Plain English with Derek Thompson - UFOs and Aliens and Drones and Balloons: Understanding the U.S. Sky Wars

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Since a big white Chinese spy balloon floated across the ocean and into U.S. airspace, the United States has shot down four objects over North American skies. What are we looking at, and what are we shooting at? Are these objects American? Are they Chinese? Are they human? To tell the full story of this bizarre month in aerial objects—from the balloon to the aerial shoot-out to the UFO freak-out—we’ve got two guests: former Atlantic correspondent and Substack writer James Fallows and the science writer and noted extraterrestrial-object researcher Mick West. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guests: James Fallows & Mick West Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're lost in the darkness, look for the pod. Specifically, the Prestige TV podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network, where we're breaking down every new episode of HBO's The Last of Us. On Sunday nights, grab your battery and join Van Lathen and Charles Holmes for an instant reaction to the latest episode. Then head back to the QZ on Tuesdays for a deep dive with Joanna Robinson and Mallory Rubin. From character arcs to video game adaptation choices, story themes to needle drops, we'll parse every inch of this cordyceps-coded universe.

Watch out for mouth tendrils and follow along on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today, why the U.S. keeps shooting stuff out of the sky? And a reality check on UFOs. Ever since a big white Chinese balloon floated across the ocean and into U.S. airspace, the United States has now shot down four objects over North American skies. The first one, that balloon, has landed in the waters off the coast of South Carolina. We are currently harvesting its exploded remains for information about.

Chinese surveillance technology. As for the other three, well, we don't know much. The scattered remains are littered in the Arctic Ocean, the Yukon territories, the Great Lakes, and the government has not been entirely forthcoming. The head of NORAD said the military didn't fully understand the propulsion system, allowing these objects to stay in the air. That's a little weird. And into that vacuum of weirdness and uncertainty, conspiracy theories are flooding.

What isn't the government telling us? What kind of technology is floating around American skies? Is it American? Is it Chinese? Is it human? My personal take on UFOs is a little bit like my position on God. I know that sounds weird, but give me 30 seconds to unweird it. So I'm an agnostic reform Jew.

I don't know that I fully believe in God. I'm questioning. But I also don't think anyone can be reasonably positive that God doesn't exist. For the simple reason that we haven't looked everywhere, we haven't explained everything. Yes, you can go back through time and show that many things that we associated with God were eventually explained by science. We thought God made the sunrise and the moon and the stars. We thought people could be possessed by angels and demons. And then we discovered gravity and telescopes and the solar system and psychosis.

So as we whittled away at God claims, a certain person could go through history and say, well, we use science and theories of a deterministic universe to explain the supernatural. So that's evidence that there is no higher power. But that's not rational. Just because previous supernatural phenomena have eventually been explained by science doesn't mean that every phenomenon is explainable. If you find a thousand white swans, you haven't proved that black swans don't exist. And that's how I feel about UFOs. We have many, many, many, many historical reasons to be skeptical of UFO claims in our episode a few weeks ago on conspiracy.

theories. We talked about all these government programs in the last 70 years where the government would experiment with aerial technology. The public would either see or recover some of that aerial technology. And the government wouldn't say much. And it would allow the public to think this was a UFO when in fact the government was just serving a geopolitical end. They were trying to keep secret projects out of the public eye. And if you think that sounds like a conspiracy theory, tin-hatted, look up Project Blue Book. But you take this history of debunking possible UFOs, and what does it actually add up to?

Like, just because previous UFOs have been explained by humans and science doesn't mean that every unidentified flying object is of our world. Again, if you find 1,000 white swans, you haven't proved that black swans don't exist. Maybe you just haven't found what's really out there. So to tell the full story here, from the balloon to the end of the... aerial shootout to the UFO freak out. From the real story of Roswell's flying saucer to today's alien watchdogs, we've got two guests.

Coming up first is former Atlantic correspondent and substack writer, James Fallows, on the Chinese spy balloon and its aftermath. And then we've got science writer and noted extraterrestrial skeptic, Mick West, talking about UFOs, UAPs, aliens, and evidence. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Jim Fallows, welcome back to the show. Derek, it's always a pleasure and honor to speak with you. I want to start by taking us back a few weeks to the Chinese spy balloon that picked off this whole trend of America shooting stuff out of the sky. You know as much about China and Chinese-American relations as anybody that I know.

