Pre-Sputnik Earth-Orbit Glints

Summary

IMHO, the strongest evidence so far that (some) UFOs are aliens just dropped. (OK, two weeks ago.) This evidence is of many brief bright glints of sunlight reflecting off of big surfaces in high orbit around Earth, before humans had put anything up there, and correlated in time with both UFO reports and nuclear tests.Glints are brief flashes of the Sun (or other bright sources) off of flat reflecting surfaces. On Earth, and in the rest of the solar system, natural glints come mainly from flat surfaces of water or ice. (Rarely, wind polished rocks glint.) On Earth today, correcting for water, glints are strong indicators of human spaces, due to our many flat reflecting surfaces.Modern automated telescope sky surveys see ~1800 glints per hour per sky near the equator (as of ~2020), and three good LLMs told me we are pretty sure, via multiple lines of evidence, that most all these glints are due to human-made satellites and their debris. Typical momentary brightness of these glints is magnitude 9 to 11, and making glints this bright requires (I think) an ideal ~1-2cm diameter circle at geosynchronous orbit [GEO] (42K km radius). Real glinting objects are smaller than this if closer to Earth, but larger if not perfectly flat, aligned, or reflective.It is thus quite surprising to learn that there seem to have been ∼340 big glints per hour per sky (~1/5 of current rate) before we humans launched our first satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957!Says who, you ask? The First Palomar Sky Survey, using the 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Mount Palomar 1949-1958, was the first comprehensive photo survey of the entire northern sky. It took almost 2,000 square photos, each covering about 6° on a side. Typically, each region was photographed twice in a row, once using a plate sensitive to red light for ~50 min, and then one sensitive to blue for ~10 min.These plates were later digitized, and recently the VASCO project has looked for “transients”, i.e., objects seen in the red but not...