More than 70 years ago, astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in California photographed several star-like flashes that appeared and vanished within an hour — years before the first satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into orbit.
New peer-reviewed research revisiting those midcentury sky plates reports that these fleeting points of light, called transients, appeared on or near dates of Cold War nuclear weapons tests and coincided with a spike in historical UFO reports. Could these things all be related? Researchers are trying to find out.
