>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.