In this episode of "Reality Check," Ross Coulthart sits down with astrophysicist Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, founder of the VASCO project at Nordita in Stockholm, and Vanderbilt's Dr. Stephen Bruehl, whose new paper suggests something in near-Earth space was flashing sunlight onto the photographic plates at Palomar Observatory years before Sputnik ever reached orbit. Projected back down to the ground, those flashes don't scatter at random. They cluster over some very familiar places, including the Pacific off Southern Mexico near where the Nimitz Tic-Tac encounter took place in 2004, the southern Gulf of Mexico off Tampico and the American Southwest around Sedona and White Sands Missile Range.
The nuclear connection gets even stranger. On the night before Castle Yankee, the 13.5-megaton hydrogen bomb detonated at Bikini Atoll in May 1954, 203 high-probability transients appeared over the Pacific, while the transients tied to Nevada tests fell over Arizona and New Mexico instead.
Coulthart plays the debunker for much of the hour, pressing the pair on plate defects, cosmic rays, radioactive fallout, survey bias and whether enough statistical tests will always turn up a hit. They also discuss independent work by former Hubble scientist Ivo Busko, whose plates from a German observatory show the same spike in transients on April 4, 1956, that appears in the Palomar data. By the end, Villarroel says she believes they're looking at some kind of surveillance system, Bruehl puts the odds of nonhuman monitoring at better than 50% and both confirm the three-letter agencies have taken notice.
#nonhuman #Palomar #sputnik
CREDITS
Host: Ross Coulthart
Executive Producer: Andy Gipson
Editorial Producer: Meagan Medick
Producer: Will Tomasi
Research Producer: Rob Jones
Editor: Anthony Diasio
On "Reality Check," NewsNation Special Correspondent Ross Coulthart takes a fact-based approach to tackle everything from unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) to mysteries often missing from the headlines.
More Reality Check: https://www.newsnationnow.com/podcasts-newsnation/reality-check-with-ross-coulthart/
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CHAPTERS:
0:00 Intro
5:40 Mapping the Transient Hotspots
8:08 Plate Defects or Real Objects
13:46 Survey Bias and Cosmic Rays
17:07 The Nuclear Test Window
20:27 Ruling Out Natural Reflectors
22:36 Hypotheses Set in Advance
24:59 Castle Yankee, May 1954
34:55 Nevada Tests and Operation Teapot
40:13 Pre-Sputnik Human Technology
42:12 Replication and Falsification
47:29 The Tic Tac and Tampico Hotspots
50:22 Taking It to Peer Review
51:20 Non-Human Surveillance
53:01 Interest From Three-Letter Agencies
