What do the Navy UFO videos really mean?

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Listen everyone. I love getting your emails. No, no, I
really do. That's why I answer all of them, usually
right away. But recently I've been getting a lot of
email asking about one particular topic, and of course it's
a topic that's near and dear to my heart and
one that I've talked about a lot on the show
You Guessed It. It's aliens. Those crazy videos with the

(00:31):
tic Tac ship and those pilots saying these things are everywhere,
and it starts to feel like the opening scene of
a science fiction movie on Netflix that you didn't mean
to watch, but you can't turn off. The kind where
the news reports weird events around the world while scientists
are scoffing. So of course you want to know are
today's scientists actually scoffing or are they preparing for the

(00:52):
first Interstellar Physics Conference. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle
physicist and I really really really want to believe in

(01:15):
the aliens And Welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge
Explain the Universe, a production of My Heart Radio in
which we talk about all things alien, not just extraterrestrial intelligence,
but the universe itself, which sometimes feels downright alien, with
its weird quirks and strange neutron stars and potential alternate
dimensions and weird emergent properties like space and time and

(01:37):
general relativity and ice cream and hamsters and lava and
all that crazy nonsense. We explain all of it to you.
And one of the challenges of this universe is that
it seems a little alien that we look at it
and we don't quite understand why it is the way
that it is. It seems different from the way that
we expect from the fact that time isn't universal and

(01:58):
velocity is purely relative to the weird randomness of quantum mechanics.
We feel like we are living in a universe that
we might not be able to understand. And that's why
I personally am very much looking forward to the first
Interstellar Physics Conference where we can hear about other intelligent
beings and their struggles to understand the universe. It's my
fervent hope that they have different struggles, that they worry

(02:21):
about different things, that there are different things in the
universe that they struggle to understand, and things that we
struggle with they find simple, and so maybe they can
explain them to us. Discovering alien intelligence would be so valuable,
not just because we could learn physics, not just because
they might give us insights into the deepest nature of
the universe, but because it would directly answer one of

(02:42):
the biggest questions in the universe. And that's, of course,
are we alone? Is intelligent life unique to Earth or
has it cropped up all over the galaxy. We just
don't know the answer to that question. So people have
been watching the skies, you know, for decades and for centuries,
and we've all heard reports of flying saucers and easy
things in the sky and crash laying things at roswell.

(03:03):
But it's been sort of easy to dismiss because they
come from people without a lot of credibility or telling
tall stories. But recently there have been videos released from
a much more credible source, not weird cranks on the
radio at three am. We're talking about fighter jet pilots,
people who have been through intense screening. They fly zillion
dollar jets at supersonic speeds and they can drop death

(03:24):
from eighty thousand feet, So they got to be clearheaded.
These people have some credibility, and they've seen some weird stuff,
and they got it on video, and they released it
to the internet, and everybody is talking and a lot
of those people are also emailing me to ask me,
what do you think about these videos? So on today's podcast,
we'll be asking the question, what do the Navy UFO

(03:52):
videos really mean? This thing has percolated to the highest
levels of our culture. Even Obama said, and I quote,
there's footage and records of objects in the skies that
we don't know exactly what they are. We can't explain
how they move their trajectory. They did not have an
easily explainable pattern, and so people take it seriously, trying
to investigate and figure out what that is. He's not scoffing,

(04:15):
he's not dismissing it. He's not saying alien conspiracy theories.
He's saying, hey, there's stuff out there the US government
does not understand. And the reason that it's so exciting,
so tempting to believe that this might actually be aliens,
is that it comes at the same time as we
are understanding much more about the prevalence of life supporting

(04:35):
planets around the galaxy. You know, only twenty five thirty
years ago, we didn't know if there were planets around
other stars, and so only recently have we actually known
that there are planets all over the galaxy, and not
just a few planets, but a lot of planets, billions
and billions of planets, lots and lots of Earth like planets.
We now estimate the twenty of every star in the

(04:59):
galaxy see has an earth like planet. So that's a
lot of potential places for life to start. But of
course we take a clear eyed view on this podcast.
We don't know that just because there are lots of
places for life to start, that life has started in
lots of places. It could be very, very rare. It
could be that we are the only ones, and though

(05:19):
there are billions of opportunities, it's a once in many
billions kind of thing. We also don't know if there's
intelligent life in all those places. It could be that
there's life all over the galaxy, but it's mostly moss
and algae and little microves, nothing that would make a
ship and fly all the way over here and scare
our navy pilots. But it makes us wonder, because there

(05:40):
are so many places for life to live. We wonder
have they come to visit? Is this them coming to visit.
But on the podcast, of course, we don't just speculate.
We dig into it. We delve deep to try to
find some real answers. So on today's podcast we have
a very special guest, someone who will tell us exactly
how to look at these videos and what they mean.

(06:04):
All right, well, it is my absolute pleasure to welcome
the podcast Nick West, who is the founder of metabunk
dot org, a forum about the debunking of conspiracy theories,
and the author of Escaping the rabbit Hole how to
Debunk conspiracy Theories using fact, logic and respect because a
long history and as deep expert in these questions and topics,

(06:26):
and recently wrote an op ed in USA Today about
these very videos. So Nick, thank you very much for
joining us today and for sharing your expertise with us.
Thank you for having me very glad to be here.
Could you tell us a little bit first about your background,
how you got into this game of debunking crazy ideas,
What did you about it, and what is your expertise. Well,

(06:46):
my deep expertise going back a long time is I'm
a video game programmer, which may not say on sound
like particularly relevant stuff, But what idea is a video
game program, but was programming a couple of things. One
is computer graphics, which is how you say a kind
of a model of the world, a three D model
of the world, and you create two D images, so
you have some kind of internal representation of the world,

(07:07):
and then you translate that to the screen. And the
other thing I did is physics, which is, you know,
probably not quite the physics that you have, the advanced
physics that you talk about a lot of the time,
but relatively simple stuff like mechanics, the laws of motion
and velocity and acceleration and things like that, because we
have to simulate objects within the games flying around in

(07:28):
this three D world, and in my case, it was
a skateboarding game Tony Hawks Pro Skater, and so you
you would model things like the skater rolling up hills
and jumping off ramps and things like that, so you're
familiar with the basics of how to calculate things like
acceleration and velocity and collisions and force and mass and
things like that. In the aliens ever appear in these
Tony Hawk skiing games, they do, actually, yes, And in

(07:50):
one of the games, there's actually an area fifty one
where we have a flying sourcer and you can actually
this cheat codes where you can play as an alien.
But this is all completely unrelated to my later interests,
So you know what was What happened with how I
got from A to B from the video games to
debunking flying sources was after I kind of sent my

(08:12):
retired from the industry. I was just working as a
consultant for a while, and I had a lot of
spare time, and I was doing things that I found
personally interesting, and I was learning to fly, and I
got interested in conspiracy theories, and in particular, this is
one called the chem trails conspiracy theory, which is the
idea that the government is secretly spraying trails behind planes
to poisonous or change the weather or the climate. And

(08:32):
I got really into doing stuff like tracking down the
planes and you can actually look them up an online databasis.
But there's also a lot of the mathematics I talked
about in the video games coming very handy there, because
instead of taking a three D image and turning into
the two D, you're taking a two D image and
turning it into three D. You've got to kind of
interpolate and extrapolate things a bit more because you've only

(08:53):
got two dimensions, but it's the same kind of video
spatial reasoning that you use, and so I got good
at doing that with contrails, and then that kind of
lead naturally, there a bunch of other conspiracy theories to
the UFO stuff, and people started sending me pictures of
UFOs and videos of UFOs, and I started getting into
tracking down what these things actually were, what we're being

(09:14):
shown in these videos and these photos, and I just
find it a lot of fun and it's really interesting.
And so you got interested in these conspiracy theories because
you were worried about chem trails and contrails, or because
you were interested in the whole phenomenon of conspiracy theories.
I'm interested in figuring things out, and so I like
to figure out what's actually going on. And you know,
you're look into something like the chemtrails conspiracy theory, it

(09:34):
becomes readily apparent, fairly quickly, there's nothing to it. I mean,
I didn't really think there was anything to it to
start off with, but people make a claim of evidence
and they say, you know, contrals shouldn't persist or something.
You'll look it up. When you find that other contrails canvases.
That was obviously nonsense. So I kind of enjoyed tracking
down things like that, and I also enjoyed explaining is
the people and it's you're not knowing, it's like an aha,

(09:56):
I got your type way, But more just how do
you get across to people what the reality is and
if they have a misconception about something, how do you
explain what that misconception is. So it's been a fun
challenge for me. And I've even dabbled in talking to
people who think the Earth is flat, which is always
makes you interesting conversations, but it also touches upon real
issues of geometry essentially like an optics and how you

