Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What do the Navy UFO videos really mean?

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

Daniel talks to Mick West, expert UFO-video analyzer, to understand what we are seeing in the Navy UFO videos. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

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or wherever you get your podcast. 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 Tick-Tack 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 first interstellar physics conference? Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I really, really, really want to believe in aliens.

And welcome to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeartRadio, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 crazy things in the sky and crash landings at Roswell, 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 3 a.m. 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 from 80,000 feet. So they go. Gotta 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 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. He's not dismissing it. He's not saying,

psh, alien conspiracy theories. He's saying, hey, there's stuff out there that U.S. 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 planets around the galaxy. You know, only 25, 30 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 20 to 30% of every star in the galaxy 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 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 microbes. 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 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 if 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. All right, well, it is my absolute pleasure to welcome the podcast, Nick West, who is the founder of Metabunk.org, a forum about the debunking of conspiracy theories, and the author of escaping the rabbit hole. How to debunk conspiracy theories. fact, logic, and respect.

Mick has a long history and is deep expert in these questions and topics and recently wrote an op-ed in USA Today about these very videos. So Mick, thank you very much for joining us today and for sharing your expertise with us. Thank you about having me. I'm very glad to be here.

Can you tell us a little bit first about your background, how you got into this game of debunking crazy ideas? What is you about it? And what is your expertise? Well, my deep expertise, going back a long time is

I'm a video game programmer, which may not sound like particularly relevant stuff, but what I did is a video game programmer was programming a couple of things. One is computer graphics, which is how you take a kind of a model of the world, a 3D model of the world,

and you create 2D images. So you have some kind of internal representation of the world, and then you translate that to the screen. And the other thing I did is physics, which is 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 as flying around in this 3D world. And in my case, it was a skateboarding game, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. And so 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. And do aliens ever appear in these Tony Hawk skating games? They do, actually, yes.

And in one of the games, there's actually an area 51 where we have a flying saucer. And you can actually, there's cheat codes where you can play as an alien. But this is all completely unrelated to my later interests. So, you know, what happened with how I got from A to B, from the video games to debunking flying saucers, was after I kind of semi-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 there's one called the chem trails conspiracy theory which is the idea that the government is secretly spraying trails behind planes to poisoners or change the weather or the climate and I got really into doing stuff like

tracking down the planes and you can actually look them up on online databases but there's also a lot of that mathematics I talked about in the video games coming very handy there because instead of taking a 3D image and turning it into a 2D, you're taking a 2D image and turning it into 3D. You've got to kind of interpolate and extrapolate things a bit more because you've only got two dimensions. But it's the same kind of visual spatial reasoning that you use.

And so I got good at doing that with contrales and then that kind of led naturally via a bunch of other conspiracy theories to the UFOs stuff. And people started sending me pictures of UFOs and videos of UFOs. And I started getting into tracking down what these things were actually were, what were being 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 chemtrails and contrails, or because you were interested in the whole phenomenon of conspiracy theories? I'm interested in figuring things out, so I like to figure out what's actually going on,

and you know, you're looking to something like the chemtrails conspiracy theory, and it 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, Contrails shouldn't persist or something. You look it up and you find that the contrels can persist. So that was obviously nonsense. So I kind of enjoy trekking down things like that. And I also enjoy explaining it to people.

It's not knowing it's like an aha, gotcha type way, but more just kind of 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 for interesting conversation. but it also touches upon real issues of geometry essentially and optics and how you perceive the world,

which again goes back to the video game, a thing of you've got 3D to 2D. It's just all things that have interested me. And I generally am viewed as a debunker of conspiracy theories because when I look into them, they tend not to hold up to scrutiny because I'm looking into things like Flat Earth or 9-11 was an inside job with nanothermite. You look into things like that and they don't hold up. So I end up essentially, you know, debunking things. But that's not what I'm setting out to do.

I'm settling 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, from 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 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 discuss.

discovered when I was looking into your background that you and I have another connection, which is that this Chemtrails paper was actually written with a close friend of mine here at UCI, Steve Davis, who's an established scientist. He told me that when you guys put out this paper, you got a lot of, how she'd say, popular pushback. Yeah, very much so. The paper is a 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 who are domain experts and ask them, do you think that this photo represents secret spraying or something else? Do you think these test results represent something? And a lot of people thought that we were joking. And they would email back and say, you know, what is this? What's going on here? Are you even doing this? And this is a common problem in addressing pseudoscientific claims is that genuine scientists do not want to waste time with these.

things. So you don't get people investigating the claims of, you know, Chemshel believers or 9-11 believers or even like UFO believers. And so it kind of creates this false illusion of balance or no balance in a way. Like 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 claims don't even deserve addressing. But then I come in there and I start to try to address them some of these claims. But of course, I'm just, you know, essentially a lay person. It's good at looking up things in Google

and good at doing 3D geometry. But I'm not, well, not a scientist. So it's always been a problem of arguments from authority where they say that they have science on their side when really they don't realize that. And do you find that making these arguments carefully and clearly based on the evidence

penetrates somehow to these folks who believe these theories? Do you feel like they're 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.

