Person
Beatriz Villarroel
Astronomer at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) in Stockholm who leads the VASCO project, which looks for transients on pre-Sputnik sky-survey plates. In 2026 she told Reality Check that her best aligned multi-transient event dates to 27 July 1952, a weekend of the Washington DC flap, and described ExoProbe, a triangulating telescope project, and her European UFO Crash Retrieval Initiative.
Claims (4)
Her ExoProbe project is installing its first telescope; it aims at two sites 15 km apart, later about 1,500 km apart (New Mexico and California), to triangulate objects out to about half way to Mars, with a wide-field spectrograph.Reality Check: Beatriz Villarroel on the 1952 transients, Menzel's plates and ExoProbefirsthandSourced, unconfirmedBeatriz Villarroel
She runs the European UFO Crash Retrieval Initiative (ecrinitiative.org, since 16 December 2025) as a hobby database of European crash reports; one field trip was abandoned, and the site was hacked within two days on each of the three occasions she spoke about it.Reality Check: Beatriz Villarroel on the 1952 transients, Menzel's plates and ExoProbefirsthandSourced, unconfirmedBeatriz Villarroel
She spoke at the European Parliament on 20 March at the invitation of MEP Francisco Guerreiro and was later contacted by someone at the European Commission.Reality Check: Beatriz Villarroel on the 1952 transients, Menzel's plates and ExoProbefirsthandSourced, unconfirmedBeatriz Villarroel
The SETI Institute offered her an affiliate post on condition that she stop working with Geoff Marcy; she refused and says she has since been left out of conferences. She thinks intelligence services take an interest in scientists working on UAP and that the stigma was 'carefully designed'.Reality Check: Beatriz Villarroel on the 1952 transients, Menzel's plates and ExoProbefirsthandSourced, unconfirmedBeatriz Villarroel