← American Alchemy with Jesse Michels
American Alchemy with Jesse Michels
Top Astronomer: “I Found 100,000 UFOs Above Earth!” (ft. Beatriz Villarroel)
01:28:28
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- [00:02]
Jesse Michaels
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- [00:31]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
These short flashes and not streaks, they are associated with things that are extremely flat and extremely reflective.
- [00:39]
Jesse Michaels
Wow.
- [00:40]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Like mirrors.
- [00:41]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Like mirrors. This is from the Palomar Observatory before we had satellites in space. How many of these transients did you find?
- [00:53]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Our original sample is around 105,000 transients from just the northern hemisphere.
- [01:00]
Jesse Michaels
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal holds a PhD in astrophysics. She's won the L' Oreal UNESCO prize for Women in Science. She's currently an associate professor at Stockholm University where her research runs the gambit from active galactic nuclei to transient phenomena in the search for intelligent life.
- [01:20]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
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.
- [01:28]
Jesse Michaels
In other words, Dr. Villarre is someone who really knows her when it comes to the night skies and cosmos.
- [01:36]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
My name is Beatriz Villaruel and I'm a very curious person.
- [01:39]
Jesse Michaels
And it's precisely these illustrious mainstream astronomical accomplishments which make her latest paradigm shattering results all the more shocking and threatening to the establishment.
- [01:52]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Doctor, let me first say that your reputation.
- [01:53]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
First, could you ask the gentleman with.
- [01:55]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
The firearms to wait outside?
- [01:57]
Jesse Michaels
Dr. Villarreal has found over 100,000 light reflecting unidentified objects on the plates of the Palomar Observatory, the most prominent observatory in use in the 1950s. The only thing is, she detected these objects before the first satellite Sputnik ever orbited Earth. You heard me right. A conventionally renowned astronomer has detected over 100,000 UFOs before humans ever put anything in space. And the debunkers are flailing in their attempts to take her down.
- [02:34]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Do you feel like the world is ready to accept this?
- [02:41]
Jesse Michaels
In this exclusive long form interview, we address it all. We stress test her results and even speak to a PhD from Vanderbilt, Dr. Steven Bruell, who's followed up on Beatrice's study and correlates these UFO appearances with nuclear tests.
- [03:01]
Dr. Steven Bruel
The transients correlate not only with nuclear testing, but also show a small but statistically significant correlation with UAP reports from the general public.
- [03:12]
Jesse Michaels
Whoa. If you've seen our show or read the work of the great Robert Hastings, you'll know that the nuclear UFO connection is widespread, ongoing and global. We've even interviewed a top presidential advisor at the end of his life who admitted to holding UFO material that came from a nuclear detonation in the Marshall islands in late 1963. That's amazing, but this is unprecedented. We've never correlated those anecdotal sightings with the astronomical record. What's even more is that all of this work has received peer review in mainstream astronomical journals. In other words, she has finally caught the white whale in UFO academic validation.
- [04:02]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
And then they can get their own ontological shock. Why should only I have it?
- [04:08]
Jesse Michaels
So strap yourselves in, leave the Earth's atmosphere behind, and prepare to never see the night sky the same way again. As we welcome this week's returning Swedish alchemist, the amazing Dr. Beatrice Villarreal.
- [04:25]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Different parts of the brain have different.
- [04:27]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Activities, but you know that, don't you?
- [04:34]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Maybe you should interview.
- [04:44]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Beatriz Villarreal. Thank you so much for being here. A return guest on American Alchemy. I couldn't be more excited to have you because you had discovered some amazing things the last time we spoke. But this time you have discovered things that I think are so ontologically shocking and are hard to kind of compute for the average person because they wholesale change our worldview and our understanding of the Earth, its place in the cosmos, objects surrounding the Earth. And so I'm just so grateful for you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for spending time with us in Stockholm.
- [05:24]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
It's a pleasure. And it's a pleasure to have you here in Stockholm.
- [05:27]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Walk me through the day that you saw that there were maybe, you know, all these transients, these objects that we're basically calling UFOs surrounding the Earth. What happened that day?
- [05:42]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Wow. I've been working with transients for a while. I think a lot of people know about this transient work. We have been looking for, like, multiple transients in images. Sometimes you can see multiple of them appearing and vanishing within half an hour.
