NASA veteran Richard Stanton spoke about the results of his years of observing stars in the optical range as part of the SETI program to search for alien life. He said that on several occasions he was able to detect extremely short-lived pulses coming from several stars near the Sun.
NASA veteran’s research
From stars around the Sun, there are sometimes surprising short-lived pulses in the optical range for which there is no simple explanation. At least that’s what Richard Stanton of the Organization for the Search for Alien Life claims, based on his years of research on more than 1,300 stars that are roughly similar to the Sun and are not far from us.
Stanton previously worked for NASA and was involved with the Voyager and GRACE missions, he is a veteran of the organization. However, he has long since retired and has been slowly engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He does this with a telescope at the Shea-Meadow Observatory in California. It is a very small instrument with a mirror diameter of 76.2 cm.
However, Stanton has something that other researchers who rush to get results don’t have — time. He can afford to point the telescope at one star for an hour and get data from it. And he doesn’t care that most of the time nothing happens to it.
Unexplained signals
To be precise, something happens to the stars Stanton observes on a regular basis. They are covered by clouds, obscured by lightning, birds and satellites flying by. But these are all events that can easily be filtered out. And anyway, it’s extremely rare that something happens that can’t be explained so easily.
That’s the kind of thing a NASA veteran hunts for, and it looks like he’s gotten lucky at least a few times. First and foremost is the events of May 14, 2023. Then the researcher was able to observe two pulses coming from the same star HD 89389, which is located at a distance of about 100 light years from us in the constellation Ursa Major.
This luminosity is of spectral class F, that is, slightly hotter than the Sun, although generally similar to it. Two identical eclipses were recorded each lasting 0.2 s, which was separated by a time interval of 4.4 s. And no “earthly” reasons given above can explain this phenomenon.
Interestingly, later, already in the winter of 2025, Stanton recorded from the star HD 12051, located at a distance of 81 light years from us, another pulse, very similar to the two previous ones. And a review of previous data shows that something similar happened with the star HD 217014 also known as 51 Pegasus.
So what’s flashing?
Do stars like the Sun occasionally flash extremely brightly just in the optical range? Could this be the result of an extraterrestrial civilization? At one time, the eclipse at 51 Pegasus was explained by the flight of birds. However, this cannot be the cause of all events. Many “earthly” versions are also put forward, but they all attribute it to an unlikely coincidence.
Separately, Stanton mentions that the cause may be the passage of gravitational waves, but this assumption requires further verification. No one mentions the word “aliens” directly, although the explanations involving them are self-explanatory. This could be testing optical range interstellar communication systems or accelerating laser sail vehicles.
According to phys.org
