Top Astronomer: “I Found 100,000 UFOs Above Earth!” (ft. Beatriz Villarroel)

27:11Two remarkable scientists were in charge. First up is meteorite expert Dr. Lincoln LaPaz. Before joining this special search for mini-moons around Earth, Dr. LaPaz headed up Project Twinkle, an Air Force investigation into unexplained green fireballs showing up across American nuclear sites. Documented at places like Los Alamos and Holloman Air Force Base, LaPaz arrived at the conclusion that these green fireballs were not a known natural phenomenon, and they seemed to propel themselves intelligently. Second on the project, we have Clyde Tombaugh. Yes, that Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto.

27:51The man whose ashes are now speeding towards interstellar space inside the most expensive urn ever built, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. Until the day he died, Tombaugh remained steadfast in his conviction that some Some UFOs could represent visiting alien spacecraft. So one has to wonder, given wild rumors from credible sources and the cast of characters involved, what exactly did they actually find? On August 23, 1954, Aviation Week and Space Technology published a statement from La Paz, one which begged way more questions than it answered. La Paz confirmed that there were indeed two unknown objects, but simultaneously he claimed that the two unknown objects were fully identified natural asteroids caught in Earth's gravitational grasp.

28:44He might have been doing this to dispel American domestic panic that this could have been Soviet tech. But if you read between the lines, there's a lot that just doesn't add up. Firstly, these observations directly corroborate Kehoe's story. White Sands Missile Range actually was tracking two unidentified objects in low-Earth orbit. But it also contradicts just about everything else we know about the historic and scientific record. These two quote-unquote natural satellites never show up again in any of the literature on asteroids and near-Earth objects. Given that the moon is regarded as the Earth's only permanent natural satellite, these two mini-moons should have been a major astrophysical discovery.

29:27I'm talking national news major. Yet we never heard about these two objects again. Perhaps strangest of all, in the official Near Earth Satellite Project's final report, these two objects aren't even mentioned. Not only that, but the report concludes that there are no natural satellites orbiting the Earth. But if that was true, if there were really no natural satellites, then what the hell were these two unknowns? zones. Perhaps most remarkably, the most important U.S. government documents surrounding UFOs from exactly when the Palomar Observatory was making these observations in the early 50s, quite literally refers to objects with metallic and light-reflecting surfaces that were flat on the bottom.

30:14So the Air Force and CIA documents at the time described objects that exactly sound like the mirror-like features Beatrice's data implies. These documents include the 1947 Twining Memo, the 1948 Project Sign Analysis, and the CIA's analysis of the 1952 DC UFO flyover, along with Blue Book lead Captain Edward J. Ruppelt's analysis and more. UFOs are consistently described as light-reflecting, luminous, shiny, metallic objects, characteristics that would likely show up as light transients on astronomical plates like the Palomar Observatories.

31:24Have you tried to corroborate your findings from the Palomar Observatory? Because people maybe forever will try to say it's plate defects, even though plate defects aren't going to be biased towards, you know, what's not near its shadow and where the sun is hitting. That doesn't make any sense. Unless they are intelligent plate defects. Unless they're intelligent. They move around on the plate just to avoid a shadow. So they're the real conspiracy theorists. The plate defects people are, you know, they're in this, yeah, intelligent plate defects. Exactly. Have you tried to look at other observatory data, other plates from the 50s to cross-reference that data against the Palomar Observatory?

32:03We really want to do it. It's a big project because every time you try to, let's say, look at a new plate collection, it's a big extraction. like the whole process to look through the place, even the digital ones. It's a project for maybe two years or so. So I hope I will get maybe a postdoctoral researcher to help to do this. A lot of people watching this might be asking, oh, it's convenient that Beatrice, who was interested in UFOs, is finding UFOs. How would you respond to those people? Because the way you're describing it, to me, it's kind of undeniable from a first principles viewpoint that this is worthy of investigation.

32:50And it's very clear. It's called a scientific method. You have a hypothesis. When you build the LHC to look for the X boson, they also have a hypothesis in the beginning. When they look for a particular particle, they know what they are looking for. Is it there or not? Yes, that's right. It's a scientific method. Why should UFOs or alien life be an exclusion? I mean... That's a beautiful way to put it. The scientific method involves the interplay between hypotheses and testing. And if you can't even have the hypothesis that there could be other life or other objects that we don't detect out there, you're not going to obviously find it.

33:29Of course. Yeah. So if you go very generally and you look for UFOs and you start looking, I mean, I've seen some astronomers suggesting that you should just look without any hypothesis and classify things like you're classifying butterflies. I think you're not going to find anything. Well, obviously. Because you have no hypothesis, you don't target your experiment, and you are going to invest years into that, and you might have a great catalog of things, but I'm not interested in the catalog. I want to ask the question, I want to design the experiment. Of course, you're going to have a lot of pitfalls, things that can go wrong.

