Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Mick West: Are UFO's here? (#154)

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

Mick West, a debunker, skeptic, writer, UFO investigator, and former video game programmer. This is the official channel for videos relating to the debunking and other experiments I do on my forum MetaBunk.org. It's also where I post the video of my Podcast - Tales From the Rabbit Hole (tftrh.com) which focuses on long-form discussions with people whose lives have been affected by conspiracy theories. Mick West is the founder of Metabunk.org, a forum about the debunking of conspiracy theories. He is the author of "Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect" My primary focus is on conspiracy theories. I investigate claims of evidence around those theories, covering everything: 9/11, UFOs, False Flags, Chemtrails, and even Flat Earth. I also discuss how best to help people who have fallen down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, a topic I explore in my book: Escaping the Rabbit Hole - How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories using Facts, Logic, and Respect. Twitter: https://twitter.com/MickWest Thanks to our sponsors! https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible http://betterhelp.com/impossible Watch my other Alien Content! Jill Tarter Searching for CONTACT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9K9OBd3vHk Life on Venus? Sara Seager Venus Life: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Communication with Aliens? Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Aliens are already here? Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Arrival! Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM From Mick’s piece in USA TODAY: UAPs represent a serious issue for the military. If aircraft incursions cannot rapidly be identified, or if a pilot cannot make sense of what they are seeing, or if radar returns show what looks like super-fast moving objects, then those are real problems. There's also the inevitability that foreign adversaries are developing novel forms of drones for spying and combat purposes, which we will need to detect and counter. These are all real issues, and that's what a comprehensive report should discuss, along with suggestions for better tracking and investigating such incidents. Mysteries remain. What the pilots who reported engaging a giant flying Tic-Tac saw is still unidentified, as are the objects in several other incidents. The causes of ghostly or rapidly moving radar returns are likewise, in many cases, unknown — although since the system is classified, if it's a system glitch or inadequacy, then the Pentagon isn't going to tell us. We'll also continue to have no good answer for many photos and videos, simply because the object shown is too far away for whatever camera is being used. But "unidentified" means just that. It does not mean advanced technology. If the quality of the leaked evidence is any indicator (and it probably is), then there's not going to be any significant revelations about the existence of physics-defying craft, and certainly no strong evidence of visiting aliens. While the genuine issues that Obama raised deserve serious examination, there will be no disclosure because there is nothing to disclose. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: UFO sightings: Why federal reports probably won't point to aliens Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Mick West, this is Brian Keating, into the Impossible podcast. How are you today? Where are you joining us from? Doing great. I'm joining you from Sacramento. And I must say that Arthur C. Clark was one of my favorite science fiction authors when I was growing up. And I also watched him on TV a lot. He had a TV show in Britain. So I'm a big Arthur C. Clark fan. Very good. I am honored to be.

be the co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, and Arthur had many, many sayings, one of which I use as the title of this podcast, which is the only way of discovering the limits of the possible, is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And another one, which will come up today, undoubtedly, is for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And the third one, which we open all of our regularly scheduled interviews with, is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And we're going to talk about some magical technology today, perhaps, that has been reported. And I want to talk about some of the implications of this technology, if it's true, if it did actually exist.

And some of the evidence that we have, as a scientist, I'm always, of course, interested not so much in belief, but in evidence. and I want to harken back to that great hunter of evidence, and that is Carl Sagan. He was not a knight like Arthur C. Clark was, but he did say things such as extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now, Mick, I'm a scientist. I never reach into a bag that says, you know, here's the extraordinary evidence. I don't know about you. But first, can we get a little quick recap for listeners in my podcast? Can you give me a quick recap of how you came to study such phenomena that are unexplained, first of all? Sure. Sure.

Well, I'm not a scientist. I'm actually a former video game programmer, which you might think doesn't suit me well for doing this type of thing. But it's actually a lot of the mathematics that I use in analyzing UFO videos are the exact same mathematics that are used programming video games, because you have to do the same type of calculations to figure out where things are in 3D space and how you transform one to the other. and the very simple physics that you do in video games is often all the physics you actually need to figure out certain things that are going on in UFO videos. So I kind of got interested in UFOs maybe about four years ago, and before that I was doing a lot of investigation into various conspiracy theories,

one of which was the chemtrails conspiracy theory. So I got really interested in tracking down where planes are in space and things like that. And that just naturally translated into the, the UFO realm and I started looking at these interesting UFO videos and trying to figure out what they were showing. And recently there's been an upsurge in interest in all different venues. I started to get interested in this, courtesy of a very good friend of mine who's, I call him, you know, the atomic clock, Eric Weinstein, because they say a broken clock is right twice a day, but you know, Eric's been right about an awful lot of things and it's very hard to dismiss what he is interested in. And so I

I take him very seriously from all sorts of things like lab leaks of certain things that shall not be named currently to other sorts of things that might be considered fringe or conspiracy. He tends to be right more often than not. And anything that interests him piques his interest will certainly peak my interest. And so he's sort of more convinced than I've seen him in a long time that there's something here, that there's something to pay attention to. So that's good enough for me to at least pay attention to it. Now, I'm a physicist. I'm an experimental physicist. He's a theoretical, he's actually a mathematician by training,

but interested in the theoretical implications of such technology. He's made statements on Clubhouse and elsewhere that, you know, he's curious. Who knows about these phenomena? Who is watching these phenomena? We've had conversations with Ryan Graves on Clubhouse and on and off, who is one of the fighter pilots who's been interviewed by 60 minutes. Maybe he's watching. Maybe he's not.

He's a very generous individual, as well as Alexand Dietrich, who's shown a great deal of class and dignity and talking about this. And I believe that these individuals who have provided eyewitness accounts are credible. They're highly trained. They're incredibly patriotic and motivated. I don't think there are ill intentions here, but there's certainly a lot of passion involved. I don't want to talk about why people are motivated to do things. But to what do you attribute this most recent upsurge? Is it this Marco Rubio, you know, instigated report, this Pentagon data dump?

What is contributing to it? And, you know, why now? What's the Nancy Kerrigan, you know, kind of background on all this? Why now? Why me? Well, I think Eric's take really is about whether smoke, there's fire. And that's really what he's looking at. He's seeing that there's a lot of talk about it going on at relatively high levels.

You know, we've recently had former President Obama talk about it a couple of times in different situations, and people are bringing it up. I think what we're seeing is kind of a culmination of something that's been going on for a number of years. And you can kind of trace it back to about four years ago with the publication of the New York Times article titled Glowing Ores and Black Money, which kind of revealed the existence of this Pentagon program called ATIP, which was in part supposedly studying UAPs or UFOs. And it was also looking into various types of advanced technology like warp drives, potential. hypothetical things and different types of energy sources and whatnot. But, you know, this story came out, and with that came a couple of videos that looked like initially there were really impressive videos of UFOs.

And people started looking at these videos and it got on the media. And that kind of started a feedback loop that's been going on, I think, for about the last four years, really. And what we're seeing now is in some ways a culmination of that kind of media tsunami of interest, fueling the public interest, which fuels more interest, and then politicians get interested in it as well. And it just kind of has been on a role ever since then. But I don't, you know, saying that, I don't think it's just simply an issue of the media promoting this and these people promoting this. There's also very real issues that are going on that are kind of related to the

whole phenomenon. You know, we have a real issue with unidentified objects. And, you know, if the Navy can't identify something that's in their space, that's a real issue. So it's not like there's There's nothing going on. But I think we do perhaps have a bit of a conflation of two things. We have all this media interest, which is really driven by the idea that these might be aliens. And then we have a bunch of real issues, which have to do with things like drones and unidentified airspace incursions. But it's all kind of coming to the head. And I'm kind of hopeful that this coming report might resolve a few questions.

