It bothers me that for increasing distances the explanations requier ever bigger or stronger reflectors, but objects much closer to the telescope are not considered. A spec of dust temporarily illuminated (lightning? artificial light? etc.) or myriad of other explanations are not explored.

We should first try to figure out possible explanations by reasoning, but in a worst case scenario, if relating the sensitivity of the old telescope and modern observation proves too tenuous, there is always the last resort of reconstructing the telescope as it used to function, and have a modern telescope observe the same field of view. Then we could relate the statistics from old pictures to currently observed statistics. The whole process should be reproduced, the same film development process,...

This also reminds me of the story of the film manufacturer (was it Kodak?) detecting the start of man-made nuclear radiation levels. At first they thought something was wrong in their manufacturing process.

To improve the likelihood tests for the orbit parameters don't just include the Earth shadow, but also the Moon shadow.

I don’t think this is the smoking gun the author thinks it is. This is near 3 million objects observed per year. Logically how could there not be some conclusive evidence in the decades of observation and launching satellites?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_inci...

I've been watching Ross Coulthart who has been interviewing the main author of the paper. It's aliens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylw_NRxJEgM

Volcanic glass (eg obsidian) is also shiny and by no means rare in the solar system.

Many asteroids are also metallic, and perhaps metal crystals or fracture planes could produce reflectors of the right size.

But maybe it’s just aliens.

Followed immediately by a picture of water and an icy tree, lol. "Correcting", indeed. "Correcting for expenses, I'm very wealthy!"

> three good LLMs told me we are pretty sure

Ah.

http://svocats.cab.inta-csic.es/vanish/

doesn't seem to provide the time of recording (unless its the tiny unreadable markings)

How was the analysis done without timestamps on the observations available in the dataset?