In the 1950s, mysterious flashes of light were captured on photographic plates taken at the Palomar Observatory in California. Two new studies claim that these flashes were caused by reflective objects in high-Earth orbit connected to sightings of alleged unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), a new catch-all term for UFOs not only in the sky, but also in space or even that travel through water.
For the past few years, astronomers including Beatriz Villarroel, of Nordita, Stockholm University, have been scrutinizing photographic plates exposed in the years before the Space Age began, as part of the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project. The aim of VASCO is to use archival data, now digitized, to search for new astrophysical transients, which are objects that brighten or fade, sometimes dramatically. These objects can appear as a spot of light in one image of the sky or space, only to vanish in the next.
