Transcript

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
This shows that we have a population of objects near the earth that have not been discovered until now. There’s absolutely no way how they will remember this little circle of 8.7 degrees and only there have a deficit, but not outside it. So only reflections can produce that deficit.

Brian Keating:
What do you make of these claims of tic tacs and non human biologics and interdimensional being? I mean, do you think that any of these hold the candle scientifically that meets your rigorous standard?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I believe it’s true.

Brian Keating:
Why aren’t they here now?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Who has said that they are not here now?

Brian Keating:
Are you worried about your safety?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Yes, there have been a number of incidents.

Brian Keating:
And when did you start Vasco?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
So it depends on how one defines it. The first test we did was in 2016, and it was something I was obsessed with, an idea since I was a student and I wanted to search for vanishing stars. It had nothing to do with UFOs, but I was super, super interested in vanishing stars. It came from a crazy idea I got when I was writing a fable about a poor depressed quasar. And, you know, while writing and there at the end, and I started wondering, but can an object just vanish? Could an object vanish? And. Well, I was just a student at the time, and then I got stuck with this thing. And I remember I. I even had a phone conversation with.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Could it have been Michael Strauss from. From sdss? And I was asking, hey, can you redo the whole Sloan like one more time so that I get one more like, set of a photometry? And I had no idea what I was asking. And he was smiling a little bit, you know, when I was asking if they could just do it one more time, observe the whole sky so that they could compare like different epochs and see if something or a galaxy or whatever had vanished. And that was like, that was the first thing in 2016. But the group or the network didn’t exist until 2017, when together with two senior scientists, we said, okay, let’s do it for real. Because in 2016 I had together with two bachelor students, try to do a small search In a like 1% of the sample provided by the US Naval Observatory looked for vanishing objects. But then they said, okay, now we need to do the whole sky. And that, my God, that was a challenge.

Brian Keating:
Wow. So what would make you think that there would be things that vanish other than, you know, true transients that, like supernovae or novae? Why did you think there might be objects that would disappear and that they would be relevant somehow?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Astronomically well, first failed supernovae, there’s a class of like, massive stars that are believed that they might be able to collapse into a black hole without emitting in a supernova. So that was one of the things. And I was curious about whether that could happen. But then, of course, I was also wondering about just purely fundamental questions like could something just vanish? Has anyone ever looked? And that was maybe the thing that mostly like, was bugging me. If nobody has ever looked, how can you know that it doesn’t happen? And then we were, when I wrote the paper, we were motivating it a little bit with SETI questions like maybe it’s a very, very advanced technological civilization. Although I was mostly interested in this just fundamental thing, right, which is I can’t explain it. Sometimes you just get stuck with something without really understanding why.

Brian Keating:
And the transients that you thought you might find originally, besides the failed supernovae, I mean, were they like planets? Like, astronomy has a very long tradition of looking for things, you know, blinking back and forth between images or photographic plates are now CCDs or CMOS cameras. So did you think you’d find comets and you’d become a prolific, you know, father finder of, of phenomena in our solar system that are interesting, but maybe not as, as ground shaking as aliens or even supernova.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Well, I was hoping for the failed supernova, or I was mostly hoping to find, you know, a star that is there in all images and beautifully there through, you know, Palomar survey one this, then the second Palomar survey in the 80s 90s, and then one looks today and it has vanished. And we would maybe even be able to get some beautiful light curve by looking at some sky surveys taken in between. And I was very excited by that particular idea. So we were looking first and we found nothing. But I found these stupid images, you know, with just one single point source and not again. And then we did this second attempt when I looked through 15% of the data. So I had 24,000 candidates, and that’s like three times as many images. And I had nobody who was willing to help me to look through them.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
And one had to look through them one by one. And then the machine learning people who were supposed to help me, they were doing their work, of course, but they were a little bit slower. And I was growing impatient, like, come on, we have, somehow we have to sift through this data set. So I took these images and one by one I went through all these 24,000 candidates. And of course you take small images because you’re not going to use 6 by 6 degrees plate. You use small images of 10 by 10 arc minutes or something to look if something vanished in the middle. And I was just hoping to find that vanishing star. I found hundred of these blinking things that appear and vanish within one image.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
But I didn’t find a single of these objects of the vanishing stars. And I was like, okay, we have to do anything even more of an even bigger catalog. So it was.

Brian Keating:
Now the instrument that you used is not far from me here in San Diego. Mount Palomar is a legendary observatory that goes back many, many almost 100 years. It almost killed the director, the original director of it, just getting the 200 inch mirror up the mountain. But there are other instruments there too. There’s 48 inch camera. And why don’t you talk about the instrumentation? What was used? What is a photographic plate? For my viewers who are under 50, you know they’re not going to get this. You don’t even have much experience. You’re so, you know, much, much younger than I am.

