Do aliens exist or not? That is the question.
A retired NASA figure argues there may be reason to think the answer could be yes.
Ivo Busko, a former NASA developer who worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute, has thrown his support behind a study looking into unexplained flashes captured in the sky during the early nuclear era — long before satellites made it easier to monitor such events.
This week, Busko released a preprint that backs up reports of unusual, short-lived flashes first highlighted by astronomer Dr Beatriz Villarroel and her VASCO team, which were detailed in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports last October.
Busko revisited Villarroel’s work from the 1950s. Villarroel, a researcher at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden, had documented ‘transient’ lights appearing in sky observations.
Until now, many researchers have struggled to account for these transients through natural explanations. In Villarroel’s notes, the lights were described as ‘mirror-like’ and seemed to rotate as they appeared across the sky.
After assessing Villarroel’s earlier results, Busko carried out his own examination by combing through archived sky photographs from the 1950s. Rather than simply repeating the same approach, he applied a different analytical technique to test whether the original findings would still hold up.
That search turned up dozens of transient flashes showing the same strange characteristics previously reported by the VASCO team.
These ‘independently confirm the presence of such transients’, Busko concluded.
‘By analyzing pairs of plates taken in rapid sequence (about 30 minutes apart) of the same sky regions, we find evidence of transients similar to those previously reported by the VASCO Project,’ he added in the study, which was published in arXiv.
Notably, a number of the bright events seem to have occurred before the first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1, launched in October 1957 — meaning they could not have been produced by human-made objects in orbit.
Busko argues those circumstances strengthen the case for life beyond Earth.
His analysis echoes the earlier work, pointing again to comparable ‘transient’ lights recorded in historical sky imagery.
Support for the pattern also appears in a separate batch of material: around 98,000 photographic plates from other sky surveys conducted at the Hamburg Observatory during the 1950s are said to align with the same phenomenon.
The ‘Glints’ visible in those photographs were described as strikingly close to what the VASCO project reported.
In the latest paper, Busko says his next step is to digitize additional archival collections, aiming to further verify the transients identified in the original VASCO work — convinced that taken together, both lines of research suggest the presence of life beyond Earth.
If that confirmation is achieved, researchers believe the objects involved could represent some of the earliest documented evidence of unidentified objects operating above Earth’s atmosphere.