Beatriz Villarroel
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Beatriz Villarroel is a Swedish astrophysicist and associate professor at Stockholm University who holds a L'Oréal-UNESCO Prize for Women in Science. Her research on transient astronomical phenomena led her to identify approximately 105,000 anomalous light-reflecting objects in Palomar Observatory photographic plates from the early 1950s — before any artificial satellite had orbited Earth — which she and colleagues argue represents a statistically significant population of UAPs in near-Earth orbit.
Biography
Villarroel holds a PhD in astrophysics and is an associate professor at Stockholm University, where her research spans active galactic nuclei, transient phenomena, and the search for intelligent life.
VASCO and the Palomar plates
Villarroel's work is conducted under the VASCO project (Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations), a scientific initiative searching for anomalous transient objects in digitized astronomical archives. Her primary dataset consists of photographic plates from Palomar Observatory — glass plates coated with a light-sensitive emulsion, used to image the sky during the 1950s and subsequently digitized for modern analysis. A key methodological challenge she addresses is the distinction between genuine transient objects and emulsion defects ("plate defects") in the glass. The sample cannot be dismissed as plate defects because the transients show a statistically significant deficit in regions corresponding to the Earth's shadow: a solar reflector would produce no signal inside the shadow, whereas a random plate defect would be uniformly distributed regardless of the shadow's position. The observed deficit is approximately 30–35%, implying that at minimum 30–35% of the detected objects are genuine solar reflectors rather than artifacts.
The short-duration "flash" signature of these transients — as opposed to the streaks left by objects in motion — is consistent with objects that are "extremely flat and extremely reflective, like mirrors," rather than rocks or ice. The northern-hemisphere sample alone contains approximately 105,000 transients; Villarroel estimates the full-sky total at around 70,000 genuine reflectors, covering approximately 780 hours of exposure over six years at a rate of roughly 1.1 transients per square degree per hour.
Correlation with nuclear tests
Villarroel collaborated with biostatistician Stephen Bruel of Vanderbilt University on a study examining whether the transient detections correlate temporally with atmospheric nuclear weapons tests of the 1950s. Bruel compiled a database of approximately 2,700 days, recording for each day whether a nuclear test had occurred and whether any transients were detected. The study, accepted for publication in the journal Scientific Reports, found that on days following a nuclear detonation, the probability of detecting a transient rose from approximately 11% to approximately 19% — a 68% increase — with a p-value of approximately 8 in 1,000. The nuclear tests in the dataset include US tests at New Mexico and the Pacific, Soviet tests in Kazakhstan, and British tests in Australia. Bruel also found a statistically significant correlation between the transients and historical civilian UFO report databases, producing what the researchers describe as a "triad" of statistical relationships: transients, nuclear tests, and UAP sightings.
The timing of two clusters of multiple simultaneous transients — one from 27 July 1952 and one from around 19 July 1952 — to the Washington D.C. UFO flyover of July 1952, in which radar operators at Washington National Airport tracked multiple unknown objects.
Suppression of plate evidence
Some of the absence of prior scholarship on these objects is attributed to Donald Menzel, director of the Harvard College Observatory, who destroyed approximately one-third of Harvard's photographic plates and associated log books in the early 1950s — shortly after assisting the United States Air Force in debunking the 1952 Washington UFO sightings — without involving the observatory's astronomers in selecting which plates to discard. Menzel held extensive government security clearances.
NASA and the European Space Agency routinely subtract "uncorrelated targets" — objects detected by optical or radar sensors that cannot be tracked or matched to known satellites — from their official counts of objects in near-Earth space, and that the lists of these uncorrelated targets are compiled by military agencies and classified.
Independent scientific reception
Philosopher Jason Reza Jorjani, in a 2025 interview with Ashton Forbes, cited Villarroel's Palomar plate study as evidence that "tens of thousands of these things would show up, especially like within hours of a nuclear explosion" — interpreting the correlation as consistent with his theoretical framework in which nuclear detonations locally shear the fabric of spacetime, potentially opening "cracks" that allow access from other dimensions.
Physicist Kevin Toth of Vanderbilt University described the VASCO project as "an excellent idea" and praised the early aligned-transient papers, while noting that the scale of the later 100,000-transient results required additional replication: "The most recent papers with 100000. that's hard to believe. That was. that's a little shocking. That makes me worry that you really have to double your efforts to look to make sure there's not an artifact issue that you haven't considered."
In a 2025 presentation for The Sol Foundation, Villarroel described how the research evolved from a simple question — "Can a star vanish?" — during her PhD studies, through pilot studies using the US Naval Observatory catalog, to the discovery of 100 transients that "appear to appear and vanish within one plate exposures" in pre-Sputnik era data. Villarroel further explained the Earth-shadow methodology: the test was prompted by a peer reviewer who demanded proof that the transients were solar reflections rather than plate defects. Since objects in the Earth's shadow cannot produce solar reflections, a genuine deficit of transients in the shadow region would rule out random plate contamination. Garry Nolan participated in the discussion, asking what resources would be needed to replicate the VASCO or Palomar results at scale.
Peer review
Villarroel's work on Palomar transients has been published in mainstream astronomical journals and subjected to peer review. The Bruel correlation study was accepted by Scientific Reports. "If I look at everything that I learned in the last years, I will be fair. I don't think we are alone. I think we have company."