Brian Keating:
But tell me, what is a photographic plate? What was the ideal characteristic of this instrument that really stood out to you to use it?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Well, if to be fair, it was something much simpler. I didn’t even think about photographic plates when we used this. I just was searching for the, for a digitized catalog of the sky that was as old as I could find it because I wanted to have some hundred years in between. I only got 70 years, but then. So the photographic plates, they are these big, big glass plates. They are heavy. I have never actually worked with them myself. I’ve seen one once in Sonderberg Observatory when I was visiting them.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
They’re big, they’re heavy, I wouldn’t lift it. And they have a photographic emulsion on top and they have different type of emulsion. If you look in the red light, if you look in the blue light, they have like silver halides crystals there that are reacting if you have photons that hit it. So they are using this big plates with emulsion at the telescope. So the good thing about it is that you can actually observe a big patch of the sky. They are much less sensitive to cosmic rays than our CCDs for example, because they are even less sensitive than the eye to cosmic rays, these kind of emulsions. And so these photographic plates were used in astronomy a lot in the past to watch the sky. And they had a long exposure time.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
So very often you had like 50 minutes or you could some blue plays had only 10 minutes. Today with CCDs you can take, of course, an image just enough in a few seconds. So. And with the CMOS cameras, you can even take several images per second of the sky. So it’s a totally different technology than the modern one of the sky. So, yeah, historic things.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. No, and they’re treasures. I do have a plate. I’ll put in a cut of it from. Margaret Burbage is one of the pioneering astronomers of the 20th century. Came came up with fundamental paper explaining why we exist and have the composition in our bodies that we do. Because the big bang can’t produce most of the elements in our bodies, it makes a lot of the hydrogen and other elements, but nothing really that we can sink our teeth into, so to speak. So talk about vasco.

Brian Keating:
First of all, what’s the acronym stand for? What does the pipeline actually do when it gets a plate, compares it to something new or two different plates within the same survey? What does it do? So what does it mean?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
So Vasco is the Vanishing and Appearing sources during a center of Observations project. And that’s the one that we started in 2017, one year after the first test that I did as a PhD student. So what’s it actually doing? Well, it was. It was this project that was supposed to search for this failed supernovae and all kind of funny objects that I was hoping to find. And what it did is that essentially we are comparing the sky from the early 50s with the sky as it looks today. And so one can use digitized images. And this is what we have been doing. So originally we used the US Naval Observatory catalog and later used images from DSS, etc.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
In like in 2019 or 2020, I got in touch with the Spanish Virtual Observatory with Enrique Solano, who has created lots of catalogs, like digitized catalogs. And so what he did then is he went directly to the source material to the Palomar survey and he fetched all these terabytes of data and started comparing pixel by pixel to. To the sky as it looks today with pan stars like 70 years later. And we were. He was doing that at the same time as we still were processing this data from U. S. Naval Observatory catalogs and comparing also again with PAN Starrs. And.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
But there we had a citizen science project, so we had two parallel efforts to analyze the same data. The citizen size project, where we had a interface where a lot of students and young astronomers and children and actually also professional astronomers were going there and looking for the vanishing stars that we were hoping to find. And then we had this automated process with a very super, like, well, very advanced thing that Enrique Solano developed. And both were searching for vanishing stars. And so we actually went through something like 600. Yeah, I think something like 600 million objects with, With a automated analysis that Enrique did. We did all that, the whole Northern hemisphere and even more. And we found zero vanishing stars.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I mean, zero.

Brian Keating:
The failure, right?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Yeah, I mean, we did report it. Maybe, maybe the super, like the theoretical astronomers that are believing in failed supernovae were not as excited. But instead we found all these, like, thousands and thousands of objects that appear and vanish within a plate exposure. And initially we were thinking, okay, maybe it’s M dwarf flares, maybe it’s some kind of. Maybe it’s optical afterglows to gamma re bursts. And that was the initial thought. So we were writing about all the possibilities. I also, I think in 2019, it was 2019, we were also including the SETI possibilities because I had a figure.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I remember the referee was telling me to tone down the aliens. And then I felt compelled to include. To do the opposite, of course, and I included a picture figure, one with a green little alien in it as one of the possibilities. And there the referee gave up, just approved it. Well, well, we also included all the other changes, but, you know, it was very like, early for me. And, and then we had this. I had through this visual, we vetting of 24,000 candidates alone during three months. You know, you get crazy after that.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I, I promise you it’s. It’s working to get a little. And so I had this Table 2 there. And then there were 100, like, coordinates that I identified as interesting with these single images that could have been M dwarf layers, whatever. And the really interesting thing didn’t come in that paper. It came when I decided to look through that table yet one more time. And we suddenly discovered that one of these images had nine objects appearing and vanishing at the same time, but in a small image. And we were like, what is that?

Brian Keating:
Were there segments? Like, if you, if you look at a transient, were they all basically the same? Like, there’d be some blurring or smudging. I mean, obviously some things like, you know, we’ll talk about cosmic rays later, of course, we’ll talk about, you know, asteroids and planetary objects and near Earth objects that do come and go, perhaps, or, you know, bolides or meteoroids and things like that. But do. What was the characteristic of these transients? Let’s say, let’s stipulate that they are, you know, some. Some sort of Technology, although obviously we’re going to talk about that. It’s contested, but let’s say it was. Would that have the exact same transient, you know, behavior in a photographic emulsion as it would say in a CMOS camera or similar advanced camera? What would you, what do you actually see? Like what can you describe them for the people that are listening? What do they look like?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
So what we saw was nine objects that looked just like stars, like any kind of stars in the plates. And when I manually tried to look at the brightness profile. So what we astronomers do to separate something that is round and is around dirt, because you can have bubbles, you can have plate defects that are round and also star like. So what you do is to look at the brightness profile for a star of a certain magnitude and compared to the brightness profile of another of a real star that you know is real and that is there in multiple catalogs.

Brian Keating:
And this camera. Sorry to interrupt you, Beatrice, but the camera has a support for the secondary, right? So it must have some diffraction spikes or some telltale SAS for point source function, the point spread function. And what you’re saying is that the point spread function looked identical for, for these objects as for a true point source, like a star, right?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Exactly. So it just compared and it looked identical. And I was comparing to the stars that had similar magnitudes, so they just looked identical to me when I was measuring. Now later we learned that there are some statistical differences, but when you just manually were trying to look at it, then it looks very similar for like if you compare one and one, what

Brian Keating:
is the new phenomena that you, you said you found statistically looks different when you examine it statistically rather so today.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
And actually that’s thanks to some of the critics. If you, if you take a big sample of these transients and you compare to a big sample of the stars, you see that they are slightly, not much, but a little bit sharper and more narrowed the brightness profiles than they are of the real stars. And that fits very well with what happens if you have a very short flash because then you have less of time for atmospheric turbulence to disturb the profile. So then it’s slightly more narrow.