(10:20):
perceive the world, which again goes back to the video game,
a thing of you know, you've got three D two D.
It's just all things that have interested in me and
I generally I'm viewed as a debunker of conspiracy theories
because when I look into them, they tended not to
hold up to scrutiny. As I'm looking into things like
flat Earth or you know nine eleven was an inside
job with an ano thermity. You look into things like
that and they don't hold up, so I end up essentially,

(10:43):
you know, debunking things. But that's not what I'm setting
out to do. I'm setting out to figure out what's
actually going on. Well, it seems to me a very
natural extrapolation from what we do in physics all the time,
taking a set of data and trying to use it
to build a model of the universe that's coherent and
consistent and that stands up to examination from multiple perspectives.
And here you're taking, you know, a two dimensional image

(11:04):
and trying to understand more deeply what's actually going on.
But it seems like a natural extension of that as well.
And I just have to add for our listeners that
I discovered when I was looking into your background that
you and I have another connection, which is that this
Camp Trails paper was actually written with a close friend
of mine. Here you see, I Steve Davis, who was
an established scientist. He told me that when you guys
put out this paper, you've got a lot of how

(11:25):
she'd say, popular pushback, Yeah, very much. So, like the
paper is kind of consensus paper, essentially synthesizing consensus by
asking scientists. And Steve did a lot more working than
I did. I was just kind of helped formulate the
questions and find photos and things like that. But we
tried to reach out to as many scientists as possible,
there were domain experts, and ask them, what do you
think that this this photo represents secret spraying or something else?

(11:49):
You know, and and you do you think these these test
results represents something? And a lot of people thought that
we were joking and they were the email back and say,
you know what is this? You know what's going on
here by you even doing this and this This is
a common problem in addressing pseudo scientific claims is that
genuine scientists do not want to waste time with these things.

(12:10):
So you don't get people investigating the claims of kempshell
believers or nine eleven believers, or even like UFO believers,
and so it can creates this false illusion of balance
or no balance in a way like that they think
that they have all the science on their side because
there's no rebuttals to that science. But the reason there's
no rebuttals is that the serious scientists think that these

(12:31):
claims don't even deserve addressing. But then I come in
there and I started trying to address them. Some of
these claims, And of course I'm just essentially a lay
person who's good at looking of things in Google and
good at doing three D geometry, but you know, I'm
not not a scientist. So it's always been a problem
of arguments from authority where you know, they say that
they have science on their side, when really they don't,

(12:55):
but they don't realize that. And you find that making
these arguments carefully and clearly based on the penetrates somehow
to these folks who believe these theories. Do you feel
like there really are open to the evidence. It does
people when presented with a clear explanation for something, they
generally respond fairly well to it, but there's lots of
factors that play into that whether it actually works or not.

(13:15):
There's there's a thing in science communication called the backfire
effect where if you give people information that's contrary to
their beliefs, sometimes it makes them believe those things even
more because they have to. They feel like they're in
an other serial situation and they feel like they have
to fight back. So if you attack their beliefs, it

(13:36):
strengthens their belief because it's almost like are testing their
belief And if you don't actually break through their wall
of disbelief in your theory, then they think that they
have one and they believe or the test of being challenged,
and so it ends up not working. So you have
to do it carefully. And this is another challenge that
I have is is how do you communicate the reality

(13:57):
of the situation to people who believe the opposite without
making them believe that opposite thing even more. And that's
something I talk about quite a bit in my book
How to Treat People with Respect and get through to them. Well,
I think that listeners to this podcast are sort of
entranced by the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors and aliens in general,
as am I of course, but also open to scientific

(14:20):
explanations and eiger mostly to hear the truth to know
what really is going on in the universe. Sometimes what
we discovered by the universe is bonkers and hard to
digest and can be stranger than aliens visiting. So we
definitely need to keep our minds open to all sorts
of crazy realities, but of course it needs to be
supported by the science. So now let's turn to the videos.
In questions only, if you could briefly describe to us

(14:41):
what we see in these videos before we get into
the process of how to analyze them and what we
think they actually mean. Can you walk us through some
of them? Sure? Those actually six videos that have been
released over the last few years. So they kind of
divided into two sets. The three older videos that are
kind of seni official U. S. Navy videos, and then
there's three more videos that were a lad more recently

(15:03):
play to a filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, and he's released these.
The first three ones are the ones that people talk
about the most because they've been around for a while
and that the Navy has actually said that they are official,
and as you released official copies of them. There's three
of them. They're called flear, go Fast, and gimball you
these little little acronyms, which are actually the official names
that they were given by the U. S. Navy. So

(15:24):
I think these names actually have some meaning. But that's
pretty much all that the Navy tells you about them.
So each of these videos is a black and white video.
They were all taken with a piece of equipment called
the raytheon Act flair pot, which is an advanced targeting
advanced targeting forward looking infra red I wish is you know,
kind of fancy, but it's essentially it's just a big
camera that's very good at zooming on things and tracking them.

(15:46):
So it's just this targeting part essentially, the fits on
the planes. And these are infrared videos, so not in
the visible light. They're largely infrared. One of the videos
has a section which is in what they call TV mode,
which TV mode is just a regular a regular video,
but it doesn't actually look that much different to the
to the infrared. But most of the videos are just
the infra red, so what you're looking at is heat.

(16:07):
They're also a little confusing because what you see as
heat shows up as black in these videos is in
black hot mode most of the time in these videos,
and so it's kind of confusing in terms of the
feeling that you're looking at an actual object, because it
seems like you're looking at a physical object when really
you're essentially looking at a very bright light bright it

(16:27):
would be a bright white light if you were looking
at it, if you had infrared vision yourself, you would
just see bright light coming from and you're not really
seeing the shape of the object. What they show is
like the Flear one kind of shows what looks like
a distant object that kind of like bounces around a
little bit, and you didn't see very much as very
small and fuzzy. This is the one sometimes referred to
as the tik tak. Yeah, sometimes refers to as a

(16:49):
tik tak, although the shape in the in the video
isn't really like a clean cut tik tak, is almost
more like a peanut shape. It's kind of like it's
a little waste in the middle. And this was something
that it went along with an encounter and actual eyewitness
encounter by pilots who actually saw something that they described
as a TikTok, And then later another pilot took this
video and said that it was, you know, the same

(17:12):
thing that people assumed it was the same thing, but
you know, it shows something off in the distance and
it's not really moving in the video very much. But
the other two videos do actually show motion, which is
a lot more impressive. There's one called Go Fast, which
looks like the camera is just a been looking down
at the ocean surface and then this object whizzes interview
and then the camera tries to track it and follow

(17:32):
it and then eventually kind of locked on and then
it starts following this object and it's whizzing really really
fast across the ocean surface, at least that's what it
looks like. And then the third video, gimbal, is the
one I think that's the most visually impressive and people
have often cited as being the most compelling. You have
a video out there because it shows a flying surcer
is what looks like a flying source which shows a

(17:54):
kind of like a top type ship, almost almost diamonds
shaped with a little bit rounded with like little spikes
at the top from the bottom and on the end,
and it looks like it's flying along over the top
of some clouds, and then it looks like it slows
down and then it does this weird rotation where it
kind of rotates so it's almost like standing on its end,
and then it rotates the past vertical and it seems

(18:15):
to be hovering in that position about the clouds. So
it looks really impressive. If you were looking for a
video of a UFO flying is also doing something amazing,
it seems like here it is almost like something you
would put in the video game. And so to be clear,
these three videos were sort of released together but they're
not necessarily connected. Like the first one, the tic TAC one,

(18:37):
the FLEAR one was an incident in two thousand four
off the coast of southern California, whereas the other two
were nearly ten years later, and we're taken by planes
operating off the east coast. Yeah, that's right. There were
eleven years later, I think in two thousand and fifteen.
And the first earlier video of the FLIR video taking
in two thousand and four was actually leaked in two

(18:58):
thousand and seven, so it's actually been knocking around on
the Internet and people have been looking at it and
analyzing it for were well over a decade, so it's
not like it's this new thing that has just suddenly
been dropped by the US military. The other two videos
that are connected, they were actually taken by the same
weapon system operator on the same plane, the same pilots
and everything. You can tell you there's information on the

(19:20):
screen that matches, and the voices the same thing. It's
so much newer video, but you know, it's still is
still a few years old. But that one came out
in at the end of two thousands and seventeen, and
it was kind of leaked out by people who used
to work in the Pentagon. There's a guy who you
used to work in the Pentagon, and he says he
worked on this program that studied unidentified aerial phenomena, which