There's this 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 adversarial situation and they feel like they have to fight back. So if you attack their beliefs,

it strengthens their belief because it's almost like you're testing their belief And if you don't actually break through their wall of disbelief in your theory, then they think that they have won and their belief has stood 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 how do you communicate the reality 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. 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 explanations and eager mostly to hear the truth, to know what really is going on in the universe.

Sometimes what we discover about 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 question. I was wondering if you could briefly describe to us 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.

There's actually six videos that have been released over the last few years. They kind of divide into two sets. There's three older videos that are kind of semi-official U.S. Navy videos. And then there's three more videos that were leaked more recently 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 the Navy has actually said that they are official and actually released official copies of them. There's three of them.

They're called Fleer, Go Fast, and Gimble. They all have these little acronyms, which are actually the official names that they were given by the US Navy. So I think these names actually have some meaning. But that's pretty much all that the Navy tells you about them. So each one of these videos is a black and white video. They were all taken with a piece of equipment called a Raytheon at Fleer Pod, which is an advanced targeting, advanced targeting forward-looking infrared, which is kind of fancy, but essentially it's just a big camera that's very good

at zooming in on things and tracking them. So it's this targeting part essentially that 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, regular video. And it doesn't actually look that much different to the infrared. But most of the videos are just infrared.

So what you're looking at is heat. They're also a little confusing because what you see as heat shows up as black in these videos. It's 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. It 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.

You're not really seeing the shape of the objects. What they show is, like, the Fleer one kind of shows what looks like a distant object that kind of like bounces around a little bit, and you don't see very much. It's very small and fuzzy. This is the one sometimes referred to as the tic-tac. Yeah, it sometimes refers to as a tic-tac, although the shape in the video isn't really like a clean-cut tic-tac. It's almost more like a peanut shape. It's kind of like a little waist in the middle.

And this was something that it went along with an encounter, an actual eyewitness encounter. by pilots who actually saw something that they described at the TikTok, and then later another pilot took this video and said that it was the same thing. People assumed it was the same thing. But 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 GoFast, which looks like the camera is just looking down at the ocean's surface and then this object whizzes into view. And then the camera tries to track it and follow it and then eventually it 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, Gimble, is the one, I think, that's the most visually impressive. People have often cited as being the most compelling UFO video out there because it shows a flying saucer. It's what looks like a flying saucer. It shows a kind of like a top type shape, almost diamonds shaped, but a little bit rounded

with little spikes at the top and the bottom and on the end. And it looks like it's flying. 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 it rotates past vertical and it seems to be hovering in that position above the clouds. So it looks really impressive. If you were looking for a video of a UFO flying saucer doing something amazing, it seems like here it is. Almost like something you would put in a 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 Tick-Tac one, the Fleer one, was an incident in 2004 off the coast of Southern California, whereas the other two were nearly 10 years later and were taken by planes operating off the East Coast. Yeah, that's right.

They were 11 years later, I think, in 2015. And the first, the earlier video, the FLIR video, taken in 2004, was actually leaked in 2007. So it's actually been knocking around on the internet and people have been looking at it and analysing it for well over a decade.

So it's not like it's this new thing that it's just suddenly been dropped by the US military. The other two videos are connected. They were actually taken by the same weapon system operator on the same planes and same pilots and everything. You can tell there's information on the screen that matches and the voices the same.

It's a much newer video, but it's still a few years old. That one came out in the end of 2017 and it was kind of leaked out by people who used to work in the Pentagon. There's a guy who used to work in the Pentagon, and he says he worked on this program that studied unidentified aerial phenomena,

which is the more politically correct term for UFO. It's like a UFO without all the baggage of little green men flying saucers. But essentially you're talking about the same thing. It's an identified flying objects, an identified aerial phenomena. So this guy, you know, he worked on this program, which did some study of unidentified aerial phenomena,

and he knew about these videos apparently and then he worked to get them cleared for release and it kind of got them out. But there's some dispute about how they got out. The military wasn't entirely happy with it. They think that he misrepresented what he was going to do with them. But it's kind of irrelevant 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. Here we are. And when we say real things, we mean the videos are videos taken by these airplanes, not that the Navy or the government is saying what they are videos of?

