Somewhere in the Skies - A Rabbit Hole of UFOs with Mick West

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

On episode 229 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we are welcomed by noted skeptic, debunker, and one of the most controversial figures who has found himself thrust down the rabbit hole of UFOs... Mick West. West describes how he first got in to debunking when it comes to conspiracy theories and UFOs, why it's important to question everything, his personal thoughts on belief v.s. fact, and the cold hard truths about witness testimony, trained observers, and how we can all work towards clawing our way out of the rabbit hole and in to the future of UFO studies and beyond. Follow Mick West on Twitter: @MickWest Visit his website at: www.metabunk.org Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Somewhere in the Skies Coffee! https://bit.ly/3mIAq2o Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Somewhere in the Skies Subreddit: www.reddit.com/r/SomewhereSkiesPod/ Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at www.CWseed.com Episode edited by Jane Palomera Moore Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is part of the eOne podcast network. To learn more, CLICK HERE Copyright © 2020 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Terms apply. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. And today we have a very special interview with one of the most controversial people in the UFO field, community, whatever you want to call it. And controversial for all the right reasons, which we will definitely talk about. So we have a ton of listener questions for him. And I have a bunch of my own. So I'm not going to waste any more time.

I am going to welcome Mick West. Mick, how are you? I'm glad to be here. I'm doing good. Glad to be here. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. I can't believe we haven't made it happen earlier,

but I'm happy we're doing it now because you and I were talking off air. It seems that kind of the UFO fervor has died down lately. And maybe that was to be expected after this report came out. But yeah, how do you feel about what's going on right now in terms of that? Yeah, it has died down. And it's interesting. I was looking a while ago at the Google trend for searches for the UFO. And it actually peaked a little bit before the report came out with the media coverage, 60 Minutes in particular, was like the kind of high point.

And the report itself, I think, perhaps let people down. And it wasn't quite as exciting as people were anticipating. And when it did actually come out, you know, it's not a nothing burger, but it's not the kind of like the big reveal that everybody was hoping for. So I think there's a little bit of kind of a rebound effect from the anticipation and then the letdown and people are kind of recalibrating their expectations. And a lot of people are just, I think, kind of lost interest, you know, the people who are kind of like the people who were brought in by the media attention and they thought that

there was something like amazing about to happen and then it didn't. And we're moving on. It doesn't really mean any interesting new videos for me to look at either. So I've got kind of losing interest for myself. Yeah, I know I sent you a couple of videos a few weeks ago, I think it was, from out in Hawaii, which is a case I'm still working on. But I got to thank you for taking a look at those. And hopefully I can share them with the public soon because I got your opinion and a few others as well.

And that'll be interesting. And that's kind of what I want to talk to you about today. You know, that anticipation and that expectation that a lot of the people in the UFO field, I guess, crave or kind of feed off of. And then there's the stark reality to the topic, to the issue, to the way the government is looking at it. So you did mention the UAP report had a little bit of interesting things in there. Would you mind maybe touching on what you personally found of any interest or compelling about it? Well, for me personally, there was kind of a funny thing that was interesting, which was that the first explanation that they listed,

you know, they categorized things into five possible explanations for these UAPs. The first one was birds and balloons and other airborne clutter like drones and things. And I thought that was kind of funny because people had been mocking me for suggestions. testing things like balloons and even birds. It's become like a bit of a meme that see everything is a bird or balloon. And then along comes the Navy and they're like, yeah, a lot of this is airborne clutter and things like birds, balloons and drones. And I just went, yes, when that's happened. But the interesting things are that there are cases that they haven't been able to identify that seem.

to display unusual movements, unusual aerodynamic behavior. And they list a couple of things like very high velocity and very high accelerations. Now, those things, if they're actually craft in the sky that are doing that, would be very interesting. And I would be very interested to see what that data actually was, excuse me, that led them to that conclusion that these things might actually exist, but within the report itself, they go on to say, actually they start out saying that these things might be censor error, they might be observer misperception. Now, then you've got this kind of interesting way, like the report kind of divides things up into

different categories, and then it divides them up into different categories in other ways. And you can't tell which way these categories overlap. So they will say things like, like a lot of these sensors, a lot of these things were physical objects because they were picked up by more than one sensor. And then they say things like some of these objects displayed unusual aerodynamic behavior, aerodynamic behavior.

But we don't know if the ones that displayed unusual aerodynamic behavior were the same ones that were picked up on multiple sensors. Because that for me would be the interesting thing. if you could actually pick up something that's displaying unusual aerodynamic behavior on multiple sensors, and that behavior is detected on multiple sensors. Like you've got a video of something that looks like it's moving really fast, and then you've also got radar data that shows that thing moving really fast at the same time and the same location.