34:08It's all trial and error. We're learning continuously. But this is what I want to do. I want to test the question, I want to do the experiment, and I want to analyze the data and see what is the outcome. And it's a great example you used. You said LHC, which is the Large Hadron Collider, which is CERN, this big particle accelerator. The Higgs field, I believe, was predicted in the 70s, and they actually discovered it much later, obviously, with the Large Hadron Collider. So it's a perfect example of you need to be open or knowledgeable about the thing you're looking for before you find it. It's not just science is not like remove your brain and you're just like an instrument or a sensor.

34:47You have to target your sensor, you know, against something. And so that's what you're doing. And here's where I think things get even more exciting for people like me who have been into UFOs for a very long time and have long known about this connection between UFOs and nuclear detonations. I mean, it's a ubiquitous phenomena. There's a great book by a journalist named Robert Hastings called UFOs and Nukes, and it documents the global widespread phenomena of UFOs showing up around nuclear installations, nuclear civilian energy grids, and nuclear weapons facilities. You have 167 Q-cleared missile-based security personnel, radar operators, guys that work at these bases who are basically hired to protect the crown jewels of defense.

35:38And they have to report if they're taking, you know, Tylenol or ibuprofen. Like, they literally have to be the picture of mental health. And they all say they see UFOs, saucers, Tic Tacs. And so you found that there might actually be a connection between nuclear and UFOs in space. So my colleague, Stephen Brewell, he has been leading a study. I'm co-author on this paper. So he has used the sample from the Spanish Virtual Observatory, the same sample that we used for the Umbra test, exactly the same thing. And he has tested a hypothesis of that there's a correlation in time between our transients and nuclear bomb tests.

36:16And he finds a correlation. It's weak, but it's there, and it's statistically significant. He also finds a correlation between UFOs and nukes and between UFOs and transients. And all of them are statistically significant. So you have this triad, UFOs, nukes and transients. Wow. And is it specifically nuclear detonations? Yes. So it's the timing of nuclear detonation. Yes. Within a day, you see this increase in transients. As you know, on American Alchemy, we cover a lot of technology that goes beyond human limits. This is about technology that helps the body catch up and feel good. I'm talking about the iRestore LED face mask, a red light therapy system that uses clinical grade wavelengths to boost skin cell energy production.

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38:27I approached Beatrice via email and I said, you know, what do you think of trying to explore this further? and she was nice enough to agree to do a Zoom meeting and we started talking about it. And she became very excited about the possibility of systematically looking at this, which she had not really thought about doing before. And we kind of came up with a plan for how to do it. And over the course of the past year, compiled this enormous database with 2 ,700 days in it. And for each day we recorded, was there a nuclear test that day? There were like 134 over that period of time. Was there a transient that day?

39:11And transients were only seen on about 300 days out of those 2 ,700. And then we looked, is there a relationship between those and a relationship with UAP sightings in the old Center for UFO Studies UFOCAT database, which covers that period of time? And, you know, I was shocked. We got a really interesting finding that was highly significant statistically. And I double checked it, triple checked it, and then reached out to Beatrice. She was very excited. And we immediately started writing it up for a paper, which was actually just accepted this week at a journal called Scientific Reports. That's amazing.

39:54Congratulations. So how strong is the correlation that you found between the transients and nuclear tests? Let me put that two ways. So statistically, there is an 8 in 1 ,000 chance that this is an error, which means it's pretty unlikely that it's an error. And then the other way to look at it is in terms of percentages. So out of those 2 ,700 days, if there's no nuclear test, there's a transient on 11 % of those days. But if there's been a nuclear test the day before, then it's almost 19 % of those days have a transient. So that 11 versus 19 is about a 68 % increase in risk for a transient if you've had a nuclear test.

40:41And so when you're documenting all these nuclear tests, these are tests presumably at the Nevada test site, which turned into Area 51, maybe the Marshall Islands, or like those sorts of nuclear tests. And then, you know, maybe whatever Russia was doing with the Tsar bomb in Kazakhstan, that sort of thing. Yeah, that is all true. It's Kazakhstan, there's some British tests in Australia, and then the U.S. tests in New Mexico and in the Pacific. That's right. There's WUMERA test range, which the head of the nuclear division actually in Australia, the joint intelligence organization, was a guy named Harry Turner, and he was obsessed with UFOs.