The videos are real videos, is what they're saying. And they show something. I mean, it's not like a simulation. Right. There's something there. There are these white dots or these black dots represent actual things that were there that were flying essentially. No one's suggesting that they are fake,

but no one's also really, well, the government isn't suggesting that they are alien flying sources. So those are the first three videos. And then there were some new videos in 2019. 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 journalist. There's two, just two separate people. There's a filmmaker called Jeremy Corbell and a Las Vegas journalist called George Knapp, who are kind of like partners in crime, not in crime, but the partners in their endeavor in releasing UFO videos. And apparently someone

has sent them a bunch of UFO videos that were recorded by the U.S. Navy or by people on ships, you know, U.S. Navy personnel. And so the first one is, called the Green Pyramid video, and it appears to show a flying green triangle that flies across the sky, and it's flashing a little bit, and then it flies past 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 gimbal video, because it showed an actual flying pyramid, and people assume that's what it was, because that's what it shows in the video. Then there was another one called the Omer Harstphere video, which shows a black heat source

kind of descending and then going behind the horizon. And then there was the Omaha radar video which just shows like 30 seconds of a radar screen that shows some tracks on it and people are talking about them and they're not entirely sure where they are. So those are the six videos, which sounds like a whole bunch of evidence.

There's a lot of wonderful evidence for UFOs. But when you start digging into them, 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. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged,

and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't

think is a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories.

I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high-introupes,

rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it's make it even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're 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 are evidence of aliens and other people are more skeptical. So Mick is an expert in debunking these videos and understanding from a 2D image what we are actually looking at. So Mick, I want to hear about your process for how you 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. 13%

percent of them said it was 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 kind of discount the last one that there are edited videos. They're being confirmed to be real videos taken by Navy personnel, by the Navy. And in my analysis of it, I even 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 represent something 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, but how do we know that the sailors themselves haven't, you know, modified this data? Can you see like the metadata or somehow verify 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 fake. They look genuine to me. just in the, they're very self-consistent if you do the analysis of what actually happened. Throughout the entire video, there's nothing that suggests anything nefarious is going on. Self-consistent meaning, for example, the reflections and the angles. The texture of the video remains the same. Like, when people edit things, you often see things

like some areas of it, like have a different kind of noise in the background. I would look for lighting as one of the things that is fake, but this is an infrared video. So there's nothing that suggests from an infrared perspective that there's anything going on or anything like the light comes from one part in one part of the video and the other part in the other. But, 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 At Fleer system. And so if you want to find a video to see, here's a genuine At Fleer video and here is this one, maybe it's fake, these are actually the best At Fleer videos

that we actually have available because the military does not release this type of footage. There's nothing at all that's a better quality than the gimbal video or the GoFast video. So there's a great video from that perspective. So we should assume that the Navy has done some internal authentication to verify that they're not being dup by their own sailors and 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 a Navy pilot and they would have had to have fated in the cockpit essentially because these things get recorded on tape that is then stored on the system in digital form and there's a chain of custody essentially. So the pilot would not have fated in the cockpit. The other ones, the triangle video, is possible that the guy was just messing around when you look in the actual explanation, maybe we can kind of get into what's actually going on. but he could have actually created this effect himself or herself.

And then this sphere video and the radar video, they have the sounds of multiple people acting as if they are in a CIC, a combat information center, like the room in the ship, where they have all these screens and they look at incoming threats on the radar and whatnot. And it all sounds very genuine. So if that was fake, they would have had to go to a bunch of guys to stage this whole thing. I think the military probably would have explained what was going. on by this point if it was faked to that degree. So, you know, I think we can take it as read

that these are genuine Navy videos. All right. So then we're looking at the videos. We're interested in what could explain this? How could this possibly be something earthbound or prosaic? So how do you analyze it? How do you take it apart? Well, yeah, what 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 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. So I'm first of all checking their analysis to see if that holds up because it's kind of pointless me doing 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 FLIR video, the claim is made that the object on screen moves in such a rapid way that it's experiencing G-Forces much higher than a human-powered craft could do. How human piloted craft could actually. do. It's doing like 50 Gs or something like that, some quite high number. Much higher numbers have been speculated to the eyewitness accounts up to several thousand Gs, but that's kind of all different kettle of fish. Here by 50 Gs, you mean the acceleration. We're seeing changes in velocity. Yeah. To change the position on screen would require a certain velocity, and you've got to get to that velocity within a fraction 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 could really only do with our technology if you had some kind of powerful rockets attached to the object, or if it was a very small object and you had like mini-jet engines or something like that. So, yeah, I start to look at that and I think you know, you do the math. If it is moving, then yes, it is actually experiencing these high accelerations. But then I started going through the video and looking at all the indicators on the screen and it tells you what mode it's in and what zoom level it's in, whether it's in TV mode or infrared mode.

And I noticed that whenever it did 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 switched between wide angle and narrow angle, it would do a little movement.