(19:42):
is the kind of the more politically correct term for
the UFO is like UFO without all the baggage of
little green men and flying scurces, but essentially talking about
the same thing. It's unidentified flying objects and identified areal phenomena.
So this guy, you know, he worked on this program
which did some study of unidentified area but not phenomena,
and he knew about these videos apparently, and then he

(20:03):
worked to get them cleared for release and it kind
of got them out. But there's some dispute about how
they got out of the military. It wasn't entirely happy
with it that they think that he misrest misrepresented what
he was going to do with them. But you know,
it's gonna be relevant really because they're out now and
the military has said, you know, these are real things.
They were taken by Navy pilots and they were classified
as unidentified at some point. So here we are, and

(20:24):
when we say real things, we mean the videos are
videos taken by these airplanes. Now that the Navy or
the government is saying what there are videos of the
videos are real videos, it's what they're saying, and they
show something. I mean that it's not like a son
of simulation. There's something there. There are these white dots
or these black dots represent actual things that were there,

(20:47):
that were flying. Essentially, no one's suggesting that they are fake,
but no one's also really well that the government isn't
suggesting that they are alien flying sources. So those the
first three videos, and then there were some new videos
in two thousand nine. Yeah, there was this one came
out called The Well. It doesn't really have an official
name because it's not really an official video. They were
all leaked to this filmmaker and a journalists to too

(21:10):
several people. There's a filmmaker called Jeremy corbell In a
Las Vegas journalist called George Knapp, who are kind of
like partners in crime, a crime, but you know, the
partners in their endeavor in releasing UPHO videos, and apparently
they want to send them a bunch of UFO videos
that were recorded by the U. S. Navy of by
people on ships. US Native personnel. And so the first
one is called the green Pyramid video, and it appears

(21:33):
to show a flying green triangle that plays across the
sky and it's it's flashing a little bit, and then
its life passed two other flying green triangles, and everyone
was amazed at this. It was described as the most
incredible UFO video of all time, better than the gimbaled
video because it showed an actual flying pyramid and people
assume that's what it was because that's what it issues

(21:54):
in the video. Then there was another one called the
Omahaspea video, which shows a black heat source kind of
this ending and then going behind the horizon. And then
those the Omaha Radar video, which just shows by thirty
seconds of a radar screen that shows some tracks on
it and people are talking about them, and then not
entirely show where they are. So those are the six videos,
which sounds like a whole bunch of evidence, a lot

(22:15):
of wonderful evidence for UFOs, but when you start digging
into them, because the magic kind of falls away, all right,
So we will dig into them in just a moment
and talk about what your process is for how you
analyze these and figure out what you think is going on.
But first, let's take a quick break. All right, we're

(22:43):
back and we're talking to Mick West about what's going
on in these videos that the Navy has released that
contain these strange objects that some people are claiming our
evidence of aliens, and other people are more skeptical. So
Mick is an expert in debunking these videos and understanding
from a two D image what we are actually looking at. So, Mike,
I want to hear about your process for how you

(23:04):
take these things apart and understand what's likely going on.
But first I want to share with you the results
of a poll I gave to our listeners. I asked
them this morning, what is the most likely explanation for
the Navy UFO videos? And half of them said that
it was nothing remarkable, a third said it was some
secret military technology, thirteen percent of them said it was

(23:25):
clear evidence of aliens, and five percent claimed it was
likely manipulated video. So that's sort of a snapshot for
where our listeners are in their minds, And so I
think we'd love to hear about what your process is,
how you analyze these videos, how you take them apart. Well,
first of all, I think we can gond just count
the last one that there are edited videos that being

(23:45):
confirmed to be real videos taken by Navy personnel by
the Navy, and in my analysis of it, I haven't
found anything at all that suggests that they are fake
in any way. They appear to be taken by pilots
on planes or sailors on ships, and to represents something
that that's actually showed up in the camera when they
were filming it. But how do you know that the
video itself is authentic, Like maybe the Navy believes it,

(24:07):
but how do we know that the sailors themselves. Haven't
you modified this data? Can you see like the metadata
or somehow verified the authenticity of the digital You can't
see the metadata, But just looking at the video, there's
nothing at all to suggest in it that it was fate.
They look genuine to me, you know, just in the
very self consistem. If you do the analysis and what
actually happened throughout the entire video, there's there's nothing that

(24:30):
suggests anything that various is going on self consistent meaning
for example, the reflections and the angles, the texture of
the video, but it remains the same like when people
added things you often see things like some areas of it,
I have a different kind of noise in the background.
I would look for lighting as one of the things
that is fate, but you know, this is an infrared video,
so it doesn't. There's nothing that suggests it from an

(24:53):
infre prospective that there's anything going on or anything like
the light comes from one part in in one point
of the video and the other part and the other.
You know, it's just nothing left out to me. It's
difficult to test videos like this because there are almost
no videos to compare them against. It's a classified system,
the ALEO system, and so if you want to find

(25:13):
a video to see, you know, here's a genuine APT
flaw video, and here is this one maybe is fake.
These are actually the best at FLE videos that we
actually have available because the military does not release this
type of footage. There's nothing at all. There's a better
quality than the gimbal video or the go Fast video.
So there's a great videos from from that perspective. So

(25:34):
we should assume that the Navy has done some internal
authentication to verify that they're not being duped by their
own sailors, that they understand these systems better than we
obviously do. So we have to just take their word
for it that the US government is not purposely putting
out things they know to be false and move on
from there. I think definitely with the first three videos
because they are Navy pilots and they would have had

(25:55):
to have faced it in the cockpit essentially, because these
things get recorded on tape that is installed on the
system in digital form, and there such a chain of
custody essentially, so you know, the pilot would not have
faced in the cockpit. The other ones, the triangle video,
you know, it is possible that the guy was just
messing around. When you look in the actual explanation making,

(26:16):
we can kind of get into what's actually going on,
but he could have actually have created this effect himself
or herself. And then this the sphere of video and
the radar video, they have the sounds of multiple people
acting as if they are in a c i c.
Combat information center like the room and the ship where
they have all these screens and they look at incoming

(26:36):
threats on the radar and whatnot, and it all sounds
very genuine. So if that was faked, they would have
had to get a bunch of guys to stage this
whole thing, and I think the military probably would have
explained what was going on by this point if if
he was faked to that degree. So you know, I
think we can we can take it as read that
these are genuine Navy videos, all right, And then we're
looking at the videos, we're interested with what could explain

(26:59):
this would how could this possibly be something earth bound
or prosaic? So how do you analyze it? How do
you take it apart? Well? Yeah, what when I look
at in these videos is, first of all, I look
at what other people have claimed about them, because that's
the most important thing where to start off with is
if a claim is made about a video, you can
see does this claim actually hold up? Because these are
other people who say they've done analysis of the video.

(27:21):
So I'm first of all checking their analysis to see
if it got holds up, because it's kind of pointless
meeting a completely different set of analysis and coming to
a different conclusion if I don't look at their analysis.
So in the first video, the FLEAAR video, the claim
is made that the object on screen moves in such
a rapid way that it's it's experiencing g forces much

(27:41):
higher than a human powered craft could do. Human power,
human pilotive craft could actually do it just doing like
fifty g s or something like that. So some quite
high number, much higher numbers have been speculated to the
eyewitness accounts, up to several thousand g's, but that's kind
of all different kettle of fish here. By fifty gs,
you mean the acceleration. You think changes in velocity. To

(28:02):
change the position on screen would require a certain velocity,
and you've got to get an eid velocity with an
attraction of the second, which means you have to have
very rapid acceleration, which means obviously very high forces upon
the occupants of the craft or the craft itself, and
some very powerful means of propulsion, which you can really
only do with without technology if you have some kind
of powerful rocket attached to the object, or if it

(28:23):
was a very small object and you had like minigiat
engines or something like that. But so, you know, I
started to look at that, and I think, you do
the mass if it is moving, then yes, it is
actually experiencing these these high accelerations. But then I started
going through the video and I'm looking at all the
indicators on the screen, and it tells you what mode
is in and what zoom level it's in, whether it's
in TV mode or infrared mode. And yeah, I noticed

(28:47):
that whenever it did this this movement on screen, it
was actually switching which camera it was using, So it
would be switching between say TV mode and infrared mode,
and then the object would do a little movement. If
it's for between wide angle and narrow angle, it would
do a little movement. The camera has to do these
the gimbal rock corrections occasionally where it traverses the forward direction,

(29:09):
it has to rotate the camera around, and when it
does that, it also does this little movement. And then
right at the end of the video you get the
same type of saying. The camera mode changes, the camera
loses lock on the object, and then the object drifts
off the side the screen. So I noticed all these
things lined up, and then I noticed that the heading
on the top of the screen, which tells you which

