I love the idea that some intelligent civilization on another planet discovered new physics beyond what we think is even possible, developed spacecraft with that new technology to cover vast distances, and then used them to come and prank us with flashing lights.

The single paper that is linked as their research in this article itself states that the anomalies they are investigating have a reasonable likelihood of being contamination to the images. A comment on that paper points out other artifacts on the images that point to almost certainly being contamination.

They are also a further refutation of the common, yet unfortunate, critique that all transients are merely photographic or optical defects. That critique continues to circulate, despite being ruled out by our findings.

Their own papers, literally the one they link to in this article, state that this is a possible explanation.

Looking at a couple of the other papers they've published (I had to go to their main site to track them down) they also state that their findings can be explained by known phenomena of various types.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And this ain't it.