The camera has to do these gimbal roll corrections occasionally where it traverses the forward direction. 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 thing. The camera mode changes. The camera loses lock on the object, and then the object drifts off the side of 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 way 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 traversing like 10, 11 or 12 degrees over the course of the video. So essentially it's tracking left. 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, which is the camera had stopped tracking. And so I did the math on this and looked at the angular speed of this, at 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 figured out its angular speed because it's traversing the half a degree, which is that half of 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 lock and regains it and then in the end it loses lock 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 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 on the screen, you don't know necessarily if that's the camera turning or if that's the motion of the actual object. Exactly. Like if you imagine you've got some binoculars and you're looking up to plane up in the sky,

you know, a far distant plane, and you're just tracking it by following this thing. But occasionally it goes behind three or something so you have to move position. You'll see the plane will jostle around in your 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 that 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 angles and the camera modes. It all basically lines up with this explanation. I see. So you're not just speculating. You're not just finding some alternative explanation

that the camera motion is causing this apparent movement. 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 time the object appears to move, it is in sync with some kind of change of the camera. Either the camera is doing its gimbal correction or it's changing mode from one mode to another or it's changing zoom levels. 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, hundreds, hundreds of Gs of acceleration to get to that speed instantly, almost instantly. But you 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've got these different lenses down the bottom, if you rotate the magnification, the objective down below, you will see the image shift and move. And that's what we're seeing in this video. At the same time, this object does this movement off to the side.

You see that they're switching from one optical field of view to another. So they're changing, they do it internally with mirrors. It's not actually lenses because they use mirrors for infrared cameras to reduce the absorptions of the light. So it's a lot more effective to use mirrors. So they're rotating this set of mirrors in. And then what happens in the next few frames is it magically appears right back in the middle. So he's obviously never moved.

It was always there, but the movement of the camera made it move off to the side. And exactly the same as when you rotate a 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 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 were 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 there are eyewitness accounts, but they're not of the same thing. They're not of what was seen in the video. So we have some eyewitnesses who said they had an encounter with a tic-tac-shaped object. It was like a 40-foot-long tic-tac that kind of mirrored their motions and moving. around and then flow off very rapidly. And then an hour later, another plane went out and took this video. So we don't know if it's the same thing. So it could be that it could be the same thing.

But in the video, we can tell that nothing amazing is going on in terms of some movements and high accelerations. But we do have this eye witness account from an hour earlier of possibly a different object, possibly the same object, that was just moving rapidly this time. But I don't know what that was. I have a few ideas, 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, you know, no shade against Navy pilots, but eyewitness accounts are famously unreliable and really can't be probed in any detail. So we really just have to look at the evidence we have in front of us. Yeah, indeed. And Navy pilots are very highly trained and they're very good at identifying other planes. They're highly trained at doing that and, you know, planes from different angles and things. but what we're asking them to do here is identify something that would remain unidentified

even after they saw it. So they never actually identified it. They saw what looked like a tick-tac shape object, like a giant propane tank. They gave that description. Maybe that's just what it looked like. 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 still familiar with? If you don't know how big something is, you don't know how far away is it. They said it was 40 feet long, but how did they actually figure that out? They never actually explained that, and they said that they're very familiar with looking at a Hornet, which is a type of plane they fly in F-A-18, which is 40 feet long, and he said it was about the same size as that.

But that, to me, sounds like he's used to seeing things that are 40 feet long. And so he just automatically fit this object, which may have been 10 feet long or 20 feet long or 80-feet long into that mold. Because he didn't know how big it was, you then don't know how far away it is. think something is 40 feet long, and it's actually 20 feet long, then the actual distance is half what it actually appears to be. So he's thinking something's 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, the Go Fast and the Gimble videos.

Okay, so the Go Fast video actually looks like something moving very, 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 25,000 feet, and that's in the bottom left corner. It's barometric altitude, so it's based on the pressure, but it's close enough. So it's about 25,000 feet. We have the range of the target, because it actually gets a radar lock on this target. So he knows how far away it is.

It knows it's 3.3 nautical miles away line of sight from you to this object. And then we also have the slant angle, which is the angle down from horizontal that the camera is, which I believe is started around minus 22, like 22 degrees down. So we know we're at 25,000 feet. We're looking down at 22 degrees at something which is 3.3 nautical miles away. So you can think this diagonal line down is, say, the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle. And 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 skimming just over the surface of the water at 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 surface of the ocean at really high speed. So I'm seeing, is it actually doing that? And if we can use 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 a very, very simple mathematics. We have a right angle triangle, and we have an angle, and we have the length of the hypotenuse.

We just take the sign of the angle and multiply it by the hypotenuse, and it gives you the opposite leg of that triangle, which is the height below where you are. This is just high school mathematics. It's 10th grade mathematics. If you take 10th grade trigonometry, then you would learn exactly how to solve this very, very simple problem.

