Brane Space: The Novel Phenomenon of the Triple Transient (Discovered on Decades Old Photographic Plates) and UFOs-UAP

UAP captured by Navy pilots in 2017 encounter

Isolated transient and comparison star

Triple transient on 19 July, 1952 disappears hrs. later (compare the positions between the two slides)

Headlines for DC 'Saucer Swarm' in July, 1952

“I find it absolutely important to test whether the UAP phenomena can be linked to some kind of ET probes… And if I get the answer yes, then I’m going to be a complete believer into UAPs. So far, I’m agnostic.”
— Beatriz Villarroel

Can 70+ year old photographic plates (taken at Mt. Palomar Observatory) lend themselves to a revelation of alien contact? This is via a UAP-UFO blitz, such as occurred over Washington D.C., in July of 1952. Evidently, yes, and we can thank a bold Swedish astrophysicist for this insight and contribution. This is in terms of what she and co-workers have called a “triple transient” – an apparent configuration of 3 stars that appeared on a July 19, Palomar photographic plate – then vanished when the next plate was generated hours later the same date.

See, actual stars cannot do that. Cannot just vanish on a photographic plate. They cannot do that because real stars are light years distant, so any change of their physical properties – such as brightness- would require light years to reach us. Take the case of the star Sirius, 8.7 light years distant. If it suddenly decreased in brightness it would take 8.7 years before we observed the effect.

In this case, of the Mt. Palomar Observatory plates, we have three apparent stars that actually vanished within the space of hours. This led the Swedish astrophysicist- Dr. Beatriz Villarroel- to conclude they weren’t stars but actually could be alien craft that operated outside Earth’s atmosphere. Preposterous? Not at all, given the famous Washington DC UFO flap e.g.

In other words, three of the so-called stars in the triple were actually alien craft that became part of the D.C. UFO flap.

Dr. Beatriz Villarroel’s work begins with a question that sounds simple until you try to answer it: could a star “vanish” on a human timescale? In ordinary astrophysics, stars don’t just blink out—at least not in ways that would leave clean, catalog-friendly evidence. So if something looks like it disappeared, the explanation is usually mundane: a catalog error, a misidentification, a plate defect, or a threshold artifact.

In podcast interviews, Villarroel describes how she turned that question into a method around 2016: take digitized sky material from the 1950s and compare it against modern CCD-era surveys. The point wasn’t to chase folklore. It was to exploit the one asset modern astronomy can’t manufacture from scratch—a decades-long time baseline.

What she found didn’t look like the tidy “vanishing star” narrative the public tends to imagine. Instead, the archive kept producing one-off “transients”: point-like sources that appear in a single exposure and then never appear again in follow-up images. This is the kind of result that simultaneously feels like “new physics” and “classic data pathology,” which is why it becomes so polarizing so quickly.

From the start, Villarroel frames the work as hypothesis-driven rather than belief-driven. She treats technosignatures and “artifacts” as possibilities, but she doesn’t treat any single interpretation as owed. In the original interview, she is explicit: she is agnostic until an observation strategy delivers decisive evidence—not a vibe.

But in a recent airing of a program – The UFO Phenomenon (Part 3) – Dr. Villarroel departs from her “agnosticism” and argues how and why the historical context of the transients – coinciding with the DC saucer flap – points to actual alien craft being the same as the transients. She begins the segment by pointing to others who've asked: "There's no evidence for UFOs so why waste time pursuing it?"

Responding: "That's a Catch 22. If no one puts in even an hour working on it, researching, then you will never get evidence."

She went on to say she leads the project at the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics, and:

"I lead a project where we look for identifiable signatures of alien space ships".

Note, she didn't say "identifiable signatures for unknown objects"

Hence, she is not adopting an "agnostic" stance.

Further support for this comes when she points out 5 of the objects in an alignment before disappearance an hour later, in a subsequent plate, on July 27, 1952. (And not long from when the DC saucer flap began). Merely a random, coincidental alignment? In her words:

"The probability of finding five random objects in this 'strip' is one in ten thousand."

So basically ruled out by probability considerations. (Though hard core debunkers might even cling to that to escape admitting alien craft were in the skies of DC that date.)