Brian Keating:
I want to just highlight something you just said. You said thanks to my critics. And I just thought of where I heard that exact same sentence before. And it was in my conversation with Nobel Prize winner John Mather. John Mather won the Nobel Prize for co leading the COBE Cosmic Background Explorer firass experiment that determined that the CMB is a black body. Despite what all my Haters and critics. And I have my own trolls out there. Beatrice, you’re not the only one who has haters and trolls, okay, my friend? So I have a lot of people that hate that.

Brian Keating:
Oh, I just. I talk up the Big Bang so much, and I make up this fact that it’s a black body, but it’s not. It’s not a black body. Only carbon can make a black body. Or metallic hydrogen. There’s a lot of nonsense I have to debunk a lot of times. Okay. But what John Mather and his team found was that the CMB is not only a black body, it’s the most perfect black body that you could possibly imagine, signifying a long period of thermal equilibrium with high optical depth and uniform absorption and emission.

Brian Keating:
Now, why did he say that? He told me in the interview I did with him six years ago, seven years ago, that he was very thankful to his critics. And I’ve heard that many times, actually, from the late Ray Weiss at mit, who won the Nobel Prize for ligo. They say your critics sometimes reveal some of the shortcomings of your argument, and by hearing them, it can make them stronger. Now, obviously, you can go overboard. You can have people that are malicious, malevolent, and do things as trolls do, and they’re not interested in the light. They’re interested in the heat. But I did want to. I always like to point out we have a lot of young scientists that listen to this program.

Brian Keating:
Beatrice and I always love to highlight when a scientist says something that’s particularly important, that can help guide the career and the choices and even the emotions of a scientist as he or she starts off young. So thank you for that explanation and for being candid and honest and having the integrity that a good scientist should have. So I really do appreciate that. And it led you to do something even better, you know, than if the critics didn’t exist, you know. So thanks. Thanks to the critics. So one of the things that’s fascinating to me is that it’s kind of. You know, I often have thought about light when I’m out on the beach with my kids late at night and they’re looking at a star.

Brian Keating:
And I’ll say to them, like, we don’t know if that star is still there. You know, it could be gone. Right? It could have vanished. I like to visualize it as, like, this. This tube of light that’s coming to us, you know, from this vast cosmic distances. Right. But it’s also a time capsule. It’s like light is storing this information Encoding this, this hologram, if you will, of information about not only the source, but of the material between us and that source, or when that source is.

Brian Keating:
But you’re doing something even more impressive because you’re using this. It’s a time capsule in space. And a time capsule in time to be redundant because it’s really sampling a different world. Like that world doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no way to recreate the pre Sputnik world. Let’s talk about that. So the first plates come from 1952, is that right?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Oh, it comes from 1949 or 1949.

Brian Keating:
Okay. And so if you see a star like flash that’s truly a transient, that doesn’t repeat, that disappears in shadows and has other strange properties that you’re going to discuss, the implication is that it can’t be man made or human made. Right. Because the first human made object that we know about. Okay, there could have been other ones. Right, but is Sputnik, which is launched in red October and 1957. Right. So it didn’t have solar panels on it.

Brian Keating:
When were the first solar panels deployed in space?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Oh, I have no idea, I’m afraid.

Brian Keating:
I think it was probably in the early mid-1960s perhaps. I mean it was actually a relatively fortuitous invention that you could get solar energy around that time as we were in space and needing to have non, you know, not bring up big battery packs with us. So if you have two different plates, you know, plate A and plate B, same patch of sky, and minutes later the flash of light disappears. Let’s talk about what this flash of the dynamics of flashes of light. Everyone’s seen the stars at night and they twinkle, Right? That’s because of turbulence. But you’re saying you use that fact that they didn’t have adaptive optics, they didn’t have atmospheric correction. You can use that to discriminate between natural and artificial or transient versus non transient. How do you use the atmospheric blurring, blending to further refine the case that these are perhaps technology?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Well, it was a little bit simpler or a little bit more complicated than that. At the same time, the interesting thing that pointed us towards the technological possibility was not the shape of them, because that came later, that came later, but that they were a group of them appearing and vanishing at the same time. And if it would have been asteroids moving then if you would compare, let’s say within half an hour, you know, the exposure time is 50 minutes. And we always have two plates that are taken like one after the other. If it would have been an asteroid that would move so fast that it would be there in one plate and not there in the other. It would have been streaking. It wouldn’t have left a point source. And the same if you would have some kind of meteorite, it would have been streaking.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
If it would have been a very slow asteroid that had created such a transient, then you would have seen the point source both in the first image and in the second image. But this thing that you see the point source there in one image but not half an hour earlier or later, and you never see it again, it points towards that, you are having some kind of flash. And when you have multiple of them, let’s say you have 10 of them within 10 arc minutes, then you know you also have some kind of. You have some kind of synchronicity or synchronous behavior. And what that means is that you can set our limits just from the speed of light of how far they have to be. And you know, okay, it’s going to have to be inside the inner solar system. So you’re watching some objects inside the inner solar system. Of course, I’m adding a parenthesis.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
We were also considering that maybe some very advanced technological civilizations are shooting lasers and they are perfectly, perfectly communicating with us and pointing at us, and it comes at different times or whatever. But the problem is that we actually even use the largest telescope in the world, optical telescope in the world in Canary Islands, pointed at those things, and we found nothing there. So that hypothesis is totally off the table.