- [05:56]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
What is a transient?
- [05:57]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
So imagine a light flash or something that changes in the sky. You have all these stars in the skies, you have galaxies. But some things change their luminosity and sometimes they change it on a short time. In our case, we saw things that appeared and vanished within half an hour. And we had two such examples that were statistically significant. One is five objects on a narrow band, and it's from the 27th of July, 1952. And then my colleague Enrique Solano in Spain, he discovered another such really beautiful example with three super bright, beautiful stars. Is the most beautiful example of all we have. This One is from the 19th of July 1952. And then my colleague Dave Altman, who is the manager, media manager for Vasco, he said, do you know what happens or what happened on 19th of July 1952? I said, no, I wasn't around. So he introduced me to the Washington flap in Washington. Ghost like objects dart across the radar screen at the CAA traffic control center at National Airport for several hours.
- [07:06]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
This was a national event. It was all over the press. It was in, you know, newspapers saying saucers on the White House lawn. It prompted a call between Truman and Edward J. Ruppelt, who was the head of Blue Book at the time. And it was, you had this Washington.
- [07:21]
Jesse Michaels
Invasion or D.C. flyover where there were.
- [07:24]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Saucers all over D.C. at the time. And it was specific, was July of 1952, but it was specifically two weekends. It was the 19th and 20th and it was the 26th and 27th. So I find that absolutely remarkable.
- [07:36]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
So there I started understanding like there is something more to these transients. And at the same time, I've been having all this discussion for several years with people who think, no, it's just plate defects. You're trying to see systematics in plate defects.
- [07:51]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Real quick, just for the audience, what is a plate? And why are other astronomers saying that you're only seeing plate defects when you're looking for these flashes of light?
- [08:02]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
In the old times, in the 50s, in order to make a picture of the sky with a telescope, you used big glass plates. Big, they were big and heavy. They had an emulsion on top of it. And then they tried to observe the sky. And they made a survey observing the sky, like the Palomar Observatory, for example, and Harvard, they, they took images of the skies with these plates. And these images, they have been digitized. So even if they're somewhere in an archive, then you today can access the digital images. And it was assumed or known, I don't anymore know if I should use known or assumed that many of these dots that could be there could be some kind of emulsion defects. And people thought, okay, so order to select a star or something like that, people normally took two images and only selected those that appeared on two images. But if you do that, you're missing a lot of short lived phenomena that might only be seen for a few minutes because then you miss all that. It's not gonna be in your samples. And astronomy is all about sample selection. The way how you define your sample, you need to think through the criteria very Carefully you start doing this research. Yes. So when we have been talking about this multiple transients that people say, oh, you're probably just running into plate defects that just happen to coincidentally look like stars.
- [09:31]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
And when you say emulsion, what does.
- [09:34]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
It mean, this chemistry you put on these plates?
- [09:38]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So the chemistry you put on the plates, when the light shows through it, you get almost like a stain or like a record, an image.
- [09:45]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Exactly.
- [09:46]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
A bubble of what was in the sky.
- [09:48]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Yeah, exactly. And they say, yeah, sorry, yeah, you get, if you have bad luck, you get a plate defect like a bottle or something like that. But if you have something real, then you will get a star.
- [09:58]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yes. And so you have these plates and they, they come from the Palomar Observatory.
- [10:02]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Those that I work with.
- [10:03]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
And was this a well respected observatory?
- [10:05]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Yes, it's one of the greatest ones. And Fritz Wicke was there and there were many very famous astronomers that were there. So yeah, so we are working with this stuff where people have, that people have been using for doing really great astronomy. Now we're going back and looking at these digitized images and of course I'm having my discussion with people thinking, ah, it's just plate defects. And then there's a simple way of testing it actually. How do you test it's much stronger? Well, one of the tests we did were these alignments where we still found things. But there's an even cooler way how you can test that. You can actually see if you have the same number of transients when you look outside the Earth's shadow or when you look inside the Earth's shadow. Because all the time the Earth casts a shadow, it's like a cone. And the further you are from the Earth, the narrower is this shadow. So my hypothesis was that these transients came from solar reflections at 42,164 km from the Earth or somewhere there around. And one of the ways how you can check it is to see are there more transients inside where you know the Earth's shadow is at a certain time or is it like fewer transients. And of course, for every transient we have the coordinate and we also have the time of the observation. So you can calculate is it inside Earth shadow or not. And if it would be plate defects, you would have no deficit. If it's 100% solar reflections, you will have zero transients there.
