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• About Dr. Beatriz Villarroel

Something many humans wonder, but, especially many astronomers, is whether we are alone in this big vast universe. It’s a question that’s been dealt with in a lot of science fiction movies, literature, philosophy, and now also in astronomy research when we search for civilizations and we search for signs of life out there. And of course there is lot of reasons to be very interested and optimistic about this kind of research and to believe that there is life elsewhere. We have billions of planets similar to the Earth just in the Milky Way. Many of them are within the habitable zone of their host star. We have also found the basic building blocks of life such like amino acids on meteorites and asteroids. However, so far, no life, not even a microbe has been found outside the earth.

And to search for intelligent life, which is where my interests are, we have traditionally used radio signals. And since the 1960s astronomers use radio signals to search for intelligent life. So far, without any success. There are different ways how we can search for this intelligent life. Personally, I had a different idea as a PhD student when I started this research.

There’s a poem by Housman:

“Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die,
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.”

This poem captures something very important about stars. Usually, they either die by fading off during billions of years to white dwarves or they die by exploding in a bright supernova. But can a star just one day just vanish and not be there? And this is something that brings together two different research fields that I was very interested in, which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and some kind of super interesting techno signatures as we call them from a very advanced civilization that could make a star vanish, but also searches for some very unusual events.

In the ’50s the Palomar Observatory was taking lots of images of the sky. It was done on photographic plates and old technology. And today, it’s done with a much more sensitive images. So in 2020 we published a hundred mysterious images that weren’t a star that vanishes, but there was some kind of brief flashes that you can find on one plate and you couldn’t see them again. And we were trying to understand, “what are we seeing?”

To do so, we created a citizen science project where people could go and it could help. It was open to the public to go there and look at these images from Palomar and Pan-STARRS and search for vanishing objects. In this citizen science project we have been working a lot with schools, with amateur astronomical societies, primarily in Nigeria and in Algeria. This has been a very exciting effort because we connect to students and amateur astronomers and university students at all kind of levels in their education, both from the very young, once even to kindergarten age, and to the university age. It’s been a really, really exciting journey for me.

But one day we found something really weird. We found something that shouldn’t be there. We found nine stars in a Palomar image on the 12th of April, 1950 and that you could never see again. They appear and vanished within the exposure time of the plates, so within 50 minutes. This became like super peculiar. I discovered this in the last week of February 2020, the same time as the COVID pandemic that just started and I was like, “what is happening?” I was sitting there with my office mate in Spain, and I was at that time a guest postdoc at IAC Tenerife, and I was just wondering, “so what is it? What are we seeing?”

In order to solve this mystery, because I really try to do different kinds of tests, what is this weird example of these nine stars that are there and not there later, I contacted Dr. Geoffrey Marcy, who is a pioneer in exoplanetry research. He was also the discoverer of the first 70 out of 100 exoplanets. He discovered the first planetary system around a sun-like star. He confirmed very quickly the exoplanet discovery made by Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor. And Geoff received the Shaw Prize, which is the “Asian Nobel Prize” they call it, in 2005 shared with Nobel Prize winner Michel Mayor. He won lots of wonderful awards for his research, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, until 2019.

Geoff, also, was very important in starting up the Breakthrough Listen program, which is a hundred million dollar program to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He got Yuri Milner donating a hundred million dollars to search for intelligent life, and he was a project leader.

Unfortunately, a few months after, a scandal erupted around sexual harassment accusations.

Was there any known astronomical phenomenon that could explain this finding? No, we couldn’t explain it with any known astronomic phenomenon. Some kind of instrumental issues? Well, we couldn’t identify any clear instrumental issue that would explain these nine stars there and vanished. We were wandering further, could there be some kind of nuclear fallout from secret atomic bomb tests? Well, on the 12th of April, 1950 and actually in the whole of 1950, there were no known atomic bomb tests in United States, and I’m no conspiracy theorist. So now we kind of started getting out of options.