Brian Keating:
That’s optical setting. That’s My colleague Shelly Wright here at UCSD works on photo avalanche detectors for extremely rapid bursts of light that could signify extraterrestrial technology. So that’s a very fruitful avenue of her research.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
So. Exactly. She does beautiful work. And we tested this thing and it didn’t work out. So now we are stuck with inner solar system objects. And there are multiple of them. And then there’s. There’s nothing in the sky today that we know of that produces that signature, except for satellites and flat surfaces, solar panels.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
And today, when you look at the sky, you see thousands and thousands of these kind of transients. Only with a naked eye. You don’t even need a telescope, but just with a naked eye, you see thousands of them over the sky every hour. And then you see something that looks like a signature of the stuff that you see on the sky today. And you see it in this place from the 50s. And the most fun thing, I remember in 2022, when we did this alignment paper, because we started thinking, okay, so let’s find better examples because this one might still be. Maybe there’s some kind of contamination that produces all this. We were wondering like maybe some kind of atomic bomb tests.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
We had two different hypotheses, like some kind of contamination that produces this versus that. We are seeing reflections of something very flat, very artificial in orbit around Earth. And these were our two leading ideas that we landed in. After that we did the exclusion method and excluded all the other things. And then I was thinking, like a better way of searching for it is to look for alignments as well. We found some alignments and we posted the first preprint. And then one of these satellite experts writes to me, a very annoyed email, like, you’re just seeing satellites. And I’m writing back.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
There were no satellites.

Brian Keating:
Thank you for proving my point. What about. I mean, just outlandish. But we use. For adaptive optics, we use artificial stars and those are done with lasers. And yes, the laser wasn’t invented as far as we know in or so. But, you know, who knows, what if there. Yeah, what if there were, you know, kind of broadcasts, you know, came from the earth, from terrestrial, from actually on the earth bouncing.

Brian Keating:
Because that was around the time we developed the first communication satellites, EchoStar. That came very soon after, not 1957 or 1950, 49, but who knows? What if there was some maser activity or there was some strange, you know, like defense programs? Would they not produce artificial star like point, like exactly like what you see?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I mean, possibly, but they would vanish in their shadow, which is later what we see for a big fraction of our objects. And that’s where it gets fun.

Brian Keating:
Let’s talk about the. We already mentioned how your critics have improved your work. Let’s let Beatrice be her own harsh referee for a moment. You’ve got these three claims. The nuclear test correlation, the 22 sigma earth shadow deficit and the techno sigma.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
There are two different ways of watching it. 22.1.6.

Brian Keating:
So. And the techno signature. So if you’re, you know, mean referee, you know, you’re referee number two. How do you rank them? What would you stick your reputation on each of them? Let’s give the strongest argument first. What do you think is the most strong argument for these being techno signatures?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
So they are those. Can I only mention my team’s discoveries or can I also mention the other people work with it? Well, the first. Well, the Earth shadow deficit I think is really beautiful to work with and I mean we see a big deficit of these Transits in the earth shadow. By the way, when we did this test, I didn’t expect that result. You can’t imagine the feeling when you get that result and you start redoing it over and over and no matter what you do. Yeah. You still see that deficit in the earth shadow. So that’s the first thing I would say.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Then of course the transient nuclear correlation I find super, super fascinating and explain

Brian Keating:
quantitatively that’s something like 50% more transients in a few day window or something like that.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Yeah, like 68% more transient within plus minus one day. Actually the new paper that we have now, the machine learning paper led by Stephen Bruhl, where they have cleaned up, so what they’ve done there is try to clean up the sample from all the plate defects. Because all the critics are worried about plate defects. They think that they might be creating these weird correlations. I don’t know how plate defects would sense. Where is the earth shadow? Apparently they’re self conscious. But when you clean away the plate defects, all these correlations get even stronger. And the funny part there is that they find also strong correlation one day before the nuclear test.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
And then one gets really confused because then of course someone could say oh, maybe it’s just because you’re already setting up some balloons or whatever. And I mean just to observe the nuclear tests is like one way. But yeah, if you read a machine learning paper that’s Steve Bruel is leading, it’s a fascinating result. So that is also super cool. And then the third I would say, and a really important discovery is the one by Ivo Busco that he posted one week ago where he actually essentially shows that some of these transits have to be real. Because first again he sees the same slightly narrower shapes of these transients than the normal stars which are indicative of that they are actually fast flashes, not normal objects. But he also shows that they come from light passing through the optics. Because sometimes these telescopes, especially if you have a shitty telescope, not the perfect telescope, but it has slightly faulty optics, they produce these aberrations and I mean commas like shapes that are of the distorted light.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
And all the stars have this ugly shapes rather than a perfect psf. And you can see the directionality of them and all kind of weirdnesses of them. You can measure it and it shows that these transients have the same aberrations as the real stars. Which of course totally kills, I mean the hypothesis of, of that plate defects are responsible for all the transients or that cosmic rays are responsible for all the transients. Yes. We know that among 107,000 candidates there’s a lot of dirt there. There will be plate defects, bubbles, hairs, cosmic rays, everything. But the important part is that a significant fraction of this population have, I mean, pass through, are produced by light that pass through the telescope and they are vanishing in the Earth’s shadow.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
This shows that we have a population of objects near the Earth that have not been discovered until now. I find it fascinating.

