090439

Following a series of remarkable recent discoveries we now know that some ofthe most luminous members of the ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) population areactually powered by highly super-Eddington neutron star accretors. However keyquestions remain about these remarkable systems and few ULX pulsars are known.Those that are appear to commonly show higher amplitude variability on longtimescales than other ULXs. Here we propose using this property to search fornew ULX pulsars using Swift to monitor four nearby galaxies rich in ULXs andtriggering up to two XMM-Newton observations on luminous transients and/orvariable ULXs when they are sufficiently bright that we can perform acceleratedpulsation searches. [truncated! Please see actual data for full text]