A new study wonders if the U.S. nuclear weapons program was surveilled by otherworldly forces in the mid-20th century.
Studying photographs from the late 1940s and 1950s, researchers at Nordita at Stockholm University say they have spotted unidentified flashes in the stars over the northern United States, where nuclear testing was underway.
The researchers said the flashes were "transient star-like objects," detected as bright spots in the sky. Their report was presented in two studies published in Scientific Reports and Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
Their project analyzed digitized astronomical plates to identify sources that blink, disappear or suddenly appear.
"Today we know that short flashes of light are often solar reflections from flat, highly reflective objects in orbit around the Earth, such as satellites and space debris. But the photographic plates analyzed in VASCO were taken before humans had satellites in space," said Beatriz Villarroel, a researcher at Nordita at Stockholm University.
Researchers analyzed over 106,000 transients — flashes of light that look like stars appearing and disappearing within a single frame.
The study shows statistical connections between the phenomena, reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, and atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s.
The flashes were 68% more likely to occur the day after a nuclear weapons test than on days without. In addition, the number of flashes increases by an average of 8.5% for each report of UAP.
When these reports and nuclear tests coincided, the effects were additive, with more than twice as many flashes of light as on days without either nuclear tests or reports.
In their second report, researchers also looked for signs of possible extraterrestrial artifacts in orbit around Earth before the launch of the first human-made satellite in 1957.
The researchers looked for instances where flashes of light were along a line or in a narrow band and found one example on July 27, 1952, the same night as the famous Washington, D.C., "flying saucer" incident.
Single points of light on astronomical plates were previously dismissed as defects, even when they looked like real stars.
Researchers say their studies show that some of these phenomena are real objects and exhibit patterns that cannot be explained by chance or image noise.
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