Give me your summary of what you think happened here. So the reaction on the U.S. side to which I had immediate and total skepticism was the idea that this was some Chinese provocation. They were giving the middle finger to the U.S., they were showing their greatness, et cetera, et cetera. And it seemed to me the much more likely explanation, given everything that seems to be true about China and true about this kind of aerial device, is that this was a screw-up. And the question was at what level was a screw-up? Was it something that happened with the winds, just at the very tactical? level. Was it somebody within the People's Liberation Army who had some big idea that they were going to do something about the, you know, to sort of taunt the United States? Was it something,

was it a miscalculation of the very highest level of Chinese leadership saying, okay, we're going to show a new thing we can do? There are instances of all those things in past Chinese history, but mainly it seemed to me this was going to make China end up looking clownish, as I think it did. And so at what level did the clownishness as opposed to the menace start on the Chinese side? It's certainly possible that the level at which the mistake began is just the direction of winds. I was fairly persuaded by one of your reports in your substack that you look at wind currents and the weather patterns that were present in North America at the time, including a little bit of a polar vortex. And that might be sufficient to explain how a Chinese spy balloon that,

might have been a legitimate Chinese spy balloon trying to take pictures of something in Guam or who knows what flew off course and ended up in Montana. Tell us a little bit about how the winds might have played a key role here. So there's a general point about winds and the way they would affect this U.S. and Chinese surveillance, which is the way the winds blow around the earth, which is almost everywhere in the northern hemisphere, west to east, means that it's very easy for countries on the Pacific like China or Russia to send balloons across the U.S. or Canada, because that is where the wind would take them. And it's very difficult for the U.S. to do that with China because you'd have to be launching them around Moscow or someplace. They have the wind blow them over China and get them over Tibet and all the rest. So it was not surprising that you had this drift westward from this, you know, Montana area to South Carolina across the United States. The particular anomaly that wasn't clear, on day one or two, but that lots of weather experts then wrote in was that the time when the balloon made its fateful, menacing crossing, starting in Montana, coincided with one of the

coldest moments in recorded history on the U.S. East Coast coast, when all this cold air from the Canadian, from the Arctic and Canada came down much further south than normal. And there's been an excellent recent series of pieces in the Washington Post where they've had both security reporters and meteorologists saying that it appears this balloon might have been launched someplace, you know, on the offshore in China and been intended for Guam. And something kicked it way up far north towards the Aleutian Islands. And then something pushed it way far south down to the U.S. And that same thing that brought temperatures of minus 100 degrees or something like that to Mount Washington in New England may have been the same mass of air.

that push this balloon down to the US. So to me, that seems the most likely scenario now. We shoot down the balloon off the coast of South Carolina, and in a matter of days, US surveillance goes from seeing one balloon in the sky to seeing suddenly a constellation of crazy, weird flying objects that we start shooting down. How would you explain what happened?

How did our radar technology, surveillance technology, go from seeing one thing to suddenly seeing all these things that needed to be taken down? Well, there is, of course, the possibility that new things are coming from space, and so we don't want to say that's impossible. I once worked for Jimmy Carter, who among his many accomplishments was sort of a UFO interested person. It seems to me the much more likely hypothesis is that radar to work has to be tuned. There is so much stuff that radar could be bouncing off that it's very much like if you're driving across the country trying to find a radio station on your

car radio back when there were car radios. And you would have a seek or scan button and it would skip around because there's so many very weak and scratchy and non-legible stations that it can't really focus on. So it finds the ones that are worth looking at. Radar works very much the same way. Something that I hadn't realized until I saw radar, you know, in airplane cockpits is that if you're looking at the ground many times, it seems like there's all kinds of crap in front of you, and it can be birds, and it can be dust, and it can be smoke from a forest fire, can be all sorts of things.