- [11:46]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yes.
- [11:46]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
And if you have that a part of them are real and a part of them are plate defects, then you will have a deficit. And you can basically estimate how big fraction of your objects that seem to be authentic. Of course. What do we do? We test this.
- [12:02]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yes.
- [12:03]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Because we have this code from a guy called guy near, so it's a public code. And then we have the transient sample from my colleague at the Spanish Virtual Observatory. So it's quite easy to test. You just insert the coordinates from the sample into the code and you count things, and guess what? You get a huge deficit.
- [12:24]
Jesse Michaels
Wow.
- [12:24]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
And that's when you start saying, like, did I do something wrong? And you start thinking, did I calculate the area of a circle on the sky correctly? And you start doing all kind of things just to test did I screw up?
- [12:38]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So. And for the audience. So you're basically showing that the Earth's shadow would not. Obviously a solar reflection wouldn't show up there.
- [12:47]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Exactly.
- [12:48]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So a real object, you know, that was in the, the way of the sun, you would get a solar reflection. A non real object, you wouldn't get anything. Right. And so what you're showing is that these are real solar reflections because there is a deficit in the Earth's shadow of these objects.
- [13:03]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Exactly. Because inside the Earth's shadow, if the sun doesn't reach, you're not going to get the reflection, while if your outside Earth shadow is going to reflect sunlight.
- [13:13]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So that's a remarkable finding because it shows that these are real objects. Because the idea that there are plate defects, that's not going to play favorites. You know, as far as the Earth's shadow, or not Earth shadow, it's just going to be evenly distributed throughout. A plate defect is a plate defect.
- [13:28]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Exactly. And it's possible that many of the transients we've been working with are plate defects, because we only see one, that there's a deficit of some of one third. So, yes, maybe there are a lot of plate defects in the samples, but you still have a 30% deficit or 30, 35%. It still means that 30 to 35% of the objects we are working with come from solar reflections and not any solar reflections. Because these flashes that we see and these short flashes and not streaks, they're associated with things that are extremely flat and extremely reflective.
- [14:01]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Wow.
- [14:02]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Like mirrors. And that makes it more fun.
- [14:04]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Like mirrors.
- [14:05]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Mirrors.
- [14:06]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Interesting.
- [14:07]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah.
- [14:07]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Not something, not. Not a stone, not a rock.
- [14:10]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Right.
- [14:10]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Not ice, not round, flat.
- [14:13]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
This is from the Palomar Observatory before we had satellites in space.
- [14:18]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Yes.
- [14:18]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So that's fascinating. And if you think about it, plate defects, again, would be even. You're gonna have some margin of error due to plate defects, maybe like you said, 30, 35%. But it's not going to be only you know where the sun is. That makes sense.
- [14:34]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Exactly.
- [14:36]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
So even if you would have 80% of like plate defects, you still would have a substantial fraction of the objects that seem to be real. And that's what counts. I would be happy if it would be 1%. But when you get like 30 to 35% and you say, am I calculating it correctly? You almost hope for it.
- [14:57]
Jesse Michaels
At this point in the interview, you might be wondering about the fact that Beatrice is looking at the most prominent astronomical observatory in use at the time. So why wasn't this discovered earlier and why haven't these findings been replicated? Well, a man who held just about every clearance in the book and ran the Harvard observatory in the 1950s, who was also part of the Bureau of Public Standards, basically compiling a lot of the astronomical data known to the public in the 50s and 60s was a guy named Donald Menzel. Dr. Donald Menzel came out swinging against UFOs. But thanks to Beatrice and others, we know the true story. He was even caught by his understudy Dorit Hoflite, who destroying astronomical plates at the Harvard Observatory.
- [15:47]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
And he helped the US Air Force to debunk the Washington 1952 flap.
- [15:53]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yep.
