Get Beatriz Villarroel on Lex Fridman Podcast

Beatriz Villarroel is one of the few working astronomers applying standard observational methods to a question usually left to speculation: whether any of the countless points of light in historical sky surveys have simply vanished or appeared, which would be hard to explain with known astrophysics. As lead of the VASCO project, she mines decades-old photographic plates with modern image analysis — an approach that turns archival data into a testable SETI search rather than an anecdote-driven one, and that has produced peer-reviewed results and candidate transients worth interrogating. For Lex's audience, she represents the productive middle ground between institutional astronomy and the UAP question: she takes the possibility of non-human technology seriously enough to design experiments, while insisting on data, replication, and falsifiability. A long-form conversation with her clarifies what is genuinely anomalous, what is likely instrumental artifact, and why that distinction is the whole ballgame.