So radar has always had to be tuned to be able to separate signal from noise. And generally, military radar has said, if something is moving at a velocity of zero knots relative to the prevailing air, and if it's so small, we can hardly see it, and it's made out of plastic, so there's nothing bouncing back, we're not going to pay attention to that, because we're looking at something going 500 knots and made out of metal, that's coming from Russia, et cetera. So I think suddenly it's recalibrating, and you see all these things as if you're bringing a microscope or a telescope

or binoculars into focus and seeing things that were always there just hadn't been looking for them. It reminds me, and this is not a radar analogy, but it reminds me of how after you watch a scary movie that involves a demon in your house, suddenly you become hypersensitive to all of these little creaky sounds in your house that are just a normal part of the event

of living inside of a house that's a bunch of wood put on top of more wood, houses creek, that is their nature. But when you are primed to be highly sensitive to those creeks, suddenly it feels like there are just demons behind every single closet. And from a sort of radar surveillance perspective, it seems like we were spooked

we got spooked by a balloon. We started to retune our radars to look for more demonic balloons. And as a result, we ended up finding what might very well have been, a lot more balloons. Is that the general picture of things? Yes, I think that's an excellent way to put it in plain language, as what might say in plain English. So, yes, there's things that have always been there. There's all sorts of things in our ambient environment that we just, our senses, tune out because we know they're always there, they're not worth paying attention to. Here's another

sort of data point for people to bear in mind. One reason that weather forecasting has become as accurate as it is, is that the U.S. is putting up these weather balloons all over the place. There are hundreds or thousands of them per day. So if you're flying around in little planes as I've done, you see these things. And you just know they're part of the landscape. They go up, they come down. Suddenly, they are these ominous threats. And we had a couple of days in the U.S. of, oh, the Chinese are coming with their balloons. And the Chinese, actually, I'll just mention, they went through an interesting sort of political spin cycle on their own. Initially, when the U.S. is saying, oh, the Chinese are coming, they're threatening us. The Chinese were saying sort of forelock

tugging, we didn't mean this as a mistake. You can see that the wind currents. They have recently shifted in two ways. One is to say, oh, the U.S. is really beating up on us. You know, they're becoming so mean and aggressive. And now they've gone back to sort of the Marco Rubio position, which is, yes, the U.S. is showing its weakness by overreacting to these balloons. So there's been sort dynamics on the politics of both sides. I want to keep a couple of ideas in the air. One is that, speaking of in the air, we just had a very strange meteorological event that blew a balloon into Montana. There was a national freak out. Republicans got on Biden. He felt like he had to shoot a lot more balloons out of the sky. Americans in the absence of information about what exactly these

things were, started freaking out about aliens, and we've just spooked ourselves into believing that we are surrounded by alien aircraft. That is one possibility. It is also the case, though, that we are entering a generation of warfare, of military technology, where these kind of aerial technologies, unmanned aerial technologies, things like drones, are going to be a bigger part of the picture. And it's conceivable that around the U.S., off the coast of California, maybe, potentially 60,000 feet, 70,000 feet in the air, it's possible there are drones and balloon-type devices that are spying on us. I mean, we know satellites are spying on us in low orbit, but it might also be the case that drones in these kind of balloons are just going to be a part

of our existence for the next few years. Is that right? Oh, I very much agree. with that. And I think it's worth distinguishing in the scenario you present, which I think is entirely plausible. You know, nations spy on each other all the time, everything you're sort of putting into digital forms. Somebody is likely to intercept at some point. For aerial surveillance, there are different altitudes of significance. There's very high altitude surveillance from satellites, which are extremely precise and sophisticated for some things, for photography and all the rest and for heat signatures. There are things that are very close to the ground.

For example, at zero feet of elevation, where you have actual spies or people driving around, at a couple thousand feet, couple hundred to a couple thousand feet where drones can fly. It's difficult for, quote, enemy, unquote, drones to operate in the U.S. right now because they are pretty easy to detect for the FAA and the rest. So the question is, what, at this intermediate altitude from, say, 40,000 feet to 60,000, to 60,000 feet where these balloons go, what else they might get? And so at face value, it doesn't seem that there is that much more they might get from that altitude. But conceivably, you know, there is. And that's presumably what the U.S. is now looking for with whatever it is fishing out of

the waters out of South Carolina. Right. Yeah, exactly. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here and say that even though there are aspects of the story that are kind of ridiculous and the U.S. may have ever reacted, and we might be having a freak out about balloons that are not, in fact, alien technology. It still is the case that there's people who are worried might be directionally accurate about the idea these aerial objects are going to play a larger part of our future, especially if relations between China and America continue to be this chilly. Jim Fallows, thank you very, very much. Derek, it's a pleasure. Thanks to you.

