National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

In 2025, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Now, Beatrice and Steven have also formed an unusual collaboration examining thousands of mysterious star-like flashes, transients, recorded on photographic plates from the first Palomar Observatory Sky Survey during the 1950s.

And here's what makes those observations so interesting.

Many were photographed before Sputnik 1 was launched in October 1957, when, according to the conventional historical accounts, there should be no artificial satellites orbiting the Earth.

And that raises a fascinating new question.

If these objects, these transients, were really orbiting the Earth, what was lying directly beneath them on the surface? And this is where things get very interesting.

Dr. Villarroel, Dr. Brule, and their colleagues have now published a new archive paper entitled Earth Projected Clustering of Historical Optical Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.

And out of 107-plus candidates and using machine learning to select those most likely to represent genuine objects rather than photographic defects, they've projected those observations back onto the surface of the Earth and asked whether they were distributed randomly or whether they clustered over specific geographical locations.

And where the telescope was pointing when it caught a flash, you could mathematically project that coordinate straight down onto Earth's surface to see exactly which geographic location the object was hovering over.

That brings us to the second massive paper that was just released, Earth Projected Clustering of Historical Optical Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.

When the researchers plotted the Earth projected coordinates of these pre-Sputnik transients, they didn't get a random even distribution across the globe.

They discovered intense geographic clustering.