JC Bratton

I am very excited to announce I will be assisting in an unofficial AI scan of photographic plates from The Hale Telescope of the Palomar Observatory via CalTech to help identify “vanishing star” phenomenon. This work was motivated by amateurs and staff members by the work of Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, an astronomer at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, leads the VASCO project, which systematically compares historical photographic plates from observatories such as Palomar and Harvard with modern sky surveys. Her core question was whether stars or star-like objects can simply vanish. By examining pre-satellite-era images, she identified thousands of anomalous transients—point sources that appear on one plate and are completely absent from later exposures or deeper modern catalogs, with no conventional astrophysical explanation such as supernovae remnants or known variable stars. Among the most striking discoveries were multiple simultaneous transients that appeared and disappeared within the roughly 50-minute exposure time of a single plate. One notable case involved nine star-like objects clustered in a small region of a 12 April 1950 Palomar plate that never reappeared, even in far deeper modern images. Even more remarkable were events tightly timed with the famous 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO wave: a bright triple transient captured on 19 July 1952 and another highly significant candidate on 27 July 1952, both falling on the consecutive weekends of intensive radar, pilot, and ground sightings over the capital. Villarroel and her colleagues interpret many of these transients as possible solar reflections (glints) from flat, highly reflective metallic surfaces in high Earth orbit. Because the plates predate Sputnik 1 by several years, no human-made satellites existed at the time. Supporting this idea is a statistically significant deficit of such flashes when the putative objects would have been inside Earth’s shadow, where they could not reflect sunlight, along with elevated rates of transients near dates of atmospheric nuclear tests and reported UAP events. These findings, published in peer-reviewed journals including Scientific Reports and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, challenge the long-standing assumption that all such plate anomalies are mere defects or contamination. While individual cases remain difficult to confirm, the overall patterns—spatial alignments, temporal correlations, and shadow avoidance—suggest a genuine population of short-lived, reflective objects that may represent non-terrestrial artifacts monitoring Earth during a period of intense nuclear activity. We will hope to use my AI model to establish a baseline of field surveys from the facility plates and to have a high confidence parallax. This all will take place on “off time” as it is not officially endorsed. I will give updates when permitted. I am certain this will be an interesting use for AI and we will get robust results. Here is my award wining friend, @g_knapp and one of the best shows on broadcast television Mystery Wire, full show is here: youtu.be/MIKCGyFdatE?is=2hLs…. George discusses the “vanishing stars” phenomenon…

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Why would something not real be classified? Ohh 👀