Astronomer Beatriz Villarroel has been studying photographic plates taken at an observatory in California in the early 1950s and her team found more than 100,000 “transients”, sometimes called vanishing stars
A boffin has told of her shock when she spotted what could be non-human satellites orbiting the Earth.
Astronomer Beatriz Villarroel said she had “stomach ache” when she realised the potential enormity of her discovery. The assistant professor has been studying photographic plates taken at an observatory in California in the early 1950s – half a decade before mankind’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched.
Her team found more than 100,000 “transients”, sometimes called vanishing stars, of which a third appear to be flat objects glinting in the sunlight. Some are in straight lines and disappear in the Earth’s shadow, meaning they could be in orbit, just like modern spacecraft.
Dr Villarroel told the Daily Star Sunday: “Atmospheric phenomena would typically leave streaks or trails, not point-like flashes.
“I spent weeks rechecking the analysis, over and over again with different approaches.”
Weirdly, a number of the flashes in the photos appeared around the time of the famous 1952 Washington UFO “flap” where mysterious objects buzzed the US capital over two weekends, watched by thousands of witnesses.
Others seem to coincide with major atomic bomb tests.
The research, from the University of Stockholm, Sweden, has now been submitted for review by other scientists.
Dr Villarroel said: “The next step would be to encourage other observatories with photographic plate archives to attempt independent replication.
“We also need to develop civilian programmes to investigate uncorrelated objects in modern satellite orbits.”
Meanwhile a mystery 12-mile wide object hurtling through space at 135,000mph could be a ‘possibly hostile’ alien craft that may be ‘dire for humanity’, boffins say.
Scientists spotted 3I/Atlas on July 1 and believed it to be a natural phenomenon travelling towards the Sun from another star in a journey lasting billions of years.
NASA predicts it will reach its closest point to the Sun on October 30 at a distance of 130million miles – passing within the orbit of Mars.
It was expected to zoom past Earth at a distance of around 150million miles away.
But now a team of scientists has warned it may not be a natural object such as a comet and could instead be an extraterrestrial spacecraft capable of attacking Earth as soon as November.
They have suggested governments should prepare to encounter an alien-operated ‘interstellar interloper’ that may not be friendly. If their theory is right the researchers said it could spell disaster for the human race.
In a scientific paper newly published in boffins’ archive arXiv (corr) they said: “The consequences, should the hypothesis turn out to be correct, could potentially be dire for humanity.”
In their study researchers suggest aliens could be behind the object which may be ‘technological’ spyware in disguise.
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