Dr. Beatriz Villarroel is a researcher at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics who is the brains behind the VASCO project - a study of Vanishing and Appearing Sources During a Century of Observation. The project asked a stunningly simple question - if we compare photographic plates of the cosmos taken in the 1950s with photographs taken in the last few years, would there be much of a difference? To their great surprise, Villarroel and colleagues discovered more than 100,000 mismatches between the two datasets. We talk to her about the missing objects, the art of astronomical observation, how to stay creative in a system that rewards incremental progress, and her ambitious goal of identifying and recovering an extraterrestrial object from within our solar system.