Brian Keating:
So obviously it’s extremely fascinating. I think, you know, just to again, in the spirit of, you know, steel sharpens steel, you know, and pushing back with respect that, you know, I mean the first with the, with the, you know, reflective deficit. I think the nuclear test correlation to me is the most, you know, kind of disturbing. Not really because, you know, worried about, you know, something being suppressed or hidden. But what could possibly be the correlation factor rather or causative factor? I mean there’s a lot of things that happen, you know, in correlation that aren’t causative. So what’s your best model for the nuclear test? Correlation function.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
So if we remove all the other observations, if we just remove all the other observation, you can always say that it could be, maybe it’s cosmic rays or something, or maybe it is high energy particles from the atomic bombs. You could, you could say that if you ignore everything else. The problem is that we have or not we. But another independent scientist, a nuclear engineer who has a retired nuclear engineer called Kevin Kahn. He played around with the sample and discovers an empty correlation with geomagnetic storm activity, which totally disagrees with the cosmic rays. Of course some people will say and argue, yeah, but maybe if you have higher solar activity, you’re going to block them. You’re going to like somehow shield the Earth from cosmic rays. But again, they’re different kind of cosmic rays.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
They’re cosmic rays that you’re going to get from the sun. A lot of particles that are going, they are going to be low energy and then you’re going to have high energy galactic. And even if you have a lot of high energy galactic that are blocked out, you still also have a lot of low energy ones. And which ones are most likely to produce a transient on the plate? It’s not the galactic ones that are blocked, it’s the low energy ones that are going to most likely produce, if I think correctly, a point source on the photographic plate. Because they are simply easier or they easier could do something on the plate while the high energy are just going to pass through the photographic plate and then you’re not expecting an anti correlation. You’re going to expect a correlation between the solar activity and the number of transients. We see the opposite. Maybe I’m thinking wrongly here.

Brian Keating:
Quick thing before we go on. If you’re getting something out of these conversations, you can get closer to them. Members of the channel who join the channel as members get the videos before they go public. They get members only videos that you won’t find anywhere else. Occasionally you’ll also get ad free episodes and this is the one that people love. You get to put your questions to my guests live. When we’re doing live stream recordings and we’re talking to some of the most fascinating people in all of science. And at the top tier, the cosmic office hours level, you get one hour with me in a group call on Zoom, just us talking about science, the things that matter to you, your pet theory, your favorite hobby horse, whatever you like.

Brian Keating:
It has happens every month at the office hours level that’s at $20. So please do consider joining. The links are below. Yeah, let me, let me just summarize what I understood. Now again, this is not my field, but I did talk to Avi Loeb this past week on a live stream for other purposes, including his, his new program that, that he’s initiating with, with scientists and philosophers and skeptics and all sorts of interesting people. Not all scientifically, you know, oriented or not all with, with the same level of credentials that you say you have, but nevertheless quite, quite astounding that he’s been able to put it together. And he claims the following. He claims that 60,000 cosmic rays hit a plate, you know, basically in an exposure at that time, and that 10 of them or so land basically perpendicular, which would make them look enough like a point source that someone could mistake it.

Brian Keating:
So he’s saying that that accounts for the entire candidate population by that mechanism. So before we get to the modulation, he has a claim about that that we discussed as well. And I’m summarizing he’s not here to defend himself, but I hope like we can, we can, you know, shed some light, no pun intended, on it. So what do you, how do you respond to that? Why is he potentially wrong about that?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Well, first I think he was expecting a correlation and then I pointed it out in his medium essay and then he changed essay and then he expected suddenly an anti correlation. So I think there was a little bit of maybe it was a we misunderstood each other or something like that when we were.

Brian Keating:
No, you’re right, he does say that the it’s an anti correlation due to what are called corona mass.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I pointed it out after I you did his previous argument then he changed.

Brian Keating:
I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that but I’m just looking at the data that’s on the, on his medium page now. Yeah, and what we talked about on Monday, he. He didn’t mention that but.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
No, but that’s totally fine. He updated the medium and say then But I think he, he’s considering all cosmic rays like coming like he’s considering this like if they’re all galactic ignores all the low energy cosmic rays that you get from the sun. And I think that one has to consider what is more likely to leave a point source. Of course you’re going to have the direction will matter but also the higher the energy the more likely it’s going to pass through. Also another thing to consider is that CCDs and photographic plates react like differently and very often if you have some high energy particles or anything you’re going to have diffused radiation or you’re going to have a lot of streaks and all over. But to get a perfect point source it’s probably going to be much easier with a low energy. That’s what I think. But I, I suspect that neither me nor Avia have been working on this enough to actually be able to model what is more likely to produce the perfect point source.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
But I suspect that, that it’s more likely those particles that are coming that are associated with the sun activity. So I would expect a correlation rather than anti correlation. That way I wouldn’t put them all together. I would separate by energy levels and try to model that.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, I guess the argument as I understood for Monday was him saying that the modulation by the sun affects the cosmic ray flux from the galaxy and that active sun mass ejection in the direction of the Earth, you know, potentially or even if it’s omnidirectional will then suppress, you know, globally. But then where we’re sitting it introduces this anisotropy which is directly, you know, anti correlated with the sun Earth axis which means that it would be in the shadow. It would appear to come from the shadow because you basically have this shield that’s being modulated either up or stronger or weaker. But then there’s a second paper by this Hambly and Bear team as I understand at Edinburgh, peer reviewed, you know they’re independent of AVI of U. They looked at nine of the transients and they said that they could find these round stellar like profiles but they said they were attributable to what are called emulsion flaws. So that’s a different team. So how do you respond in that?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Well, they did. They concluded it could be emulsion flaws based on that they were slightly narrower. That was the argument. And because they found so many narrower things on the plate, of course a number of objects, you can’t say that if it’s 10 of them or if it’s 500 that just by citing the number, you can’t say that it’s emulsion defects. Of course they might emulsion defects, but they used that it’s so many. And there are many that are narrow, that is most likely emulsion defects. However, there’s somebody who actually at the archive looked at them with microscope and if you look at them with microscope again, this, like this, nine or eight out of the nine transients are looking like they’re around. They’re slightly sharper and rounder, but they look like on the digitized place essentially.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
So how are you going to separate that from transients that are appearing due to flashes? Because you have here a so called ambiguity or. I mean it can be either or, but because both transients associated with short flashes will produce narrow profiles as well as hypothetically plate defects. And to separate these two, and if you can’t do it with a microscope, then you need population statistics. And I think that’s why the Earth’s shadow is so important. And also one more thing to think about. When you talk about the Earth’s shadow, we don’t talk about the night side. We mean specifically the geometric shadow at 42,000 km altitude, which is 8.7 degrees. And when cosmic rays enter into the atmosphere, they are.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I mean you have all this scattering and you have all the secondary particles. There’s absolutely no way how they will remember this little circle of 8.7 degrees and only there have a deficit, but not outside it. So I think that’s something very important to remember that we’re not talking about just looking at low Earth orbit. We’re talking about this shadow at 42,000. How is any cosmic ray going to remember the geometry there? It’s not going to do that because of all the scattering. So only reflections can produce that deficit.