41:22And so I think it's probably not a coincidence that he was overseeing a lot of those nuclear tests. But yeah, that's fascinating. Is there any way to geofence the transients to maybe correlate it even more tightly? I think in principle, there is the possibility of doing kind of looking at general directions, because all of these that we've looked at so far were taken from California at the Palomar, Mount Palomar Observatory. There are plates from that same era that are taken at other observatories like the Vatican Observatory. And if we could get access to digitized plates from some of these other locations, I would think we'd be some ability to kind of triangulate on those days when you get a transient that coincides with the nuclear test and may be able to identify roughly what direction that was in.

42:20So right now, we haven't been able to do that, though. This would be a really big deal, I think, if the entire consensus sort of accepted it, because already you have people like Robert Hastings documenting 160-plus Q-cleared ICBM security personnel, radar operators, guys at nuclear bases with no incentive to lie, no histrionic streak in their personalities. Often they're tested, actually, for being sound of mind. They're on what's called the PRP, Personal Reliability Program. They have to be inherently, you know, kind of credible witnesses. And they're all seeing UFOs. And what your study does is it almost implies, possibly, that these are coming from space.

43:07They're not just showing up, you know, locally at the Air Force Base. Yeah. So here's the pieces of information that I like to point out when I'm talking to people about this. And I have to say, a few years ago, I would think I was crazy for saying this, but these are just statistical facts. So Beatrice has shown that these transients, the number of transients drops dramatically when they are in an area where the Earth's shadow would be. So that indicates that they are reflective objects in orbit. They're not plate defects. our findings indicate that these things were in the sky the day after a nuclear test and they weren't there the day before so somehow based on a nuclear test going off within 24 hours you have these objects whatever they are appearing in geosynchronous orbit this episode is brought to you by Google Chrome.

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44:50Absolutely. Are there any kind of first order debunks that you've thought of when it applies to your findings? So like the first order debunk with Beatrice would be that these are plate defects. And I think she answered that pretty substantially with, you know, unless the plate defects are intelligently shifting themselves based on, you know, light patterns, it doesn't really make sense. Right. So do you have like a first order debunk that you've thought of or addressed or plan to address in the future? Yeah, so the things that are, and this is all pretty obvious, but the transients were identified using an automated system.

45:31It's not true AI, but it was an automated process conducted by a computer. And I know for a fact that some of those are errors because I've gone through, at this point, probably 100 of these transients manually, which is a lot of work. But you can compare and see why the computer thought it was a transient. And there are some things that are errors in there. So that is always a concern. but the thing is, like for example, with the nuclear tests, I looked at the transients that were seen the day after a nuclear test and for each of those dates that happened, I have manually confirmed that there was an actual real obvious transient, at least one of them, on that day.

46:19And that gave me more confidence that this isn't some weird error, some random pattern that we've capitalized on. So I know there's real transients in these days when the nuclear tests happened, but the debunk of it is, is it something local to the observatory, right? And what's interesting is the transients correlate not only with nuclear testing, but also show a small but statistically significant correlation with UAP reports from the general public. So on a day when there is a nuclear test, or see, day after a nuclear test, and there are UAP sightings, you get a much higher risk of a transient.

47:04So they all kind of are like a triangle. They're all together as one thing. And that's fascinating to me. And you can't explain that by anything that was local to the observatory or the film. Those associations wouldn't be there if it was plate defects or radiation effects, if it was the bomb casing, just let's say some bit of it survived, it's not going to sit in one place in the sky for 24 hours to be seen as a transient afterwards. So just none of the things I would think of make any sense. And, you know, as a psychologist, most of the research I do has a lot of error in it because you're basing it on what people tell you.

47:49And there's error in this data set, but it doesn't undo the fact that there is a real signal there that is clearly detectable and is actually quite large when it comes to the Nuclear Testing Association. Well, also, if you're doing kind of pointed error correction on the days that these, you know, transients seem to show up, then you're actually saying that 68 percent more likely, transients, nuclear, is a baseline statistic. And it's probably higher if there are errors in the entire data set, and there are probably more transients than we think. Yeah, same thing with the UAP sightings. A lot of error, a lot of those are prosaic things that just there was no ability to research them.

48:35So our plan, hopefully, is to use AI to try to clean the transient data, you know, train the AI to tell the difference between a bad plate or dust or a streak on the plate and a real transient. And what you just said is true, that if we do that successfully, we're going to get rid of the error and end up with more signal. And that should increase the associations we see. Now, I want to mention one thing, too, and this is just kind of an odd fact that I find interesting. is when we look at the data set, the last time we saw a correspondence between a nuclear test and a transient was March 17, 1956.