This is when we found one hypothesis. That possibly these short flashes could come from some kind of non-human or extraterrestrial satellites in orbit around the Earth in 1950, because this is seven years before Sputnik 1. If you would use the same instrumentation to look at the sky today, you will see millions, you will see thousands of these flashes on the sky every hour simply because you have so much space debris, and they are flat and they are highly reflective materials and then you get these fast flashes. What we saw then could potentially be something like that, maybe. We formed that as a hypothesis. It’s just that again, it’s seven years before Sputnik 1. So this is super, super exciting for us. The paper published in Scientific Reports^[1] in the beginning of June 2021.

So what was the reaction? When we published this paper, what was the reaction of my astronomy colleagues? Because I was nervous. And this also came at the time when Pentagon started talking about UFOs and they made a very famous report in 2021 where they talked about that multiple UFO cases could not be explained because they were seeing these UFOs across multiple sensors, much of the data classified, both pilots and ground-based personnel report encounters with this kind of unknown aircraft. UFOs must be taken seriously. All this coincides in June 2021.

So yes, what was the reaction of the astronomy community and in particular the SETI astronomers? Here’s a first reaction. We had a social media storm. This was before I got a Twitter account, so I couldn’t reply to anything. And here’s an example tweet, where my name is circled there and then there is, “Why the F does the exoplanet community keep doing this?” “Yes, women participate in rape culture.” There’s also a call, “Is the press gonna cover or what?” So yes, now I’m accused of participating in rape culture.

So Nature, apparently on the 27th of May which is a few days before we got our paper accepted, actually writes that the National Academy of Sciences in United States has just expelled Geoff following the harassment complaints from 2015.^[2] So six years have passed, but now six years later, suddenly there is a problem with collaborating with Geoff. Despite that he published 70 papers with various collaborators in these times without issues. Now there’s a problem, and another group gets attacked and now we get attacked for working with Geoff.

So first are the Astrobites, who make an official statements where they refer to our Nature paper, and they make a statement about harassment and how upset they are that people are collaborating with Geoff still and that they will not be supporting or promoting our work. There are a lot of tweets going around about that one should not be citing or promoting my paper.

I also get rejected from a workshop, or my talk gets rejected from a workshop at Penn State. I may still attend, but I cannot give a talk. And they write to me on the 13th of June, 2021,

“After the assignment of presentation slots, the committee learned about your recent paper published in Nature Scientific Reports that directly relates to your proposed presentation. As the second author on this paper has violated these codes, we have withdrawn your invitation to present such as for vanishing stars with VASCO.”

Now the interesting thing here is that I had not even mentioned the Scientific Reports paper in my abstract. It was a general abstract where I had wished to present the citizen science project. They refer to the code of conduct, where they have written down acceptable behaviour, and you can see at the end that there is a new point that is not having the same formatting as all the other points because it was probably so impulsively included, and where they make it unacceptable to promote the work of those who have violated professional code of ethics, for example, the AAS code of ethics:

“Promotion of an author’s work includes any verbal or visual presentation including that person’s name or likeness. In cases where the participant’s work is sufficiently scientifically independent from that of the person who has violated the professional code, the work may be presented so long as the presenter is not engaging in promotion. Citations are not violations of this policy, though all participants should weigh the necessity of presenting the citation with the harm that it could perpetrate.”

The same thing happens with the SETI.news. Actually, it’s again someone from Penn State that sends me an email where it is written:

“As for SETI.news, that is a curated resource we provide as a service to the community. And we have decided that we don’t want to use it to promote Geoff Marcy’s work. This isn’t to say that we won’t include any papers he has contributed to. But this paper has him as second author. And since I know his style well, I can tell he had a heavy hand in it.”

So now I’m even accused for not having written my own paper, despite that I was writing it and doing most of the work. This is not only my own work that was influenced when this happened, but there was actually a bunch of people in the VASCO collaboration whose work wasn’t presented, from representing four continents.

But I go on and at the same time as these things happened I also was very excited about the possibility to search for for ET probes in photographic plates because photographic plates that are pre-dating Sputnik 1 are like a time machine. So, by going back and watching these photographic plates, and if you see something that looks like an artificial satellite, you know you might have something that is an ET probe. That is a pristine sky, not like the super contaminated sky that we have today. We have some predictive signatures of extraterrestrial probes, for example, multiple transients, as you can see that is multiple of them, or that is a triple transient or better if you see several of them in a line, and we calculate it with statistics and try to estimate how many in a line do you need in order for it to be sufficiently separated from any kind of weird plate.