And that was kind of slated at the end of the Trump administration initiated by. by Marco Rubio and others talked about in a recent interview on 60 Minutes, a couple weeks back. And that had a six-month fuse about to expire in June. And that, you know, kind of set the wheels of motion, at least in my mind, that this was sort of interesting. Although I've been saying, you know, this might be kind of the last opportunity if it turns out to be nothing. And so in talking with Eric on Clubhouse and elsewhere, I've been saying, you know, might this not be a case of, you know, buy the rumor, sell the news if folks are going to interested about it, we might want to capitalize on attention for those that might have purposes other than the pure actual investigation of scientific phenomenon.

Yeah. I think a lot of people who are promoting this are actually already convinced and they're not really so much interested in the scientific investigation of are these amazing phenomena or are these natural phenomena. They're actually convinced that these are, well, in many cases they're convinced that they are aliens. The way that they talk about it, it's not human, essentially. And so you've got kind of a, you know, two things there. You've got people trying to promote the idea that these are aliens, and then you've got people trying to figure out what they actually are. Now, in my field

of astronomy, we have a tradition actually called Great Debates. These go back hundreds of years, actually back to the time of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, etc. Continuing through 100 years ago, exactly last year, what was called the great debate, the size of the universe, the scope of the universe is the Milky Way, the entirety of the universe was actually called the great debate, even though it was just one of many. And I actually feel that debate is almost pointless in science. It's very hard to convince somebody of an opinion, especially as Upton Sinclair said, if his or her job depends on it, not believing a fact to be true. But I do believe that the perspective of two different opposing sides can be valuable.

at revealing truth. And for that reason, I've had on diametrically opposed forces on The Into the Impossible podcast. I've had on Michael Saylor, perhaps the world's most preeminent proponent of Bitcoin and blockchain technology. And I've had on his arch nemesis, Peter Schiff, as well as other proponents of gold versus blockchain. Not at the same time.

I didn't have them debate each other. I've had on Noam Chomsky and his ideological alter ego, Ben Shapiro. I don't know people that have had on, you know, such diametrically opposed forces. I've had on Kamran Vafa at Harvard, and I've had on, and Mitchie Okaku, the foremost proponents of string theory in the universe, as I know it. And I've had on, as I said, Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hassenfelder, and many other great opponents of string theory. So I am not unaccustomed to this. And I have had commitments from some of the pilots who have been involved in some of these tentative commitments, I should say, and I don't want to say which ones, to come on the Into the Impossible Podcasts.

And I'm grateful for that, not only for their patriotism, far beyond anything I would ever show. But I do want to say that I think it's useful as I will ask them, I want to ask you for your perspective on their reports. And I'm going to ask them on their perspective on your report. So some of the reports that have been made on Lex Friedman's podcast, who's a friend of mine and has been very vocal about these things, is it not possible that because you are not an expert in the FLIR systems and the pods that are installed on the super hornets that were involved in the 2004 Nimitz encounter, which was not far from where I am now in San Diego, you're not an expert, you're not operating this, shouldn't you be contacting engineers at Raytheon to learn how to use this? Isn't it possible that you're falling into the confirmation bias fallacy that's really befuddled astronomer scientist ever since

the time of Galileo up through Einstein and beyond. Sure, and I would love to talk to Raytheon, and I've tried to contact them a couple of times and got nothing. Other people have tried to contact them on my behalf, and they've said, basically, well, we refer you to the users of the equipment for what's actually going on. So, you know, I would really like to talk to experts. I've had people who say they're experts in the FLIR system, which is not really the same thing exactly, but the rebut me, but essentially it's, you know, I kind of disagree with them because I think that they're not actually understanding my argument. But it becomes very problematic because, you know,

here's me, you know, a former video game programmer who is certainly not someone with much experience in these systems. And I'm putting forward theories and hypotheses and other people who ostensibly have more experience than me say that I'm wrong. But I think usually what happens in these situations is that they're not actually addressing the arguments that I'm raising, which sounds kind of very presumptuous on my part. I understand how that sounds. But if you look into what we're actually talking about, there's one one issue in particular that I talk about quite a bit, which is to do with one of the videos, it's the gimbal video, which we can get into later. But it's a very simple thing, which is when the scene rotates, can something that rotates

the scene make a glare rotate. And people have told me that obviously it can't, that can't happen because if you're rotating the entire scene, everything is going to rotate, which is true. But unfortunately, they were asked the wrong question. So we get this situation where it's not really dueling experts here. It's kind of people almost talking across purposes. Like I put forward a hypothesis and someone doesn't understand what it was, but they're not actually talking to me, so we can't, we can't thrash it out.

So I would love to talk to Raytheon. I would love to talk to actual engineers. I have heard people who told me that I was right in various things. They can't talk about it because it's a classified system. The Atfleur system, the video that we're looking at right now was taken with an Atfleur camera, which is a very expensive military pod. Tartagnar effect is simply to take your camera phone and just kind of touch the lens on the back. It's actually, this is actually the best footage that we have available from that camera.

We can't actually find any other footage because it's a classified system and the military does not release that footage. So we've got this opaque wall of secrecy beyond which I can't reach. We have some people who are a bit closer to that wall and they can kind of look over it. And we have people on the other side who can't actually talk about it at all. And so we've got this big problem of communication. How do I get, how do I resolve? whether I'm right or wrong if no one can actually talk about it. Yeah, and I think, you know, there is this kind of deference to authority,

which, by the way, does not have a place in the scientific method. Einstein was wrong no less than seven times, at least by my reckoning. He was, of course, right many more times than that. And I point out in my book that he deserved probably seven Nobel prizes, according to most physicists, and why he didn't win that is a tale for another time. But similarly, you know, we could make the same argument. for astronomers who, as my friend Sarah Skolls has made in her book, they are already here. She was on my podcast last year about her book, which focuses on Tom DeLong and kind of the features there.

You know, astronomers are also experts at watching the skies, and we have advanced technology that's not classified. And in fact, most of the technology that goes into military hardware has some pedigree, some heritage that traces its way to astronomical signals. For example, the cosmic microwave background that I study was detected by accident serendipitously by two radio astronomers, and it's a through line directly to the cell phone that we're using. Many of our listeners are watching right now on to the devices in our pockets to this very day. And the technology that went into the first CCD cameras, those are all for astronomical image sensing. Astronomers are watching the skies right now around the planet, any clear night of the day. and we use all wavelength bands, and we don't have any less of an interest.

In fact, Carl Sagan, one of the most eminent astronomers of all time, Jill Tarter, Seth Shostak, who will be on The Into the Impossible podcast live tomorrow Thursday, and you're welcome all of you listening out there to join in. All these folks have been on my podcast. We astronomers would like nothing better, Mick, than if this were true, if we could have access to advanced technology, if we could have access to new knowledge and new laws of physics, This, I mean, if you were suppressing this, Mick, I would be more mad than any of the comments that come in negatively against you.

So I think to argue that, you know, astronomers are suppressing this. I think that's sort of a laughable point now. The government conspiracy against it, you have to give them something, right? If they're saying, well, the government's not going to give you the fleer because it's advanced technology, I think that's a little hollow. This image was taken, these images were taken in 2004. That probably means the Raytheon technology is over 30 years old, right? I mean, the Fleer system itself was mounted on a pod. It's not installed in the F6.

As I understand, F-18, this variant, which is the Super Hornet, as the upgrade first commissioned in the 1980s. So this is not like some modern stealth fighter, right? This is a pod that's external to the original airframe. Am I right? Yeah, it fits underneath. You can take it on or off some of the planes that even have it on. But yeah, it's just a camera, essentially.

And so when we're talking about, you know, what can it do or what can't it do, there aren't that many really secret technological things that are hidden. And a lot of it was actually described in the patents, which I read in great depth. And they describe to some degree the internal workings of the system and how it uses these gimbled mirrors internally to steer the line of sight and how it has this external gimbal and how they work together. So it's not like we know nothing at all about it. It would be good to have confirmation. Part of the problem here is that what I'm describing is quite complicated. It was described by Joe Rogan as performing mental gymnastics, which is a term that's kind of caught on for describing these theories.