- [15:54]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
And two or three months after he suddenly becomes the director of Harvard Observatory and he destroys one third of the photographic plates. And he doesn't ask, as I understand from the record, she doesn't ask the astronomers to select the place? No. He asks his secretary to go and throw away one third of the plates. And there's a woman, Dori Toflight, that has been like telling about the story in her memoirs. And kind of, he started revenging on her later too, for as I understood it, for that she tried to protect some of the plates. He also threw away a number of the logbooks that are keeping the observations and what plates exist.
- [16:34]
Jesse Michaels
So you only have a handful of observatories in use at the time, and you have a national security state headed up by people like Don Menzel, tightly controlling the information disseminated to the public. It's not beyond belief to me then that a widespread coverup could have occurred. So we've shown that these aren't plate defects, because plate defects don't move intelligently around based on the Earth's shadow. They also don't move intelligently around based on nuclear detonations occurring in the 40s and 50s. And if you're wondering just how ubiquitous the UFO nuclear connection actually is, check out my interview with the great journalist Robert Hastings, author of the book UFOs and Nukes who's chronicled 167Q cleared nuclear base employees who have blown the whistle on UFOs showing up all over our nuclear installations. Roswell was the site of the most nukes in the US in 1947 at the time of the Roswell crash. And lest you think this is an American deep state Psyop, you can go as far as Japan, where a town named Eno, which is right next to the Fukushima prefecture, has a mountain, Mount Sengan Mori, where UFOs constantly show up. Many of the townspeople are obsessed with UFOs. They have a museum on top of this mountain dedicated to UFOs. INO is directly adjacent to the Fukushima prefecture and their civilian nuclear grid. In the 90s in Zimbabwe, over 60 schoolchildren all saw a UFO land and an alien descend out of the craft and telepathically speak to them. And where is this school's location?
- [18:10]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
And you know, an aerial school that was near a uranium mining site? That is right as far as I.
- [18:16]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Understand.
- [18:20]
Jesse Michaels
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- [20:33]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So this is amazing because you've basically found pre satellites in space objects surrounding the earth. How many of these transients did you find?
- [20:43]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Well, it depends on how one counts. Now our original sample is around 105,000 transients from just the northern hemisphere. But we assume that it's only one third of these that are relevant. So we can count on 70,000 all over. However, I don't know how many of these transients might be associated with only one object or if it's like one object could give several of them. I just don't know at the moment. We have to investigate this.
- [21:11]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yes, because a transient is a flash of light.
- [21:14]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Exactly.
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Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
And so it could be the same object, flashing, traveling, or whatever. And you found this over what period of time?
- [21:22]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
It's over six years. It's 780 hours of exposure time. Okay, so we need to do the calculations correctly. I think it's something like 1.1 transient per square degree per hour.
- [21:38]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Yeah.
- [21:39]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah.
- [21:39]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Wow.
- [21:40]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So like almost like 15,000 per year or something.
- [21:45]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
It's a fun number.
- [21:46]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah.
- [21:47]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
What I didn't know is that there's apparently since the early 1960s, there were something called uncorrelated targets. And people have been finding them in hundreds per week or something like that, where again, they see something only once or a few times on a radar or with optical sensors and then they. They can't track it. So it becomes an uncorrelated target. And they are always reduced from the background. When people calculate the number of objects in space, let's say space trash and satellites in space, how do you separate.
- [22:23]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
An uncorrelated target from a satellite? How do you know? Because it's not orbiting like a satellite.
- [22:29]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Because they can't track it. So if I understand it correctly, NASA and ESA and those always remove it from the background. Okay, sorry. They removed this background of uncorrelated targets from the total number of things that they see in order to calculate the number of objects in space. However, I think that they don't do it themselves. It's done by militaries and it's classified list. So it's kind of becoming a little bit more fun. I'm trying to look into this right now.
- [22:56]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah, so maybe like mentioned recently, like, you know, NASA's the kind of the more civilian space exploration output. Obviously they do intelligence work as well. But maybe Space Force has these targets, these uncorrelated targets, and they remove them for NASA.
- [23:14]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
I think that's what I heard from someone on the inside. Yes, that they don't do it themselves. It's the Space Force that has this list. These lists are classified as also those earned lists from the 1960s. Because what I would like to have is one of these lists, coordinates, and check if they vanish in the shadow.