Brian Keating:
So I have some questions from my audience as well. Someone named Cyboris says, Beatrice, thank you for your dedicated work. These vanishing objects for the last past seven years. Given the pre Sputnik timing and your assessment that these appear to be reflective or metallic objects rather than stars, what do you consider to be the most likely explanation?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Well, I think there is something very flat and very reflective in orbit around the Earth. Now if I also, because there are different ways how you can view this problem. You can view it as that you have a mix of different phenomena. There might be one population that is reflective, another population that is correlating with cosmic rays, a third one that is anti correlating with geomagnetic storm activity. Or it can be all exactly the same population. For example, Brian Doherty, he wrote a paper and he looks at it and he sees that if you actually focus on the sunlit transients and remove the others, the nuclear correlation gets even stronger, which argues for that it’s actually the same population of objects producing the different, different features. And if I look at that, I’m sorry, but I find it hard not to attribute it to something artificial. And I will be straight.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
That’s what I think. I wasn’t born with some political being, so I will just say it straight. And also it’s even more interesting, he also, Brian Doherty, he does this beautiful machine learning and cleans up the data from all the plate effects. And he sees also that they are avoiding the ecliptic. So obviously they don’t behave like your average asteroid. And also in a new paper we are working on, we are seeing that they are all clustering around the equator. And it’s even more interesting, we try to like in this new paper we’re trying to look at the sizes and all the typical features of the objects. And they are so similar to the objects reported by astronomers today when they look at space trash.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
It’s just that then we see maybe one transient per square degree per hour. And today you have 1.7 per square degree per hour. But it seems to be very similar type of objects. So I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say other than that.

Brian Keating:
Another question from the audience. Could it be like a pulsar that, you know, was a transient pulsar, very bright flash briefly and then just is no longer aligned with the Earth anymore?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
No, it wouldn’t be because of that to see groupings of them and they are synchronized and that doesn’t agree. If I can just like speculate, we would have one single example of, let’s say of a triple transient, but we would have all the other transients, but we would have an empty sky, but somewhere we would see three transients at the same time appearing and vanishing. We could be discussing gravitational lensing by a super massive black hole. That’s a possibility if you have one Though maybe there’s an extra, a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way we didn’t know about. But when you have so many as we do, then you’re running into trouble.

Brian Keating:
So then there are people that are a little less, you know, kind of supportive of it. And that is. Well, let’s go to this, this, this recent paper which I believe is either published or appeared in the archive by Waters at all. And you know, they talk about the clustering and they talk about the nuclear test correlation, but they claim this one thing which I found, you know, kind of noteworthy, is they talk about, they call data hygiene that you rely on this data set V and that skipped some of the scan artifact removal steps. And Waters estimates 91% of those features belong to a set that wasn’t distinguished from catalog object. Can you explain what he’s claiming? Or they’re claiming rather. And then what is your response to this? To this?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Oh, I’d love to talk about. This is fun. So the first thing that they do is that they say if you have plate defects in your sample, you cannot do statistics. You need to have a validated data set. And here I find this super fascinating because a, I mean, you look in the particle accelerators, it’s not like you’re going to have all that. When you search for Higgs boson, you only say the Higgs boson and throw away everything else. I mean statistics, you know, you work with dirty samples. But the most important is if your dirt or contamination is somehow dependent on the variable you are testing or not.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
And of course we know that defects are not going to be tracking the sun, Earth geometry and follow, where is the Earth’s shadow? The defects don’t know this. They might be assembled on the edges of the plates, but they are not going to be tracking the Earth’s shadow. So it actually doesn’t matter. So that’s the first thing. I think there’s a confusion today between traditional statistical inference and like statistical or traditional hypothesis testing with machine learning, like machine learning based research where people talk about validating samples and people have started conflating the two. So that’s the first thing. The second we have actually tried to remove all the plate defects. But now it gets even more fun.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
So Waters used a data set that was public. They didn’t email us. They could have sent an email to us and asked about like if the, if this data set was good or not. They used a sample of 5,000 transients reported in Solano at all 2022. The problem is that these weren’t just normal transients. These were a data set created to search specifically for vanishing stars where a lot of additional criteria were added. Essentially we did not only look for things that flashed, but one also removed anything that existed in any catalog, astronomical catalog, across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, which creates a beautiful hole. If I may show you, if screen sharing works, there is this.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
So if you look at our like at the two data sets, there is the original one of 107,000, it has its artifacts, etc. But like some, some stripes, empty stripe. But in general it’s a fairly homogeneous data set. The sky surveyed by the plates, it’s like all plates in the northern hemisphere are covered. Then you look at the sample used by Waters and there is this big hole. And that big hole by itself produces excess in the earth’s shadow simply because a lot wasn’t observed. So that’s the first thing. And then the second thing, they don’t even have the time stamps.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
And that’s a whole story by itself. I don’t know if I should tell

