Scientists have made a discovery that could fundamentally alter what we know about objects orbiting Earth. A team of 15 international researchers led by Swedish astronomer Dr. Beatriz Villarroel has found evidence of mysterious artificial objects in Earth’s orbit that existed decades before humanity launched its first satellite.

The findings come from analysis of 298,165 short-lived transient events captured in photographic plates from the First Palomar Sky Survey, taken between 1949 and 1957. These aligned, multiple-transient events appeared in the sky before any human-made satellites existed. Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, wasn’t launched until October 4, 1957 – yet these mysterious objects were photographically documented years earlier.

Dr. Villarroel, working from the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm, leads the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project. Her team has systematically examined historical astronomical data, comparing sky surveys from the 1950s with modern observations to identify objects that have appeared, disappeared, or changed in ways that defy conventional astrophysical explanations.

This latest research builds on a series of discoveries that began with an extraordinary event on April 12, 1950. Nine star-like objects simultaneously appeared and vanished within a 10 arcminute region during a single 50-minute photographic exposure at Palomar Observatory. These nine transients were absent from images taken just 30 minutes earlier and completely missing from all subsequent observations, including modern deep-sky surveys that reach magnitudes far fainter than the original plates.

The April 1950 event prompted more systematic searches. The VASCO project has cataloged many thousands of unknown transients visible only within single plate exposures, representing phenomena that last mere minutes compared to the decades-long time scales of conventional variable stars.

The new aligned transient discovery represents a major advancement in the research. Unlike isolated cases of multiple simultaneous transients, these events show clear geometric patterns – point-like objects arranged along narrow bands across the sky. The most significant candidate exhibits a 3.9-sigma statistical significance, meaning the probability of such an alignment occurring by chance is approximately 0.01 percent.

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Research has documented multiple connections to one of the most documented aerial anomaly cases in history: the 1952 Washington D.C. UFO flap.

On July 19, 1952, the team discovered a bright triple transient that vanished within 50 minutes. This date coincides exactly with the first weekend of the Washington UFO events, when air traffic controllers at Washington National Airport spotted seven slow-moving objects on radar screens far from any known flight paths. The objects moved at speeds exceeding 7,000 mph and were witnessed by multiple radar operators, pilots, and ground observers.

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The strongest evidence for the artificial nature of these objects comes from what scientists call the “Earth shadow test.” When the team analyzed the broader sample of 106,339 transients from the northern hemisphere, they made a remarkable discovery – these mysterious objects exhibit a profound avoidance of Earth’s shadow.

At an altitude of 42,164 kilometers (geosynchronous orbit), transients were found to be 3.5 times less likely to appear in Earth’s umbra than statistical probability would predict. This 22-sigma statistical significance provides overwhelming evidence that these objects require sunlight to be visible, consistent with the hypothesis that they represent reflections from highly reflective artificial surfaces

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The discoveries in the Palomar plates are stunning on their own, but the story takes a darker turn when viewed in historical context. Our research shows that during this same period of high strangeness, Donald Menzel, a prominent UFO skeptic and director of the Harvard Observatory, allegedly destroyed portions of Harvard’s photographic plate collection in 1952 and stopped the observatory’s sky surveys in 1953. This “Menzel gap” lasted fifteen years until his retirement. The timing coincides with the peak period of transient detections, raising questions about what other evidence might have been lost.