That was former Atlantic correspondent and substack writer James Fallows. Next up, we've got the science writer and noted extraterrestrial skeptic, Mick West. Nick West, welcome to the show. Thank you. Very glad to be here. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Well, I'm an investigator of UFO videos as my main interest at the moment. My background is that I used to be a video game programmer about nearly 20 years ago now. And after I retired from that industry, I just got interested in investigating all kinds of strange claims, things like conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and UFOs.

And now here I am. I want to situate the story of the last week in the broader history of UFOs in America, which I guess we now have to call UAP's unidentified aerial phenomena. Let's go back to perhaps the first most famous incident in U.S. history, July 8, 1940. Roswell Army Airfield issues a press release stating they have recovered a flying disc, which is sometimes reported as a flying saucer. This Roswell incident lives on in pop culture. It has become synonymous with aliens and UFOs. Remind us what we actually learned here. What actually happened in Roswell that might be important for understanding of what's happened in the last week? Well, I think Roswell is a great example of what in your... UFOology, I call the low information zone. The initial reports that came out of Roswell were very

mixed. First of all, there was a report of something crashing, and then later there was a report of a flying source of being recovered. And then there was all kinds of conflicting information that was out there. And the reason that there was all this conflicting information is that it was essentially a military event. And the military is never very forthcoming about what they are actually doing, for very good reason. And at the time, of course, it was kind of in the start of the Cold War, and there were lots of concerns

about Russian intelligence and finding things out. And as it turns out, what the Roswell event actually was, was in fact a balloon. It was a crashed essentially like a weather balloon, but it was a scientific balloon that was used for a project called Project Mogul, which basically was listening for the sounds of nuclear.

explosions in the atmosphere. And so it was a very sensitive project. And so the military's interest was in not revealing what was actually going on. So I think at the time, they were fairly happy just let the speculation about aliens and UFOs actually run rampant. And so we just really had this massive confusion around the event, which is something that we see today with military UFO encounters. And so for the last 70 or 80 years, and especially during the Cold War. This has become a theme. The military isn't forthcoming. And people, Americans, come to believe in alien UFOs, not because these flying objects or aerial phenomena use inexplicable technology, but rather because they use secret technology that the government

doesn't necessarily want people to know about. Is that right? Yeah, it's really that the government, or rather the military, by default, will not tell you what they are doing. There are things that are probably very straightforward that can be explained very easily that have become these famous UFO cases that we just simply don't know about because it contains something that's a little bit sensitive. And it doesn't even mean it's something that's amazing. A lot of the time we hear rumors about supposed advanced technology that has been observed, But we never actually see that information.

And a lot of the times when it does come out what these things actually were, it turns out it wasn't that advanced after all. It was just something that they didn't want to talk about. They don't want to talk about the type of radar that they use, for example, which is a really boring thing for most people compared to flying sources. But it's something the military wants to keep covered up. So we get this kind of this area in which rumors and speculation can grow just because the military doesn't want to talk about things that are actually fairly boring. And before we get into the news of the week, I want to make a point that might be obvious

to many people explicit. You would agree that two things can be simultaneously true. On the one hand, the government can be consistently unforthcoming, if that's a word, the government can consistently lie or withhold information from the public, which increases the public's belief that there are UFOs that are not actually alien technology at all.

They're either US technology or maybe some other, country's technology that we don't necessarily want to share with the public. That can be true, but also it can be true that aliens exist, that extraterrestrial intelligence exists, that at some point in the last year, 50 years, a thousand years, we have been visited by alien aircraft that we either didn't pick up or perhaps did see and don't fully understand that we saw, right? These two things can both be true, yes? Absolutely, yes. There's nothing about the absence of evidence that proves definitively that we haven't been visited by alien visitors. It could well be that perhaps they've come once or twice, a very small number of times.

It does seem, though, that the absence of evidence, the lack of good photographs, good videos, or highly corroborated eyewitness testimony, does indicate that they're not very common if they are visiting. If alien spaceships were, in fact, whizzing around every single day, then we would eventually expect to see them. But yes, it's entirely possible. It's entirely possible you can't rule it out that aliens may well have visited us. Aliens may well be visiting us right now

and just be very, very stealthy about what they are doing. But the real point here is that there isn't any good evidence of that. And many of the things that we assume to be evidence upon investigation, tend out to be explained by, oh, that's a glare, or, oh, that's a balloon. And we will get to some examples of that. But let's dive right into the news of the week. The government, once again in the last week,

after shooting down these three other objects, has been less than forthcoming. What do we know for sure, as of Thursday afternoon, about what these objects we've shot down are? Well, we know very much about the first object, which is this very large balloon. We know that it was a Chinese balloon. The Chinese admitted as such, and we know that it had surveillance equipment on it.

