This belongs at r/ufos, not on a HN. To anyone who is new to this - one scientist, Beatrice Villarroel, promotes a theory that old photoplates from mid 20th century, show multiple UFOs because there were discrepancies between two pictures taken 50 minutes apart. To prove this, she makes analysis of several pairs of pictures where this is indeed observed. So, she's right?
First of all, in every par she picks arbitrary a tiny fraction, like a few percentages of an area of the plate, without any explanation why the rest of the image is ignored. After looking at the full plates, one can see that there not dozens of suspicious lights but literally thousands of disappearing lights, uniformly spread out across the whole plate, without any pattern or localization. So thousands of alien saucers all across the Earth. You see where this is going? But it gets worse.
Second - in all pairs of plates the lights change one way only. On the first plate they are present and on the next plate 50 minutes later they disappear. Not a single light out of thousands is breaking the pattern and transitions from empty to light, no, all of them transition from light to nothingness only.
And finally third - these thousands of UFOs on the first plate appear because the first plate uses a brittle and unstable red pigment. I can't quickly find out the source, but one guy did analysis and found out the type of the emulsion used on the first plates in these sets in that decade and said that it was indeed a fragile compound, which is most likely the reason for these thousands of uniformly spread out image defects.
tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.
>I can't quickly find out the source
Took me too long, but here’s one:
https://thefreaky.net/dr-beatriz-villarroel-and-the-mystery-...
From that source:
“Old photographic plates are notoriously temperamental. Dust specks, cosmic rays, emulsion scratches, and scanning artefacts can all mimic stars. Villarroel’s team applied careful filters and cross-checks, but some scientists argue the anomalies could still be defects rather than cosmic revelations.”
It’s not a real debunking — Rational Wiki (now down) was good at debunking things like this which weren’t notable enough to make the Wikipedia — but it’s what I’m able to find about the matter.
I’m of course still skeptical — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — but I think a good debunking needs to be posted online, with footnotes and references.
Finally found the post I was looking for:
https://medium.com/@izabelamelamed/not-seeing-the-star-cloud...
In my opinion it's a pretty damning conclusion. I would love to see some explanation from the ufology crowd :)
Thank you. Also mirrored at: https://archive.today/20250825091916/https://medium.com/@iza...
To summarize:
• All of these anomalous points of light only appear on one particular film emulsion, 103a-E (sensitive to red light)
• Said points of light do not appear with other emulsions used at the same time (e.g. 103a-F or 103a-O)
• Each plate made with 103x-E emulsion has a lot of these points of “light” all over them, which indicates there was an issue with the emulsion.
Some other links:
https://www.ufofeed.com/141549/some-serious-flaws-in-villaro...
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-o...
Can you rule out or confirm the emulsion issue just from a print? Would you not need access to the original negative?
That's not the post I'm trying to find, unfortunately. That one was on substack I think, but I'm not sure by now.
As for good debunking - come on, it's supposedly thousands of crafts, supposedly in the same orbit (because any other orbit except for GEO would cause them to streak on the long exposure photo), in a random formation all across the sky, supposedly synchronously disappeared all at once, time synced to the photoplate change on a random Earth observatory. Pfff, just typing this out feels like a bad joke. Good proofs or even bad proofs need to be provided first by the ufology community, not vice versa.
> tl;dr - ufologists as usually failed at basic reasoning, logic and knowledge of history.
That's being generous. Some of them know damn well that they are looking at compression artifacts in pictures of Mars and not cities, but they are trying to sell a book.