But, you know, they are complicated, and it is difficult to explain. And so people then tend to pick their expert, and they pick which person they want to agree with. And, of course, like, it's a choice between me and someone who, you know, claims to be a Fleer technician or someone who is a pilot, who is disagreeing with me, they're going to pick the pilot, and then pick the FLIR technician. And it could be simply that they prefer that explanation,

but it's also because this other person has a bit more perceived authority than me. So if we have explanations that are competing and we can't actually thrash them out in the public sphere, then people are going to go with opinions rather than actual facts. But if someone disagrees with me, they shouldn't just say, I disagree with you because I'm an expert. They should say, I disagree with you, and here's why, and here's the exact technical reason why. And then we can discuss that and figure it out. One of the most troubling aspects, as far as experts in doubting the pilots, to me, as I fly tiny little Cessons, right?

One of the things that troubled me is a report that was on 60 minutes over time. And the fact that 60 minutes didn't have any, as Arthur C. Clark would say, equal and opposite experts, meaning someone like you or someone just to counter the narrative that it either is the conspiracy cover up we have right to FOIA right to know or the two pilots three pilots or more perhaps or Lou I'm blanking on his last name and probably would mispronounce it I'd love to have him on the show as well he's certainly you know a hero to many people deservedly so but anyway there was nobody to point out you know that except in 60 minutes overtime and I can put a link to that in the chat, you know, that when they came back for several days, the pilots were kind of mocked,

they were teased, you know, and I pointed out to my listeners on my channel last night. I was chatting with them in the common section on my channel, and I said, you know, you can make fun of me because I'm not a great pilot and I'm not going to like criticize that or Mick, you know, and you can say like you have no right Keating or Mick, you have no right to criticize this trained, highly skilled pilot, Fravor, Dietrich, these are heroes, these are top guns, literally. But these are other pilots now criticizing them, teasing them, making fun of them. Like, I would never tease, you never tease a pilot about an accident, about an incident. This could have led to, like, tragic consequences, right?

So I'm wondering, I can't criticize them. I can't, you know, because I'm not an expert, but these are other fighter pilots, right? Now, people are saying, well, pilots would be pilots, they'll tease each other. But come on, at some point, you have to start to say, well, like, you know, at what point do we trust the eyewitness testimony? and what point, you know, do we have to rely on censor data? Now, there are questions in the chat room. People are asking, well, what about the radar data? Is that not reliable?

That's not eyewitness data. That's cold, hard time series evidence. Mick, what do you say about that? As the Krispy Chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect.

Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me and baby I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet, no. Krispy, saucy and $4? Very.

Only at 711. Valley 36-2236, participating stores only well supplies lastly out for full terms. The radar data is by witness data because we don't actually have access to it and we don't even know anybody who has access to it now. Perhaps Lou Elizondo is claiming that he has seen something.

But if we talk about, say, the Nimitz incident, which is David Fravers' incident, we have recollections about what the radar looked like, what showed up on the scope and what showed up when they did replays of it. But we don't actually have the data. So, you know, really is that recollection of a radar reading any different from an eyewitness seeing something in the sky?

You know, it's additional information, but it's just an additional eyewitness statement. We don't actually have the corroborating data. You know, if we have the video and we had like, you know, video of the radar screen showing the same thing at the same time, that would be wonderful. That would be really, really good. If it showed something amazing, if it's just showing dots in the distance, that wouldn't be that amazing.

But, you know, we don't actually have the data that people talk about that all the time. We have eyewitness accounts of seeing things in the sky. We have eyewitness accounts of radar data, and we have this one kind of fuzzy video of something which doesn't actually happen at the same time as either the eyewitness accounts or the eyewunners accounts of the radar data. So now the time series data, is that not available to FOIA requests or something? I mean, I can imagine that, you know, after 17 years might not be super threatening. But, you know, is that something that you've pursued as well, Mike, to try to gain access to?

I haven't, but I know other people have. People have been trying to get this information out, you know, for years. this information, you know, if it was there. You know, it's just the type of thing that is classified or not cleared for release by default. And there's just no reason for the military to release it. I don't know if that would even be foible because it's something that's, you know, essentially an active operation, even if it's a training operation. I don't know if that would be something that they would release.

I guess they have released deck logs of some incidents, but they also retract parts of of those redact. So, yeah, that would be great if we could have that. And if anybody out there has got any idea how to get it, then, yeah, let's get it. But we do not have radar data now. Let's see. There's a question. My Cyrillic is not that great, but I think it's Anton. Spasiba Anton, is asking a question, why not make a collaborative research effort between Mick and some former TTSA members? Have you thought about doing that, reaching out to the intelligence community? Well, TTSA isn't the intelligence community, though. That's the To the Stars Academy. Oh, to the stars. Sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, which I thought it was a transportation safety

administration. No, that would be the TSA. Yeah, I would be happy to collaborate with anybody if they've got like some ideas or information that they want to share or they want to work over. But I've talked to someone. I've talked to Lou Elizondo. I interviewed him. I tried to get Chris and, you know, to talk, and I've emailed a few of the other people, and I'd be happy to talk to any of them. But I don't think they like me. And I think part of that is because I'm a destroyer of dreams when it comes to UFO videos. I take these videos and I give a mundane explanation of it.

And this isn't my intent. I don't go in there thinking like, oh, well, I'm going to destroy somebody's dreams today. I go there and look at these videos and say, what is this thing? You know, and try to figure out what it is. And perhaps because I'm a bit more obsessive and have a little bit more time on my hands than other people have, I often kind of arrive at an answer. And often with the help of other people, a lot of people contribute to these investigations. And it turns out a lot of these videos have very mundane explanations when TTSA, people like Elizondo and Mellon,

have been climbing in the past that they show extraordinary things, which would be indicative of some kind of amazing technology or even aliens. Now, getting back to the eyewitness accounts, you know, which I think it is believed that those are some of the more convincing accounts, right? Because you're basically saying the radar data shouldn't, should count as eyewitness data, right? You're saying the operators are testifying. We don't have the raw data. We don't have the time series data, as you might expect, correct? Yeah, we don't.

We don't have data that we can actually analyze and do some kind of reconstruction. We have people's recollections of it, which is certainly more than just eyewitnesses. eyewitness eyeballs on the thing. We have actual people talking about the radar. For example, when Frava went out to see an object, he was sent to a location because there was a radar return at that location. And it was one of these, in the Nimitz encounter,

they had these groups of five radar returns, which were slowly drifting down from the north to the south, which they initially thought might be some kind of glitch in the system. They reset the system, and then it stayed, and they thought, that might be balloons or something, they couldn't figure it out, and eventually they sent a jet out. This is the story, the recollection that people give.

And then Fravor went to the location, and then at approximately that location, he saw something down by the water, and that turned out to be the Tic-Tac, and Alex Dietrich was there with him, and she saw something along the same lines. Now, the altitude and so forth, I mean, I'd love to have on those individuals,

and I'm hoping and working to be with them, but I'm trying to work out just the job, geometry of it. You've done Yoman's work on, you know, reproducing the glare and lens flare and ghosting. The boca will get into that in just a bit. But looking at it in terms of, you know, from a pilot's perspective, how would one actually approach this? Literally, you know, flying a high performance jet low over the ocean, tracking, you know, during a daytime encounter for an object which was reported the size of an F-18, with no scale, nothing to compare to on a featureless ocean surface,

where you're flying a supersonic jet capable of extremely high speeds at what's called high angle of attack. So the only way to fly a very fast jet, very slow, as would be needed, would be to make it dirty, which is to have landing gear and flaps, spoilers, leading-edge devices, et cetera, deployed, and then fly it at high angle of attack. or high alpha, which puts the cockpit at a high, high pitch with respect to the ocean.