49:24Now, our study goes on for an entire year after that, and there are an additional 38 nuclear tests over the course of that year. Not a single time is a transient associated with the nuclear test at that point. So it was like, well, what happened suddenly in 1956? And I was reading an article that a guy named Larry Hancock with the SCU did where they were looking at sightings of UAP at nuclear facilities, like nuclear production facilities, nuclear plants, things like that. And what they found was high levels of activity from 1949 until 1953, and then it just stopped. Even though more facilities came online, suddenly they weren't seeing UAP anymore.

50:13And it just got me thinking. It almost looks like whatever it is was showing an intelligent interest in all things nuclear up until between 1953 and 1956, and then suddenly wasn't anymore, at least for a while. That was kind of odd to think about. I don't know what that means, but that was intriguing. Yeah, I'm trying to think of what happened in 56 or 57. I mean, that's when NICAP formed, which was the first civilian UFO research program. That's when the International Geophysical Year happened, where Antarctica became a no-fly zone, and a bunch of scientists, you know, internationally met together to discuss things of this nature.

51:03So maybe there's something around that. I believe that was 56, 57. Maybe. But I don't know. Yeah, and if these are, we always have to consider the possibility that there is some very odd form of plasma life. You know, I don't know what that would be, but some organism that may give the appearance of this that can hover in the sky and appear like a transient and might be interested in nuclear testing. But it is hard to conceive of any kind of organism that would be able to do what these things seem to do. Yeah, absolutely. So how many transients are we talking about total in this data set? It is surprisingly large, keeping in mind the error, but there are over 107 ,000 over that, what is it, eight-year period.

51:56Okay, wow, that's remarkable. So like a little over 12 ,000 a year. Yeah, so if we think that 90 % of these are error, let's just be conservative, we've still got over 10 ,000 things that were in orbit reflective prior to the first satellite that seemed to be interested in nuclear tests in some way. Do you have a sense of the error rate? Because if the error rate is 10 to 20%, I'd say far more confident in your study. If it's like 90%, I might be a little more, okay, let's do the error correction. I think the best way to think about that is something that Beatrice has talked about, which is when she looks at the transients and where they are and calculates which transients are in sunlight and which are in shadow, when you look at the data that way, in the shadow, the number of transients drops by about 30%, right?

52:55So that kind of presents the lower limit for error would be maybe about, you know, 30 % of these being real transients, 70 % error. I don't think it's actually that high, just having manually inspected these. But it would make sense that you'd get more transients in the light than on the shadow side right if they're in orbit yep so okay so i see what you're saying so like up to 30 percent but even that like you'd expect some you'd expect this you'd expect some delta between those two so it's really maybe up to 25 or something i don't know what the right mental bottle there's no way for us to tell at this point exactly.

53:37Yeah, it sounds like as a best way to corroborate this, just get as many observatories like their data and kind of cross check all of them, right? Yes. So if anybody out there has access to digitized plates from places beyond Palomar, please talk to us because I think there's some very interesting things we could do with that. And one more thing that I like about this result is that again it disagrees with the plate defects unless they are intelligent yes exactly if there's any sort of correlation between nuclear and ufos it's like so even if weak yeah yeah so the emulsion issues are somehow biased towards you know nuclear detonations like that that all of a sudden becomes much crazier as a null hypothesis than just admitting that there are these unidentified objects yeah people could of course say oh it's just cosmic rays then or it's something, you know, it's some high energy particle, but you're not, you're also having a correlation with UFOs.

54:36And plus, if it would be cosmic ray particles, they wouldn't vanish in the Earth's shadow. No, they wouldn't. Also. At 42 ,000. They wouldn't vanish in the Earth's shadow. They also wouldn't be systematically tracked by, you know, maybe other military organizations, you know, while civilian facing organizations, they're sort of, you know, systematically removing them. So is this data that you received from these plates, from the Palomar Observatory, is that used in other serious scientific investigations? Do other astronomers look at that data? They are used by lots of astronomers. So if there are systematic plate defects in what you're seeing, then this would discount any study online that involves this Palomar Observatory, This is Palomar data.

55:25And you're saying that it's used by a lot of serious astronomers. No, but what is usually done and always has been historically done is that people only use the images that, let's say, the objects that can be found on multiple images, and then you get rid of all the transients and the plate defects. Okay. Are there other examples of plate defects causing this number of transients? Not what I know. Okay. So you've never heard of an example like that? No. But these intelligent plate defects are correlating with UFO events, with nuclear bomb tests. They are also hiding in the Earth's shadow and they're sometimes being aligned.

56:06They are remarkable. Yeah, that's a pretty remarkable set of plate defects. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web. like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+.

56:46In 1961, legendary astronomer Frank Drake Drake started Project OSMA, the first ever organized search for interstellar radio signals. Drake scrounged together an antenna and dish using scrapped radar parts from World War II and pointed the whole apparatus skywards in hopes of intercepting an alien transmission. In doing so, he initiated the largest-scale search for intelligent life our astronomical community has ever engaged in. SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, had begun its 70-plus year life. Outside of a few unresolvable blips, like the famous WOW signal discovered by Jerry Amen at Ohio State, no alien radio signals have ever been detected in a repeatable, consistent way.

