The new study confirmed this by analyzing 98,000 photographic plates from individual sky images.
A well-known space expert has supported an innovative study dedicated to the mysterious flashes in the sky at the beginning of the nuclear era, decades before the launch of the first satellites.
Ivo Busko, a retired NASA developer who worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute, recently published a preliminary version of a paper confirming the mysterious transient flashes first discovered by astronomer Dr. Beatriz Villarroel and her VASCO research group. The study, conducted in October 2025, was published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports.
Beatriz Villarroel from the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden identified a possible connection between nuclear tests conducted between 1949 and 1957 and an increase in the number of mysterious bright spots known as "transients" appearing in the sky.
These transients proved difficult to explain using known natural phenomena, and Villarroel noted that some of them exhibited high reflectivity, resembled mirrors, and showed characteristics consistent with rotating objects.
Busko conducted an independent search of archival photographs of the sky from the 1950s, using a separate analytical method specifically designed to verify earlier findings by Villarroel, writes the Daily Mail. His research uncovered dozens of transient flashes displaying the same unusual characteristics reported by the VASCO team, including extremely brief flashes of light.
Ivo Busko stated that the data obtained "independently confirms the existence of such transients," adding further weight to the unusual flashes first reported by Villarroel's team.
"By analyzing pairs of images taken in rapid succession (with an interval of about 30 minutes) from the same areas of the sky, we find evidence of transients similar to those previously reported by the VASCO project," he added in the study published on arXiv.
Many of the mysterious bright spots in both datasets date back to the period preceding the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik 1, which orbited in October 1957, and cannot be explained as a result of human activity.
The new study confirmed this by analyzing 98,000 photographic plates from individual sky images also taken in the mid-1950s at the Hamburg Observatory with a 1.2-meter camera.
