UFO Anomalies Spike on Nuclear Test Days, Study Finds

A groundbreaking preprint study from astronomers Beatriz Villarroel and colleagues has uncovered a strange and potentially historic link between unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and humanity’s most destructive technological moments: nuclear bomb testing.

Using decades-old astronomical data from the POSS-I sky survey and the VASCO project, the team scanned hundreds of thousands of photographic plates for transient light events—bright flashes in the sky that appear once and vanish, with no apparent natural or known technological cause. On most nights, these events were sparse. But on days aligned with known above-ground nuclear tests, the numbers skyrocketed.

“One particular day saw an incredible 4,528 transient detections across the night sky,” the researchers note in the preprint report.

While no definitive claim of “extraterrestrial craft” is made, the statistical anomaly is striking—and has fueled speculation in the UFO community that advanced, unknown observers may be monitoring humanity’s nuclear experimentation.

UFOs and Nukes: A Pattern Decades in the Making

This new finding adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting a mysterious connection between nuclear weapons and UFO activity:

• Malmstrom AFB Incident (1967): U.S. Air Force personnel reported glowing objects hovering near a missile silo in Montana. Minutes later, ten nuclear missiles went offline simultaneously.
• Soviet Test Site Reports: Declassified Russian documents describe strange disc-shaped craft observing atomic detonations during the height of the Cold War.
• Modern-Day UAP Briefings: Multiple whistleblowers, including former Pentagon insiders, claim that nuclear weapons systems remain a focus of unexplained aerial phenomena interactions even in recent decades.

Researcher Robert Hastings has compiled decades of testimony from military personnel suggesting UFO activity spikes near nuclear weapons facilities and test sites worldwide. The new VASCO data could be the first large-scale quantitative evidence supporting these long-held suspicions.

What Could These Anomalies Be?

Scientists remain cautious about drawing conclusions. Potential explanations include:

• Atmospheric effects from high-altitude nuclear blasts causing reflections or optical distortions on photographic plates.
• Sensor errors from early 20th-century astronomical equipment.
• Unknown high-energy astrophysical events coincidentally occurring on the same dates.

Yet, the sheer number of anomalies detected on specific nuclear test days—thousands compared to near-zero on control days—makes coincidence harder to accept.

“If even a fraction of these transients are real physical events, we’re missing something important in our understanding of the night sky,” Villarroel stated in a follow-up discussion of the results.

Why This Story Could Change the UFO Debate

For decades, government UFO disclosures have focused on military pilot sightings and modern radar returns. This study adds a cosmic-scale