57:36Nonetheless, the search is still in its infancy. One study literally calculated that the volume of the galaxy that SETI has scanned so far is like comparing the volume of a hot tub of water to all of the Earth's oceans and asking, where are all of the fish?

57:59Even back in the early 60s, at the start of SETI, some of its scientists were already exploring radical alternative possibilities, even ones that went far beyond basic radio signals. One such outside-the-box thinker was electrical engineer Ronald Bracewell and his concept of a communicating probe. Let's say you're trying to have a phone call with alien broadcasters in Epsilon Botes, some 203 light-years away. You send a message, hey, what's up? 406 years after you sent the original message comes the response, nothing much, how about you? The point is, it would take 406 years just to exchange those two sentences.

58:44Interstellar radio beacons don't exactly make for engaging real-time conversation. The speed of light is the fastest thing we know, but it's also painfully slow. Here's where Bracewell saw an intriguing concept. Instead of waiting around for radio signals to cross interstellar distances, why not send a physical robotic probe to the star system of interest? Even if you couldn't have a real-time conversation with someone from another star, you could upload an automated messaging system, or even eventually your mind, into an interstellar spacecraft, which could then, upon arriving in orbit of the destination planet, after eons in the void, initiate a real-time conversation with the local lifeforms.

59:29But what would the first message be? How would one even go about starting such an interspecies dialogue? Bracewell's idea was simple. You'd intercept whatever radio transmissions the locals were already sending out, and then send those radio transmissions back to them. Bracewell took his speculation one step further by considering that such a probe may already be lurking somewhere in the dark recesses of our solar system, waiting to reach out at any moment.

1:00:03One may recall a relevant scene in Carl Sagan's classic novel Contact, which follows SETI astronomer Ellie Arroway as she intercepts a genuine extraterrestrial signal sent from aliens in the Vega star system. In a wild plot twist, the initial contents of the message come as some shock. Hitler's speech at the 1936 Olympics was Earth's first ever television broadcast to break through the ionosphere and reach space. So in the novel, Hitler is also the first representative of humanity the Vega civilization sees. Not exactly a good first look.

1:00:45In a manner just like Bracewell's concept, the Vagan aliens decide to respond by bouncing Hitler's speech back to its initial source, encoding instructions inside of it to build an interstellar wormhole device. You're under control, do you read me?

1:01:07It's worth remembering that the solar system is a very big place. It's also a very ancient place. Given the vastness of space and time in our solar system alone, where would any such a probe park itself. The Earth-Moon Lagrange points would be the ideal choice. Think of Lagrange points as pockets of stability, where gravity, rotation, and orbital motion all balance out, and objects within these pockets stay still. If our solar system truly is awash in alien time capsules and artifacts, they'd accumulate in Lagrange points, like a grand celestial treasure chest for space-bound archaeologists. If you wanted to send a probe to monitor our planet for millions or even billions of years, the Lagrange points are a great strategy for playing such an observational long game.

1:01:58Okay, but Jesse, isn't this episode supposed to be all about hard data? Why all the sci-fi speculation? Well, it so happens there's a long, well-documented, unexplained radio phenomenon that yearly pattern matches to many of these ideas and predictions. I'm talking about long-delay echoes, or LDEs. The story begins back in 1927. Norwegian shortwave radio operators began to notice something odd.

1:02:29Shortwave radio naturally travels around the world and makes its way back to its source, usually creating an echo one-seventh of a second after the initial signal. This is completely normal and expected. One-seventh of a second is how long it takes to travel around the entire Earth's circumference at the speed of light. Radio waves, of course, travel at the speed of light. But for some transmissions, a ghostly echo would follow. Sometimes up to 30 seconds later. Much too late to be a normal shortwave radio echo. The radio operators who first noticed this phenomenon were completely baffled. Norwegian physicist Carl Stormer quickly got to work trying to explain these mysterious echoes.

1:03:14To this day, a definitive answer remains elusive. A vast majority of LDEs are likely caused by radio waves bouncing through plasma in Earth's ionosphere. A few are more mysterious, perhaps even echoing from the Earth-Moon Lagrange points. Some of the longer delay times match the travel time to these Lagrange points. And one study even found a statistically significant increase in LDEs when the Earth-Moon L5 Lagrange point was above the horizon. Just consider for a moment how closely long delay echoes resemble Bracewell's concept for interstellar communication, taking local transmissions and bouncing them back.

