Mapping the Palomar transient hotspots | Reality Check

<p>In this episode of &quot;Reality Check,&quot; Ross Coulthart sits down with astrophysicist Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, founder of the VASCO project at Nordita in Stockholm, and Vanderbilt&#39;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&#39;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.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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&#39;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.</p><p><br></p><p>#nonhuman #Palomar #sputnik </p><p><br></p><p>CREDITS</p><p>Host: Ross Coulthart</p><p>Executive Producer: Andy Gipson</p><p>Editorial Producer: Meagan Medick</p><p>Producer: Will Tomasi</p><p>Research Producer: Rob Jones</p><p>Editor: Anthony Diasio</p><p><br></p><p>On &quot;Reality Check,&quot; 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. </p><p><br></p><p>More Reality Check: https://www.newsnationnow.com/podcasts-newsnation/reality-check-with-ross-coulthart/ </p><p><br></p><p>Email your questions to RealityCheck@NewsNationNow.com </p><p><br></p><p>NewsNation is your source for fact-based, unbiased news for all Americans. </p><p>More from NewsNation: https://www.newsna