So we know it was essentially a spying balloon. We think that it was originally heading for Hawaii or Guam, and it got blown off course, and it was not actually intentionally sent over the United States. And we know that a large balloon like that is not very stealthy. It's something that you could basically see with the naked eye as a white dot and certainly through binoculars, and that it's something that would have shown up on radar. So it wasn't a stealthy spy balloon. We know then that after that we had three other incidents,

all of which appear to be consistent with balloons and have been described by various people, including Chuck Schumer as being balloons. And we know that they move at airspeed, meaning they just drift along. They're not transmitting anything. And we know that at least one of them looked like a Mila balloon. It was kind of described as being a silvery balloon

with a small payload underneath it, which is probably something like a Pico balloon, which is a hobbyist radio balloon, where they try to send a radio as far around the world as they can. So this may well have been something that's been around the world twice and just happened to be flying over Yukon at the time it was shot down. And I think we also know that it's perhaps a bit of an overreaction. We spent a lot of money shooting down these balloons.

Now, the first one, you could make an argument that is justified. We want to recover this surveillance equipment. But the other three do not appear to have any real justification for shooting them down. There are lots of balloons in the air. There are lots of other objects in the air, like large birds that we don't shoot down all the time, that provide about the same threats to aviation. But we still spent about a million dollars shooting down each of these three balloons, which is perhaps an overreaction.

In the days after we shut down these UAVs and maybe they were balloons, Representative Jeff Jackson, North Carolina, published his own report of what he understood. And he said that the three UAVs that have been shot down since that initial Chinese balloon were all, quote, fundamentally different from the spy balloon. They were smaller, they were flying much lower, about 20 to 30,000 feet above the ground rather than the first balloon, which reached an altitude about 60,000 feet, you know, almost twice as high as a typical domestic airline would fly. He also said that while one of them had a shape and size that was consistent with the balloon,

the other two were more like the size of an ATV or a four-wheeler, which means they're small and they're hard to see. Have those initial reports been corrected, or are you describing something that is consistent with representatives Jackson's reports? Yeah, that size of an object, something about the size of a smaller car, is what a pilot might describe the size as being. Balloons are very hard to judge their size. All you've got essentially is a sphere that you can see in midair,

and you don't know how far away it is, and you're zipping along at 300 to 500 plus miles per hour in your fighter jet. You can't actually get too close of it for fear of collision. So you've got basically this small thing off in the distance, very, very difficult to judge exactly how big it is. And a lot of these balloons, like hobbyist balloons, are of a size about three feet in diameter, whether balloons get quite a bit larger,

but still not that much larger than a, say, a small SUV, for example. But yes, this is certainly consistent with just regular balloons of the wide variety of types that we expect to see in the air, and very different, obviously, from the initial balloon, which was 200 feet wide. We're talking about things that are much smaller, perhaps just a few feet wide. Do we have been a good theories

about where these balloons came from? You said that some of them are hobbyist balloons. I mean, can we rule out the possibility that this is just like some guy in Pennsylvania, some person in Iowa who just has a fascination with balloons and radar technology that just launched something that's been floating around for a bit? Or do we have reason to think,

given this kind of equipment that they're more likely to have been launched by a foreign government? Well, there's no other indication that there's any sophisticated equipment on these balloons. One was described as being a metallic balloon, like a Mila balloon with a small payload beneath it.

And that's actually suspected to be a specific balloon that someone in the United States launched and that went around the world and kind of came back around over the United States at that time. And it stopped transmitting radio information at the same time that this other balloon, probably the same balloon, was shot down. So there's a very good case to be made that it's likely this particular

pico balloon by just a radio hobbyist. The other two, we don't really have any good information about what they are. But we do know that there are literally thousands of balloons up in the sky at any one time of a large size and probably tens of thousands, if not more, of the smaller type. Because party balloons get released constantly all the time. We can't figure out exactly what they are, but there's no real reason to suspect them as being nefarious. I think one of the politicians came out of the briefing suggesting there were things like car sales lot balloons, promotional balloons that might have just got loose, things like that. That's perhaps a silly example, but it's the type of thing that does happen. Balloons get let into the sky just for random reasons.

