The Earth’s-shadow test: a cleaner diagnostic idea

1:34:38So if we were to think that all of these things are plate defects, all of these transients are plate defects and not actual objects in the sky that are reflecting sun sunlight, then if they are plate defects, the number of things that are happening in Earth's shadow should be the same as outside Earth's shadow because it's not dependent on whether the thingy whether the patch of sky I am looking at is in earth's shadow or not. >> Right? >> If on the other hand these objects are reflecting the light from the sun then there should be fewer transients when

1:35:21I'm looking in earth's shadow >> right >> than when I'm not. >> Right. >> Okay. And I know the coordinate of the spot in the sky where I'm looking, right? Because each of these photographic plates has a right ascension and declination, which is our latitude and longitude in the sky. We have our time of day. So from that, I can calculate which patch of the photographic plate is in Earth's shadow and which patch is not. I do have to do an assumption based on like how high I think these objects are, but they make an argument which I actually don't quite fully understand, but they make an argument that um these objects are

1:36:01probably at geocynchronous orbit, which is 42,000 km. Um and at that altitude, I can calculate which object which part of my photographic plate is going to be in it Earth shadow and which part is not. Right? And then from that I get an expected number of 12 thou 1,200 objects but I only observe 349. >> So that's a pretty statistically significant sample. And this is where I remember when you first came to me with the story you said 22 sigma significance right the statistical significance. I

1:36:41was like what are you talking about? This is what they're talking about. They're talking about that like the 349 is so far away from 1223. It's 22 sigma away. They actually did a more realistic comparison where what they did was um they they looked at the actual sky because this was actually kind of cool. So the the photographic plates in Palomar didn't uniformly sample the entire night sky. The 22 sigma comes from the assumption that the photographic plates are completely uniformly sampling the night sky. On the other hand, some patches were looked at more than others, right? And some patches were completely missed. So what they did was they did a more realistic

1:37:23simulation where they said, "Okay, suppose I only looked at those patches and I randomly generated objects. How often would I see defects versus not defects and all that other kind of stuff?" And there they get a lower significance, but it's still a lot. 7.6. six sigma. That sits better with me. Okay. 7.6 >> seems more reasonable. And and the benchmarking that they did kind of made more sense to me, right? Because they're they're taking into account this prior distribution of like where the telescope was looking rather than an assumption that oh, it just looked everywhere. Well, it didn't. Right. >> It's it's not the Vera Rubin Observatory, >> right? Right. It's not just like Yeah.

1:38:03Yeah. This is the 50s, right? like it took us 80 years to get to get to the Vera Rubin. So, so, so that's the first um that's the first story. The second story which is study number two, this is published in um nature scientific reports and this is correlations with the atomic age. Okay. Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomenon. This is it's got UAP in the title. >> It's got UAP in the title in in in in a nature subjournal >> in a nature subjournal. Springer Springer publication, >> which which is a a significant thing in

1:38:44and of itself given the uh aversion to doing anything related to this subject from most peerreview journals. >> Yeah. I mean, I was pretty surprised myself. >> Yeah. When you were like cuz I brought up like well what what journal is it? I was like and you're like wait really >> wait nature. Yeah. Fine. I guess if it's Springer, we can do it. >> We'll cover it if it's >> Yeah, we'll cover it. Yeah. So, here what they're doing is they're doing a more of a time sensitive approach. Okay. >> Mhm. >> They're looking at the rate of the transients. >> Yep. >> That appear in those photographic plates that I talked about. Yes. >> And they're trying to correlate it with dates of above ground nuclear weapons tests. >> Yes.

1:39:24>> And daily counts of UAP reports. Okay. So the the timeline is again 1949 to 1957. They get a bunch of transient count. So for every single day they've got photographic plates and they count how many transients were found on each day. Each day also gets a binary flag on whether it's within a day of a nuclear test or not. >> Right? And back then I think only three countries were doing nuclear tests. The Soviets, the US, and Great Britain. Um, and then there's also daily UAP reports from the UFO CAT database. And these three things are what they're

1:40:05trying to relate. >> Yeah. Y >> they use something called a generalized linear model. I'm very familiar with something called a generalized linear model because my PhD had a lot of that. Basically, these kinds of models are what you want to do when things are not just simply linearly correlated to one another. In my PhD specifically, I was trying to correlate the spiking of neurons in terms of many different behavioral motifs like which way he's looking, how fast he's running, where he is. All of these things can have varied responses that are not necessarily like, oh, if I'm looking this way, I just have more. Maybe it's like a weird response, right?