It's irrefutably the same object. That will be really interesting for me, but we don't know if that actually happened. Right. Yeah, that triangulation of data from. different, like you mentioned, whether sensors, angles, radar, whatnot, is essential. And you're right. I think, you know, the one word we can say about this assessment, preliminary assessment, apparently, is that it is ambiguous. And, you know, for a good reason, I think that leaves them off the hook for a lot of things as well. But that leads to issues in itself, which I do want to talk to you

about a little bit later in terms of, you know, what that ambiguity does to the public in terms of the world we live in today with conspiracy theory. But I am getting ahead of myself, Mick. For any of my listeners or viewers who don't know the Mick West origin story, you know, the comic book, bitten by the spider sort of thing, how did you get involved with all this? I know you've talked about it a bunch, But how do you get involved with this, interested in UFOs? How did you eventually create Metabug? Yeah, if you don't mind, given us the Flip Notes version. Sure, my potted history.

Well, you see, back there I have a skateboard, which is a Tony Hawk skateboard. That was given to me when we finished the first Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game. I was one of the programmers on that. It was one of the co-founders in Eversoft. So that's my background is that I used to be a video game programmer. And after, you know, we were fairly successful with doing the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series, I kind of took early retirement from the video game industry and just started doing things that I found interesting. And something I've always been interested in is, you know, essentially like things like pseudoscience,

things where people are making claims, things like perhaps the supernatural, perhaps things like UFOs, and things like conspiracy theories, and then investigating those things. And that's just something I was interested in as a young person back in the 1970s and 1980s, and didn't get much time to indulge that whilst I was working. And kind of when I went into semi-retirement, I just started looking at these types of things.

I got interested in looking at the chemtrails conspiracy theory, which is a conspiracy theory that the government is spraying stuff from the backs of airplanes, and that's where we see these long white trails behind them. And I read a blog about that. That's evolved into another site called Metabunk, which is just about discussing all kinds of things like conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and investigating sightings in the sky.

And I did that for a while. And I wrote a book, which as you can see on the shelf there, escaping the rabbit hole, which is about how to talk to people who are kind of trapped in conspiracy theory thinking and how to help them out of it. And over the last few years, because of my interest in things like chem trails, I got quite good at identifying airplanes and identifying what something is in the sky. And it's just kind of a skill that I developed over time.

And that naturally lent itself to UFOs. And it was never really a UFO guy until maybe like three or four years ago, about the end of 2017. I occasionally look at them. But then I got interested in, first of all, this Chilean Navy case, which was kind of a similar case to the U.S. Navy cases where they had this video of a strange object. And I helped figure out what this object actually was. And then these newer cases came along, and they were very interesting.

The U.S. Navy cases, the Gimble, the GoFast, and the Nimitz encounter, the Tick-Tac. And they were getting a lot of attention. And you've got these interesting little videos that you can analyze. And I've always been someone who's been really interested in taking a video or taking a photo and then trying to figure out what it actually shows. So I use the 3D geometry skills that I learned while doing video game programming. Because you have to take, with video game programming, you have to be able to do the transforms to turn 3D into 2D, and it's just the opposite type of thing when you're turning a 2D image into a 3D image. tried to figure where things are in space. So I just got really interested in doing that,

and it's just kind of grown over the years. I think in a way it kind of sucked me in because I am very interested in analyzing these videos, and so I became a little bit well known as the guy who looked at the videos and came up with his alternative explanations, which I did do along with other people. And then people asked me questions about other things,

and initially I'm saying, I'm not really that interested. I'm not really a UFO guy. I'm a video analyst guy. But, you know, people keep asking. And so I come up with answers. And I start talking about the broader issues like, you know, are UFOs, aliens and things like that. And I give my opinions there.

And it's just kind of, you know, it's just become this little interesting hobby. Although, like I say, you said, it started, is starting to die down. So I'm actually starting to kind of wean myself off UFOs to a degree and get about. the stuff I used to do on Medibunk, which is looking into conspiracy theories. I was going to ask, what comes next, you know, when UFOs go on the shelf? Because this happens in the UFO field. This topic goes, you know, kind of explodes into the mainstream when like a big seminal case happens or maybe a mass UFO sighting or, you know, a soundbite in the New York