So that's not really compatible. And I'm wondering, you know, people have actually simulated, you know, what would the encounter look like? Just from an aviation perspective, what does the geometry involved? You know, what did it look like from the cockpit? Because it wasn't like, you know, imagine driving down the freeway and you're looking for something in the size of a car or two cars. And you're going the stall speed of an F-18 in that configuration, which is its landing

configuration still about 100 knots or so. And so he'd have to be going faster than that, or he would stall and he wouldn't be here, God forbid. So you're going 200, maybe 200 knots, 230 miles an hour to stay safe. And then you're still at a pitch-up angle if you're not deploying all your drag devices. So has anyone looked at, what is the geometry involved? And what would it look like in the cockpit? The cockpit is not like a glass bubble.

He's got a lot of stuff in his face. He's got a heads-up display. Has anyone looked at that? Well, I think the cockpit kind of is, the top half of it is kind of a glass bubble, and the pilot does actually sit relatively high because they do need to have very good visibility in the airspace around them, so it's not like they can't see out of the side. And the angle of attack perhaps isn't so much of an issue at the front, because when Frava says he saw it at first, he says he looked out of the side window and saw

it. So it would have had a reasonable view of the ocean. And I think even if you're going at 200 to 300 knots, we're looking down at the ocean at something that is 20,000 feet below and a few thousand feet to the side. So say it's about four or five miles away visually. So even if you're going fairly fast, in your field of view, the rate of change of the angle of the object isn't going to be that much. So you would be able to keep an eyeball on it if you could see it in the first place.

And they didn't actually see the object itself first, the Tick-Tac object. They saw what they describe as being a disturbance in the water. So they looked down and they saw what looked like, either waves breaking over something or some kind of boiling in the water type disturbance, like a submarine surfacing or whales feeding or something like that. And then they saw this tick-tac object above this disturbance in the water. So you could imagine that this larger disturbance would catch their eye, and then they saw this smaller tick-tac. So I think it's plausible that they saw something and certainly seeing something in the water. But then where it gets complicated is, like you say, they're looking at something where you have no context as to how big it is.

You know, it's a TikTok. I've got this. This is like an iPhone case I'm holding up here, tic-tac shaped. And, you know, you know how big it is because you know how big my hand is. But if this was just, you know, hovering in space and there was blue sky behind it, and you didn't know how far away it was. If this was like, say, you know, back on my shelf over here, it would actually be a lot bigger than what you see here

it would be like, you know, four times as big. But because you know where it is, you... Excuse me. I didn't mute my Skype. Because, you know, what the context is, you can figure out how big it is. But if you lack that context,

you cannot actually, you cannot actually find out how big it is. And if you don't know how big something is, you don't know how far away it is. And vice versa, if you don't know how far away it is. You don't know how big it is. Now, Frava says that he looked at this thing and he knew it was 40 feet long.

And he was asked by Lex Friedman, like, how did you know this? And his answer was 15 years experience as a pilot, as a Navy pilot, top gun pilot. Right. And, you know, it's just kind of fair enough. But how actually do you know? How do you know? Is there some kind of technique that you use? Do you reference something else? Or you just, you look at this thing.

You have no idea what it is. is no idea what how big it is, but you instantly know how big it is by by magic is somehow essentially. And the Frava then goes on to talk about in this same interview with Lex Widman about how you you can't actually trust your eyes. Fridman asked him, how often, you know, do you trust your eyes? How often do you make mistakes? And Frava was saying, you know, all the time. Yeah, he says you were actually trained not to trust our eyes because your eyes fool you in aviation. He was talking about other stuff. And it's saying, like, you know, we go down, when he went down, because he didn't go all the way down to the surface of the ocean,

because you always stop before you get too close to the ocean, because people lose spatial awareness as to how high they are, and they fly into the ocean. He said that happens all the time. Right. So if he knows about all these visual illusions that can happen, how does he know something like that didn't actually happen to him? Yeah. Although they have radar altimeters in the F-18, and there are many ways to do it. But yes, you're right. As a pilot, the first lesson you get is trust your instruments. That's why we have instruments. That's where you use the altimeter rather than looking to see where the ocean is when you're descending towards the ocean. When you try to land at an airport, you're using, you're generally using things like the

landing aids that are on the side of the airport. On the other hand, you know, I am torn, right? You would like to have there not be a stigma. You know, if there are some in-cal, let's say it's not, you know, exotic phenomenon. Let's say it is, you know, Chinese drones or, you know, let's say those, you know, Portuguese. I don't know why we always have to, you know, stigmatize that there's, you know, these nefarious enemies trying to, let's say those damn Portuguese people again. They're trying to get back, you know, the new world and they've got sophisticated anti-aircraft, you know, anyway. And so they're harassing. So you wouldn't want to make it so that, you know, the next time an F-35 pilot is out there that she's not going to report it, right?

So you don't want to stigmatize it too. Yeah. I'm all for that. I'm all for reporting these incidents because I think the more that they can be reported, the more we can clear it was actually going on, because I think there are very real issues here. If Fravor, you know, saw something and it wasn't identical, that needs to be figured out. They should have followed it up. They should have tried to figure out what was going on, and maybe they did.

So, you know, either there was a failure there in doing that, or they already knew what it was. And I think it's probably the former. They probably just didn't take him seriously, and they didn't follow up with investigating it. So I think, you know, if pilots are seeing things that are unidentified, that is an issue. Sometimes that is going to be the pilots themselves making mistakes. Sometimes it might be issues with equipment and sometimes it might actually be real things. And it could be just, you know, different ways of looking at things that we haven't really thought about before. Like, you know, perhaps sometimes we get certain atmospheric effects which do, you know, make something appear like a flying source off in the distance.

So, yeah, we should definitely look into these things. So just a reminder, take a little pause. We're speaking with Mick West, who's got a wonderful YouTube channel, which you may find wherever YouTube's videos are sold and bought. I am Brian Keating, the proprietor of the Into the Impossible podcast. And you can find me, Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube and on Twitter. And Mick West at Mick West on Twitter and on YouTube as well. So Array Gray is asking, what do you think of the most foundational UFO cases?

Ariel school siding, Phoenix Lake, West Hall School Siding, Forest, Rendhal's Siding, Rendell's Siding, how much weight do you give to any of these sightings? Well, you know, a lot of these things are, I win this only accounts. The aerial school sighting was a lot of school children who saw something. and the the Randallsham Forest sighting, I think, has some maybe very limited imagery, but again, it was mostly eyewitness accounts, and a lot of these sightings are very, very old.