(29:29):
where the camera is pointing relative to the plane, starts
off on the right. I think it's like five degrees
right something like that, and then it moves over to
eight degrees left, so it's traverting like ten eleven or
twelve degrees over the course of the video, so essentially
it's tracking left. And I noticed that every time the
camera lost lock because it did a little camera movement,
the object moved to the left as if what had happened,

(29:51):
which is the camera has stopped tracking. And so I
did the math on this, looked at the angular speed
of this the camera, and then based on the field
of view of the camera itself, figured out how long
it took the object to leave the screen and take
it out his angular speed. But it's traversing like the
half a degree, which is just that that half of

(30:12):
the camera that gives you another angular speed, and these
two angular speeds matched. So what seemed to be happening
was the camera is tracking this object. It occasionally loses
LCK and regains it, and then at the end it
loses luck and doesn't regain it, so it stops tracking it,
and so the object just continues moving. So it didn't
appear to be doing anything that had amazing g forces.
In fact, it wasn't accelerating at all. There was there

(30:34):
was almost no perceptible acceleration from this object. So what
we're talking about here is an image on the screen
from a camera in motion taking a video of something
else in motion. And what you're saying is that to
understand the motion of the object itself, you also have
to understand the motion of the camera because the image
is relative to the camera, and so if it's drifting

(30:55):
on the screen, you don't know necessarily if that's the
camera turning or if that's the motion of the actual exactly.
Like if you imagine you you've got some binoculars and
you're looking at the plane up in the sky, you know,
far distant plane, and you're just tracking it by following
this this thing, but you occasionally it goes behind the
three or something that you have to move a position.
You'll see the plane will just all around in your

(31:15):
field of view. And then if at some point you
simply stop tracking it and you hold the binoculars in
that position, that the plane will appear to continue going.
And I think essentially is what we're seeing here, and
that's what matches all of the on screen display. You know,
the user interface on the screen displays all these these angles,
and the camera modes. It all basically lines up with
this explanation I see. So you're not just speculating, you're

(31:37):
not just finding some alternative explanation that the camera motion
is causing this apparent motion of the object. You're actually
seeing confirmation on the screen itself that reads out what
the camera is doing, that tells you that everything that
the object appears to be moving is in fact just
due to the motion of the camera exactly. Yes, every
every time the object appears to move, it is in
sync with some kind of change of the camera. Either

(31:59):
the camera is to it's gimble correction, or it's changing
mode from one mode to another, or it's changing zoom level,
so it's changing the optical pathway within the camera. And
you actually kind of see this at one point in
the video. The object appears to zoom off really really
quickly to the bottom left corner in an incredibly high
rate of speed, where hundreds hundreds of gees of acceleration
to get to that speed internally almost instantly. But you

(32:21):
can see that coincides exactly with a switch in the
optical pathway from the narrow field of view to the
wild white field of view. And it's exactly the same
type of thing that happens. If you say you've got
a microscope, you're looking down the microscope, and you it's
got these different lenses down the bottom. If you rotate
the magnification the objective down below, you will see the

(32:42):
image shift and move, and that's what we're seeing in
this video. At the act same time, this object does
this like movement off to the side. You see that
they're switching from one optical field of view to another.
So they're changing the duty internally with mirrors. It's not
actually lenses, because they use mirrors for infrared cams to
reduce the absorbs of the light. It's it's a lot

(33:04):
more effective use knows, But so they're rotating these mirrors,
this set of mirrors in and then what happens in
the next few frames is it magically appears right back
in the middle. So it's obviously never moved though it
was there, but the movement of the camera made him
move off to the site, exactly the same as you
know when you rotating microscope, everything moves off to the side,
and then bang, it appears back in the middle again,
but in a different magnification. So if you're just looking

(33:26):
at the camera footage, you might be confused at first,
but if you were there in real time, your brain
is pretty good at sort of subtracting your motion from
your model of what's going on, Like if you're following
something with binoculars, you know if you've tweaked the binoculars
or not. Weren't there also eyewitness accounts of these objects.
Weren't the Navy pilots themselves surprised at the motion they saw?
How do we account for that? Well, the thing is

(33:48):
there are eyewitness account but they're not all the same thing.
They're not all what was seen in the video. So
we have some eyewitnesses who said they had an encounter
with a tick tak shaped objects. It was like a
fort long tic tac that kind of mirrored their motions
and moved around and then flew off very rapidly. And
then an hour later another plane went out and took

(34:10):
this video, So we don't know if it's the same thing.
So it could be that you could be the same thing.
But in the video we can tell that nothing amazing
is going on in terms of certain movements and high accelerations.
But we do have this eye when it's account from
an hour earlier of possibly a different object, possibly to
say a lot Joe that was just moving rapidly this time.

(34:31):
But you know, I don't know what that was. Have
a few ideas that hypotheses that might work to do
with parallax and things like that, but I don't think
it's the same thing as in the video. And unfortunately
no shade against navy pilots, but I witness accounts are
famously unreliable. It really can't be probed in any detail.
So we really just have to look at the evidence
we have in front of us. Indeed, and in Navy

(34:52):
pilots are very highly trained and they're very good at
identifying other planes, highly trained and doing that and you know,
plane from different angles and things. But what we're asking
them to do here he identified something that is world
remained unidentified even after they saw it, so that they
never actually identified it. They saw what looks like a

(35:13):
tic tac shaped object, like a giant propane tank. They
gave that description, and maybe that's just what it looked like,
you know, maybe that was what it was, but then
the movement. Is that what actually happened or is that
just how they perceived the movement because it was a
type of thing that they were not so familiar with.
If you don't know how big something is you do
know how far away is it? They said it was
forty ft long, But how did they actually figure that out?

(35:35):
They never actually explained that. And they said that they're
very familiar with looking at hounted which is a type
of plane theft like the f A A team, which
is forty ft long. And he said it was about
the same size as that. But that's to me, sounds
like he's used to seeing things that are forty ft long,
and so he just automatically fit this object, which may
have been ten ft long or twenty ft long or
eight long into that mold because he didn't know how

(35:58):
big it was. He then don't know how far away
it is. If you think something is forty ft long
and it's actually twenty ft long, then the actual distance
is half what it actually appears to be. So he's
thinking something flying really fast over there, it could have
been flying really slow much closer to him. So that's
the clear video. Then let's go through the other ones
to go fast in the gimbal videos. Okay, so the

(36:20):
go Fast video, actually it looks like something moving very
fast over the surface of the ocean. But here, luckily,
there's some very simple mathematics that we can do because
on screen we have three numbers, which is all we
need to figure out what's going on. Really, we have
the altitude of the plane, which is twenty five thou
feet and it's that's in the bottom left corner. So
barometric altitude so it's based on the pressure is close enough,

(36:43):
so it's about We have the range of the targets
because it actually gets a radar lock on this target,
so it knows how far away it is. He knows
it's three point three nauticable miles away line of sight
from you to this object. And then we also have
the plant angle, which is the angle down from horizontal

(37:04):
that the cameras, which I believe is a sauted around
mine twenty two twenty two degrees down, so we know
we're at twenty five feet. We're looking down at twenty
two degrees at something which is three point three nautical
miles away. So this diagonal line down is say it's
the high potent use of a right angled triangle. And

(37:25):
again what we're looking at is the center of the
screen is some object and in the background is the
ocean moving past it. And it appears as if it's
schimming just over the surface of the water incredibly high speeds.
So again, like what I'm doing here is I'm looking
at the claims that are made. So the simple claim
is that you know, it is scheming over the service
of the ocean at really high speed. So I'm saying,
is it actually doing that? And if we can use

(37:47):
these numbers to figure that out, then that will prove
or just prove that particular hypothesis. So you know, we've
got these three numbers, you know, the range, the altitude,
and the slant angle. We can do very very simple mathematics.
We are right tangle triangle and this we have an angle,
and we have the length of the hypoten news, which
just takes the sign of the angle and multiplied by
the hypoten news and it gives you the opposite leg

(38:09):
of that triangle, which is the heights below where you are.
This is just high school mathematics. It's tenth grade mathematics.
If you take tenth grade triggonometry, that you would you
would learn exactly how to solve this very very simple problem.
You can draw a diagram super simple. Turns out it's
not actually low The object is not low down at
the bottom of the ocean. It's actually halfway between where

(38:33):
the plane is and the ocean, which means that if
it's halfway between you and the ocean, then if, for example,
it wasn't moving at all, what we would see on
screen would still look exactly the same as we see
in this video. It would look like it's moving very
rapidly over the ocean. Because the plane that we're taking
the video from, one of the other numbers we see

