Top Astronomer: UFOs Are STILL Here

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**Beatriz Villarroel** (0:30)
This shows that we have a population of objects near the earth that have not been discovered until now. There's absolutely no way how they will remember this little circle of 8.7 degrees and only there have a deficit, but not outside it. So only reflections can produce that deficit.

**Brian Keating** (0:49)
What do you make of these claims of tic-tacs and non-human biologics and interdimensional being? I mean, do you think that any of these hold the candle scientifically that meets your rigorous standard?

**Beatriz Villarroel** (1:02)
I believe it's true.

**Brian Keating** (1:03)
Why aren't they here now?

**Beatriz Villarroel** (1:06)
Who has said that they are not here now?

**Brian Keating** (1:08)
Are you worried about your safety?

**Beatriz Villarroel** (1:10)
Yes, there have been a number of incidents.

**Brian Keating** (1:18)
And when did you start Vasco?

**Beatriz Villarroel** (1:20)
So it depends on how one defines it. The first test we did was in 2016, and it was something, I was obsessed with an idea since I was a student, and I wanted to search for vanishing stars. It had nothing to do with UFOs, but I was super, super interested in vanishing stars. It came from a crazy idea I got when I was writing a fable about a poor, depressed quasar.
And then, you know, while writing and there at the end, and I started wondering, but can an object just vanish? Could an object vanish? And well, I was just a student at the time. And then I got stuck with this thing. And I remember I even had a phone conversation with, could it have been Michael Strauss from SDSS? And I was asking, hey, can you redo the whole Sloan like one more time so that they get one more like set of a photometry? And I had no idea what I was asking. And he was smiling a little bit, you know, when I was asking if they could just do one more time, observe the whole sky so that they could compare like different epochs and see if something or a galaxy or whatever had vanished. And that was like, that was the first thing in 2016, but the group or the network didn't exist until 2017
When, together with two senior scientists, we said, OK, let's do it for real, because in 2016, I had together with two bachelor students try to do a small search in like 1% of the sample provided by the US Naval Observatory, looked for vanishing objects, but then they said, OK, now we need to do the whole sky. And that, my god, that was a challenge. Wow.

**Brian Keating** (3:11)
So what would make you think that there would be things that vanish other than true transients like supernovae or novae? Why did you think there might be objects that would disappear and that they would be relevant somehow astronomically?

**Beatriz Villarroel** (3:25)
Well, first, failed supernovae.
There's a class of massive stars that are believed that they might be able to collapse into a black hole without emitting any supernova. So that was one of the things, and I was curious about whether that could happen. But then, of course, I was also wondering about just purely fundamental questions, like could something just vanish, has anyone ever looked? And that was maybe the thing that mostly was bugging me. If nobody has ever looked, how can you know that it doesn't happen? And then we were, when I wrote the paper, we were motivating it a little bit with the questions like maybe it's a very, very advanced technological civilization, although I was mostly interested in this just fundamental thing.

**Brian Keating** (4:14)
Right.

**Beatriz Villarroel** (4:15)
Which is, I can't explain it. Sometimes you just get stuck with something without really understanding why.

**Brian Keating** (4:22)
And the transients that you thought you might find originally, besides the failed supernovae, I mean, were they like planets? Like, astronomy has a very long tradition of looking for things, blinking back and forth between images or photographic plates or now CCDs or CMOS cameras. So did you think you'd find comets and you'd become a prolific finder of phenomena in our solar system that are interesting, but maybe not as ground-shaking as aliens or even supernovae?