but thousands of them are completely unexplained, according to Villarroel’s research, and which she claimed correspond to well-known UFO sightings and nuclear tests.

In one instance, multiple bright transients were spotted on July 19 and 27 in 1952 — corresponding to the exact period of the famous Washington DC UFO Incident, during which there were hundreds of individual reports of flying saucers in the skies over the nation’s capital over the course of weeks. Those UFO sightings are still unexplained.

Transients also occurred on or near dates of nuclear testing — with the research claiming that transients were 45% more likely on dates within 24 hours of a nuclear test, the papers claimed.

The final date on which a transient was observed within a nuclear testing window in the dataset was March 17, 1956, the researchers claimed, which is the day after the “Joe 21” nuclear test in Russia, according to research from the University of Columbia.

Another intriguing instance showed that multiple transients appeared aligned in a straight line across a single photographic plate, which Villarroel claimed is unlikely to occur by any known natural phenomenon.

The papers further made the shocking assertions that UAP sightings are “significantly” associated with nuclear weapons testing windows.

Overall, findings of this study support our speculative hypotheses that transients exhibit some degree of association with both nuclear testing and reports of UAP,” the paper concluded.