Reality Check: Beatriz Villarroel on the 1952 transients, Menzel's plates and ExoProbe

Ross Coulthart interviews astronomer Beatriz Villarroel. She says her best aligned multi-transient event (five points on a line, about 1 in 10,000) falls on 27 July 1952 once a date-conversion error in the arXiv table is corrected, so that it and Enrique Solano's 19 July 1952 triplet both land on the Washington DC flap weekends; she calls this a hypothesis. Citing Dorrit Hoffleit's autobiography, she says Donald Menzel had about a third of Harvard's plate collection and some logbooks destroyed soon after becoming director, and stopped the sky survey from 1953 to 1967. She also describes ExoProbe, her European UFO Crash Retrieval Initiative, a European Parliament talk and the stigma she has faced.

Notes

• From the daily YouTube watch, 4 Nov 2026 (backlog 31 Oct to 3 Nov).