In the late 1940s, as humans were busy inventing new ways to annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons, we started noticing that all of our fiddling with nuclear weaponry was beginning to do something weird to the sky. It was creating a “blink and you’ll miss it” kind of phenomenon that has puzzled scientists for decades.
According to new research published in Scientific Reports, mysterious lights recorded in astronomical surveys during the dawn of the nuclear era, once theorized to be camera glitches, might have actually been the sky reacting to nuclear explosions.
The research team is composed of an unlikely duo: a theoretical physicist, Beatriz Villarroel, of Stockholm University, and an anesthesiologist, Stephen Bruehl, of Vanderbilt University. The team dug through several midcentury sky photos and found tons of evidence of “transients”—lights that appeared and then vanished.
They tended to show up in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear test.
Did Nuclear Testing Cause These Mysterious Lights To Appear In The Sky?
Their team revisited the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, a massive project that ran from 1949 to 1958, which tried to map the entire northern sky, only to notice that some recorded lights disappeared in later photos. Scientists figured the sudden disappearance was due to everyday things like dust, scratches, or film defects.
Villarroel had been running something called the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations project, or the VASCO project, which found that not all of these blips could be chalked up to bad film.
Bruehl and Villarroel decided to cross-check those disappearing dots with the timeline of above-ground nuclear tests by the U.S., U.K., and the Soviet Union, along with UFO sighting data from the UFOCAT database. A pattern soon emerged. The team found that the odds of a transient appearing jumped by 45 percent around nuclear test days and spiked by 68 percent the day after. UAP (that’s the Pentagon’s new word for UFO) reports also rose slightly during nuclear testing windows.
Nobody knows exactly why this happened. The researchers ruled out nuclear fallout or random coincidence. They also note that the people spotting UFOs at the time didn’t realize when atomic tests were happening. The only possible theory left is that the nukes did something to the sky that we don’t yet understand and can’t even come close to explaining yet.
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