(38:54):
on screen is that it starts out with a camera
fifty degrees to the left. So it's kind of like
you're going along in a car and a faster or
a train, and you're looking out the side window of
this train and you see something like a building in
a field far away, and then the mountains behind it.
If you just focus on that building, it will look
like it's kind of skimming past these mountains. The mountains

(39:16):
will pay to move behind it if you look on
onto that. If you look onto the mountains behind it,
it will look like the house is moving past. It's
it's the parallax effect, and when one thing appears to
move relative to another because of a change in the position,
all of the viewpoint. So you're able to look at
this video and measure the distance between the planes taking
the video and the object and show that it's much

(39:38):
closer to the plane than it is to the surface
of the ocean, that the claim that it's right above
the surface is just an illusion. And then it's actually
much much higher above the surface of the ocean. It's
not really closer to the plane than the surface of
the ocean is actually halfway. It's actually almost exactly in
the middle, which is like the ideal position really for
this this parallax alluvision to happen if it wasn't moving,

(40:00):
which it is actually moving, But imagine if it wasn't moving,
and you draw a line from your plane through this object.
You know, she's hovering in space down to the surface
of the ocean, and you think, you know, you move
your plane at two thirds the speed of sound in
one direction. The other end of that line, that line
of sight is going to move in the opposite direction
at two the speed of sound. So if you think

(40:21):
that the object itself is down by the surface of
the ocean, it would look like it's moving over the
ocean at the same speed as your plane, except in
the opposite direction, so you get this weird delusion. But
besides this, the simple observation that it's in the middle
and that it doesn't necessarily need to be moving. We
can then actually go in and calculate how fast it
is moving because we know time comes into it is

(40:42):
that's a factor here. So we have like thirty seconds
of the video where we have a lock on this object.
We have a range, and we have a slant angle,
and we have a bearing angle relative to the plane,
and we also have the tailt angle of the plane's wings.
So it's you know, it's getting a little bit more complicated.
Now we have more variables, but we can say the
kilt angle of the plane's wings, and we can use

(41:02):
just standard calculators to figure out what the rate of
turn would be in degrees for second, so we know
the plane is just turning to the left and amount.
We also know how fast the plane is going because
we have that number on screen. Although the number there
is the calibrated despeed, not the true air speed. You
have to convert them solves. It's a little bit more complicated,
and even though this is one of the simpler videos,
things get complicated. So we know the angle and the

(41:24):
range at the starts, and we know the angle and
the range at the end. So if we draw a
little back to diagram with a plane in one position
at the start of this segment, and then the plane
where it ends up at the end of this segment,
which kind of forward in a bit to the left
and turn a bit, we can draw two lines from
those positions and see where the target actually is relative
to the plane, because we know how far away it is,

(41:45):
and we know the angle to look at, so we
know where it is in plane space plane relative space.
And then you've got those two positions, you draw a
line between those and you measure the length of that line.
That is, how far that object has moved in the
absolute coordinates where the plane started. So knowing what you
see on the screen and knowing the position of the
camera at all times, you can completely reconstruct sort of

(42:06):
the three D story of what actually happened. Yeah, and
actually created a little interactive Vetter diagram where you could
adjust to various parameters because there's some uncertainty. Is to
know exactly what's going on in terms of how fast
this is rotating, how fast the plane is turning to
the side, but what you can do is you can
just see the range of values this object might have moved,

(42:29):
which gives you the range of possible velocitudes. And it
turns around. It's something of the order of around like
forty or fifty knots. You know, it's like forty four
fifty five miles per hour, which is very very slow
for a flying object, and in fact it's about the
exact same speed as the wind at that altitude. Typical

(42:49):
value for wind as high altitudes is anything from like
thirty knots up to a hundred knot so it's it's
entirely consistent with something just simply sitting in the wind
than being blown by the wind. So just like a
balloon under no power at all being blown by the wind,
exactly like a balloon. And in fact, the balloon is
the most likely hypothesis for another factor, which you can

(43:10):
also get from the more information that's in this video.
It's quite remarkable how much information is in there. The
video is in black hot mode. Is an INTREDI video again,
and it's in black hot. So if if it was
hot it was a jet plane, for example, you would
see the heat of the engine show it was black
but this just shows there was a white dot, which
means it's actually cold. It's actually colder than the ocean.

(43:32):
You can see it's actually colder than the surface of
the ocean, which appears darker behind it. And that would
be really weird if it actually was moving very fast,
because you'd see no emission. But since it's not moving quickly,
it makes sense that it's not emitting any heat exactly exactly,
and that's one of the claims that has been made.
This was an extraordinary craft, you know, simply a you know,
a jet flying very fast. It's not amazing. But the

(43:54):
reason there was claimed to be extraordinary was that it
was cold. They had no visible flights evises or anything
like that. He just appears as this dot. That's that's cold.
But you know, a dot lit is cold. Drifting at
wind speed is just a balloon because it would take
on the temperature of the air around it and just
be moving at the same speed as the wind. So again,

(44:14):
once you you dig into it, everything fits this new
hypothesis of it being a balloon, which kind of the
thought arises naturally, what moves out wind speed in the air,
And there's anybody you know, this either a plane pretending
to be a balloon or it is a balloon, so
it fits. And obviously it disproves the earlier hypothesis that
is some incredible craft moving without means of propulsion. Well,

(44:35):
I always wonder what happens to the balloons that are
released at like gender revealed parties, and maybe some of
them end up as you know, claimed aliens and my
navy pilots will never know. All right, So that's the
flear Tic Tac video as well as the go Fast video.
What about the gimbal one? The one you said is
claimed to be the most dramatic, lying slaster video we've
ever seen. It is if you don't know what's going on,

(44:56):
But once you do know what's going I said, it's
still kind of interesting. Again, like you do. The what's
my process here is to look at the claims that
are made about this video. One of the claims dates
back to when it was originally leaked by the New
York Times in two thousands and seventeen. The title of
the article was called Glowing Auras and Black Money, And

(45:17):
the reason they called it Blowing Auras and Black Money
was that what you see on the screen is this
black source of shaped object, but then around it there's
a white aura like kind of a white glow around it,
which looks very unusual. But then when you know that
this interred video where black is heart, that implies what
you're seeing around the object is cold, So you're seeing

(45:40):
what is it? What could it be? Is it like
a hot object with cold air around it? And it
seems like something that's physically impossible, and in fact, if
it was cold, you wouldn't actually see it because air
essentially is transparent to the infrared, so it takes a
loss of heat to actually see heat coming off of gases,
so you wouldn't actually see it if it was just
cold there. So people hypothesized about it being some kind

(46:02):
of space warp or something like that, some kind of
us walk in the nature of space time around this object,
and that's what it means. The propulsion is being suggested
by this strange aura. So what I did there is
I went to look for other thermal camera footage. Now
we don't have this particular camera that the actual camera,
but we do have lots of footage from thermal cameras,

(46:23):
just like things like surveillance cameras and people doing experiments
with little film and cameras. I have a little thermal
camera myself somewhere in my desk, and you can you
can do this experiment. And what I found was that
this type of glowing aura around a black hot shape
is actually remarkably common. I found it in numerous other videos.
I found it around the exhaust of jet plane to

(46:43):
either be a black with a white aura around it.
I found it around a dancing girl. Someone took an
inter picture of a small girl who was dancing and
she appeared as black and she had this white aura
around it. And it turns out that this aura is
a common artifact of thermal cameras. I thought you were
going to say that this dancing girl was probably an alien. Well,
and that's the possibility, of course, but you know, low

(47:06):
down on the list, so you know, I find out
that this lowing aura, I mean, the first claim that
they made about the video didn't actually hold up, and
that it wasn't actually evidence of anything at all. It
was just a normal expected artifact of the camera. When
you say artifact, you mean that we're not seeing something
that's actually there. We're seeing sort of like something that
happens to the screen as the data is taken. Yeah,

(47:26):
it's a sharpening artifact, and the reason it appears is
that to increase the visual contrast of objects, that use
a thing called an unsharped mask, which is an old
photography technique, is actually a physical photography technique where you
kind of you take a blurred version of the image
and then you subtract it from the image itself and
it accents the boundaries between light and dark. So it's

(47:48):
a very good way of increasing the contrast. But if
you boost it very high, which you do if you
want to see things very clearly and you don't really
care so much about image fidelity, you create these areas
around things and you actually you see it in iPhone photography.
If you zoom in on the edges of things, you
will see a kind of a light dark boundary between
dark light things. So you can get these kind of issues.