1:40:46Where only if he's looking this way, there's going to be more. So all of these like different multimodal effects can be captured by a generalized linear model and that's what they did. It can also simulate weird distributions that aren't like just like uniformly distributed or gausian distributed. If you've got like a binomial distribution which is like like coin flips. >> Yep. >> If if you've got you know did I see something or did I not things like that it's very good at modeling those kinds of things. Right. So there was a correlation to nuclear testing. So the transients occurrence in these photographic plates was 45% more likely within a 3-day nuclear test window.

1:41:27Okay. And the main thing was it was 68% higher likelihood on a day after the test. >> Right. >> Mhm. >> It's pretty significant. >> It's pretty significant. There's also a correlation plot that they do with UAP reports where using that generalized linear model analysis 8.5% increase in transients for every additional independent UAP report on the same day. I don't really care for that as much. Like UAP reports to me are like I don't know humans are fooled very easily and UAP reports are just humans being like I saw something that was crazy. Um there's I I can't think of whether there are tests that I could do to to see if this

1:42:08would work. Like for example, what if you like assumed that like on average half of the UAP reports were nonsense? If you took out half, would the correlation still be there? If you did a bunch of samples where you took out half and you looked for correlation, would there be some samples where the correlation would be like way higher, you know? >> Yeah. Yeah. Like that's something that we used to do in my neuroscience lab in PhD is like >> how sure are we that this variable is correlated to this variable where if I were to just take out a subset of the data if the correlation still persists then >> it's it's a more robust finding right and given given the shape of that plot

1:42:49I'm not sure if I believe it but the the the nuclear testing thing is just like that's just there right so yeah So, so those are the two reports. There's one report in PASP that's physical evidence. You've got the Earth's shadow test that a substantial fraction of the transients are sunlit objects, right? And then and then you've got the scientific reports that circumstantial behavioral evidence that says that the timing of these transients is affected by nuclear tests, right? Um there are people who obviously

1:43:30um are skeptics, right? >> As as we also saw with the same paper I just brought up earlier about the strongest evidence yet, that came immediately with follow-ups from multiple institutions that pointed to why their modeling was not sufficiently robust. >> Yeah. Like as of now, I haven't seen any follow-up scientific papers. Um because all of this all of this data is publicly available and I actually saw on the >> on the two papers it's it's readily available for people to look at. So I encourage anyone to to do their own analysis. Actually >> I I want to make a funny note on the paper that I keep bringing up within two

1:44:11weeks cuz it was was it >> it was a week dude. >> It was a week within a week cuz it was out of Cambridge offered one of the >> Yeah. Yeah. Cambridge had the original paper and then the guy at Oxford was like no than a week after came out with the rebuttal and then multiple came out. It's been more than a week. >> Yeah, >> it is getting this paper is getting quite a bit of just obviously a lot of the science media is has is doing variety of different coverage, but there's not yet necessarily been false as quickly. Yeah, >> there's a number of reasons that could be true. >> Yeah, I mean one one of them I think the big one is probably it's not an active uh scientific field like exoplanets and exoplanet researches. There's everyone's trying to make a name for themselves,

1:44:52right? They've got a career to look after. This one is not like >> something that, you know, okay, so you prove this wrong. It's not going to like give you a leg up in astrophysical career. >> There's no there's no incentive for people who are looking to climb a ladder >> to follow up on. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that could be one of the reasons. Um but in any case um the scientific American actually had an article about it that I was reading and they showed some rebuttals right so there's the um Hamley argument which is from the University of Edinburgh he's an expert Nigel Hamley he's an expert in photographic plate analysis and his main contention was that full width at half