And I personally, while I don't want to just dismiss them out of hand, I'm not particularly interested in these old sightings because the evidence that's available for analysis isn't very good. the aerial school one for example the evidence consists of a bunch of children telling the story of what they thought they saw and some pictures that the children drew and there's no physical evidence there's no there's no adult witnesses and that there's no videos or photos so that one's a very difficult one to get any any handle on and you'd have to talk to like child psychiatrists and memory experts as to you know the validity of their eye when it's accounts, but personally, I don't think it's particularly compelling. And I just, you know, I'm not actually really that much of a UFO guy when it comes down to it. I only really got into it four years ago. I'm not deeply seeped in the history of UFOs, although I've been reading a lot recently because it's so fascinating. But what I'm really into is studying videos. And so that

naturally means that I look at the newer cases, because the newer cases are the ones that have videos. So some other questions are coming in about the famous Boka Green Pyramid, which I thought you did a masterful kind of analysis with actually making use of free astronomical toolkits like Stellarium and loading positions. The only thing I thought was missing was just the analysis of an arrival, what's called an arrival corridor, where aircraft arrive on predefined set flight paths. and the fact that many of these aircraft that fly out in what's called controlled airspace, which the Tick-Tac encounter, by the way, was not within if it was conducted at the surface. It's in what's called the so-called warning area, which anybody who has a pilot's license can operate in, they do so at great risk. And that risk is to, you know, potential life and limb that you may be intercepted,

you may be intercepted, not illegally, but you may be intercepted as sort of a cat playing with a mouse and that would be that would be for practice for these naval aviators but you're legally allowed to operate in this warning area and but you may be shot with a missile by accident because they can't guarantee your safety but above 18,000 feet if this object really did ascend to 60,000 feet for example but other things like the boca if you want to explain that yeah the book is interesting because it's new but real quick i actually used to fly in that area myself i didn't really fly over the ocean very much. I would go out and look at the dolphins occasionally. But yeah, around 2003, 2004, coincidentally, the exact same time of the Nimitz encounter, I was taking

flying lessons out of Santa Monica. So I'm kind of familiar with the layout of the airspace there. And you can fly out of Santa Monica, you've got the Class B, Benetia, so you never really get down to the warning area. But yeah, it's very busy airspace, which is one of the things about it, because obviously you've got not only LAX, but you have Long Beach, John Wayne Airport and then you have San Diego and then a few other airports as well. You sometimes get people flying from Hawaii to Denver flying overhead as well and then you get people flying overhead from the north to San Diego. Very, very busy airspace. So there's lots of things to see in the sky. And that kind of brings us to the Boko video, the triangle video. Right at the start

of that video, you actually see a bunch of stars and the planet Jupiter and somebody else noticed this before I did and they pointed out that this was, you know, this, actual constellation and that Jupiter was there on that particular day, June the 15th, 2019. And so we knew exactly where the camera was looking and then we were able to trace the camera through the sky and see where it ended up. And where it ended up, there was two other stars right at the end of the video. And you see the flashing triangle passed by these two other stars and these two other stars also take on the shape of triangles.

And this was kind of originally presented when the video came out, as these are two other crafts that are not flashing and are just hovering there. But you can see by doing this trace through it that they're actually these two stars. I don't think they're actually labeled in this version of the video, but you can actually, you'll see it passed by one of them in a second. And we know exactly what the stars are. We know what we're looking at and we know what angle we're looking at because we know what time of day it is roughly.

So we can get a good idea of what we're actually looking at in terms of altitude and angular speed and whatnot. But stepping back a bit, besides knowing where it is in the sky and the fact that the triangle shape of the object is kind of an optical artifact, which is obvious from the stars being made into triangles by the camera, we also see that it's flashing and it's flashing in a very similar way to the flashing of a commercial plane, like a Boeing 7-7. They don't have strict ways that they have to flash. They just have limits between which you have to flash between something like 30 and 70 times per second or something like that.

They have a limit. And different manufacturers have different types of lights as LED lights and the xenon lights. But basically the bottom line is the flashing pattern looks like a plane. The triangular shape of this object comes from an artifact of the camera. It has a triangular aperture, like the aperture. like the aperture of the lens is triangular. Some lenses have more circular apertures, which is an octagonal one here.

This one's a triangular one. So when you take pictures of small lights that are out of focus, they will appear as triangles. And that's what we're seeing here. So all these things can have lined up. And then we know the rough location of the plane of the boat, where the video is taken. It's the USS Russell, and we have the deck logs from those two

days and we have the location in latitude and longitude of that. So you can stick it on a map and we can go back into the the flight to flight trapping acts like Plainfinder, planefinder.net. You can replay back to that day and you can see exactly which planes were flying overhead and a whole bunch of planes on that particular day. It varies based on the wind and other factors. But on that day, there were a whole bunch of planes basically flying directly overhead that area.

So everything lines up. You've got a triangular shape flashing light that's moving, it's moving a plane speed. We can do that. We can do the whole translate the angular velocity to linear velocity. And it works out to be right if it's at the same altitude as the planes.

We know there were planes in that region at the time. And we know that this is simply a small light that has been turned into a triangular shape, which is what a plane would look like. And beyond that, we have a whole bunch of people who have this type of night vision camera with a triangular aperture. This is just a lens, not a night vision camera, but they have these night vision cameras with triangular apertures. They've gone out. They've taken pictures of the night sky with stars and planes, and it looks exactly the

same as this video. So I really don't feel like there's very much room for alternative explanations here, and yet people won't let it go. So I want to switch topics to your book, escaping the rabbit hole. We want to talk about that for a little bit. What is that about? What impelled you to write it? What is the guide to helping friends, family, and loved ones? Why do you want them to escape? Isn't it sort of, you know, kind of depend on what they believe? And why did you write this book? Well, it's really about helping people who are being trapped in some kind of conspiracy theory rabbit hole. They've come to believe things which are not true. Like, say an extreme example, someone believes that the earth is flat. And they're

going around saying that the earth is flat. Everyone makes fun of them because of this. They become socially isolated because people think that they are idiots. They try to persuade other people that the earth is flat. They don't trust anything that science says. So they start distrusting every single thing that's out there in science. And so I think it's a worthwhile thing trying to help them get out of that belief. Now, that's an extreme belief. There are a lots of other conspiracy theory beliefs that are out there that are less extreme. For example, some people believe that the World Trade Center was destroyed by the U.S. government using pre-planted explosives.

This is something that people actually believe. So it's a conspiracy theory that people believe. And if you start believing that, again, you start having all these very antisocial, for one of the better word. But if you start having this deep-seated distrust of the government, you can kind of go south in a very short space of time. If you think back to a long time ago, there was the Oklahoma City bombing,

which I think was in the 1990s, maybe the early 2000, no, the 1990s, yeah, but that was by Timothy Mervais. And he was a believer in conspiracy theories. He thought that the US government was in league with the United Nations and was going to enslave everybody. And he was sending a message to the powers that be, that he wasn't going to take it.

take it. So these conspiracy theories have consequences both for the individual and for society as a whole. And so something I've actually been interested in in general is just how do you talk to people who believe in conspiracy theories. And what I've learned over the years is that the key thing to do is, first of all, keep talking. You know, maintain an effective communication with people. And don't get into a position where you're arguing with them straight away because until you reach some kind of mutual understanding, you're not going to get anywhere. So the first thing you've got to do is like keep talking. The second thing you've got to do is try to figure out, figure them out, try to understand them and on the flip side, try to explain

to them where you are coming from. But always do it in this context of keeping the conversation going. And then when you kind of establish that and you've got some kind of common ground, you can then move on to kind of the second step of the process, which is supplying them with useful. information, which is if they say something which is wrong, you can at this point, now you've established effective communication, you can respectfully introduce other opinions and facts and then talk about them. They're not necessarily going to agree with it, but you can talk about it. And then the third step here in my three-step program is to give it time, because these things take a lot more time than you would initially think. You think you could just go in there,

explain to someone why they're wrong, and they'll be like, oh, yeah, but no, doesn't work like that. You explain to them why they're wrong and they say, you're a government chill, and they stop talking to you. So it's a kid gloves process that takes a lot of time. I want to remind folks, we're talking with Mick West, who's got his own podcast, he's got his own book, and he's got his own YouTube channel, a competitor to mine. But I do hope that you will tune in to both, subscribe to both, even though it's a zero-sum game, Mick. Hopefully we'll find some fertile cross-pollination. I want to ask a question that is being asked by a listener who has a name that I was going to

choose for my first born son. His name is boiled pizza, which is making me hungry, to be honest. But he asked the question, which I'll rephrase a little bit, Mick. I want to ask you, which debate opponent on the other side of the UFO aisle would you most fear, or do you feel as most kind of intimidating to your, against your arguments? Well, I don't know. I talked recently with, oh gosh, I forget his name now, but the guy from the the SCU. I almost apologize to him, but Robert, I think, something. But he was a guy who had been kind of asking me for a long time to have a debate with him because, you know, he felt like he could obliterate me. And we had, you know, a reasonable chat and we, we thrashed out a few

things and we had some disagreements and some agreements. I don't like to debate people. I like to have discussions with them. Yeah, I think there's no point trying to, you know, try to be like, who has the best argument here? We're not. lawyers in a courtroom trying to present a case, trying to get someone off. You know, lawyers have to just look at one side. I don't want to look at just one side. I want to figure out what's going on. I'm not a lawyer.