I support this stance. How so? Given one must eliminate actual stars, and defects of the plates themselves, as well as random coincidence of 5 objects (transients) just happening in a straight line, then one must go to the famous Sherlock Holmes quote:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

And that is where I come down, having done actual transient optical phenomena research of my own, e.g.

Transient Optical Phenomena of the Atmosphere - a Case Study

Oh yeah, one notable Harvard UFO debunker, Donald Menzel, attempted to trash the Washington DC UFO flap - which would also have negated Villarroel's theory. He did this by asserting that all the alleged lights over DC were effects from cold air temperature inversions.

BUT, atmospheric physicist James McDonald demolished Menzel’s temperature inversion bull twaddle by directly interviewing witnesses and radar personnel, which uncovered evidence that the radar targets were solid, intelligently controlled objects rather than atmospheric mirages.

McDonald, analyzing the case in the 1960s, argued that Menzel's "anomalous propagation" explanation was physically impossible given the high-performance maneuvers reported by multiple seasoned pilots and tracked by radar operators.

In the segment McDonald is shown describing Menzel's cold air inversion malarkey as "not representing scientifically sound analyses" and the entire U.S. UFO program to the late 60s as "superficial and incompetent". Which is what they were. As I myself have written before, if the Edward U. Condon book: Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects had been offered as a Ph.D. thesis in advanced atmospheric physics or plasma physics it would have been flunked outright before even reaching the oral exam phase. That's how bad it was.

Astrobiologist Jacob Haqq Msra, who also appears in the program, had his reservations about the transients being actual craft, saying:

"The biggest criticism of Beatriz's work is that it's very very difficult to explain what it is you've found. So if you're left with something you can't understand, say an extraordinary hypothesis like extraterrestrials, well maybe they are. But how do you follow up on an observation made over 50 years ago."

But as Beatriz points out right after the remark, there were actually two separate cases of two transients - on July 19, 1952 and on July 27, 1952 - each of which coincided with the DC UFO flyovers on those dates. So the historical problem doesn't exist. She makes the connection of the UFO- alien craft appearances in DC with the transients already observed on her plates, which then 'vanished'. Well, 'vanished' because they then went to lower altitudes - over Washington D.C.- producing the UFO flap which had citizens and military in an uproar for days.

The same exact type of dynamic UAP behavior was described by Navy Commander David Fravor in the House hearings on UAP back in 2023, e.g.

Video Navy commander David Fravor gives detailed description of his encounter with a UAP - ABC News

What Fravor describes, an object descending rapidly from 80,000 fit. altitude to 20,000 ft. is the sort of behavior that would fit in with the 5 transients that suddenly emerge in the DC skies.

This is exactly why, when approaching the UAP-UFO phenomenon, continuity is essential. In other words, the behaviors must be integrated, Beatriz Villarroel's transients to DC skies dynamics in July 1952, with what Cmdr. Fravor experienced in his own encounter. Only in this way can we move past the chronic overthinking and provincial poppycock - the desperation to always escape the ET reality by invoking mundane nonsense like balloons, or cold air inversions. Or even "laser holographs",

Brane Space: Are Laser Plasma Holographs Created By "Foreign Adversaries" Really The UFOs Reported By U.S. Navy Pilots?

Where I destroyed the 'alternative theory' that the UAP such as recorded by the Navy pilots were really laser-generated holographs. This was in much the same way James McDonald destroyed Donald Menzel's fantasy that the Washington DC UFOs were really a result of cold air temperature inversions.

At least Carl Sagan ( of 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' fame) ultimately recognized the folly and provincialism of his own skepticism. This was revealed by the late Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek who disclosed Sagan had admitted he "did accept the validity of UFOs" (e.g. as alien craft) but "couldn't do so in front of his colleagues." See e.g.

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=76926

And:

Michael Shermer's Predictable Efforts To Apply Quasi Religious ('Sky god') Beliefs To Secular Acceptance of UAP

And:

Physics To day Book Reviewer Kate Dorsch Is As Clueless About UFOs As Neil DeGrasse Tyson

And: