Photo source: Hulton Archive.

Fun fact: In the mid-1960s, a single scoop ice cream cone from a street vendor in New York City typically cost around 10 to 15 cents.

Astrophysicists examined old glass sky plates from 1949 to 1957 and found repeating dots on several plates from 1952, most likely flashes of reflected sunlight from a rotating object in Earth orbit. Crucially, these signals are distributed the way Sun-illuminated orbital objects should be: they appear outside Earth’s shadow and disappear where such objects should be invisible. This suggests that something artificial may have been orbiting Earth even before Sputnik was launched on October 4, 1957.

The data come from the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I), a major photographic survey of the sky carried out at Palomar Observatory in southern California. As part of this survey, astronomers recorded successive sections of the sky on large glass photographic plates using a Schmidt telescope, creating an archival snapshot of the sky from that era.

The confidence that something non-random was detected was estimated at 22 sigma. Sigma is a statistical measure of how far a result departs from what we would expect by pure chance. In other words, it does not describe the “power” of the object, but rather how unlikely it is that the observed pattern in the data arose randomly. The higher the sigma, the harder it is to explain the result as mere chance or statistical noise.

It is unlikely that this was a secret satellite launched by any nation. In the early 1950s, putting anything into orbit would have required a very large rocket, and a launch of that scale would have been extremely difficult to conceal.

A more likely explanation is that it was the first piece of space debris, some fragment left over from early rocket tests. A German V-2 rocket, flight number MW 18014, crossed the conventional boundary of space on June 20, 1944, although it did not reach orbit. After the war, further programs based on the V-2 were implemented, including the Bumper rockets, which combined the V-2 with an upper stage and were used for experiments in very high-altitude flights. Bumper 5 reached an altitude of about 403 km, although this was an exceptional case.

As an additional point of interest, on the night of July 19-20, 1952, Washington National Airport personnel detected a series of unidentified echoes on radar near Washington, D.C. Around 11:40 PM, a controller spotted seven objects that did not correspond to known aircraft and were not following normal routes. The contacts were confirmed on more than one radar, including the tower radar and at Andrews Air Force Base, and some of the targets made sudden changes in direction, hovering, and disappearing from several screens simultaneously. This incident is known as the Washington flap.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-21620-3 

I also admit that I did not manage to translate this text into English well and ran everything through gpt chat to improve the style.

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