(48:10):
Are just a few pixels if that, But that's standard,
a standard image sharpening artifact in digital photography, and so
this is probably done by the camera online automatically. This
is not like some post processing that was done in
the studio. This is just digital processing in the pipeline.
This was done in camera essentially, and you can see
it doesn't occur around the numbers on the side of

(48:30):
the screen, so it's just part of the video feed itself,
and it's something that they can actually switch one or
off in the camera because it's just a standard like
sharpening setting. So then while we're seeing is a hot object. Yes,
so what we're seeing is a black hot object, which
just means hot object. So then they claim that it
shows an object which is rotating, which kind of implies
to things. I mean that one is that it implies

(48:52):
that what we're seeing is the actual shape of the object,
this kind of source of shape thing, and that what
we're seeing is that object actually rotate thing. So you
start looking into that and you think, you know, is
there an alternative to it being a physical object? And
the alternative that I came up with was that it
could be the glare of an object. If you take

(49:15):
something like a flashlight and kind of flashlights shining at
the camera here, it creates a big glare. You see.
I've got a small flashlight here's about the size of
my eyeball, and I changed at the camera and I
got this big glare that's always the size of my head.
So you can get these big glass Now, this isn't
just something that occurred to me out of the blue.
This is something that came directly from a previous case
that I had investigated, called the Chilean Navy UFO case,

(49:36):
where there was a similar looking kind of big black blob.
It was a bit more irregular this one, and some
investigation of that one by tracking down the actual radar
tracks at that time, and we knew all the GPS
coordinates and everything, so we didn't really need to make guesses.
We figured out exactly what it was this object. It
turns out this big amorphous black blob was actually an airbus,

(49:59):
a three FOURT, which is a four engined plane, and
each of the four engines was creating a infrared blare. Again,
it was infrared footage that was about maybe ten twenty
times as big as the actual engine itself, and they
all kind of merged together into this one big block.
So when I saw this other video, this gimble video

(50:19):
of something in the infrared, almost my first thought was,
could this be like in that old case, like in
the Chilean Navy uf case. Could it be the glare
of the engine that's obscuring a distant plane, and so
I started looking into that as a hypothesis, the kind
of answers you know, what's actually going on here. So
if you look into you know, the one aspect of it.

(50:41):
This most impressive, the rotation of the object, something that
came out after simply just studying it over and over again.
What I would do is I take the video into
a program where you could scrub rapidly through the videos
that you you can move the position of the playhead essentially,
so you can go backwards and forward. So I was
having the object going like this, tating, and then I
noticed that in other parts of the screen there were

(51:05):
these are vague shapes, there were also rotating. So at
the same time as the object rotated or appear to rotate,
we saw other bits of light within the scene rotate.
And I thought, you know, how could this be? I mean,
the only thing that makes any sense is that the
camera itself is rotating, and if the camera rotates, then

(51:25):
all of the lights in the scene with rotate. Now,
this is where it starts to get a little bit complicated,
and it's a little bit difficult to explain, and people
have a hard time with this. If you rotate a camera,
then the picture of what you're looking at will also rotate.
And so but what we're looking at here, and I'm
saying the cameras rotating, but only this little glare in
the middle of the screen rotating, and these these other

(51:47):
shapes are rotating. But the thing about this particular camera
system is that it's the way it is mounted. It's
mounted on a two axis gimbal, and when it moves
from left to right when it's trying an object, it
can't just smoothly do that because it's it's only a
mounted on two access and you get this thing called
gimbal lock, which people are familiar with from all different

(52:09):
like robotics has this problem where a robot can't smoothly
go through one particular angle, so it has to do
this rotation, which means that the camera rotate. The camera
has to rotate to get from lecture right. You don't
want the whole scene to rotate. The pilots watching the scene,
he doesn't want the horizon has suddenly flip upside down.
So even though the camera is rotating, the horizon stays

(52:30):
exactly a level. But so what's happening though, is that
the camera's rotating relative to some part of the equipment.
With that, it's within essentially that it's in this big
pot and it's looking at through this window. And so
my hypothesis there was that because it's rotating relative to
the window, the shape of the window or what's on
the window is creating the shape of the glare. So

(52:51):
the camera rotate, rotates the horizon. It then has this
system to rotate everything back. But since the cameras rotated
relative to the horizon, the shape with the glare relative
to the rise and changes. You know, it is difficult
to explain. I came up with a simple demonstration that
I actually show this on CNN. I have this bit
of glass, it's a filter camera and filter, and I
can rotate it and I can kind of point my

(53:13):
simulated a glare at the camera and if I hold
a bit of glass in front of it, and you
can see that whenever I take the bit of glass,
the glare rotates. You see that that line its diagonal.
Now to go. Sorry's so if a camera rotates, a
glare is relative to the orientation of the camera, the

(53:35):
shape of the glass relative to the orientation of the camera.
That will rotate as well. Then you when you when
you de rotate it to get the horizon level, the
glare appears to rotate. And it's just difficult to convey,
as I keep saying. But the reason they keep saying
that is that people when they hear this explanation, they
think that it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I can't
understand what you're talking about. You know, it's mental gymnastics.

(53:58):
But just because something is a little difficult to convey,
it doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong. If you take the
time to actually look into what's actually going on here,
it does actually make sense as as the most plausible explanation.
So then did a little bit more work, a little
bit more digging here. I looked at the patents for
this camera, the Apler system, and found out that, you know,
it has this this de rotation mechanism to de rotate

(54:19):
images that rotates when the camera rotates, and it actually
specifies in the patent that it needs to do this
gimble correction. It's around plus alinus three degrees or thereabouts,
which is more or less where it's doing it. The
big rotation happens here when you get close to zero degrees.
So again everything kind of aligns up with this, with
this other hypothesis that it is a glare, and it's

(54:41):
kind of essentially confirmed by the fact that the other
light patterns in the scene rotate when the glare rotates,
it exactly the same point in time, and there really
isn't an alternative explanation for that other than the camera rotation.
So what we're seeing here is a hot object with
an artifact giving it this aura, and then we're also
seeing this rotation which comes actually from the rotation of

(55:03):
the camera relative to some screen or some lens in
front of it. Yeah, exactly. But there's even more with
this this video like these, you know, like I said
that it's setive, is simple, and it's easy to look
at them and they go, whoa, it's amazing. That must
be a UFO because it looks like something that's amazing.
But you can dig in even more to this, and
we see again we have the numbers on the screen,

(55:23):
we have the bearing of the object relative to the
front of the plane, and it can narrows down. So
it starts out we're looking out of the left window
again at this this this object, and then we turned
around into a looking more straight on at it, and
you notice the motion of the object. It looks like
it's whizziting across the top of the cloud. But then
later it seems to slow down and almost stop, and

(55:45):
that coincides with you the plane that's following it turn
around so it's facing it. So I think, again, what
we're seeing is parallax movement. And you can again do
the mess. You can see where these objects might be
and how far away they're moving, and just it doesn't
actually take very much to create a solution of parallax.
So the claim that it's flying along and stops and

(56:05):
then rotates, it doesn't really hold up when you investigate it.
It seems like something that's simply flying away from us,
like another jet or a drone or something like that,
or you know, perhaps an alien spaceship. But it's something
that's flying away from us that it's hot. We are
looking at it from the side, and we turn around
to face it, and we get this illusion of parallax.

(56:26):
And then when the camera has to do is gimbal
role correction, we get this illusion that the object is rotating.
And I think that's that's what we're seeing. It doesn't
identify what the object actually is. That, like I said,
it could still be an alien spaceship, but it does
mean all these claims that people have made about it
do not hold up to scrutiny. There's nothing amazing being

(56:47):
demonstrated here. It's not hovering on its end, it's not
got a glowing order of warping space around it, and
it's not covering, it's not stopping. It's just something that's
basically just flying away and it's hot. So it's not
that we can tell what it is that we can
say that is or is not an alien, But the
things that have brought it to our attention it seemed
weird and seemed difficult to explain, are actually possible to

(57:09):
explain with much more prosaic theories. Yeah, so we have
unidentified object, but we don't have an unidentified amazing object.
It's real, but it's not spectacular. Right, there's a whole
other acronym. All right, I want to talk about the
newer three videos, but first let's take another short break.