- [23:31]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Totally. I mean, because if they didn't vanish, they wouldn't just be noise because it sounds, it sounds like systematically people looking at space are calling them uncorrelated targets. You're basically. It's like a. Oh, they're just. It's noise in the data or something. It's something to be filtered out. But in fact you have other agencies that are systematically tracking the noise because it's not just noise, it's. These are objects maybe.
- [23:56]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
It's very interesting. And I learned also that it's like they make up the majority of the things that we see on the sky today. But again, I didn't know about it. So I'm wondering a little bit, are my transients similar to these uncorrelated targets? Of course, it's one of the things I'm wondering about because that would be interesting.
- [24:15]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
That would be amazing because 15,000 a year or 20,000, you know, whatever number that we come to is a lot. I mean, the amount of satellites in space, like I don't even know what we're at right now. But I mean, obviously Starlink is dramatically increasing the amount of in the sky, but it's not a ton. And the uncorrelated objects, just for the audience, because we've jumped back and forth between transients, which are these light flashes that you were detecting in these plates from the, you know, 50 to 56. And uncorrelated objects, do we know that these are the same thing or.
- [24:48]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
I have no idea. Yeah, I have no idea. I'm just like speculating around this. I'm just curious and trying to look into this right now. These are just where my thoughts are wandering.
- [24:57]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
But if you saw that there was a drop off in these uncorrelated objects around the Earth's shadow, you could show that again, they're physical objects. And maybe if we could show that they were the same amount as what you found in the plates from, you know, the 50s, maybe you'd get, you know, some sort of match.
- [25:14]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
But would love to see that, like especially these uncorrelated targets, if they come from optical sensors, it would be super interesting to see if they vanish in the Earth's shadow. It would also support not only that they are physical, but that they are artificial.
- [25:30]
Jesse Michaels
As it turns out, these uncorrelated targets are a gateway to a much deeper rabbit hole stretching all the way back to the dawn of the space race. Our story begins in 1953, four years before Sputnik. Enter Major Donald Kehoe, a retired Marine Corps naval aviator and one of the earliest public advocates for UFO disclosure. Kehoe states something astonishing that the Air force was tracking two unknown artificial satellites 400 and 600 miles up in low Earth orbit. The timing here was likely not a coincidence. That same year, a very unusual project started at White Sands Missile Range. A military funded initiative to track small natural satellites, think asteroids captured in orbit orbit. Two 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 arrival 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. The 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 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. He 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 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 Earth's only permanent natural satellite, these two mini moons should have been a major astrophysical discovery. I'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? Perhaps most remarkably, the most important US 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. So the Air Force and CIA documents at the time describe 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 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.
- [29:59]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Astronomical plates like the Palomar observatories.
- [30:04]
Jesse Michaels
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- [30:36]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Have 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 in the Earth's shadow and where the sun is hitting.
- [30:51]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
That doesn't make unless they are intelligent plates.
- [30:53]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Unless they're intelligent, they move around on.
- [30:55]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
The plate just to avoid a shadow.
- [30:57]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah, so they're the real conspiracy theorists. The plate defects people are, you know, they're in this. Yeah, yeah. Intelligent plate defects.
- [31:04]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Exactly.
- [31:05]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Have you tried to look at other observatory data, other plates from the 50s to cross reference that data against the Palomar?
- [31:15]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
We really want to do it. It's a big project because every time you try to, let's say, look at a new place 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.
- [31:38]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
A lot of people watching this might be asking, oh, it's convenient that Beatrice, who was interested in UFOs, is finding, you know, 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. And it's very clear.
- [32:03]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
But it's called a scientific method. You have a hypothesis. When you build the LHC to look for the. Well, they built the LHC to look for the Higgs 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, it's a scientific method. Why should UFOs or alien life be an exclusion?
- [32:25]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
I mean, that's a, 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, because.
- [32:43]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
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 do like, 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. It's all trial and error. We're learning continuously. But this is what I want to do. I want to test a question, I want to do the experiment and I want to analyze the data and see what is the outcome.
- [33:31]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
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. You 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 167Q cleared missile based security personnel, radar operators, guys that work at these, these bases who are basically hired to protect the crown jewels of defense. And 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 SOL saucers, TIC tacs. And so you found that there might actually be a connection between nuclear and UFOs in space.