You can draw a diagram. It's 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 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 on screen, is that it starts out with a camera of 50 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 of the side window of this train

and you see something like a building in a field far away, and then there's mountains behind it. If you just focus on that building, it will look like it's kind of skimming past these mountains. The mountains will be able to move behind it if you lock on onto that. If you lock onto the mountains behind it, it'll look like the house is moving past. It's the parallax effect,

where one thing appears to move relative to another because of a change in the position 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 closer to the plane than it is to the surface of the ocean. The claim that it's right above the surface is just an illusion and that 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. It's actually halfway. It's actually almost exactly in the middle. which is like the ideal position, really, for this parallel solution to happen. If it wasn't moving, which it is actually moving, but imagine if it wasn't moving. 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 of 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-thirds the speed of sound. So if you think 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 illusion. But besides this 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 as a factor here. So we have like 30 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 tilt angle of the plane's wings. So it's getting a little bit more complicated now. We have more variables. But we can take the tilt angle of the plane's wings and we can use just

standard calculators to figure out what the rate of turn would be, then degrees per 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 that number there is the calibrated air speed, not the true air speed. You have to convert them. So 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 range at the start, and we know the angle and the range at the end. So if we draw a little vector 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 is gone forward and a bit to the left, and it's turned 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. And we know the angle to look at,

so we know where it is in plain space, plain 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 of 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 the 3D story of what actually happened. Yeah, and I actually created a little interactive vector diagram where you could adjust various parameters because there's some uncertainty as to exactly what's going on in terms of how fast it's, 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, which gives you the range of possible velocities. And it turns out it's something of the order of around like 40 or 50 knots. It's like 44, 55 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. A typical value for wind at high altitude is anything from like, you know, 30 knots up to 100 knots. So it's entirely consistent with something just simply sitting in the wind and 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 also get from the media, more information that's in this video. It's very remarkable how much information is in there. The video is in black-hot mode. It's an infrared video again. And it's in black hot. So if it was hot, it was a jet plane, for example.

You would see the heat of the engine show up as black. But this just shows up as a white dot, which means it's actually cold. It's actually colder than the ocean. 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. was an extraordinary craft, you know, simply a jet flying very fast. It's not amazing. But the reason they was claimed to be extraordinary was that it was cold. They had no visible flight surfaces or anything like that. It just appears as this dot that's cold. But a dot that is cold drifting at a wind speed is just a balloon, because he would take on the temperature of the air around it and just be moving at the same speed as the wind. So again, once you dig into it, everything fits this new hypothesis of it being a balloon, which kind of, you know, the thought arises naturally

what moves that wind speed in the air. There's only really, you know, there's either a plane pretending to be a balloon or it is a balloon. So it fits and obviously it disproves the earlier hypothesis that it's some incredible craft moving without means of propulsion. Well, I always wonder what happens to those balloons that are released at like gender reveal parties. And maybe some of them end up, as you know, claimed aliens by Navy pilots. I will never know. All right. So that's the Fleer TikTok video, as well as the GoFast video. What about the gimbal one? The one that you said is claimed to be the most dramatic flying saucer video we've ever seen.

It is, if you don't know what's going on. But once you do know what's going, it's still kind of interesting. You know, 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 2017. The title of the article was called Glowing Oras and Black Money. and the reason they called it glowing aura and black money was that what you see

on the screen is this black saucer 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 it's an infrared video where black is hot that implies what you're seeing around the object is cold so you're seeing what could it be

is it like a hot object with cold air around it this seems like something that's physically impossible. And in fact, if it was cold air, you wouldn't actually see it because air essentially is transparent to the infrared. So it takes a lot of heat to actually see heat coming off of gases. So you wouldn't actually see it if it was just cold air. So people hypothesized about it being some kind of space warp or something like that, some kind of, you know, it's warping the nature of space time around this object. And that's what the means of propulsion is being suggested by this strange aura. So what I did there is I went to look for

other thermal camera footage. And we don't have this particular camera, the Atflea camera, but we do have lots of footage from thermal cameras, just like things like surveillance cameras and people doing experiments with little thermal cameras. I have a little thermal camera myself somewhere in my desk, and you can do this experiments. 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 planes, and she appeared black with a white aura around it. I found it around a dancing girl. Someone took an infrared 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.

Oh, I thought you were going to say that this dancing girl was probably an alien. Well, that's a possibility, of course, but low down on the list. So, you know, I find out that this glowing aura, 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, so it's a sharpening artifact. And the reason it appears is that to increase the visual contrast of objects, they use a thing called an unsharped mask, which is an old photography technique. It's 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 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 auras around things. And you actually 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. It's usually just a few pixels, if that. But that's 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 the screen. So it's just part of the video feed itself. And it's something that they can actually switch on or off in the camera because it's just a standard like sharpening setting. So then all we're seeing is a hot object. Yeah, so all we're seeing is a black, hot object, which just means hot object.

So they claim that it shows an object which is rotating, which kind of implies two things. I mean, one is that it implies that what we're seeing is the actual shape of the object, this kind of sort of shape thing, and that what we're seeing is that object actually rotating. 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 something like a flashlight, I've got a flashlight shining at the camera here.