Funnily enough, we did find two exciting examples that were statistically significant, one from the 6th of August, 1954, with a probability of 0.003, and another, even more beautiful where you see five along a narrow stripe happening on the 27th of July in 1952 and with a probability of one in 10,000.

Now, this paper we submitted it and it got instead met with the stigma of the UFOs. Many journals are terrified to touch the UFO topic, and they get nervous if they get this kind of paper in their inbox. So one won’t even get to the case of review in some cases because the editor might reject it in five minutes just by the topic. That’s a stigma and that I hope will be resolved with time.

Things were also going quite fine for me at that time period, in some ways at the same time because I got the International Rising Talents Prize from the L’Oréal-UNESCO. However my contract towards the end of ’22 was about to expire, and I started getting stipends instead of salary so I was also applying for a number of grants. Like the ERC or the Swedish Research Council grant. I also moved back to Uppsala in September 2022. So that was a time with big change in my life.

In 2022, I’m also applying for an affiliate position at the SETI Institute, which allows you to apply for grants in the nation and it looks like a really good thing. Unfortunately, I receive a message that as such, we could not, for example, put forward a proposal that includes Geoff as a co-investigator to any public or private funding organization, nor could we publish a paper on our website nor advocate for publication on any other platforms or journals, a paper including Geoff as co-author. In other words, if I want to collaborate, if I want to be affiliated to the SETI Institute, I must break with Geoff as a collaborator.

Of course, I cannot do that because I really believe in human rights and this is something really important to me, and I also believe in academic freedom.

So I announced that I withdraw my application. Another thing happens in the next month, and that is that, I can’t, due to respect to all the people involved and because I have received an official apology, I cannot describe it. But there’s something happening around that I invited Geoff for something where people were so angry that they put allegations on me, I got threats and intimidation during a formal meeting, and the whole thing got into such a high level of stress that after a couple of weeks I one day had such a bad chest pain that I couldn’t breathe and I ended up at an emergency room where I spent some ten hours with all kind of tests, EKG, and CT scans and all kind of things. Doctors checking me immediately, blood samples, and after ten hours they asked me, “Has there been any moment of stress in your life recently?” Thankfully, I received an official apology after this.

That was also a moment that was a turning point for me because I realized that I cannot anymore be silent all the time when things happened to me. I have to, I have to react also.

Life moves on and a lot of good things also happen. I give a TEDx talk in Zurich.^[3] I meet wonderful people who were supportive and who helped me in various very important ways. And very excitingly, my team discovers a transient, a triple transient where you see three stars that appear and vanish within this 50 minutes of exposure time. And again, you cannot explain it. It’s like the previous case. It’s just much brighter, much clearer and much more difficult to argue. Later in the same year, it gets published in the MNRAS.^[4]

A couple of weeks after, we also find that, there is something funny about these things. We had already written down the draft of the paper when a friend pointed out that you actually discovered something very fun, that your famous triple transient happens on the date of the most famous flyover over Washington. And we say, okay, well, it could be a coincidence, but it was still there on that particular date. And when he tells me that I start wondering how about the other examples you had, like, let’s say these two statistically significant candidates we have from the paper we uploaded to arXiv the previous year.^[5] Could they also kind of match with some of these famous flyovers?

And of course, the best candidate did also match the 27th of July, because apparently, 1952, during two consecutive weekends, on the 19th of July and 27th of July, there was a most famous UFO sighting probably during the last 100 years over Washington, and it was so big that even the US Air Force had to go up and make a special press conference. As it was seen by many witnesses, and also on radars and even fighter jets were hunting the UFOs.

So this was a very, very fun coincidence that we’re still looking into to try to figure out. Is it a coincidence? Is it something more?

On the other side of the pond around Easter happened, unfortunately, something sad. There was this exoplanet team that published a paper together with Geoff Marcy, that, unfortunately, they got under huge social media attacks. Geoff Marcy was doing very important work here with both the data and with developing the code. But over social media there was a lot of anger, so they got messages such as that to defend or affiliate with Geoff Marcy in any way should be an academic kiss of death. There were people calling for influencing the [tenure review] committee of the first author who was an assistant professor at that time.

And Science journal publishes a very humiliating article with this headline: “After outcry, disgraced sexual harasser removed from astronomy manuscripts.”^[6] Here is where someone I think is very heroic, Lawrence Krauss, enters and writes a response in Quillette called “Campus Puritans come for an astronomer—and his byline,”^[7] and it was a very important article in my opinion, discussing this issue of how the social media mob forces to remove co-authors.

I myself also at this moment give up because I have contacted the American Astronomical Society and I was also contacting the International Astronomical Union, and I publish and describe my experience.^[8] Luckily the IAU replies by updating the code of conduct to stop the kind of harassment that both me and Lauren [Weiss] have been experiencing, and to also forbid this kind of discrimination for members of IAU. I think this is a wonderful thing.

However, of course, there are some people that are really upset, and the same person who wrote that it was part of rape culture also is upset on anyone who defends me and writes for example this:

“If you guys are going to confess in daylight that you don’t see the problem with this, then let me make sure people know about you.”

And she retweets it with his name. So the reactions are not very nice from a small, loud minority. I however get this very nice Courage Award so I feel a little bit better.^[9]

Nature journal, however, publishes a paper. Of course, they don’t talk about the negative and mean things written on social media, but they’re focusing on writing an article, “Astronomy society revises harassment policy after outcry,”^[10] which is of course slightly biased in the direction, in my opinion, of the people who wanted to have the right to write rape culture. Also there is the main responsible professor who was responsible both for the SETI.news letter and also the code of conduct, and that’s at the Penn State PSETI Center, who also writes a blog post explaining why they had banned my presentation.

Meanwhile, the most exciting things in the world are happening. Because at US Congress now several whistleblowers come there and talk about how they have seen UFOs, and David Grusch has interviewed thirty or forty people who have been working directly with crash retrieval programs and crashed UFOs. So what do we do?

I luckily received support to start the so-called EXOPROBE project where we do near-Earth searches for ET probes, spaceships and artifacts near the earth where we will set up a network of telescopes with multiple telescopes where, simply, we will be looking for these kind of flashes that we think we might have seen in these images from the 1950s, but look at the sky today and get rid of all the satellites, human satellites.

But that was the end of my chapter in the SETI community. I have left the SETI community lists. That chapter is closed and a new chapter has become for me with UFO research as we are destigmatizing the UFO topic. There have been many exciting things happening like a fantastic conference at Stanford by the Sol Foundation where I attended and gave a talk.^[11] The European Parliament meeting about UFOs in March. There’s a new chapter now starting now around this UFO world, and I hope to enjoy this research and help to figure out what are UFOs and if there are any non-human intelligence that are in contact with the earthlings as some people are telling us, so let’s see where it leads.

My personal journey through the unknown by Dr. Beatriz Villarroel

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About Dr. Beatriz Villarroel

Dr. Beatriz Villarroel is an assistant professor of astrophysics at Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics, Stockholm University. She holds a PhD in astronomy and a Masters degree in physics, both from Uppsala University. Her research interests include The Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations project (VASCO), the structure and coevolution of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and their host galaxies, and optical searches for extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). She is the principal investigator for the newly started ExoProbe project, that aims to search for extraterrestial artifacts and probes in Earth’s vicinity.

In 2021, Beatriz Villarroel received the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science national prize in Sweden for the VASCO project. In 2022, she was the first Swede to win the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science “International Rising Talents”, where the top 15 female early-career scientists are awarded the international prize among more than 250 national/regional prize winners globally. In 2023, she gave a TEDx talk in Zurich “Why we should look for alien artifacts,” and an invited talk at the Sol Foundation’s inaugural meeting at Stanford University.

Villarroel was recognized with the Heterodox Academy 2023 Courage Award “for the person who has demonstrated consistent courage in pursuing truth, and embodies bravery in championing the principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in the academy despite social and professional costs.”

Learn more about Dr. Beatriz Villarroel.