- [35:06]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
So my colleague Stephen Bruel, 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 use 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. And he finds a correlation. It's weak, but it's there and is 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.
- [35:48]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
And is it specifically nuclear detonations?
- [35:51]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Yes.
- [35:51]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So it's the timing of nuclear detonation?
- [35:53]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Yes. Within a day you see this increase in transients.
- [35:59]
Jesse Michaels
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- [37:22]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Originally I trained as a clinical psychologist, but I quickly moved into doing biomedical research. So as part of getting a PhD, I got training in research design statistics and have practiced that, you know, the research skills and statistics for many years. I 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 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? And there were 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 UFO CAT 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.
- [39:05]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
That's amazing.
- [39:06]
Jesse Michaels
Congratulations.
- [39:08]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So how strong is the correlation that you found between the transients and nuclear tests?
- [39:14]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Let me put that two ways. So statistically there is an 8 and 1000 chance that this is an error, which means it's pretty unlikely. That'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.
- [39:54]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
And 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 are like those sorts of nuclear tests. And then, you know, maybe whatever Russia was doing with the Tsar bomb and Kazakhstan, that sort of thing.
- [40:12]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Yes, that is all true. It's Kazakhstan. There's some British tests in Australia, and then the US tests in New Mexico and in the Pacific.
- [40:22]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
That's right. There's Woomera 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. And so I think it's probably not a coincidence that he was overseeing a lot of those nuclear nuclear tests. But, yeah, that's fascinating. Is there any way to geofence the transients to maybe correlate it even more tightly?
- [40:51]
Dr. Steven Bruel
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 the, 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. So right now we haven't been able to do that, though.
- [41:35]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
This, this would be a really big deal, I think, if, you know, the entire consensus sort of accepted it, because already you have people like Robert Hastings documenting 160/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. They're not just showing up locally at the Air Force base.
- [42:26]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Yeah.
- [42:26]
Dr. Steven Bruel
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.
- [43:20]
Jesse Michaels
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- [43:46]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Gold Card built for business by American Express. Now, who is behind that? You know, where did these come from and how can they be so close that in 24 hours they're able to be here? And I don't know the answer to that, but it really is thought provoking to me in an existential way.
- [44:06]
Jesse Michaels
Absolutely.
- [44:07]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
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.
- [44:31]
Jesse Michaels
Right.
- [44:31]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So do you have like a first order debunk that you've thought of or addressed or planned to address in the future?
- [44:38]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Yeah. So the things that are, and this is all pretty obvious, but the transients were identified using an automated system. It'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. I've gone through at this point, probably a hundred 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, I 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. And 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. With UAP reports from the general public.
- [46:07]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Whoa.
- [46:08]
Dr. Steven Bruel
So on a day when there is a nuclear test or the day after a nuclear test and there are UAP sightings, you get a much higher risk of a transient. So 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. And 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.
- [47:19]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Well, also, if you're doing kind of pointed error correction on the days that these transients seem to show up, then you're actually saying that 68% more likely, you know, 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, you know, we think yeah, same thing.
- [47:43]
Dr. Steven Bruel
With the UAP sightings. A lot of error. Those, A lot of those are prosaic things that just there was no ability to, you know, research them. So 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. And 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. Okay. Now 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 it just stopped. Even though more facilities came online, suddenly they weren't seeing UAP anymore. And it just got me thinking. It almost looks like whatever it is was showing an intelligent interest in all things nuclear up until between 53 and 56, 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. That was intriguing.
- [49:53]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah. I'm trying to think of what happened in 56 or 57. I mean, that's when NICAT 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. So maybe, maybe there's something around that. I believe that was 56, 57, maybe, but I don't know.
- [50:26]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Yeah. And if these are, we always have to consider the possibility that there's 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.
- [50:57]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah, absolutely. So how many transients are we talking about total in this data set?
- [51:03]
Dr. Steven Bruel
It is surprisingly large, keeping in mind the error, but there are over 107,000 over that, what is it, eight year period?
- [51:12]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Okay. Wow. It's remarkable. So like a little over 12,000 a year.
- [51:17]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Yeah. So if we think though 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.
- [51:33]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
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.