(57:38):
All right, we're back and we're talking with Mick West.
He was giving us a detailed accounting of his understanding
of what's going on. In these apparent UFO videos, these
U A P videos that were released by the Navy,
a lot of people are talking about is potentially credible
evidence for visiting extraterrestrials. And Nick is talking to us
about how he analyzed these videos and what he thinks

(57:58):
they might possibly mean. So we talked about the three
older videos. Tell us what you think about these more
recent videos, the ones that came out in two, Flying
Triangle and the zig Zagging Submersible spear. Tell us about
the well, the Flying Triangle one, I think is the
most entertaining one. It looks very impressive, like you see
this screen triangle. Night What we're looking at here is
night vision, which is different to infrared. Most of the

(58:20):
other videos are are infrared cameras. This is a night
vision camera, and so what's the difference. The night vision
is image intensification. So it takes what you can see
be in very faint light and it magnifies the light.
It has this intense multipliitube. When photons come in, it
creates a cascade of electrons and it creates a dot

(58:44):
on the screen on the other side, So you get
a much more powerful signal from just essentially individual photons
that creates an image that it's it's it's night vision
is commonly used by troops and they have one attached
the helmet that I mean, they flip it down and
then they go out into a bill holding or whatever.
It does need a little bit of light. Sometimes this
supplements it with a short wave infrared light, like a

(59:06):
little intra red flashlight, which adds to the amount of
a visible light which is visible and infrared spectrum. But
it's not a thermal camera. It's not a thermal infrared camera,
so it's a different type of thing. We're not seeing
heat sources. We're seeing actual lights here, so that the
analysis has to be very different because of that. So
we see a flying triangle and it's you know, it's

(59:28):
this little green thing and it moves across what looks
like stars, but actually a lot of what you're seeing
on screen is not stars. The little points of light
you see on screen, or what's called scintillation, is just
kind of random electrons inside the multiplieritube in the image
intensive fire, So we're not actually seeing a triangle moving
across the staffield that's that's visible in this in these
these things, so we see a triangle, and the first

(59:50):
thing I noticed about it was that it was flashing,
and it was flashing in a way that very closely
resembled the flashing lights of a plane. And I thought,
you know, if it's this is an alien UFO or
some kind of Chinese enemy drone that's trying to sell
the attack or whatever it's supposed to be, why does
they have standard navigation lights? So then I looked up

(01:00:13):
the rough location of where that ship was. It's the
US sr US All and they released the log book
of it, or it came out with a Freedom of
Information Act request and we know where it was. And
it's just kind of off the coast between San Diego
and Los Angeles, just going to south of Catalina Island,
and that's right on the fly path of planes coming
in towards L A. X And Airport. So there was

(01:00:36):
a whole bunch of planes just flying over roughly at
that time. So I thought, you know, it's flashing like
a plane. It's in a location where planes fly overhead.
Could it be that it was a plane? And you know,
obviously it doesn't look like a plane. It looks like
a triangle, like a flying triangle. And the whole triangle flashes.
But again I kind of realized what might be going
on here just simply from past experience, because I've seen

(01:00:58):
many videos and I thought, you know, maybe it's just
a little bit out of focus on. What we're seeing
here is what's called boki, which is the shape that
a point of light takes when it's out of focus
if you take a picture. This is something you see
in portraits a lot. So take a picture of a
person and behind them there's some lights, like like a

(01:01:19):
Christmas tree or something like that, or a little point
lights you see in YouTube videos as well. People wantn't
have very lights behind them, and then they're out of
focus and you'll generally see around shape around them. Sometimes
you will see an octonal shape or a hexagonal shape.
And what you're seeing there is the shape of the
aperture of the lens. Like if you take a typical
lens like like this one here is it's just a

(01:01:41):
regular camera lens, and you look at the interior of it,
you can see it's gonna round his shape. This one's
actually an octagon, and it's gonna blurry in this this video,
but you can see the shape of that and that's
the shape of the point of light takes. But if
you have a lens that has a triangular aperture, then
when you look through that and take pictures with that
that I'd been out of focus, then the lights will

(01:02:03):
show up as little triangles. So my hypothesis there was
that this is in fact a plane. This has just
a bit out of focus. The flashing is the flashing
lights of the plane, and it's a triangular shape because
of the triangular aperture of the camera that he's taking
this video. So then you know, I've come up with
this immediate hypothesism, like ten minutes to come up with this,

(01:02:25):
because you know, just kind of recognized the type of
things I'm looking at. I've got to try to find
more evidence for this. So going back to the very
start of the video, you see some dots in the distance,
and then originally I thought these were distant planes flying
towards the boat, with somebody else pointed out that these
actually were stars. And you can tell that the stars
because they match the constellation of those particular stars. This

(01:02:46):
one start called I think arc tourists. And then there
is the planet Jupiter, and Jupiter of course moves through
the sky is not in a fixed place. So we
took the actual data the incident nineteen saw what Jupiter
was relative to these stars, and it's an exactly that spot,
so we know exactly what we're looking at that court

(01:03:09):
part of the video. Now at that part of the
video is not zoomed in, so we can't see the
triangular shape of these things. There's there are only a
few pixels. This is very very low resolution video. But
what we can do is we can take this position
of where these stars are and then kind of move
the camera because you can see moving relative to the
clouds that appear, and so you can track where it

(01:03:29):
is and then where it ends up at at the
end of this video where you see this this flashing triangle,
and then you notice at the end of the video
there's two other triangles appear, one above the other, two
other faint triangles, and the fliers past them. And the
people meant who made claims about this video claim that
these are the two triangles, were two other drones or
alien spaceships or whatever they were to other U a

(01:03:50):
p s. But I did this this tracking of the
position of the camera across the sky, and it turns
out if you start with these stars over here and
you end up over here, there's two stars right in
that position where these two supposed you U A P
S actually are. So we know now that these two
lights are actually stars, but these two lights appear as triangles.

(01:04:13):
The only way that can happen is if they are
triangular booky, so that essentially it's kind of paste close
that there's there's nothing else that could possibly be other
than triangles created by the tremblor. But you know, you
didn't stop there. Of course, we keep going try to
find more evidence that people say, well, the standard night
vision binocular that they're using the Army, the PDS four team,

(01:04:34):
doesn't have a triangular aperture. So I theorized that maybe
that the sometimes people actually change the aperture of the
lens cap to have less light coming in. If you're
in a situation where you've got quite a bit of light,
you know, a fairly well liest situation, you can actually
have too much light and you don't need it, and
you can reduce this this aperture in front and get
better focused. Smaller aperture is better focused. That was a

(01:04:57):
little bit of a long shot, but Luckily happened then,
was that somebody on my forum Meta Bunk looked at
his night vision min ocular they just happened to have,
and he saw that it had a triangular aperture. So
he took his night vision milecular out and started filming
stars and planes going by, and it looked exactly the same.
Everything was exactly the same. We had the scintillation, we

(01:05:19):
had the stars, we had the planes flashing, we had
the same size, the exact same size triangle. So he
did that, and you made some videos and that kind
of explained this to people, and I think that explanation
is largely taken hold of other people have found the
night vision mile oculars had these triangular apertures, and they've
gone out and repeat it exactly the same people who
were once skeptics. They were like, oh no, that couldn't

(01:05:42):
possibly happen, and then they were like, oh wait, let
me look at person, and they take the video and yeah,
it all lines up. And then, maybe most convincingly, though,
you're seeing objects in this particular video which you know
are point sources, these stars in Jupiter which are appearing
as triangle, So you know that the triangle shape in
this video even though you don't have your hands and
that actually monocular are artifacts, and so then and then

(01:06:03):
you additionally reproduced this using similar equipment in other videos.
So that seems pretty clear that it's it's not a
strong case for a flying pyramid. And yeah, the people
who released this video are kind of still clinging onto
the possibility that he might be something something amazing. I
think they just kind of don't want to let go
of this this idea. And you know, there's there's a
small amount of justification to it. If this is a

(01:06:26):
video that is part of the UAP Task Forces investigation,
which according to the Navy it actually is, then you've
got to say, why didn't the Navy figure this out?
And to which the answer is maybe they have. Maybe
they have figured it out, but at the time this
might have been something that seems to be unidentified, especially

(01:06:47):
to the person who took this. This thing like this,
So this guy is he's not a vision minoculars on deck.
He see some flashing lights overhead, Actually intact, he's not.
He doesn't even see that. He's looking at the Jupiter
and then it's just around for the clouds. And then
you noticed this there's little flashing lights up there, and
he goes, oh my god, it's triangular shapes. What's going on?
And so he films it for a while and it disappears.

(01:07:10):
He gets his his camera out in his filming it
through the night vision mile ocular and then he makes
the report and says, I saw a triangular shaped craft
flying over the ship. And initially it becomes this unidentified
events and they don't know what's going on. But later
I think anybody with any technical chops who actually looks
at this video will figure out what it is. And

(01:07:32):
it wasn't just me. Other people came to it immediately
the same conclusion. Other people completely independently of me, went
out and took a video with the night vision mile
oculars with triangular apertures, and all came to the same conclusion.
So I think, yes, the Navy would have figured out
what it is. And perhaps they have another releasing a
report in just a few days on their analysis of it.