1:04:00This, coupled with a possible origin in Earth-Moon Lagrange points, paints a picture eerily similar to the long hypothesized notions of what contact could look like. Could some of these echoing Bracewell probes be what Beatrice has detected on the Palomar plates?

1:04:28When you spend time with other credentialed astronomers, after rounds of them questioning you on possible plate defects, them doing mathematical calculations, is anybody still hold out as skeptical after spending weeks plus with you and diving into the data i mean the only one i can comment about now is my referee okay and i think he sent he or she is sending bad comments that are kind of constructive asking for more tests and i think people are always going to be skeptical there is like when you say your rep your referee who is What does that mean? So we are working through the revision of the paper, and it's undergoing a review process, which means you're getting back a lot of questions, whether you're questioning your methods, etc.

1:05:21And I think this process is very important because it helps you to test your method. And it also gives you confidence about the method when the results stay robust. and in general when I interact with astronomers I think the first reaction is like it's you know it can't be well it's just my first reaction as well like it can't be but if you see it then it's there and I suspect that scientists are going to be slower with accepting certain results I think the ontological shock among scientists is going to be more brutal than among the general population. Yeah. Because we are very self-confident about that we are the smartest.

1:06:09For sure. In the universe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Are you trying to get this published in like a prestigious academic journal? We're trying the traditional way through peer review. It's difficult because it's, of course, it's a touchy topic. It's touchy results. Yeah. And there's going to be a lot of skepticism. But the way how I'm seeing it is that we might not be able to convert anyone at the moment, but we can make our data publicly available so that anyone can go there and they will have the access to the code as well. And then they can get their own ontological shock. Why should only I have it?

1:06:47That's the question. Why did you decide to go public before getting this published via peer review? Let's say like this. I know there's going to be a lot of pressure on me. I already have experienced it from people that are trying to like save me by asking me not to talk about it or like no. That's so weird. It has been a really unpleasant process in some ways. Why would they be saving you? Yeah, because they think they save me by, they think, okay, if you go out with this, there's going to be this and that and all these horrible things are going to happen to you, etc, etc. And I know that it's going to be tough with the pressure.

1:07:31And I thought it's more fair to put out the results, even the preprint early on, so that people can see this is where my thoughts are at right now. Because then they might also see how things develop, what happens, what happens to the results, how they changed. it might also be a safer way when it comes to pressure because if you don't put it out and it leaks out instead that a lot of people know about it but they are still not official there's a bigger risk that someone will come and try to really stop me already now people have been kind of some of them have been a little bit unpleasant to deal with have you been approached by aerospace or military or people with intelligence backgrounds i have been approached by some people I suspect have it.

1:08:20Okay. And that have been a little bit scary to talk to. Okay. I mean, after that, the result was out. I have also been approached by very, very nice people with that kind of background who have been instead of supportive. Yes. And I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For me, it's important to meet people who are supportive. There are good and bad people everywhere. But to me, it's interesting that academia is trying to throw the kitchen sink of skepticism and they don't know what to think about it. And, you know, God willing, you get this published, you know, in this academic prestigious paper.

1:09:00It's been really scary, especially like with people who are some of the people who I thought were my friends. And then they come back and they comment something and they try to push you down maximum. them and you say hey we shared so much and we talk so much and i've been so vulnerable with this person and then they try to stop you from making an interview or talk about your work or something like that and that's where i just why is this why is this happening it's a scary result i understand yeah it's a super scary result but i think it's an exciting result it's that scary Well, it's exciting and scary, but it still has to be out there.

1:09:42And if it turns out that it was some mistake in the calculation later, okay, then it happens. Shit happens. We are all humans. I'm also human. And I'm also learning and all this stuff. But the ideas will be out. The methods we develop will be out. Someone else who might have better methods than me might use the same ideas for the Earth's shadow. alignments, pre-Sputnik plates, combine them, and maybe we'll find really great support for what they say. The value of any scientific endeavor is how against the updating of the consensus it is. So if you have something that's totally not correlated from what most astronomers think, that's the most valuable thing that you could ever look into.

1:10:26And so the idea that you shouldn't look into that is to me insane and it's uh people who want to defend basically the establishment and the status quo and you know it's crazy how we replay the same cycles over again but you know galileo you're like a modern galileo or something so literally in some ways because you're looking at you know it's historical data but it's through a telescope my hope is that the second if we get it published and we will make these data sets publicly available and people can simply go in and check it for themselves. And they can reply through by writing a paper, not by doing some, I don't know, just complaining to me they can write a paper.

1:11:08So you're open sourcing this for everybody to be able to come to the same conclusion. I want people to go in and do this themselves because I also want a confirmation from the outside. That's beautiful. So that's how I'm thinking. Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12.