Brian Keating:
it or well, what is the timestamp of what is it stamping?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
You need the time of the observations that wasn’t included in the data set either. So they’re trying to do some detective work and the question is if they did it correctly or not. Because the initial, a famous plot that was sent to me earlier forgets the cosiness dec factor when estimating a parameter that they use for deducing the times. So maybe even the times aren’t correct either. So both a big hole, the times are not correct and then maybe, I don’t really know. They are trying to say that they didn’t do the error, but they are citing the figure in the acknowledgments. So essentially so the question is, is it right or not? I don’t know. And the third problem is that we have actually looked with machine learning at the number of defects in their so called aggressively filtered sample versus ours.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
And their sample isn’t cleaner, it’s just 20 times smaller. And if you have 20 times smaller sample, it’s also a lot more difficult to see statistical correlations. I mean it’s a big mess. They just used completely wrong sample and that’s where it went wrong.

Brian Keating:
And the claim that they make that you have to normalize the number of telescope observation nights, basically that it’s basically an imprint or an artifact of the excess correlation with around nuclear testates is just an artifact of some maybe timing or Nyquist sampling.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Say we have Tested that and addressed it in the commentary. That’s not, even if you normalize it correctly, you still have actually a correlation. It stays and it even gets stronger.

Brian Keating:
Gets stronger. Phenomenal. Wow. Okay. Now the other, another thing that they bring up is the, and I hope you don’t mind me asking these questions. I’m not great.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I’m happy to talk about it actually. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Because I mean my audience is super technical and they’re going to appreciate this, but they’re also going to like the fact that you’re framing us like Richard Feynman. You know, you’re looking for evidence. You’re not looking for feels or beliefs or wishes or, you know, dreams and fairy tales. Right. You really want this to be done scientifically accurately and then we can come to the interpretation. So there’s an argument about spatial correlation. Features that pile up at the plate, corners and edges and they form pockets of voidance where you don’t find the physical samples from optical sources that go through the telescope pipeline. Are these features that people that you agree on, I mean, are they right about this claim?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Well, if they’re talking about the big hole in spatial distribution, it’s only in their sample because they use the one that was completely made for a different purpose. But if they’re talking about that, they might be platif is. Yeah, edges might have more, more defects. But at the same time, these, they are not going to be influencing a deficit in the Earth’s shadow. So it’s irrelevant for the question. You just need to think about is a defect going to somehow walk around on the plate to follow? Like, where is the Earth’s shadow? Because the Earth shadow is moving.

Brian Keating:
One claim that I found kind of resonant with some thoughts I had was the precedent that comes from gamma ray bursts from the, you know, 70s or whatever. A satellite was designed to look for nuclear test ban violations on Earth and they ended up catching these extremely energetic explosions in deep space at high redshift. So it took 20 years. And they basically looked at a million archival plates also from Palomar, and they never really confidently confirmed a single optical transient because the emulsion effects would mimic star like flashes. So it was, it was too confusing, I guess. So why is it, how can you make the case that your search is different? Why is it different?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Well, Ivo Bosco just did what they couldn’t do.

Brian Keating:
Too bad his name wasn’t Vasco. Can you get him to change his name to Vasco, please?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Yeah, well, he showed that it goes through the telescope optics thanks to these Operation commas. They didn’t think of that, but he thought of it. It took a couple of more decades. Just because someone didn’t manage to do it in the 70s doesn’t mean that someone can’t do it 50 years later and gets a good idea. And Ivo Buska got that good idea. And I think that’s beautiful. He did what they haven’t managed to do before. And also in those times, they didn’t work with big catalogs.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
They worked with like one by one of objects. They took a microscope, maybe they used, what is it called, this magnifying glass, and they looked one by one and they maybe said, oh, we can’t say, we can’t separate it. It could be plate defects. But today we have population statistics. We have all this digitization of the surveys, machine learning, big computers. It allows us to do population statistics in a way they couldn’t do in those times. And that’s the beautiful thing of progress and of like all these new tools we have today.

Brian Keating:
And I want to be fair to Waters, I may have misspoken. It’s not a published paper. It’s just a preprint, and that’s fine. A lot of things get. Get handled wrong and then they get handled a better way. Maybe you’re going to comment, maybe the editor, referee, etc. Just as people have corrected you by criticizing you, you may criticize him and correct him and benefit him, right? So this could make it all better, for the sake of heaven, as he’d like to say. Okay, now I want to take a big say again.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
We have a commentary online in response to them.

Brian Keating:
Oh, you do? Okay, great. I’ll put a link to that in the notes below. So let’s just take a big step back. We just had this movie come out in America called Disclosure Day. We’ve had multiple disclosures, you know, from the Trump administration. We’ve had Avi Loeb, you know, volunteer to take up his eighth job at the White House. Now, apparently, according to Avi, at least I’m trying to get confirmation from my sources and media and the White House myself. But for now, I trust him and we’ll see how it comes out.