Times or whatnot. And then it kind of goes away. And I think, you know, this is the longest, I would say, prolonged amount of time UFOs have sort of been in the mainstream for almost two years now. I mean, it's just grown exponentially in terms of those interested in it and becoming members of the quote-unquote community. But, yeah, what sort of are you looking at now since we're kind of, you know, taking a little breather with UFOs? Well, I think the good news is that people are always going to see strange things in the sky. Right. Just because of the nature of things. If there were no aliens and there was no

magic technology, assume there isn't for a second, people are still going to see things in the sky that they don't understand and they need explaining or investigating or possible things hypothesized. So that area is still going to remain. But these big stories about UFOs seem to have kind of been pushed back or just not pushed back really, I guess died away because nothing new has come along. We had before this drip, drip, drip of new videos being released. but that hasn't happened for a while so maybe it would ramp up but if I'm not looking at UFOs which I will still look at them I look at conspiracy theories and right now there's a whole bunch of very significant conspiracy theories

that I almost feel bad that I spent time looking at UFOs because there are these other issues that are out there I mean one in particular is the anti-vaccine conspiracy theory people thinking that there is some kind of conspiracy by big farmer to push vaccines, even though they don't work and they're dangerous. And then some people go more extreme than that, and they think that, you know, the vaccines

are deliberately toxic or that they have little microchips in them or something like that, or that the coronavirus is a hoax. So I think there's a very important issues to address. Before I was doing UFOs this year, I was very into looking at the election conspiracy fraud type election election fraud or voter fraud

like conspiracy theories there was lots of people thinking that the election was stolen by Biden and that Trump actually legitimately won but obviously from my perspective he didn't

and I think it's very important to kind of help people see what the real facts are in that case as well because I think that's something that's very destructive to the very fabric of of our country if we have this very polarized beliefs.

And it's interesting the older conspiracy theories like hemtrails and 9-11 and things that have been around for a long time that I used to think were like this is what a conspiracy theory is. They've almost faded away to nothing when you compare them to these newer conspiracy theories like QAnon, the anti-vaccine stuff. the voter fraud stuff, it's all kind of melded together into one kind of huge meta-conspiracy where the deep state is trying to impose some kind of communist rule over the world. And things like Kemptrails and 9-11 and even the UFO thing, which has, you know, it's been a conspiracy theory to some degree for a long time,

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That's a good point. you know i i feel like there was when i first got involved with the ufo topic i was 13 and you know i was on aOL in the chat rooms in the forums perinette all that stuff and it just seems so innocent back then you know who shot jfk or you know stuff like that and you're right and you know i've got this conspiracy board in my background as kind of a i i not i guess a parody of that whole idea of connecting everything together and you're right qanon has become this like amalgamation of everything and it's become like you said real and dangerous you look at the riots excuse me you know what happened at the you know at the at congress and everything or the capital

excuse me and it's become real and it's become dangerous and i i love to get your thoughts on that um you know the danger of conspiracy theory other than just you know an insurrection like these things have drastic consequences for every buddy you know yeah very much so and i think you know the most immediate consequence that you can see with conspiracy theories is when it comes to health a lot of people are very suspicious of of conventional health care and so they they seek out other uh forms of health care people don't get the vaccine the coronavirus vaccine uh largely because of disinformation that they've read They read things like that more people die because of the vaccine than die of coronavirus.

And they believe these things because they kind of resonate with something in their minds because they've become kind of accustomed to distrusting government. And even if you make very extreme statements like that, you know, claiming that more people die of the vaccine. This is people saying, you know, I got injected with a vaccine and, you know, that somebody died. because they were injected with the vaccine. It's kind of a ridiculous statement, but people believe it because if you've, if you started to believe things like, you know, in the olden days, like the 9-11 being an inside

job, if you could believe the government could actually do that, then it's a very short step. You know, it's almost like not a step at all to believe that the government would be covering up some kind of huge, I don't know, population control experiment or something like, or something like that or some kind of, you know, they want to usher us all into COVID camps type thing. And then obviously you're not gonna get this vaccine because you think that the government is trying to poison you and you end up, yes, a bunch of these people.

You've seen that some of the more ardent opponents of the vaccine, the conspiracy theorists, are getting COVID and dying. And probably most of them would have been fine had they got the vaccine. So it's not just harmful, it's killing people. People are dying. If you take that, not just of those individual stories,

you look at the entire country and the entire world, and you think how many people have been affected by this belief that vaccines are harmful, this conspiracy theory essentially, because it would have to be a conspiracy to cover up, you know, this thing Fauci would have to be on it, you know, the president would have to be in it, Even Trump would have to be in it because he says you should take the vaccine now. The effect of that is going to be maybe something like tens or 100,000 deaths because of essentially a conspiracy theory.

And not just old people who are going to die in a few years anyway, which I wouldn't say it's a good thing because I don't want my elderly relatives to die years earlier than they should. But younger people as well, you know, people in the 50s and people in their 40s and even like teenagers. They're getting affected by conspiracy theories and they're dying or they're becoming very ill. I mean, coronavirus has effects that last, you know, still, still, you have this long COVID thing where people have breathing issues or they have brain fog that last for a long time. And these are very, very real effects of conspiracy theories. And then of course you've got the broader distrust of government and then people storming the capital, and the breakdown of civil society and the polarisation of people into groups where they shouted each other rather than talk with each other. And that's part of the reason why I do what I do is that I see these harmful effects of conspiracy theories.