(01:07:54):
So we'll see what they say. But tell us quickly
about this last video. This zig zagging submersible sphere, the
zig zagging submersible sphere, it doesn't zigzag again. What we're
seeing here is camera movement. And this is something that's
even more apparent than the Flair video. You see a
dark shape again, it's black his heart. So we're looking
at something that's hot. It could well be a glare.
Anybody probably is a glare. But it looks at the

(01:08:16):
first leg it is zips over to the left, and
the zips over to the right, and a zips there
is a left episode in the right. What's happening there
is there's somebody in the ship with a little joystick
who is moving the camera trying to get a lock
on this this shape, and it's getting a visual lock
on the shape of the camera. Just it's kind of
like when you do motion tracking in ABE after effects
or somebody say, like track this objects. All he's trying

(01:08:37):
to do, basically, is to get the cursor around this object.
So he's moving at election right from right, So the
object itself isn't moving a left and right. It's moving
at the constant velocity, which could be hardly moving at all,
because we don't know what the relative speed of the
ship is or what we're seeing on the ocean surfaces
that the motion of the ocean, or is that the
motion of the waves and the wind that gives an

(01:08:57):
illusion of motion, so we're not seeing something very rapidly moving.
But then it appears to kind of drop down to
the ocean and disappear into the ocean. And people have
suggested that this is what they call a transmedium craft,
like it's it flies in the air and then it
flies in the ocean. And you know, for a start,
like when we're looking at something that's descending increatively slowly,

(01:09:19):
it's very slowly down to the ocean, and then it
kind of disappears. And if you look at what actually
happens when it disappears, that's really interesting. You zoom in
and go frame by frame. It doesn't like go behind something.
It's not like you know, it's like a round object.
Going behind something would be like you see half of
it when it's half behind it and it disappears. What
it appears to do is it appears to shrink into

(01:09:42):
like a little point and disappear. Now that would happen
if it was a glare and instead of going into
the ocean, it was actually just disappearing behind the horizon.
You know, the Earth, this is a sphere. So when
we look out over the ocean, the horizon is kind
of like a very shallow hill. So something's are away
and goes down below that, it will disappear, and it

(01:10:03):
will disappear by shrinking. If it's a glare, like if
I have a glare. Again, if you shine a light
at the camera and moving down behind something you don't
see it like being cutting half, you will see it
actually shrink. It stays the same shape and shrinks right,
and it shrinks, And this is exactly what we see
in the video. In fact, we see it disappear and

(01:10:24):
then can pop up a little bit and then the
spear again. So I think the most likely explanation to
that I haven't identified it, but the explanation for this
strange behavior is that it's disappearing behind the horizon, and
we're seeing it being obscured by way. It's just on
the horizon. They're going up and down, so you see
it disappear and then briefly appear behind a wave and

(01:10:44):
then then disappear again. So it could be as something
like a distant plane or some kind of craft flying
away from the camera, and it could be tens of
miles away, maybe even a hundred miles away, and it's
descending because it's getting further away, and so it gets
closer to the horizon. And then when it gets to
the horizon, it's not actually in the water. It's just
very very far away. It gets obscured by the waves,

(01:11:06):
and then eventually it's lost from site. I don't know
what's actually going on, but it doesn't seem to exhibit
it's not zigzagging, and it's not exhibiting any apparent trans
medium activity. It doesn't necessarily look like an alien flying submarine.
That's right, you know. It looks like a slow moving
heat source that disappears behind the horizon. All right, so

(01:11:28):
thank you very much for telling us about all of
those videos. Let me ask you a more hypothetical question now,
which is, can you imagine a scenario where you see
a video that you think is consistent with, you know,
some sort of unexplained extraterrestrial craft. What would it take
to convince you that what you're looking at can't be
explained by you know, other more prosaic theories. Well, this
kind too fast to that. So one is like, if

(01:11:50):
you see a video of something that's really amazing, you
don't know if it's aliens or if it's humans, because
someone's could have invented some new technology. But let's say
you know, what would be the video evidence of something
that amazing and she was an amazing technology like a
warp drive or anti gravity or something like that. And
I think that the evidence you need there is independently
measured things from two positions, essentially, so with video, like

(01:12:13):
having two videos taken by two different people of the
same thing from known locations with known cameras, so you
can then triangulate what's going on so that you can
actually see it is actually making this particular sac of
motion in three dimensions. So when you're looking at something
in two dimensions, you don't know if something is is
small or far away, and you don't know if what

(01:12:33):
you're seeing is some kind of optical effect in this camera.
If you have two videos, that eliminates a lot of
that possible confusion and you can see it it is
actually moving. And if you have more video, that's even better.
And then on top of that, if you have radar data,
that's going to be great too as well. So you
know multiple readings of the same exact event, not you

(01:12:54):
know things that happened roughly at the same time, but
the same exact thing doing something amazing would demonstrate it
that it was actually doing something amazing. And so when
you take one of these videos and you find another
explanations and it makes sense to you that doesn't require
invoking aliens, what do you feel. Do you feel like, ah, ha,
I cracked a puzzle. This is super fun, or do
you feel, oh, that's too bad. I was kind of

(01:13:16):
hoping this might be aliens or some combination. Well, I
always hope it might be aliens, but I don't have
very high hopes, so I don't have great expectations that
are being aliens. If if it did turn out to
be something amazing, it would it would be flabergasta and
it would be totally amazing. So usually when I figured
something out, it's just like figure it out, no, no, no,
I solved the puzzle, because that's what it is for me.

(01:13:37):
A lot of the time is if you're trying to
figure out the puzzle, so there are all these little clues,
you know, the things I talked about in these videos.
Sometimes you're looking at like ten fifteen different little clues
in the video, and once you figure it out and
you know you're you're beating other people to figure it out.
That's kind of a fun thing too, because it's a
little bit of competitiveness in it, because we're all trying
to solve these things. We'll trying to figure out what

(01:13:58):
they are, and if you managed to do it, it's
fun little feather in your cap. Well, that's what we're
all trying to do in sciences and for the true
nature of the universe. Based on the pieces of evidence
we have, it's all just one big detective story. So
let me ask you a non scientific question, since we
obviously don't have evidence one way or the other, do
you have a personal feeling for whether there are extraterrestrial

(01:14:18):
civilizations out there in the galaxy? Well, my personal feeling
is just I think, similar to most people, that the
universe is so big that it almost seems inevitable that
then must be some kind of life out there. I mean, sure,
maybe we are the first life to arise in the universe,
but I think given the size of the universe, it
seems fairly likely that some kind of civilization has risen.

(01:14:41):
You know, maybe not very very complicated, but you know,
I'm sure there's self replicating organisms elsewhere in the universe,
but you know, civilization is a little bit more complicated
than that. But yes, I think it's out there. I
just don't think there's any good evidence that they've come
visiting anytime recently. Absolutely, I agree. And something that convisits
me as well is that we have all these videos,
but they are all of totally different kinds of apparent phenomena.

(01:15:03):
If we had like nineteen different videos and they all
showed the same kind of ship doing the same kind
of trick, that might be tele convincing story, because in
the end, what we're looking for is a coherent explanation
for everything. Certainly possible that extrass reels have visited and
they're sneaking around and were occasionally capturing glimpses of them,
But six completely different kinds of aliens, flying completely different
kinds of ships that can do six completely different things.

(01:15:25):
That's a little harder to swallow. Yeah. Here we have
like a we have a flying take tack, We have
a hovering flying source of top type thing, and we
have a flying cold object actually other ones that are
all hot, and then we have a flying flashing triangle,
and then we have a flying hot sphere that des
sends into the ocean, so that, yeah, why don't we

(01:15:45):
have two videos, even even at seferent times, to just
to show the exact same amazing thing. And that's too
bad because I personally would love if aliens came to
visit and could help us unravel some of these secrets
of the universe. And I hope that if they do,
they don't hide and then to sneak around, they just
you know, land on the White House lawn and start
to talk to us. All right, well, thank you very
much macke for sharing with us your experience and your

(01:16:07):
expertise and walking through the details of these videos. They
are interesting. The videos themselves are amazing, but it may
be that they don't show actually amazing craft. Thank you
very much for having me love very interesting topic and
I love talking about it, all right. Thanks again, and
thank you everybody out there who stuck with us for
this long and very detailed, but I think illuminating podcast
episode about something that has tickled all of us. Thanks

(01:16:30):
everyone for tuning in, Thanks for listening, and remember that
Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is a production of
I Heart Radio For More podcast for my Heart Radio,
visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

(01:16:51):
you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah.

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