And there's also a lot of scientific balloons like universities and research organizations. and scientific organizations, release balloons to study things like upper-level winds and pollution in the upper air and radio transmissions and things like that. So there's lots and lots of benign explanations for what we might be seeing. But of course, it might also be something that was released by a foreign adversary, Russia or China, to do things like test our defenses or test what might happen if a balloon gets blown over the United States. and I guess they've got their answer now. I don't have perfect information about what exactly we shot down. You're not saying that you have perfect information about what we shut down, but it certainly seems like if the federal government has a certain confidence

or a certain degree of confidence, that we shot down are essentially a bunch of relatively unsophisticated balloons. I'm not sure why that point hasn't been made more clear to the American public, because once again, I think the administration or the government, government's instinct to withhold information from the public about UAP or UFOs is creating a space, creating a vacuum into which conspiracy theories are running. But maybe just one announcement from President Biden that says, look, we shot down this Chinese balloon. We had a conversation with the Chinese government and said, be careful about your balloons being swept into U.S.

airspace, even if it's by wind. We changed the way that we're using our radars. We got more noise compared to Signal. We shot down some stuff that we don't think you should be worried about. Please, everyone get on with your lives, hug your family, have your dinner, go to the movies. This is not one of the 1,000 most important things for you to care about. Again, we don't have all the information. So maybe there's a very good reason why the government hasn't done that. But it seems to me the government should have done that. I think they kind of largely have. It's just kind of a mixed message that is coming out. I think there's a degree of, you know, they overreacted after the first balloon and they started shooting down every single thing that popped up on their newly configured

radar. If they continued doing that, they'd be shooting down like a couple of balloons every single day. So I think... Spending billions of dollars a year shooting down a bunch of escaped used car lot balloons. So I think they probably realized that those three balloons were a bit of an overreaction, and they've probably detected a bunch of more balloons since then and decided just to let them go on their merry way because they really are not a threat to aviation. It's a very big sky, and balloons and planes are very small, and the challenges of collision are

vastly smaller than probably hitting a flock of birds. And I think, you know, they basically said, don't worry about it. It's not aliens. There's nothing to be concerned about there's no threat to the American public. They just haven't really given the full accounting of exactly what happened. And I think partly that's because they're reluctant to do so. They can use the excuse that it was a threat to aviation, but that's really not a particularly good one for spending a million dollars every time you detect a balloon flying over the country. In the last few years, you've published a lot of articles and YouTube videos debunking various famous sightings,

sightings that might be more likely to be inexplicable and more likely to be extraterrestrial, certainly, than a couple balloons that have fallen now in the Yukon and Great Lakes. I want to ask you about the famous Gimble video, if that's okay. If people haven't seen this, I'd encourage them to check out the video. It is maybe just a couple seconds long. And just to describe it briefly, for those of you that don't want to stop the podcast, the gimbal video is taken by Navy pilots. It shows a dark object roughly shaped like a top or a dreidel, skimming over the clouds, turning over its end in a way that seems to defy aerodynamics.

Like at some point, it seems to pause in midair, despite winds around it that are swirling at about the equivalent of 130 miles per hour. What do you think this video is showing? I think it's show, well, first of all, it's an infrared video, which means it's showing heat. It's not showing what the pilots could actually see with the naked eyes. I think what it's showing is a distant hot object, possibly something like a distant jet plane that's probably about 30 miles away.

And what we actually see on the video, the shape, what you described as a dreidel. or flying saucer or a spinning top, is just the glare from the hot engines. We know from various previous cases that when a plane is very far away and you train an infrared camera on it, then all you can see basically is the heat coming out of the engines,

and it spreads out in the same way as when you look at the sun, all you can see is a giant glare, even though the sun is actually relatively small in the sky. So we're seeing a glare of a hot engine. And the interesting thing about it, of course, is that it appears to do this amazing rotation and kind of stand on its end. But we did some investigation of that

on Metabunk, my website. And it turns out that the rotation of the object exactly matches the rotation of the camera that is required, which seems like an odd thing. I mean, why is the camera rotating? But the way the camera is mounted, it's on one of these targeting pods. It looks like a little torpedo

that's underneath the wing of the plane. And it's got a camera that looks kind of like, you know, one of those pan tilt zoom cameras that you see, security cameras. But the way it's mounted means he can't actually track something from left to right without rotating. So this camera actually has to rotate, and it especially has to rotate when it crosses over the forward

direction. And because it rotates, the image rotates inside the camera. And the pilot doesn't want this rotation. He wants the picture to look like what he sees out of the window. So there's another mechanism inside the camera that just rotates the image the right way back up. But the end result of all this rotation is that any glare that you get in the image will end up rotated because the camera's rotated, but the glare doesn't rotate, and then the derotation rotates it back, which makes the glare rotate.