1:11:40The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple-conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12. I do think it is telling, perhaps, that academia is more like disinterested or skeptical. And they're saying, don't ruin your reputation. And then you have aerospace, military, those sorts of people are coming to you. And they're saying, you know, they're expressing more interest. Almost as if maybe they know a thing or two about what you've already found. which has been my experience in many things that I've found when it comes to exotic propulsion or UFOs is the military and aerospace are often like there's something there you know and then academia has no idea how to even conceptualize what you're talking about because they're in this kind of ivory tower citadel which is kind of separated from reality.

1:12:34I think there's like I think there's a certain amount of like mismatches one realizes when one is interacting with academics. I had recently someone telling me like, oh, every astronomer wants to be the first one finding alien life. And you're doing a mistake. You're doing the same mistake as, and he read some names. And I'm just like, yeah, he was upset over that I wrote the paper and that I'm going, like, that I might publish it. And I'm just thinking like, I'm not out here to be the first in something, because if this result is correct, then I'm far from the first. There are thousands or ten thousands of people who know about it.

1:13:13There are millions of UFO reports. There's nothing about discovery here. The only thing that would happen is that there is scientific data confirming something that is already known. And probably there's loads of results that are classified related to this. There's nothing related to discovery being first. Well, this is how science moves forward. If you read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he says science moves forward more due to politics than due to truth. And so if you think about who was the first person that hypothesized that we live in a heliocentric universe that revolves around the sun or solar system, it was the universe at the time, was actually a guy named Aristarchus, who was a third century Greek.

1:13:56Nobody believed him and he was forgotten. And then in the 16th century, you have Copernicus saying, you know, we live in a heliocentric universe. And then, you know, obviously, Galileo helps kind of see that through a telescope. But the point is, is that people can be not listened to for the longest amount of time and then posthumously be right and get no credit. And then it's the right time, it's the right place, and the discovery gets born. but it's way more about the social zeitgeist, people being receptive and ready than it is purely truth. I agree. And also, what about somebody at the Palomar Observatory?

1:14:36A great example is I interviewed you last time and you talked about Dorit Hofleit, who is this astronomer who ended up being a very well-respected astronomer herself. But at the time, she was kind of an assistant professor, I think, for Don Menzel at Harvard, at their observatory. And she talked about Don Menzel, who is basically as prominent in UFO lore as any astronomer or astrophysicist there is, who was privy to classified Navy and, you know, all sorts of data, military data. And he was a big UFO debunker. And he was caught destroying astronomical plates from the early 1950s. It's amazing, the whole thing.

1:15:16And it happened two months after the Washington 1952 flap. And by the way, that's when we have our interesting transient cases too. There you go. And then connect that now, the story with Don Mansell, to the fact that the Vera Rubin telescope is going to remove a lot of classified satellites and other objects. And now also that we know that there's a background of uncorrelated targets that are classified also, as far as I understand. I mean, that seems like a pattern to me and very worthy of... As far as I understand, that's what I understood from my source at NASA. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, no, we can investigate and look into it.

1:15:54I would love to learn more about this and check exactly where it happens, where do they remove them from which calculation. And I would like to learn more about it. And can you find a list from the early 1960s somewhere? Yeah. And not only like 10 of them, you want something like thousands of them.

1:16:14In light of Dr. Villareal's latest paradigm shifting results, perhaps we should at least consider the possibility of non-human technology. We can also examine the testimony of the legendary French godfather of ufology himself, Dr. Jacques Vallée. Young Jacques was working as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory as part of its nascent satellite tracking program. One night on July 11, 1961, he and his colleagues noticed something truly bizarre, an unidentified object orbiting the Earth. The object was in retrograde orbit, going the opposite direction to the Earth's rotation. To unpack why this was so weird, we need a bit of Rocket Science 101.

1:16:57Many of the world's top launch facilities are located along the equator. And no, dear alchemists, it's not for some freaky symbolic occult ritual. It's actually to get an extra boost from the Earth's natural rotation. If the Earth spins on its axis and your rocket shoots off in the same direction as that spin, it takes some of that momentum with it on its way up. To go against the Earth's rotation and enter a backwards orbit is much harder. As baffling as this mystery object's backwards trajectory was, it also may be a clue to possible intent. Retrograde trajectories often show up in polar orbits.

1:17:38In a polar orbit, the satellite passes directly over the North and South Pole, making it the only orbit capable of imaging the entire Earth's surface as the planet turns below. In other words, if these objects were indeed from an alien civilization, they would have been peering down from a perfect vantage point to survey the Earth. Some try to explain away Jacques' orbital mystery sighting by invoking the Corona Program, a series of highly secretive CIA-sponsored satellites first launched in 1960, kicking off the modern era of orbital espionage. The corona satellites did have a nearly polar orbit.