I'm an investigator. I'm someone who's trying to figure out what actually happened in these cases. So if anybody wants to talk to me, that's fine. I mean, if they want to argue with me, that's fine, too. Like, I don't mind that. You know, if they want to try to point out where I'm wrong, that's great. Because if people are pointing out where I'm wrong, we can have a discussion about that and we can say, you know, am I actually wrong?

You know, maybe not. So maybe I am. And if I am, I'll revise my position and move on. Very good. So we have a couple more questions from the audience. And I will also conclude with some questions of my own. So cooperating with the to the Stars Academy, which you corrected me about, of course, is not out of the question.

You would love to have them collaborate with you. but so far they have not accepted. What do you make of Harry Reid and getting involved in this? Kind of make strange bedfellows with Marco Rubio. Does that peak your interest? Yeah, well, I mean, Harry Reid has been a UFO enthusiast for a long time. He got into UFOs back in 1996 when he, I think, first went to a UFO convention with his friend, George Knapp, who's a local Las Vegas journalist.

And he has a friend, Rob Bigelow, is the guy. behind the A-TIP program. We've got the original A-TIP contract. So, you know, he's been a UFO enthusiast for a long time. I don't know about strange bedfellows with Rubio. It's kind of, in a way, a kind of an apolitical issue. So, you know, if Republicans want to get interested in it, then I don't think they're going to be particularly, you know, upset that they're working with Democrats on it.

You have Rubio and you have Mark Warner, who is the actual chief of of the Intelligence Committee now that Rubio was when Trump was president. And, you know, they're basically saying the same thing, that there are things that the military can't always identify, and that we should look into this because, like I said earlier, it's an issue. So I don't really see any kind of political problem there. And what do you say of those that criticize you because you're a video game designer? Very good again.

I mean, for example, I heard Frivor comment on you. Well, you know, the TikTok analysis that you did, you know, the plane is, you have the gimbal, but the plane is not banking. It's just sort of pivoting. And aircraft don't really do that, which is true. And you know that as a pilot as well. So what do you say to that? Well, video game programming is actually fairly complicated.

There's a lot of stuff going on in there. And the mathematics that we're talking about in terms of things. like gimbal rotation and axes of rotation and three-dimensional transforms are just these exact same types of things that I do in video game programming. So I may not know the nuts and bolts of what button to press in the cockpit, but I understand what happens when a mirror rotates or I understand what a camera rotates and I understand what gimbal lock is. And I can read, the patterns and I can see what's going on inside these cameras. Now, Frave is great at operating the equipment. But that doesn't mean he necessarily knows every nuance of what might happen

to it in various unusual situations, like with the gimbal. I don't think he really had a good rebuttal of the fact that there is this gimbal role. In fact, he explicitly said that there wasn't a gimbal role of transition when you go past zero degrees. And yet in Underwood's video, which he's very familiar with, you can actually see the gimbal roll happen. You see the entire sky rotate, much more dramatically, in fact, than in the gimbal video. So he's missing something that's right there in front of his face. And I think if I was to be able to sit down with him and respectfully go through it with him, I'm sure he could show me things, but I think I could probably show him a few things as well.

Yeah, I mean, from a physics perspective, which is the way I hope to engage, you know, I can't engage other than the tools that I have, which are, you know, from the perspective of an astrophysicist, is very learned in general relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, etc. You know, these objects are, you know, potentially traversing, you know, if they're, you know, truly described by interstellar phenomena. They would have to traverse vast distances, be controlled remotely, be autonomous, because, you know, they'd have to have some purpose in mind. And then they're operating in a very narrow, you know, region of the Earth's mesosphere

in very short durations. but then they happen to be in a very, very narrow region of one country's warning areas, you know, that's defined by an obscure administration agency of the federal government. And they seem to show up preferentially in one country. And they don't show up, you know, when Venus is below the horizon as often. They don't show up outside of certain flight paths. And what do you make of also this kind of resurgence of interest? Of course, David Kaiser is Professor of Science, Technology, as well as physics at MIT, wrote a book, recently Quantum Legacies about how the atom and splitting the atom and the quantum revolution led to many similar related phenomena, both the threat of nuclear holocaust, but also the resurgence or the surge of interest in radar in UFOs, etc.

And now we kind of see a new twin paradox coming about where we have a resurgence or a surge in interest in interplanetary travel, a courtesy of SpaceX perhaps. We have exploration going back to the moon, not the space age, space race originally. We have hopes for fusion reactors on Earth. We have hopes for artificial intelligence, machine learning. It's sort of like paralleling the post-war d'a-tayton, but Cold War instead of Russia, we may have China, as we've said, do you make of it that, you know, kind of this arises in a milieu of vast technological kind of what they call future shock? Is that to be expected in such a milieu? I think so.

But I'm not sure that's what's happening here. I'm not sure with the current UFO flap. It's actually really any difference to the UFO flaps of the 1940s and 1950s. Now, back in the 40s and 50s, we had a very kind of. interesting technological backdrop, which was the threat of nuclear weapons and the promise of nuclear power. So we had this kind of new technology, and a lot of people theorized at the time that flying sources were actually Russian nuclear-powered planes, and that somehow the Russians had done this technological leap, which is something people theorize now, that what we're seeing

is an adversary who has developed some kind of warp drive. So it seems very, very similar. I don't think there's this kind of similar backdrop in terms of an advancing technology. I mean, sure, there's the space, SpaceX aspect of it, and that's contributed. But I think more SpaceX has contributed because of the SpaceX satellites and the constellation trains of satellites are still being mistaken for UFOs. But my feeling isn't really that there's this big shift in technology, which is being represented by a shift in perceptions of UFO. I think what we're seeing now is really essentially the result of a fairly good PR program by the groups of people who are interested in UFO disclosure. I mean, going back to Harry Reid and Rob Bigelow and Tom DeLong and Lou Elizondo, people like that.

They're doing a good job of getting it out there in the media. Tim Wilson is saying the names of the videos, Go Fast, Gimble, are clear indications, that the Department of Defense realize what they are, and they are trolling people. What do you make of that? It could be that the names of the videos represent what's actually in them in terms of the analysis of them.

The GoFast video, you could think of that both ways because GoFast looks like it's going fast. So if they were really trolling people, they would call it go slow because it's actually going slow, and that would be the real explanation. The Gimble video, I think, is perhaps the more telling file name.

And these are actually the file names that were released by the DOD. Because the rotation of the gimbal craft appears to be a gimbal lock, a gimbal lock artifact. The camera traverses zero degrees. It has to rotate at some time while it passes zero degrees. And that causes the horizon to rotate relative to the camera, which means the glare is now at an angle relative to the horizon. and then the derotation mechanism has to rotate the horizon back,

which means that the glare is now rotated in the scene relative to where it was before. So, yeah, it could well be that this file name, Gimble, represents the actual explanation of what is going on in the video. So we have a question from Philip Shane, who is a good friend and host of the What the If podcast. and let me see if I can call up his question. So Philip is asking, would Noah be a proper national oceanographic and atmospheric administration? Would they be a proper agency to investigate UAPs? And I think that UAPs, he's saying, should be called unidentified atmospheric phenomena.