- [51:48]
Dr. Steven Bruel
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. So that kind of presents the lower limit for error would be maybe about, you know, 30, 30% of these being real transients, 70% error. I don't think it's actually that high just having manually inspected these.
- [52:26]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
But it would make sense that you'd get more transients in the light than on in the shadow side. Right.
- [52:31]
Dr. Steven Bruel
If they're in orbit.
- [52:33]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yep. So, okay, so I see what you're saying. So like up to 30%, but even that, like you'd expect some, you'd expect the, you expect some delta between those two. So it's really maybe up to 25% or something. I don't know what the right mental model is.
- [52:49]
Dr. Steven Bruel
There's no way for us to tell at this point. Exactly.
- [52:53]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah. It sounds like as a best way to corroborate this, just get as many observatories like their data and kind of cross cross check all of them. Right, yes.
- [53:04]
Dr. Steven Bruel
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.
- [53:16]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
And one more thing that I like about this result is that again, it disagrees with the plate defects. Unless they are intelligent.
- [53:23]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
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.
- [53:43]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
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. And plus, if it would be cosmic ray particles, they wouldn't vanish in the. In the Earth's shadow.
- [53:58]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
No, they wouldn't.
- [53:59]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Also at 42,000.
- [54:01]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So 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 are 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?
- [54:26]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
They are used by lots of astronomers.
- [54:28]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So if there are systematic plate defects in what you're seeing, then this would discount any study online that involves these Palomar, this Palomar Observatory, this Palomar data. And you're saying that it's used by a lot of serious astronomers?
- [54:44]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
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.
- [54:57]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Okay, are there other examples of plate defects causing this number of transients?
- [55:04]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Not that I know.
- [55:06]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Okay, so you've never heard of an example like that?
- [55:08]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
No, but these are. 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. Yeah. Remarkable.
- [55:24]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah, that's a pretty remarkable set of plate defects.
- [55:28]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
This episode is brought to you by State Farm, listening to this podcast. Smart move being financially savvy. Smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to buy, bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by State.
- [56:06]
Jesse Michaels
In 1961. In 2021, legendary astronomer Frank Drake started Project Ozma, 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 link life our astronomical community has ever engaged in. SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, had begun its 70 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. Nonetheless, 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? Even 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 bootes, some 203 light years away. You send a message. Hey, what's up? 406 years after 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. Interstellar 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 Instead of waiting around for radio signals 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. But 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. One 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 Vegas star system 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 Vegas civilization sees. Not exactly a good first look. In a manner just like Bracewell's concept, the Vegan 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. It'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. Okay, 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 eerily 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. Shortwave radio naturally travels around the world and makes its way back to its source, usually creating an echo 1/7 of a second after the initial signal. This is completely normal and expected. 1/7 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. To 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 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. This 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. Like, could some of these echoing Bracewell probes be what Beatrice has detected on the Palomar plates?
- [63:49]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
When you spend time with other credentialed astronomers after rounds of them questioning you on possible plate defects, them doing mathematical calculations, does anybody still hold out as skeptical after spending weeks plus with you and diving into the data?
- [64:10]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
I mean the only one I can comment about now is my referee and I think 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.
- [64:23]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
There is like when you say your referee, who is, what does that mean?
- [64:28]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
So we are working through the revision of the paper and it's undergoing like review process, which means you're getting back a lot of questions whether you're questioning like your methods, et cetera. And 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 results stay robust. And in general, when I interact with astronomers, I think the first reaction is like, it can't be. Well, it's just my first reaction as well. 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 and the general population because we are very self confident about that. We are the smartest for sure in the universe.
- [65:30]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So are you trying to get this published in like a prestigious academic journal?
- [65:36]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
We're trying. The traditional way through peer review is difficult because there's, it's, of course it's a touchy topic. It's touchy results.
- [65:45]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah.
- [65:46]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
And there is 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? That's the question.
- [66:08]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Why did you decide to go public before getting this published via peer review?
- [66:15]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
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 they're 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.
- [66:35]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Why would they be saving you?
- [66:36]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
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, etcetera, etcetera. Etc. And I know that it's going to be tough with the pressure and 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? Have 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.
- [67:29]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Have you been approached by aerospace or military or people with intelligence backgrounds?