1:18:16However, it's a very insufficient explanation. As Vallée pointed out in a later interview, Later, I found out that other observatories had made exactly the same observation, and that in fact American tracking stations had photographed the same thing and couldn't identify it either. It was as bright as the star Sirius. You couldn't miss it. It didn't reappear in successive weeks. Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. So if this was an espionage satellite, they weren't doing a great job of hiding it. Corona satellites were deliberately built with less reflective materials than others at the time, making it extremely incompatible with the exceptional brightness that Jacques reports.

1:18:59Jacques also mentioned that the object did not reappear in successive weeks, also strange and inconsistent with the Corona satellite explanation. What happened next would shock young Jacques to his very core. His superior at the observatory, Paul Muller, got a hold of the data. The next morning, Muller, who behaved like a petty army officer, simply confiscated the tape and destroyed it. Jacques would later recount realizing that scientists were human beings like the rest of us. When their reputations were threatened, when their ideas were challenged, they reacted by eliminating the data. If the data didn't fit their preconceived notions, they just got rid of it.

1:19:39In many ways, this was the inciting incident which sent Jacques on his lifelong hero's journey to the furthest edges of the unexplained. It also parallels the heated response Beatrice now faces from many of her peers, and it shows that her anomalous observations are in good company. They don't exist in a vacuum. Do you feel like the world is ready to accept this? I think there is no such moment it just happens when it happens on the other hand like you say sometimes some knowledge doesn't land well because it came in the wrong moments I don't know but now we have all the whistleblowers coming out or that they came out and they gave really great testimonies all these people who have talked about their experiences many of them are really really like really really intelligent brilliant healthy in all ways yes and it's like people who want like role model people no we're getting to i think a tipping point even on my little youtube show you know it's like we've probably broken maybe 15 16 of these people with again the intersection of very credible backgrounds green berets air force combat control recruits national geospatial agency elder statesman advisor to the president in the case of Harold Malmgren, you have all these people saying the same thing.

1:21:09I just interviewed a chief of aerospace medicine, one of the top doctors. He was attached to NASA. He was at the Air Force. He was a senior doctor there. And he saw something. So it's like, we're getting to a tipping point, I think, where it's like, okay, one thing is a campfire story but like you know a hundred like what how do you explain that away i mean it starts to get really interesting i mean 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 yeah and that's my impression i'm hopelessly curious and i cannot i cannot stop once i i mean once you see this kind of results It's not like you can just give up and say, no, no, I should go and do some classical astronomy to support my living.

1:22:01You just can't. It's also like something you become dependent on, trying to satisfy that curiosity. You ask a new question you have to know. I think it's just going to take time for this to get out there. I think when people actually see this published and read it, if they think about it, I think they're going to be very intrigued by this. So it's going to be interesting to see what, if anything, this changes in terms of the way people think about science of UAP. But I know there are many other interesting scientific projects going on in the UAP area. And I think in the next, you know, five or ten years, it's going to be night and day from what it has been in the past.

1:22:42And we're going to start seeing a lot more peer-reviewed studies, assuming journals are willing to take them. That's always the concern, is because of the topic, a lot of journals don't even want to touch it.

1:22:58We've spent most of this episode examining the data, but with results that so thoroughly challenge our existing modalities and worldviews, it's worth stepping back and trying to grasp at a bigger picture. So what does all of this mean, and what are the deeper implications? As with any cosmic shift in perspective, Carl Sagan's pale blue dot comes to mind. Our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged. But what does this all mean if our pale blue dot is being intently studied by other little pale dots? Pale dots that fully surround it.

1:23:38What new meanings do Sagan's words carry if we're actually not a lonely and obscure speck, but instead so enveloped in cosmic company that tens of thousands of alien satellites were studying our planet before we could even launch one of our own? I can't answer that in this video, but maybe trying to contemplate those questions is a next step in our collective evolution. And if you ever do find yourself staring up and watching a starry night sky, just ask yourself, who or what might be staring back? I want to thank Dr. Beatrice Villarreal for her time and for sharing her remarkable findings. I also want to thank Dr.

1:24:18Steven Bruhl. Until next time, I'm Jesse Michaels and this is American Alchemy. Alchemist, did you enjoy that? Well, here's the thing. That episode was just the tip of the iceberg. If you want the full picture, head over to the American Alchemy magazine we just launched on Substack. That's where we deep dive into all sorts of crazy topics that we don't have time to fit into every video, with weekly articles exploring all of the strange, forgotten, and conspiratorial corners of space, history, and high weirdness. So join up today at our free or paid tiers on Substack. I am including the full link in the description of this video.

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