It creates a big glare. You see, I've got a small flashlight here about the size of my eyeball, and I shan it at the camera, and I got this big glare that's almost the size of my head. So you can get these big glares. 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, 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 A340, which is a four-engines plane. And each of the four engines was creating a infrared blare in the news again, it was infrared footage that was about maybe 10, 20 times as big as the actual engine itself. And they all kind of merged together into this one big blob. So when I saw this other video, this gimbal video of something in the infrared, almost my first thought was, could this be like in that old case, like in the Chilean Navy UFO case? Could it be the glare of the

engines 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 that's 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'd take the video into a program where you could scrub rapidly through the video, so you can just move the position of the playhead, essentially, so you can go backwards and forward. So I was having the object going like this rotating. And then I noticed that in other parts of the screen, there were these vague shapes that were also rotating.

So at the same time as the object rotated or appeared 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 all of the lights in the scene would 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 it. If you rotate a camera, then the pitch,

of what you're looking at will also rotate. And so, but what we're looking at here, I'm saying the camera's rotating, but only this little glare in the middle of the screen rotates and these other shapes are rotating. But the thing about this particular camera system is that the way it is mounted, it's mounted on a two-axis gimbal.

And when it moves from left to right, when it's tracking an object, it can't just smoothly do that because it's only mounted on two-axis, and you get this thing called gimbal lock, which people are familiar with from all different 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 rotates. The camera has to rotate to get from left to right. You don't want the whole scene to rotate. The pilot's watching the scene. He doesn't want the horizon that suddenly flip upside down. So even though the camera is rotating, the horizon stays exactly level. So what's happening, though, is that,

the camera's rotating relative to some part of the equipment 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 the camera rotates the horizon. It then has this system to rotate everything back. But since the camera's rotated relative to the horizon, the shape of the glare relative to the horizon changes.

You know, it's difficult to explain. I came up with a simple demonstration that I actually showed this on CNN. I have this bit of glass. It's a filter, a camera filter, and I can rotate it. And I can kind of point my simulated glare at the camera. And if I hold the bit of glass in front of it, you can see that when I rotate the bit of glass, the glare rotates. And you can see that line is diagonal now to go as horizontal.

So if a camera rotates, a glare is relative to the orientation of the camera, the shape of the glade relative to the orientation of the camera, that will rotate as well. Then you, when you derotate it to get their horizon level, the glare appears to rotate. And it's just difficult to convey, as I keep saying. But the reason I keep saying that is that people, when they hear this explanation, they think, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I can't understand what you're talking about. It's mental gymnastics. But just because something is a little difficult to convey, it doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong. If you take the trying to actually look into what's actually going on here.

It does actually make sense as the most plausible explanation. So then I did a little bit more work, a little bit more digging here. I looked at the patents for this camera, the Aplea system, and found out that it has this derotation mechanism to derotate images that rotate when the camera rotates. And it actually specifies in the patent that it needs to do this gimbal correction at around plus or minus three degrees or thereabouts, which is more or less where it's doing it. the big rotation happens when you get close to zero degrees.

So again, everything kind of lines up with this with this other hypothesis, that it is a glare. And it's kind of essentially confirmed by the fact that the other light patterns in the scene rotate when the glare rotates at exactly the same point in time. And there really isn't an alternative explanation for that, other than the camera rotating. 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 the camera relative to some screen or some lens in front of it. Yeah, exactly.

But there's even more with this video. Like these, yeah, like I said, they're deceptively 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. We have the bearing of the object relative to the front of the plane,

and it kind of narrows down. So it starts out. We're looking out of the left window again at this object, and then we turn around until we're looking more straight on at it. And you notice the motion of the object. It looks like it's whizzing across the top of the cloud, but then later it seems to slow down and almost stop. And that coincides with 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 math. You can see where these objects might be and how far away they're moving. And it doesn't actually take very much to create this illusion of parallax. So the claim that is flying along and stops and then rotate 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 perhaps an alien spaceship, but it's something that's flying away from us that is hot. We are looking at it from the side and we turn around to face it and we get this illusion of parallax and then when the camera has to do it's gimbal roll correction, we get this illusion that the object is rotating.

And I think that's what we're seeing. It doesn't identify what the object actually is that. Like I say, 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 demonstrated here. It's not hovering on its end. It's not got a glowing aura of warping space around it. And it's not hovering.

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 that seemed weird and seemed difficult to explain are actually possible to explain with much more prosaic theories.

Yes, we have an unidentified object, but we don't have an undidentified, 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. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just to... chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.

Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not?

To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online. online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you.

It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace.

You discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories.

I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. podcasts. All right, we're back and we're talking with Mick West, who's giving us a detailed accounting of his understanding of what's going on in these apparent UFO videos, these

UAP videos that were released by the Navy. A lot of people are talking about is potentially credible evidence for visiting extraterrestrials. And Mick is talking to us about how he analyzes these videos and what he's. he thinks 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 2019, the flying triangle and the zigzagging submersible sphere.

Tell us about those. Well, the flying triangle one, I think, is the most entertaining one. It looks very impressive. You see this green triangle night. What we're looking at here is night vision, which is different to infrared. Most of the other videos are infrared cameras. This is a night vision camera.