It's all very complicated and kind of difficult to get a grasp on. Actually, I want to pause here because this last point, people can actually do a home project to see what you're talking about. You have an iPhone or you have some smartphone, any phone with a camera, and you are filming a glare, say, coming off of the table, and you turn that phone 360 degrees around and then stop it and watch the video. What you'll see is that everything in the video will rotate 360 degrees, but the glare seems to roughly stay in place, which looks like it's hovering in midair and doing something that is quite alien. You're saying this is simply a function of the rotating nature of the infrared camera catching a glare in the distance. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

And you can definitely see this with just a simple phone. The simplest way to duplicate the shape of the glare is just to touch the lens of your camera very gently with your finger. And this will just create enough of a streakiness on the lens to make the glare spread out in a particular direction. Then point your camera at something like a flashlight. or a bright light bulb and just rotate it. You will see this effect where the orientation of the glare rotates independently from the image. And we think that's basically what's happening

with this gimbal video that perhaps the front window of the camera is a bit streaked from flying through clouds or something like that. Or perhaps there's some other thing inside which contributes to the shape of the glare. But this is a very strong mathematical relationship between the rotation of the glare and the angle that's required by the camera.

There's a bunch of other things as well. You could actually see patterns of light in the background rotate at the same time as the object rotates. You can see little bumps before it starts to rotate, which is maybe the engines of the roll mechanism kicking in. You can see that it's actually at the start of the video when the plane banks, the object's orientation doesn't bank, but the horizon does. So it's kind of decoupled from the horizon.

It's not part of the environment, all of which points to it being just something in the camera. I think pretty much, I think 99% of the people who have looked at it in any depth will agree that this actually is a glare. And we've heard from the Pentagon that they agree that the orientation and the rotation of this object is in fact a camera artifact. This was cited in the New York Times and in ABC News, both citing, unfortunately, anonymous Pentagon sources, but presumably with the New York Times, they vet their sources. So it was a real

person from the Pentagon, basically agreeing with me. I have friends who are fascinated by the phenomena of potential UAPs and UFOs, who still look to the gimbal video as being potentially the best possible case that we have been visited by some kind of alien technology. And I know that while everything you said sounded just so, so overminded and so intuitive and persuasive, I know that they're not persuaded. And one of the reasons they're not persuaded, at least as they've explained it to me, is that we seem to have multiple pilots saying that they've seen this phenomenon on their radar from several directions, which makes it less likely to have been a phenomenon created by a single plane's infrared camera,

rotating in such a way as to create this dradele-like phenomenon. What do you say to the fact that there are still pilots who seem similarly sober-minded who are saying, I'm not persuaded by this explanation, we have multiple Navy pilot sources saying we saw something like this on this day. Yeah. Well, the issue there is I think it's conflating a whole bunch of different cases. This one case, the Gimble case, was seen by two pilots. there's two pilots flying the plane.

And they didn't see anything with a naked eye. They saw something on the radar, and they say they saw a fleet of things on the radar, and then they pointed their infrared camera in that direction, and then they saw this one rotating thing. And it seems like what they're pointing at is a hot object, and that the rotation is part of the camera. That doesn't tell you anything really about what the object actually is.

it still might be something interesting. It might be something like a distant plane, or it might be something that's closer, that's flying in a bizarre way that kind of defies the laws of gravity still. You can't tell. But what the explanation of the rotation does is it means that there's now a plausible, benign, mundane explanation for it.

