EARLY SKY "TRANSIENTS " Unknown Orbiting Bodies - Pre Sputnik orbiting Earth
Before Sputnik: Did Astronomers Photograph Something in Earth Orbit That Shouldn’t Have Been There? By Steve Douglass There is a fascinating piece of the UAP puzzle that has almost nothing to do with blurry cell-phone videos, Navy gun-camera footage or eyewitness accounts. It comes from glass photographic plates exposed more than 70 years ago—before Sputnik, before NASA and before humanity was supposed to have anything orbiting the Earth. And that is what makes the work of astronomer Beatriz Villarroel so intriguing. Villarroel leads the VASCO project — Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations . The basic idea is wonderfully simple: compare old astronomical photographs of the sky with modern surveys and look for things that were once there but aren't anymore. The project has examined photographic plates from the First Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, or POSS-I , most of them taken between 1949 and 1956 with Palomar's 48-inch Schmidt telescope. Thes...
