Mapping the Palomar transient hotspots | Reality Check

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 CREDITSHost: Ross CoulthartExecutive Producer: Andy GipsonEditorial Producer: Meagan MedickProducer: Will TomasiResearch Producer: Rob JonesEditor: Anthony DiasioOn "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/ Email your questions to RealityCheck@NewsNationNow.com NewsNation is your source for fact-based, unbiased news for all Americans. More from NewsNation: https://www.newsnationnow.com/ Get our app: https://trib.al/TBXgYpp Find us on your screen: https://www.joinnn.com/CHAPTERS:0:00 Intro5:40 Mapping the Transient Hotspots8:08 Plate Defects or Real Objects13:46 Survey Bias and Cosmic Rays17:07 The Nuclear Test Window20:27 Ruling Out Natural Reflectors22:36 Hypotheses Set in Advance24:59 Castle Yankee, May 195434:55 Nevada Tests and Operation Teapot40:13 Pre-Sputnik Human Technology42:12 Replication and Falsification47:29 The Tic Tac and Tampico Hotspots50:22 Taking It to Peer Review51:20 Non-Human Surveillance53:01 Interest From Three-Letter Agencies