That's a potential explanation. But it doesn't disprove the possibility that we're still looking at something amazing. Then of course we've got all these other reports that have been happening around the same time. If you listen to some of the people who talk about what was going on in that area on the East Coast, they were saying they were seeing things pretty much every day. And if you're seeing something every day, just explaining one particular case doesn't really explain anything about all the other cases. Is there an outstanding mystery, like an unexplained mystery,

an unknown that's still out there that is, to your mind, the most interesting puzzle to solve in this space. Something that you haven't been able to look at and map out as you've done so expertly with the gimbal video, and you're still like, you know, I am not a deep believer in UFOs. I don't have a I want to believe poster necessarily in my bedroom,

but like this is pretty weird. Is there an example like that to you? I think one of the best examples is the Nimitz encounters. And this was actually a series of events back in 2004. And it started out with lots of strange blips on the radar. They were described as being groups of five objects moving from north to south at 100 miles per hour. And then there was another event when they went out to investigate what these blips were, where the pilots, David Fravor and Alex Dietrich,

saw what they described as a white tic-tick-shaped object, making strange movements and mirroring their movements as one one. went down to investigate it. And then later on, another pilot took a video of something kind of similar to the gimbal video in a way of what looks like a distant hot object. And this is an event that has a lot of mythology built up around it. But the simple accounts of what the pilots saw is very much a bit of a mystery.

If what they said was accurate, it's something that was defying the laws of physics. But it could well be something where, that operator, observe a misperception, played a large role. And then people conflate all the different events within that. There's the video, and then there's the radar returns, and then visual sightings. If you assume those are all the same thing, it becomes really amazing. But if you separate them out into individual things, the smaller parts of the same puzzle.

But I think for me, the biggest thing is, what did the pilots see that day? What was this white object that seemed to be jumping around? Was it something like just a significant illusion with something like a balloon? Or was it something like a high-tech drone that had perhaps been launched from a submarine, like a missile type thing that was capable of advanced maneuvering? So that's very much unknown. And it's also something we'll probably never figure out until maybe 50 years when the secrecy requirement is lifted, because it's one of those things hidden by the military.

In June 2021, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a famous report on UAPs, and it famously came to no conclusion about what many of these phenomena were. If it's clear to you and to others that videos like Gimble represent pilots mistaking an infrared glare for a flying object, and it is in the interest of the government to dispel unhelpful rumors about alien aircraft. Why didn't the DNI report come to any firm conclusion? Well, I think that perhaps overstates the degree to which it's in the government's interest to dispel rumors. That's not really a priority for them. It's not something where they follow Twitter and see what the latest talk is and then want to try to debunk it.

Their primary interest is in preserving national security. And so that's always going to take precedence over everything else. And they don't comment on things, basically. They've said explicitly that if they investigate something like the gimbal video and they make a determination of what it is, then they will not tell us what they discover. Because the entire incident is covered by national security, because of the advanced technology that is being used,

both in the initial event and subsequent investigations as well. So the default position is simply not to tell you what they've found. And with things like the gimbal, I don't know what the object is. So from my perspective, it's still a UFO. It's something that's unidentified. It's just not as special as it was previously thought to be. It is something that could very well be of mundane or, is not necessarily a advanced physics object, which you would be if it was actually rotating.

The metaphor that comes to mind is it's like being a detective, trying to solve an already complex crime where you have a certain degree of certainty that the expert witness is going to lie to you, right? Because the underlying facts of the case are often very confusing and require a lot of technology to pull apart. You know, why is a dreidel spinning in space and seeming to defy the laws of gravity, oh, well, maybe it's because of the nature of the infrared camera and how it's positioned on the plane. And then as you get deeper into the story and try to really figure out what do we know about this, perhaps the most important source of information has no clear interest in being withholding, or excuse me, being transparent is withholding.

That seems to make our job and your job very difficult. Yeah, I would kind of not say it's that they're necessarily going to lie to you. It's more like they just don't want to talk to you. It's if you have a witness who's brought up in a culture where snitching is not a thing that you do, you just don't want to talk to the police. It's kind of like that, but in reverse. The military does not want to be very forthcoming

about every single thing that it is doing to the general public. It's going to avoid lying wherever possible, and the best way of doing that is simply by not saying anything at all. Yeah. They outsource the investigation to us, the public. And I appreciate the route there on the front lines trying to help us understand these UAP and UFOs and strange phenomena.

Nick West, thank you very, very much. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like the show, please go to Apple Podcast or Spotify. Give us a five-star rating. Leave a review. And don't forget to check out our TikTok

at Plain English underscore. That's at Plain English underscore on TikTok. Thank you.