Well, that's certainly a possibility. And a lot of the times when people point to things in the sky, they are actually pointing at atmospheric phenomena. They're pointing at things like clouds or things like inversion layers causing some kind of mirage, like a Fatimorgana type mirage or a superior mirage where something that's on the horizon appears like it's floating way up above it. So I don't think, obviously, that every single UFO is some kind of atmospheric phenomena. But certainly people who are experts in that type of thing at NOAA could be involved in the discussion.

and NASA has a lot of atmospheric scientists as well. So, yeah, I think a UAP task force of any quality would have an atmospheric scientist on board. And the last sort of question that someone's asking, if you would like a Tic Tac, I think that's not called for. I think that's way out of order. Nobody wants a Tick-Tac right now. This podcast is sponsored by Bubbilicious, of course. I am a big fan of TikToks, actually. I have my empty box that I just finished earlier.

The gum of choice. You need a new supply. So thank you for those super chats. I'll make sure Mick and it gets a tick and attack. I'm sorry, I said TikTok later. Earlier, that must have been I was talking too much about Chinese. That's why I'm being so nice in saying the Portuguese are responsible for all this. So I also want to talk just the last points about kind of the scientific method, scientific results.

I think there is sort of a wish fulfillment in some sense that, as I said earlier, no astronomer worth his or her salt would turn down, you know, the opportunity to study these phenomena. First of all, the instantaneous tenure. I have a colleague here, Professor Shelley Wright. She studies optical setty. She's looking for burst of light, not far from where you are at the Lick Observatory, looking for blast of light from alien civilizations. This is legitimate scientific study. It has been studied for 60 years plus. And tomorrow when Seth Shostak comes on the podcast, I'm going to ask him, when this was conceived in the 1960s, Frank Drake and others, Philip Morrison and others, they thought it would be maybe a quick search.

And it was kind of spare time on telescopes, radio telescopes. It's now lasted in a seventh decade. When do you stop searching? Because there is a phenomenon. Look elsewhere. If you look long enough, you will start to see three sigma, standard deviation. type effects. But, you know, is that justifiable? Is that self-justifiable? Is there a sunk-cause hypothesis? I know this isn't your field, but, you know, when do you stop looking or when do you

double down? What do you think about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? Totally distinct from what you and I have been talking about. Yeah, well, I think that there's two searches, really. There's the search out there, and then there's the search here. And, you know, the UFO stuff is obviously the search here, but the external search, I think, is something that's, you know, where I would never stop looking for that. I don't think you're ever going to exhaust the data sets that are out there, or you're not going to exhaust different ways of looking for things, like different ways of looking for signatures in exoplanet atmospheres and the variants in solar radiation from other stars for things like Dyson Spears and whatnot, various Dyson structures.

So there's always going to be things to look for. I think, sure, like you might get some kind of false positive eventually, but that doesn't mean that you don't stop looking. It just means that's just another data point because it's not going to prove it to people, because people will do the do the math and figure out that that doesn't actually prove that something exists out there. And you follow up with the experiment. You'd look in the same bit of the sky and see what else is out there.

So I'm a big science fiction fan, like I said, big Arthur C. Clark fan. One of my favorite books when I was younger was rendezvous with Rama. And I just love the idea of aliens. And I think we should keep looking. So I want to build on a question by Tim as well. But I want to ask, you know, you're a game designer. Let's fast forward, you know, 20 millennia. Let's apply Moore's law. You know, what do video games look like? What does, you know, computational technology look like? What does AR look like? What if there are advances keeping a pace? First of all, is it possible? Can we keep progressing according to Moore's law? Just thinking about video games? Yeah. Well, if you think about,

video games are essentially simulations of reality. And what we're talking about here is getting more and more high fidelity simulations that more closely resemble the real world. And Moore's law does have certain physical limits. You can't keep making transistors smaller and smaller because atoms are not divisible in terms of silicate. But you can have massively parallel computation. And you can extend that out almost indefinitely. All it requires is space, material, and energy. So we could build, theoretically in the future, very, very large computers that could use,

like I was mentioned, the Dyson sphere, which is a sphere that encompasses a star to use all of the energy. that the star is putting out, you could make a supercomputer, which was the size of a Dyson sphere, which would be incredibly large. And you could do a very impressive video game with a computer that size. I don't know who would be playing it. But essentially what you're talking about there is a simulation that is indistinguishable from reality.

And, of course, that leads you to the simulation hypothesis. Are we living in a simulation now? But I think perhaps like, you know, going along those lines, you think could aliens have developed some kind of supercomputer like that? And if they have, like, probably that supercomputer is going to be vastly more intelligence than those aliens themselves were. If you get enough computing power and you structure the thing right, you're going to get hyperintelligence, which is vastly more powerful than humans. which makes the case that I think if aliens do arrive, they will probably arrive in the form of super intelligent robots rather than aliens themselves.

And thinking about, you know, kind of the end game of where this goes, do you think it's more likely than not that the net result of this release purportedly coming very soon, perhaps in a next day or two, would be, would be almost amounting to just a confirmation of what's been already talked about. In other words, that the Pentagon could essentially just release what's already been released, maybe wrap it up with some, you know, government stamp with some redacted tape, put over some, some splotches and satisfy the Rubio Commission and so forth.

Or do you think, you know, they basically have to release something, as Eric Weinstein has said, you know, how do we, how do we, you know, kind of troll the, the state, and say, oh, we've got all this information, we're going to release it, but then simultaneously release almost nothing? I mean, isn't that basically beyond the pale of what a government could do to its citizens? Well, they haven't said that they've got all this information. Lou Elizondo has said he's got all the information, but he's not in the Pentagon anymore. He left it several years ago.

Various other people have said things, but the actual Pentagon hasn't really said that they've got lots of information they're going to release. they said they're going to cooperate with the inquiry, and they're going to do what was mandated by Congress. So you've got to look at what does the bill actually ask. And essentially, it's asking for details of investigations into UAPs, which, you know, they don't have to give you stuff that is classified. They could have a classified annex, which is a data repository of all the classified stuff. So I don't think that they are obligated in any way to give some kind of huge data dump, if that's what Eric Weinstein was saying.

I think what we're likely to get is basically an overview of the situation. I hope it is one that puts things in correct context and doesn't engage in speculation. I think it will probably talk about the real issues that we have with an identified object, like drones and airspace incursions and pilots not being able to identify things. And I do not anticipate that things will change very much. Because I think what will happen is that the UFO fans are going to get angry that not enough was released. And I will probably be a bit disappointed that they didn't actually clear things up a bit more. And we'll just go on from there.

Yeah. So, you know, I've had on, as I said, many different perspectives from perspectives differing on the properties of Bitcoin, from Michael Saylor to gold on Pitter Schiff, from proponents of string theory like Michi Okaku to opponents of string theory like Avi Loeb, who also has conjectures about alien techno signatures. And maybe we could talk about that for a second. UFOs are the ultimate form of techno signatures, right? So it surprises me that the foremost proponents of techno signatures like Avi and like Michi Okaku, who have thought about aliens in great detail and discussed that with me on my podcast, and I could put links and cards and so forth later on. But they don't seem to be advocating that these data really are substantive for the existence of alien presence or technology.

What do you make of that? Should that be dismissed or could that just be a case of, well, they're not pilot, so we shouldn't trust them? Well, no, I mean, you've got to look at the evidence. The evidence really isn't indicative of aliens. People are seeing things that, you know, they can't explain, but that doesn't mean that they're aliens. There's a multitude of possible explanations running all the way from people misperceiving things to various types of natural phenomena or things like foreign drones or even, you know, drones from like the kid down the road that's flying up over your house. There's all kinds of explanations that, are generally a better fit than the idea of aliens. The aliens is an extraordinary explanation for any particular given case. If you take even the Nimitz encounter, which is presented as being one of the best evidence of aliens out there. But the idea that there's no simpler explanation than aliens is quite ludicrous, really.

