Ivo Busko is an astronomer and retired scientific software developer from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. Writing as an independent researcher, he published two papers in 2026 on short-lived "transients" recorded on photographic sky plates from before the launch of Sputnik, and both became central to the debate over the VASCO project's findings. His papers give his affiliation as "Independent Researcher, Retired Developer at NASA/AURA/STScI," which led much of the press coverage to describe him as a former NASA scientist.

Busko earned a master's degree in astronomy and a PhD in astrophysics at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. At STScI he was a senior software engineer in the Operations and Engineering Division, building scientific software for Hubble and other NASA missions. He was also part of the team behind Iris, an application built for the US Virtual Astronomical Observatory to assemble and analyze the spectral energy distributions of astronomical sources.

His first transient paper, posted in March 2026, reported a preliminary search of mid-1950s plates from the Hamburg Observatory's 1.2-meter Schmidt camera, digitized by the APPLAUSE archive. By comparing pairs of exposures of the same sky region taken about 30 minutes apart, he found "evidence of transients similar to those previously reported by the VASCO Project," with 41 plates yielding 70 candidates and 35 after visual vetting. He wrote that their narrow profiles supported an interpretation as sub-second flashes "consistent with reflections from flat, rotating objects in orbit around Earth," the hypothesis advanced by Beatriz Villarroel and colleagues. Press coverage presented the paper as independent support for Villarroel and Stephen Bruehl; the Daily Mail went further, headlining it as backing evidence of non-human intelligence, which the paper itself does not claim.

A second paper, posted in June 2026 and published in The Open Journal of Astrophysics that October, used 398 plates taken between 1934 and 1957 with Hamburg's 0.6-meter Doppel-Reflektor, a telescope whose images show mild coma distortion. Busko found eleven transients bearing the coma pattern expected of light that passed through the telescope optics, which he described as "a signature that plate artifacts cannot naturally reproduce." The transients clustered in two small regions of sky and fell between 1949 and 1953. He wrote that the results were consistent with a reported link to nuclear weapons tests and with the glint hypothesis, but that the sample was too small for statistical conclusions and that the data alone could not establish the physical origin of the light.

Villarroel called the June result "HUGE news" and said it drove "a final nail into the coffin" of explanations based on plate defects and cosmic rays. Skeptic Mick West answered her post with "How not to read a scientific paper," and Busko's own conclusions said the coma technique still needed better sampling and automated identification. His papers gave the VASCO debate an independent dataset from a different observatory and instrument, making a retired Hubble software developer a central figure in the argument over what was flashing in Earth's skies before the first satellite.