And so what's the difference? Night vision is image intensification. So it takes what you can see in very faint light, and it magnifies the light. It has this intensive multiplier tube. When photons come in, it creates a cascade of electrons, and it creates a dot on the screen on the other side. So you get a much more powerful signal from just essentially individual photons that creates an image.

So it's night vision, it's commonly used by troops, and they have one attached to the helmet, They flip it down and then they go out into a building or whatever. It does need a little bit of light. Sometimes this supplements it with a shortwave infrared light, like a little infrared flashlight, which adds to the amount of visible light. It's visible in the infrared spectrum, but it's not a thermal infrared 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 the analysis has to be very different because of that. So we see a flying triangle. And it's, you know, it's this is a little green thing and it moves across, well, it 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 are what's called scintillation. It's just kind of random electrons inside the multiplier tube in the image intensifier. So we're not actually seeing a triangle moving across a star field that's visible in these things. So we see a triangle and the first thing I noticed about it was that it was flashing. And it was flashing in a way that very closely resented. the flashing lights of a plane. And I thought, you know, if this is a alien UFO or some kind of Chinese enemy drone

that's trying a stealth attack or whatever it's supposed to be, why does they have standard navigation lights? So then I looked up, you know, the rough location of where that ship was, it's the USS Russell. And they released the logbook 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 kind of south of Catalina Island. And that's right on the flight path of planes coming in towards LAX and San Diego Airport. So there was 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 many videos and I thought maybe it's just a little bit out of focus and 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 a Christmas tree or something like that or a little point light. You see it often in YouTube videos

as well. People often have very lights behind them, and then they're out of focus, and you generally see a round shape around them. Sometimes you'll see an octagonal 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 this one here, it's just a regular camera lens, and you look at the interior of it, you can see it's got a roundish shape. This one's actually an octagon. It's kind of blurry in this video, but you can see the shape of that, and that's the shape of the point of light takes. If you have a lens that has a triangular aperture, then when you look through that and take pictures with that that are a bit out of focus, then the lights will show up as little

triangles. So my hypothesis there was that this is in fact a plane. This is just a bit out of focus. The flashing is the flashing lights of the plane and is a triangular shape because of the triangular aperture of the camera that is taking this video. So then I've come up with this immediate hypothesis to me like 10 minutes to come up with this because you know just kind of recognize the type of things I'm looking at because 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

where somebody else pointed out that these actually were stars. And you can tell that they're stars because they match the constellation of those particular stars. This one star called, I think, Arcturus. And then there is the planet Jupiter. and Jupiter, of course, moves through the sky. It's not in a fixed place. So we took the actual date of the incident, July 15th, 2019,

saw where Jupiter was relative to these stars, and it's in exactly that spot. So we know exactly what we're looking at at that part of the video. Now, that part of the video is not zoomed in, so we can't see the triangular shape of these things because 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 is and then where it ends up at at the end of this video where you see this flashing triangle. And then you notice at the end of the video there's two other triangles that appear one above the other,

two other faint triangles and it flies past them. And the people who made claims about this video claimed that these other two triangles were two other drones or alien spaces or whatever they were, two other UAPs. But I did 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 UAPs actually are. So we know now that these two lights are actually stars, but these two lights appear as triangles. The only way that can happen is if they are triangular bulky. So that essentially, it's kind of close to that. There's nothing else that could possibly be other than triangles created by the chamber. But, you know, you didn't stop there, of course.

We keep going. Try to find more evidence. People say, well, the standard night vision monocular that they use in the Army, the PDS 14, doesn't have a triangular aperture. So I theorize that maybe that 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, a fairly well-lit situation.

You can actually have too much light and you don't need it and you can reduce this aperture in front and get better focus. Smaller aperture is better focus. That was a little bit of a long shot but luckily what happened then was that somebody on my forum MetaBunk

looked at his night vision monocular they just happened to have and he saw that it had a triangular aperture. So he took his night vision monocular 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 had the stars. We had the planes flashing. We had the same size, the exact same size triangle. So he did that and made some videos and kind of explained this to people. And I think that explanation has largely taken hold. Other people have found their night vision monoculars have these triangular apertures and they've gone out and repeated it exactly the same people who were once skeptics.

They were like, oh, no, that couldn't possibly happen. And then they were like, oh, wait, look at this. And then 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 triangles.

So you know that the triangle shape in this video, even though you don't have your hands on that actual binocular, are artifacts. And then you've additionally reproduced this using similar equipment in other videos. So that seems pretty clear that it's not a strong case for a flying pyramid. And yet the people who released this video are kind of still clinging on to the possibility.

that it might be something amazing. I think they just kind of don't want to let go of this idea. And there's a small amount of justification to it. If this is a video that is part of the UAP Task Force's 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 seemed to be unidentified, especially to the person who took this thing like this. So this guy, he's a night vision binocular, he's on deck, he sees some flashing light overhead. In fact, he doesn't even see that. He's looking at the, he's Jupiter, and then he's just

panning around the clouds, and then he notices this little flashing light up there, and he goes, oh my God, it's triangular shaped, what's going on? And so he films it for a while, and it disappears, you know, he gets his camera out and he's filming it through the night vision monocular. And then he makes the report and says, I saw a triangular shaped craft flying over the ship.

