I get Battle of Los Angeles vibes from this, tbqh.

This specific analysis isn’t p-hacking because although they conduct multiple tests, they report all of them rather than just the statistically significant ones.

They should however account for multiple testing. The Bonferroni correction (which is conservative) would set the alpha level to 0.05/5=0.01, for which the 1 day after result is still (just) statistically significant.

Not to say there couldn’t be other problems.

Had to look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging

I'm glad you called this out. p-hacking can be useful to generate hypotheses, which ought to be then tested (rather than thinking the p-hacked conclusions are just that)

The bomb casing from a successful nuclear detonation would be entirely atomized and instantly vaporized. The exponential runaway of an atomic chain reaction produces so much radiation (read: light, heat, X-rays, and even gamma rays) in the first nanoseconds that literally every chemical bond is ripped apart, plus so many fast-moving neutrons that many nuclei (even not of the initial fissile material) are either fissioned themselves or altered to radioactive isotopes. Because so much EMR is produced so fast, there literally isn't even time for matter to be physically accelerated away before being absolutely soaked in EM. It's possible that some other matter in the vicinity might be intact and blasted away, but anything within the fireball radius of ~100m is absolute toast.

Was wondering about that but then came across this passage in the paper: “ The last date on which a transient was observed within a nuclear testing window in this dataset was March 17, 1956, despite there being an additional 38 above-ground nuclear tests in the subsequent 13 months of the study period.” I would expect to see artifacts of the tests themselves continue under that hypothesis. Of course this raises a whole bunch of other questions…

These things are i think around 400,000km out in space so no.

In reality other advanced civilizations elsewhere and elsewhen in our galaxy are as constrained by the speed of light as we are, thus they can't come here as we can't go there.

https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/nuclea...

Kodak had this issue for sure.

That wouldn't explain why the effect only disappears for parts of the sky within Earth's shadow.

> "We also find a highly significant (∼22σ) deficit of POSS-I transients within Earth's shadow when compared with the theoretical hemispheric shadow coverage at 42,164 km altitude."

I'm not an statisastroscienticianist, so I have no idea what that means, but maybe it's significant.

That being said, Kodak discovered nuclear testing was a thing before the public for all the obvious reasons.

It occurs to me that the gamma ray hypothesis has a fairly easy check. Light sources pass through the telescope’s optics (typically mirrors or occasionally lenses) which leads to a characteristic “point spread function” for point sources like stars. If it were an errant gamma ray exposure directly on the film, it’s extremely unlikely to have the PSF of the standard light sources.

You can compute the PSF from known stars on the same image and run a statistical test, but TBH just visually comparing the transient with a few stars of similar brightness on the same image should put this one to rest.

>I can't quickly find out the source

Took me too long, but here’s one:

https://thefreaky.net/dr-beatriz-villarroel-and-the-mystery-...

From that source:

“Old photographic plates are notoriously temperamental. Dust specks, cosmic rays, emulsion scratches, and scanning artefacts can all mimic stars. Villarroel’s team applied careful filters and cross-checks, but some scientists argue the anomalies could still be defects rather than cosmic revelations.”

It’s not a real debunking — Rational Wiki (now down) was good at debunking things like this which weren’t notable enough to make the Wikipedia — but it’s what I’m able to find about the matter.

I’m of course still skeptical — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — but I think a good debunking needs to be posted online, with footnotes and references.

> one scientist, Beatrice Villarroel

The example papers [1] [2] [3] [4] have 18 unique co-authors. Also, it's Beatriz.

> she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures

"We base our analysis on the catalog of 298,165 short-duration transients presented in Solano et al. (2022), detected in 200 red POSS-I plates with typical exposure times of 45–50 minutes." [1]

"Of the 2,718 days in this period, transients were observed on 310 days (11.4%)" [2]

"These searches significantly reduced the number of candidates (from 298 165 to 9 395)" [3]

> uniformly spread out across the whole plate

> thousands of uniformly spread out image defects

"we find a strong deficit of transient detections, at the 22 sigma statistical significance level, within the Earth’s umbral shadow" [1]

"we expect N = 1223 transients in shadow out of 106,339 total, corresponding to an expected fraction of fexp = 0.0115±0.00033. However, we observe only N = 349 transients in shadow" [1]

"Plate defects, by contrast, are expected to be randomly shaped and distributed" [1]

> in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear

"transients that appear only in one long exposure and are entirely absent shortly before and after" [1]

"In brief, transients were defined as distinct star-like point sources present in POSS-I E Red images that were absent both in images taken immediately prior to the POSS-I Red image and in all subsequent images." [2]

(*) POSS -- Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

[1] Aligned, multiple-transient events in the First Palomar Sky Survey, 2025, preprint

[2] Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, Scientific Reports, 2025

[3] Discovering vanishing objects in POSS I red images using the Virtual Observatory, 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 515, 1380

[4] A glint in the eye: photographic plate archive searches for non-terrestrial artefacts, 2022, Acta Astronautica, 194, 106

Turns out looking for quotes directly contradicting debunker's statements is a great way to focus while reading a UAP-related scientific paper, thank you.

> tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.

That's being generous. Some of them know damn well that they are looking at compression artifacts in pictures of Mars and not cities, but they are trying to sell a book.

Try reading the article. You might enjoy it and it will answer your question.

None of those rockets attained anything like orbital speed.

Iron Sky is just a movie...as far as we can tell.

> Weren't Nazis sending rockets into space by 1945? Soviets and Americans, probably as well.

No to all, without reservation. The German V-2 didn't go into orbit, and the US and USSR weren't active in large missile activity at all, until long post-war.

No. In general the statistics look a bit amateurish, which is normal for a scientific paper. I'd actually like reanalyze the data, just out of curiosity. (Those p-values and other things can still be on the right ballpark even if the models and analyses are not top notch. I'm not exactly doubting them, and the results are interesting even without any correlation to UAP sightings or nukes.)