100,000 mystery flashes were found in sky photos from the 1950s—and they lined up with nuclear tests.
Caltech’s Palomar Observatory photographed the night sky years before Sputnik. But decades later, researchers scanning them found thousands of star-like lights that appeared in one exposure and vanished in the next. They were not satellites or catalogued stars. What were they?
The timing is the strangest part. Those flashes were far more likely to show up within a day of above-ground nuclear tests, and even more likely the day after.
On some of the same dates, UFO reports spiked, as well, including the 1952 Washington wave.
Were the flashes just plate defects? Nuclear fallout? Sunlight bouncing off something already in orbit? Or something watching the dawn of the atomic age?
On this Edge of Wonder Live, Ben Chasteen and Rob Counts break down the Palomar plates, the nuclear test calendar, and the claim that the Cold War was more cosmic than people think.
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