1:45:32max right the fact that these transients are so pinpointy and precise compared to the stars that are kind of spread out because of all the noise from the detectors. And there's skepticism that, you know, this is a classic signature of an emulsion or a flaw or a plate defect. And it's not a celestial object because a celestial object would have this kind of noise. >> Um, and one of the crucial things that he says is the ultimate orbiter is actually just the physical evidence. The plates are still around. We can take those original glass plates and examine them under a microscope and not examine the digital scans. And under a microscope, it's going to be very

1:46:12obvious whether this is a defect of the silver just like being kind of weird at that point or if it's a genuine astrophysical source. So, I think I think that's, you know, he's he's proposing a way to >> to make it go away >> to make it go away. I I think that's good. So if you're interested in doing a microscopic study of the digital plates and you would like to collaborate just in the comments below, >> yeah, let us know. >> Let us know. But and we already talked just previously about >> even in the paper itself a means by which that is not necessarily the likely

1:46:52outcome. However, you can remove it. Yes, the earth shadow point. you can still remove it entirely from being the cudgel that you're seeing being put out because a lot of times in the coverage of it, people say, "Oh, it's probably plate defects." Without actually explaining >> Yeah. >> how the paper points to why it's not plate defects. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Which is the kind of the issue. >> The Earth Shadow thing is like pretty pretty substantive, I think. And so, however, it can the the the beauty the beauty of us still having the original plates is that it it's falsifiable. >> Yes, exactly. Um, there's another one that's proposed by uh Sean Kirkpatre,

1:47:33who's the >> Dr. Jean Kirkpatre, >> former Pentagon AO head. >> We we like to call it arrow. >> Arrow. Okay. Arrow head. Um, I guess that's like a anomaly office or something. the the that's the all domain anomaly resolution office. >> Okay, got it. >> That was created in 2022 as a result of Congress pushing on the executive branch to like give them more information about again because >> military and intelligence officers were coming to Congress saying this is happening and we we we need help in dealing with this and we're not getting the support we need. >> I see. That was that was the impetus for why the office was established and its mandate was twofold which was

1:48:15unfortunate because it was basically a mandate that that had conflating uh outcomes. One was we want you Arrow to take data from the Department of Defense, all of the combatant commands and the intelligence community intake it and then analyze what we're seeing as these UAP reports and if it's conventional send it to the office that exists to deal with it and if it's unconventional figure out what we need to do to figure out what what it is. Right? That was one of its mandates. The other mandate was a public communications mandate to help to demystify this issue to the public by creating public education

1:48:56materials and this then the third. The problem with that is you're asking you know the department of defense which is not a public communications office to do public communications. There's a reason why NASA >> is its own agency. >> Yeah. And you don't have NASA running out of the DoD because we would never get anything out of >> Yeah. >> that structure. So there's sort of a confl there's there's a friction between the two things the two things Congress asked it to do which is why a lot of the public is frustrated because they are not very forthcoming with all they have thousands of these reports. We've basically seen none of it. >> Yeah. Okay. Well, he he he put his uh Sean Kirkpatre he he gave his two cents

1:49:38which I thought was actually quite good which was he said you know there's nuclear detonation and clearly this thing is correlated with nuclear detonation. Now when you have these high altitude nuclear detonations, you know, you can have radiation particulate stuff that goes away and it can create transient luminous events like churnov radiation or even reflective metallic junk like the the stuff that made the nuclear like you know there's going to be stuff that gets thrown out and that junk could reflect light in the way that we're seeing in these Palomar sky surveys. This is interesting because I was actually I was just at the soul conference at in Lake Missouri, Italy this past week where Dr. Bishers Vill

1:50:21presented these two papers. Um, and one of the there's a Q&A section where one of the people actually asked about the churnov radiation >> uh as a solution to the problem set. Someone can clip this and put the response. I don't think it's public yet. I didn't I didn't write it down, but that she did have a a response to that issue. >> Yeah. >> Um which I I unfortunately can't replicate in this context, but that was that was brought up by someone in the audience as the like obvious next step in the progression as as an answer to it. >> Yeah, I can imagine like I mean for churnov radiation it would probably be like streaky rather than single point sources. Um but you know if

1:51:04you have like metallic junk >> then it's that >> then that that could like just like you know as it's turning like create that reflective. So uh to me the metallic junk is is a a better explanation than chirkoff radiation or ionization because those have very characteristic >> signatures um on photographic plates. But one of the challenges that Sean Kirkpatrick said was, you know, we've got GPS satellites now. Why don't we try to reproduce these results with the GPS satellites? Um, I think it would I think it's harder said than done because GPS there's so many satellites now, right? It's not just like you're

1:51:45gonna have so many streaks. So, >> for a 50minute exposure, you're just gonna get completely wrecked by Starlink, right? Um there's another proposition by Elliot Gillum at the um SETI Institute search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Um he said you know meteors traveling directly towards the telescope could appear stationary dots not streaks. Um it's viable but like now you got it's traveling directly at the telescope like okay >> and that that volume level and simultaneous simultaneous multiple aligned. >> It's a little challenging. Yeah, it's a little challenging given the numbers. Um,

1:52:26there's a Princeton astrophysicist Robert Lupton who has this look elsewhere effect. He's basically saying that, you know, in a massive data set with thousands of plates, millions of images, finding a few apparent alignments by chance is not that surprising. And you can't actually use the Edmonds and George formula to do that kind of statistical significance to figure out whether stuff is in a line because there's so many things that are in a line. You know, you're you you can easily fool yourself into thinking that the thing that is in a line is there for some reason, right? And the probabilities need to be corrected for the vast number of stuff that's out there.

1:53:06>> This goes back to your not looking at the alignment as the interesting part. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I I think there's a I need a little bit more convincing on the alignment being something that's interesting. Okay. >> Right. Um but I mean the debate is there. >> You know 7.6 sigma deficit of transients in the umbra. That's not something that I think we can ignore. Um, I think it forces a shift from are any of these transients real to okay, given a significant fraction of them are probably real sunlit objects, what are they? >> Okay. Um, it's it's it's certainly like giving me

1:53:48pause. I'll be honest, >> which I want to say for the audience, I've been working this guy for a long time. So to be giving him pause >> Yeah. is is >> it's like that's statistically significant. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You probably have like the number of times you've tried like nah. >> I've tried so hard. But but I I I thought you'd find this interesting even just from the experimental design perspective, the clever approach of trying to do a study like this in a way that's compelling. >> Yeah. I I mean I mean clearly like the team the team in the PASP paper at least the the one in the proceedings of the

1:54:29Pacific Astronomical Society that one that one has done its job of like you know going through the proper science and things like that. The the time stuff I'm a little less excited about. Uh the the one with the the earth shadow thing, that's just like solid calculation, you know, >> good math. >> Yeah, that's just like good math. Um there is like there was one that was kind of interesting. So candidate five, the five transients um systematically in alignment that happened on July 22nd, 1952. >> July 27th. 27th. >> Oh yeah, July 27th, 1952. And they mentioned that this coincides with the

1:55:11um most intense weekend of 1952 Washington DC UFO flap, which I hadn't heard about, but I looked it up. And we've got a photo showing like the the the recorded number of of incidents that were reported. And apparently like there were visual sightings, fighter jets were scrambled, there was a press conference from the Pentagon. So, I didn't even know that this thing happened. So, this is one of the things weird, bro. >> So, this is one of the things that's so interesting. Why would they do that? >> It's it's so interesting because there's again this is why when I start at the beginning of this there's this whole

1:55:53legacy of this subject that exists um that's very dense and there's a lot of information there um and you know unless you have an entry point you won't know it's there but you know we've UFO flaps are consistent and persistent throughout about the history not only of the US but global society and it it it is interesting to see it how it cyclally comes back up. Um but that was candidate 5. Yeah. And that was the one that was like super aligned. I mean um I still think it's pro it's probably coincidence but it's it's an interesting coincidence. I'll say that.

1:56:33Um, the other the other thing they they do at the end of the at the end of the PASP paper is they look at 3D simulations in Blender and show how these reflective objects, if they're like slowly processing something that has a shape like that, could create the kind of signature that we see where like randomly it's at exactly the right angle where it's reflecting the sun into the Palomar telescope and then it goes away real quick. So then you get a really sharp, you know, image spec in your photographic plate. It's speculative at best. I think I