- [67:36]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
I have been approached by some people I suspect have it. Okay. And that have been a little bit scary to talk to. Okay. I mean, if 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.
- [67:57]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Yes.
- [67:58]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
And I appreciate that.
- [67:59]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [68:00]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
For me it's important to like meet people who are supportive.
- [68:03]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
There are good and bad people everywhere. But you've. It is, it is. 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 space.
- [68:19]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
It's been really scary. It'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 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.
- [68:53]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
I think it's an exciting result. It's that scary.
- [68:56]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Well, it's exciting and scary, but it still has to be. I mean, it has to be out there. And 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 the 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. Shadow alignments, Priest, Sputnik plates. Combine them and maybe we'll find really great support for what we say.
- [69:30]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
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. And so the idea that you shouldn't look into that is to me insane. And it's 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.
- [70:11]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
My hope is that the second, if we get it published, then we will make these datasets publicly available and people can simply go in and check it for themselves. Yeah, and they can reply through by writing a paper, right? Not by doing some, I don't know, just complaining to me. They can write a paper.
- [70:28]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
So you're open sourcing this for everybody.
- [70:30]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
To be able to. I want it to be open source. I want people to go in and do this themselves because I also want the confirmation from the outside.
- [70:37]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
That's beautiful.
- [70:38]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
So that's how I'm thinking.
- [70:43]
Jesse Michaels
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings you the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss.
- [70:59]
Dr. Steven Bruel
A meme or milestone.
- [71:01]
Jesse Michaels
All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [71:06]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Learn more@WhatsApp.com 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.
- [71:53]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
I 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 or 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. There 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.
- [72:49]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Well, this is how science moves forward. If you read like 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 universe at the time was actually a guy named Aristarchus, who is a third century Greek. Nobody 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, 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 the, you know, somebody at the Palomar Observatory or a great example is I interviewed you last time and you talked about Dorit Hoflite 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, 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.
- [74:34]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
It's amazing the whole thing and it's, it, it happened two months after the Washington 1952 flap when by the way, that's when we have are interesting transient cases too.
- [74:43]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
There you go.
- [74:44]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
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.
- [75:01]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
I mean that seems like a pattern to me and very worthy of.
- [75:04]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
As far as I understand. That's what I understood from my source at NASA.
- [75:09]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well no, we can investigate and I.
- [75:14]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
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 the list from the early 1960s somewhere? And not only like 10 of them, you want something like thousands of them.
- [75:34]
Jesse Michaels
In light of Dr. Villarreal's latest, 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 Vallee Young Jacques was working as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory as part of its nascent satellite tracking program. One night on July 11th, 1961, he and his colleagues noticed something, 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. Many 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. 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 grade trajectories often show up in polar orbits. In 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. However, it's a very insufficient explanation as Vallee pointed out in a later interview. Later I found out that other observatories had made exactly, 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. Jacques 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. In many ways this was the inciting incident which sent Jock 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.
- [79:21]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Do you feel like the world is ready to accept this.
- [79:26]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
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.
- [79:56]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
Yes.
- [79:57]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
And it's like people who want, like role model people.
- [80:01]
Interviewer (possibly host of American Alchemy)
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. I just interviewed a chief of aerospace medicine, you know, 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 it's. 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, how do you explain that away? I mean, it starts to get really interesting.
- [80:53]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
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. And that's my impression. I'm hopelessly curious and I cannot stop once. I mean, once you see these kind of results, it's not like you can just give up and say, no, no, I know I should go and do some classical astronomy to support my living. You 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.
- [81:28]
Dr. Steven Bruel
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 10 years, it's going to be night and day from what it has been in the past, and 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.
- [82:18]
Jesse Michaels
We'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.
- [82:40]
Dr. Steven Bruel
Our imagined self importance, the delusions that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged.
- [82:49]
Jesse Michaels
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? What 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. Steven Bruel. 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.
- [84:28]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Limu Emu.
- [84:30]
Jesse Michaels
And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
- [84:41]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Fascinating.
- [84:42]
Dr. Steven Bruel
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu.
- [84:47]
Jesse Michaels
Is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
- [84:49]
Dr. Beatrice Villarreal
Cut the camera.
- [84:49]
Jesse Michaels
They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry, underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.