Brian Keating:
Okay, so let’s just say there’s 100,000 of these things and 99,999 are fake. Okay? They’re just artifacts. They’re just something, you know, a flock of shiny birds and some swamp gas. Or like there was, there was a laser, you know, we didn’t know about the lasers. What’s that?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I’M imagining seagulls with tin foil.

Brian Keating:
Yes, yes. Okay, so let’s say there was, you know, some, some laser and a tinfoil shot at a laser with covered on a. Okay. But let’s say of all those 999,999, they’re all, they’re all wrong waters. You know, Avi Lobe, everyone could rule it up, but there’s one that’s real. We can’t explain it. Beatrice, that’s history. Right.

Brian Keating:
So what would that mean? What would that do for our perception of where things fall in the cosmos?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Well, I think it’s going to make us much more humble because we as humans have a reason to unite in some ways because it shows that we are not the only ones. I mean, not only that, we are not the only ones in the universe. We are not even alone here on Earth. It’s. I mean, it has to bring some humility even to those of us who are not doable. I think it’s going to be amazing actually. And of course I would be curious, like, what else do they know? What could we learn from this other civilization? I think it would be amazing. Really amazing.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
It doesn’t guarantee that we are safe, of course, because we can’t guess the intentions. You know, there’s a lot of people that try to guess whether they are benevolent or whether they are evil. And I just say we have no data.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
We have really no information to make any qualified guess.

Brian Keating:
I mean, aside from this, what do you think is the evidence for highly technologically advanced life forms outside of the Earth? Do you, do you feel like ignore your work? Okay, I need you to do that. But what do you think is, I mean, what do you make of these claims of tic tacs and non human biologics and interdimensional being? I mean, do you think that any of these hold the candle scientifically that meets your rigorous standards, let’s say like this?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I think there is a lot of evidence that is not accessible to scientists because there are really credible people and a lot of credible people who talk about crash retrievals and there’s. I believe that what is being said there is most. I mean, I believe it’s true. I do find a difficulty in that we cannot judge any evidence because there is no evidence out there for us as scientists, which is a problem. And which is why I prefer to do my own stuff. If they are not going to give me the evidence, I will do my own searches. We even, we even have this European Crash Retrieval Initiative that we started where we have been requesting the public to give us tips for crashed saucers. Because for me, it’s not enough that someone tells me that they are.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Even if, if I believe them, I still want to see the evidence before I state that this is the case. You can have an excellent source, I mean, all the excellent leads, but I still want to have it in my hands before I say there are crashed saucers there.

Brian Keating:
I’m a pilot and I fly little planes, you know, propellers around, but, you know, they’re not very stealthy and certainly not to have, you know, I want to be seen by the air traffic controller so I don’t hit another plane. These objects, they weren’t doing much to hide, let’s say stipulate that all of them are extraterrestrial technology. It seems like they a wanted to be found or didn’t care if they were seen, which seems kind of dangerous, especially if they’re avoiding nuclear tests. You know, maybe they, if they’re detected, they could get shot down. So it seems like maybe their judgment’s not so great or maybe they’re bad drivers, I don’t really know.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Or maybe sensitive because you see that there are fewer of them during geomagnetic storm, higher geomagnetic storm activity. Maybe they are too fragile. Maybe they are.

Brian Keating:
And the other question I have is what happened to them? Like, why aren’t they here now?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Who has said that they are not here now? I see lots of these things in the sky still. I mean, there are papers that are reporting the same kind of flashes. So I think they might be here. I think there’s a lot of UFO reports. Even if most of it, like 97% of all the UFO reports are just like misidentifications. You still have some 3% that can’t be explained and can’t be explained despite access to data. And you still have cases like the Nimitz case that are highly fascinating. You still have the Washington flap that you can’t just explore away just like that.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I think it’s a highly credible case. The problem again with all these really interesting, high quality cases, is that it’s classified. Once something is really good, it gets classified and we scientists can’t access it.

Brian Keating:
Well, that’s where, you know, I think AVI is coming into play and wanting to declassify it based on his relationships with powerful congresswomen like Anna Paulina Luna here in the United States. I have just one last topic before we wrap it up. I know it’s super late for you and I really appreciate you. Another viewer on my channel. If you’re a member of the channel, you can ask questions of my guests and I like to do that to engage my audience with brilliant scientists. So this person, I was going to say this entity, but their name is entity unknown, which I was going to use for one of my kids names but, but I, I decided against it. My wife. So entity unknown says the following.

Brian Keating:
Beatrice. He says, stay safe. Are you worried about your safety?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Yes.

Brian Keating:
Why is that?

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
I don’t want to explain all the details but there have been a number of incidents and it’s, it’s, let’s say I do have support for it.

Brian Keating:
Okay, well I want you to stay safe. I want you to visit here. I want to take you to Mount Palomar. You’ll come along with me and my kids. We love to go camping and hang out up there and we’ll collect some, some special, special, let’s say non technological artifacts like pine cones and rocks and things like that I’d love to give you and actually give you one of the plates that I collected from my late great colleague Margaret Burbidge. I think she’d be proud to know you. And of course my friend and colleague Shelly Wright would love to talk with you. And we have a lot to talk about.

Brian Keating:
So I think let us think of this as the first of many conversations.

Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:
Okay, Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Brian Keating:
Be well. Thank you for joining us. I know you all found Beatrice as fascinating as I do and if you want to see more of her, let me know in the comments. Would you like me to moderate a debate between her, Avi Loeb and Michael Shermer, noted skeptic? And also click here and watch the video I just did with Avi Loeb.