And initially, it becomes this unidentified event 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. It wasn't just me. Other people came to immediately the same conclusion. Other people, completely independently of me, went out and took a video with their night vision monoculars 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, and I know they're releasing a report in just a few days on their analysis of it, so we'll see what they say.

But tell us quickly about this last video, this zigzagging submersible sphere. Yeah, the zigzagging submersible sphere doesn't zigzag. Again, what we're seeing here is camera movement. And this is something that's even more apparent than the FLIR video. You see a dark shape, again, it's black. hot, so we're looking at something that's hot. It could well be a glare, and it probably is a glare. But it looks at the first, like it's zips over to the left, and it zips over to the right, and it zips over to the left, zips over to 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 shape, and it's getting a visual lock on the shape. The camera just, it's kind of like when you do motion tracking in Adobe After Effects or something, you say, like, track this object. So all he's trying to do basically is to get the cursor around this object. So he's moving it left and right. So the object itself isn't moving left and right. It's moving at a 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's surface, is that the motion of the ocean, or is that the motion of the wind that gives an 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 flies in the air and then it flies in the ocean. For a start, we're looking at something that's descending incredibly slowly. It's like going really,

really 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 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 is a sphere,

so when we look out over the ocean, the horizon is kind of like a very shallow hill. So something's far away and goes down below that, it will disappear, and it will disappear by shrinking if it's a glare. Like if I have a glare, again, if you shine at a light at the camera, and move it down behind something, you don't see it like being cut in 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 then pop up a little bit and then disappear again. So I think the most likely explanation for 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 waves just on the horizon, and they're going up and down, so you see it disappear, and then briefly appear behind a wave, and then disappear again. So it could be 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 100 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, and then eventually it's lost from sight. 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 transmedium activity. It doesn't necessarily look like an alien flying submarine. That's right. No, it looks like a slow-moving heat source that disappears behind the horizon.

All right, so 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 other more prosaic theories? Well, there's kind of two parts to that. So one is like if you see a video of something that's really amazing, you don't know if it's aliens or if it's humans

because humans could have invented some new technology. But let's say, you know, what would be the video evidence of something that is 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 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 signal action in three dimensions. So when you're looking at something in two dimensions, you don't know if something is small or far away, and you don't know if what 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 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 know, things that happened roughly 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 explanation, something that makes sense to you that doesn't require invoking aliens. What do you feel?

Do you feel like, aha, I cracked a puzzle. This is super fun. Or do you feel, oh, that's too bad. I was kind of 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 of it being aliens. If it did turn out to be something amazing, I would be, I would be Flabbergastor, and it would be totally amazing.

So usually when I figure something out, it's just like, figure it out. No, no, no, I've solved something. the puzzle because that's what it is for me a lot of the time is you're trying to figure out a puzzle and there are all these little clues you know all the things I talked about in these videos sometimes you're looking at like 10 15 different little clues in the video and once you figure it out and you know you're beating other people to figuring it out that's kind of a fun thing too because there's a little bit of competitiveness in it because we're all trying to solve these things we're all trying to figure out what they are and if you manage to do it it's a fun little

feather in your cap well that's what we're all trying to do in science is and for the true nature of the universe based on the pieces of evidence we have. It's all just one big detector 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 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 there must be some kind of life out there. I mean, sure, maybe we are the first life to arise in the universe, but I I think given the size of the universe, it seems fairly likely that some kind of civilization has

risen, you know, maybe not very, very complicated, but 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 convinces me as well is that we have all of these videos, but they're all of totally different kinds of apparent phenomena. If we had like 19 different videos and they all showed the same kind of ship doing the same kind of trick, that might tell a convincing story. Because in the end, what we're looking for is a coherent explanation for everything.

It's certainly possible that extraterrestrials have visited and they're sneaking around and we're 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, that's a little harder to swallow. Yeah, here we have like a, we have a flying tic-tac. We have a hovering, flying saucer top type thing. and we have a flying cold objects, the other ones are all hot,

and then we have a flying flashing triangle, and then we have a flying hot sphere that descends into the ocean. So, yeah, why don't we have two videos, even at separate times, they just show the exact same amazing thing. 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 they don't 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, Mick, for sharing with us your experience and your expertise and walking us 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. It's a very interesting topic. 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, everyone, for tuning in. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order. criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota luckily it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot he doesn't think it's a problem but i don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other but i just want her gone oh hold

up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime Podcasts and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, got you. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.