There's lots of explanations, even though they're perhaps a bit unlikely some of them. Yeah, is alien visitors actually a more likely thing than these other explanation? Right. I had this debate, you know, I'm being a little bit too provocative, perhaps, but, you know, there's a notion in philosophy called abduction. And I joke about alien abduction. So abduction is the philosophical reasoning tool of inference to the best explanation. And we use this as a scientist. People in the chat room have been pointing out that William of Acham, you know, I'm probably saying that too much Hebrew with the chet. I shouldn't be doing that. But William of Ackham, you know, said that the simplest explanation is probably the best. So my friend David Bryn, who is a Ph.D. astrophysicist at UC, San Diego, renowned science fiction writer as well, sends you his regards. He's not in the chat room as far as I can tell. But he says, you know, tell Mick he's doing great work. But he's saying also something very important, Mick. He says, Mick, just remember, you don't have to account for everything, you as a debunker.

You know, it sort of said about like people that work on, you know, in defense. They have to be right every time. But you don't have to be right every time. In other words, you don't have to account for everything. Even if David Bryn says, even if there are some actually physical blob effects in the atmosphere that emit light and swerve and veer in non-Newtonian waves, there can be alternative explanations within the laws of physics as we know it. The purported behavior could be, quote unquote, the same as a cat laser effect.

Okay, he's being shorthand, but in other words, there could be effects, like if you say, if you take a cat laser and you shine it towards Proxima Centauri over there, and then you turn it around the opposite direction and shine it towards. towards the Virgo constellation over there, they'll actually receive these two bursts of light instantaneously, you know, each one will receive it. And then somehow they could reason, oh, well, they saw it at the same time. There must be faster than light travel. No, we just used a cat laser. And there's no, there's no need to distinguish or to provide extra Einsteinian space time violations. So in other words, he's saying there's a million ways,

he says, to cause a physical blob in the atmosphere to emit light. And this is a very, you know, He's a PhD theoretical astrophysicist, Caltech and UCSD trained to emit light and swerve and veer in non-Newtonian ways. He could do it. David Bryn could do it with a half a million dollars worth of equipment, which suggests that the fellows responsible are, quote, human. So he's basically making this alien abduction, you know, abduction meaning reasoning to the simplest possible hypothesis, which is what I want my audience is so brilliant. And I claim, you know, I've had nine Nobel Prize winners on this audience is the best and brightest. and I'm going to, you know, beg your indulge. I'm sure your audience is just as bright.

But I've had nine Nobel Prize winners on this show. More are coming. And we like to go extremely deep. And the point is, we take things from a scientific perspective. Again, nothing would get, I already have tenure, you know, which is why I can have people on the show, you know, that I've had on, and be controversial, perhaps. But the point is the process that I like to engage in is to stimulate curiosity.

It's kind of a drug that's very powerful and very addictive to me personally. But also, I would like nothing more than, to me, to shortcut and hack the scientific method and know things about the future, right? And wouldn't we all like to know the physics of the future? We would. And if aliens arrived theoretically, they could give it to us. And that is one of the great attractions of this, the ET hypothesis. And it's, you know, ties into science fiction and popular portrayals of aliens. is they are the bearers of gifts, great gifts for humanity, and they are going to basically ascend

humanity to the next level, and that's why people are so interested in that. But I think that creates the willingness to overlook a lot of things and the willingness to go towards one particular explanation when there are other explanations which are perhaps less palatable and in some ways a little bit more complicated because you've got to actually think about them rather than it just being the simple aliens, that actually make a lot more sense. I would have made more sense to William of Ockham. And I actually, I use a reasoning technique for figuring things out, which I call Ocamic ranking, which is taking all possible hypotheses, everything that has been suggested and everything I can think of,

and putting them into a list, and then ranking them by which seems, most likely, basically. It's a heuristic. You know, you see, does this seem more likely than know that's based on the evidence? If this was to go up the list a bit, what would need to happen for this to go up to the list? So I have these lists of things and so you start at the top, like with optical illusions or balloons or another plane or atmospheric effects or, you know, CGI or the guy made a mistake. It was all a dream or he was lying and aliens did it or it's a a glitch in the matrix is part of the simulation. So you have all the hypotheses and you try to figure out which one of them is at the top.

But you don't just focus on that one. You keep thinking about the other things on the list as well because quite often you have one, two, or three things near the top. And one of them isn't a clear winner. But people like to pick a clear winner. I think that's a mistake is to just go with one hypothesis. So I would encourage people to try this out. Make a list.

Make a list of your hypotheses and give them a rough ranking. give them a percentage as to how likely you think it is to correct and just sort them into order. And then as new information arises, you take them and you change the order and new ones might bubble to the top and things might fall to the bottom. But you always keep things open as possibilities. So we're going to wrap up in the next few minutes. We'll take one or two more questions. We have one here that is a question about whether or not there have been any kind of multi-sensor UAP with a radar signature, been verified to

go into the ocean or has that only been claimed via Navy witnesses? In other words, has there been multiple sonar plus radar confirmation or is that only been via the eyewitness data? This is something that people have claimed a few times that there's this one, you know, there's these five observables of UFOs that people say are signatures of UFOs being something other than human technology and one of them is transmedium travel, which is something that flies in more or less equal speed through the air and through the water and possibly space too. And people have claimed that this has happened. People have claimed that there's radar data and then there's sonar data, but there's no real

good examples of this. If you ask people to point them out, there's not actually anything where you have any kind of continuous chain of evidence from the radar to the sonar. There was a recent case where a video was released of. a sphere descending towards the horizon. And then video of a radar screen was released, where it shows some targets on the radar appearing to disappear off the screen,

which they did disappear off the screen. Like they just blinked out to existence. Some people have kind of said that is evidence that something was going underwater. But it could equally have been the object simply going out of the radar scan volume, because it was a surface scanning radar, not actually something designed to scan things up in the sky.

So, you know, Shorthamster, No, not that I know of. Great. So this has been so much fun. People are asking, you know, will you debate Commander Fravor? I'm going to try to make that happen if I can. First, I'm going to try to have a conversation, not a debate. I agree with my past guest, Lord Martin Reese, the Astronomer Royal.

Most debate is pointless, but we should debate with love. We should use Occam's razor every now and then to get a close shave. But we should do so with comity and sometimes a little comedy. Throw in a little bit of levity shouldn't always be so super serious. And I really have enjoyed this. I want to ask people again, please do subscribe to Mick West's channel and follow him. He is doing yeoman's work. I don't think you're getting compensated.

We YouTubers don't make that much money for views and likes and subscribes, but please do like, comment and subscribe because it does tell the algorithm. There are algorithms of advanced artificial intelligence that do kind of control our lives, at least as YouTubers. So help us out if you can. So Mick, please, please, I wish you great success. I hope you'll come back. Tomorrow I do have on Seth Storstack, whose book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter, is a wonderful book from an astronomer who himself has searched for aliens, who would love nothing better than aliens to be real. I'm going to get him to comment on some of the work that you've done and some of the work that we are, with in microwave and radio astronomy and also physics of the future. And then later, I do hope

to have on some of these wonderful, very heroic, patriotic pilots. I've been in contact with two of them. And hopefully I will be able to get at least one or maybe two of the pilots who are up close and personal on various occasions. I do think that they've been a lovely, you know, they've done incredible work. And I think they should be part of all the all the conversation and I don't think they have anything to gain either. In fact, I think that they've probably suffered a lot too for everything that they've done and they should not because I think that they are heroes as I know you do too, Mick. So I want to thank you Mick for everything you do. I want to recommend your book again and your YouTube channel. So please everybody,

stay tuned for more episodes of Into the Impossible tomorrow with Dr. Brian Keating. And for now, signing off and I encourage you all to keep watching the skies and watching the two YouTube channels. Good night, everybody. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really

helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into The Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination

in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating.