Nine Vanished 'Stars' on 1950 Palomar Plate Prompt Open Call for Evidence

PALOMAR OBSERVATORY, CALIF. — A Reddit user posting to r/UFOs has drawn attention to a 76-year-old astronomical puzzle and to a new public effort to resolve it. According to the post, a telescope at Palomar Observatory photographed a patch of sky on a glass plate on April 12, 1950.

The author writes that astronomers who re-examined the plate decades later found nine star-like points of light. These points, the post says, do not appear on a photograph of the same spot taken half an hour earlier, and do not show up in any modern survey of the sky.

The post describes an open challenge intended to test the matter. Participants are asked to examine old glass plates from other observatories, using only those taken before the launch of Sputnik. According to the author, if similar flashes turn up on those plates as well, it would become much harder to explain them as defects on the Palomar plates.

The challenge, the post states, is open to citizen scientists as well as university teams, and carries prizes of up to $75,000. The post does not name the organizers or say how entries will be judged.

The author concludes that this is the closest anyone has come to a real answer on the case. The post itself notes that plate defects remain the explanation the challenge is designed to rule out, and it offers no conclusion as to what the points of light might have been, if they were real.