And I think the more that can be done to lead people away from disinformation and lead them towards good information, the better because these harms are real and we should do something about them. Right. And, you know, I want to connect that to the UFO conspiracy in just a sec-mic. But I'd love to ask you this. When you first got involved in debunking and, you know, trying to sort of stamp down these things before they spin off their access and out of control, did you ever see where we are right now happening,

where conspiracy theory would become this big, a world leader would not only promote some of these, but go on to inevitably cause a lot of damage in this country, in other countries. There's conspiracies going on right now with Biden too. But, yeah, did you ever foresee any of this? No, I kind of thought it would stay as it was, and that these conspiracy theories would be a fringe that was embraced by, you know, five to ten percent of the population. and perhaps more mainstream conspiracy theories like who shot JFK would have more of an adherence.

But yeah, I think what happened was very surprising to me. Something that always happens to me with conspiracy theories is the first time I hear about them, I think, oh, that's ridiculous. No one could ever believe that. And then I see more people talking about it. And I guess, you know, it's just, it's not going to, nothing much will come of it. And it's just so ridiculous, I'm not going to allow people to talk about it on the forum. That's the way 9-11 started for me. Even though that's a mainstream conspiracy theory,

I was into chemtrails at the time. And I thought, this 9-11 stuff is just nonsense. I don't want to talk about that. But eventually I did. And then I started Metabunk, and then people started bringing up Flat Earth. And I thought, that's just so insanely ridiculous. I'm not going to allow any discussion of Flat Earth on Metabunk.

And of course, now I have a huge Flat Earth subforum on there because people kept talking about it. And then QAnonon comes along. And this ridiculous story about how there's a secret person in government who's leaking information to an army of anons via H-Cham, which made no sense whatsoever. And it just seemed obviously ridiculous, you know, kind of an extension of Pizza Gate, which was also ridiculous. And so I wasn't repaying it much attention. And then it became the biggest and most consequential conspiracy theory in modern times. it really took off way beyond my expectation.

So no, I did not expect it. It's unbelievable. It really is. Well, I mean, zooming in on the UFO thing, what do you find most dangerous within the UFO circle when it comes to conspiracy theory? It's not. I've always said UFOology and the UFO conspiracy theory

is mostly harmless because it's not you know it's not like you believe in UFOs and you know whatever you start thinking that the government is trying to poison you but I do think that if you were a believer

in the UFO conspiracy theory which would be that the government is covering up knowledge of UFOs it kind of leads to a distrust of the government so if you look at you know the history of UFOs it really the modern era of UFOs dates back to 1947, 1948. In 1947 was the first flying saucer incident.

19848 was Roswell. And in those years, the UFO scene was essentially born and matured almost to the state it is today in the course of like a year. We immediately got people saying, what are these flying saucers? What is the government trying to hide? does the government have evidence of it, what's being covered up. So, you know, if you believe that UFOs have been visiting us since the 1940s, then the government would have to know about it.

You know, there's no way it can be just some kind of accident that the government's just so inept that they don't have any evidence. They would have to have evidence if all these actual incidents were true. You know, going back to Roswell, a lot of people think that Roswell actually was a crash, a crashed alien, spacecraft or some kind of craft. There have to be a cover-up, which means that you're essentially suggesting a theory that involves this big conspiracy of the government.

And if you believe that, I think it makes it a bit easier for you to believe other conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories that are more consequential. So if you could believe that the government is hiding contact with aliens or evidence of aliens or something along those lines, from you and has been doing it for 70 years, then it's fairly easy to believe that the government might be covering up something like, does the vaccine work? Or is coronavirus real? Or is global warming man-made or not? And is there anything we can do about it? You can start to distrust the government and distrust science if you believe that there's a huge conspiracy, and not just a

huge conspiracy, but a huge and very well-run conspiracy where You've got this men in black coming around and shutting people up, and you've got all these bits of evidence that are hidden away in lockers somewhere, and all these sightings somehow never get leaked out from the military. It just, I think, it's not hugely damaging, I would say, but it does lead a little bit in that direction. Yeah, it's sort of the gateway, for sure. But, you know, the struggle I have with that, Mick, is I personally don't believe the Roswell incident was extraterrestrial in origin. But what I do believe is there was definitely a cover-up of some kind. Sure. Like, that's basically been proven.

But that's hard because one part of me is, like, I know it wasn't probably aliens, at least in my personal research and in investigation. and I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me, but it's hard because there was a cover-up. So then you're like, okay, maybe it wasn't aliens. Maybe the quintessential modern UFO era that started with Roswell wasn't aliens. But does that mean that none of it is? Or what do we do there? Because they covered something up.

So how do we trust that? Yeah, that's the thing, though. I mean, I'm not advocating blind trust in the government. I certainly wouldn't say you trust everything that people, in power say because people in power will lie to you and people in power a lot of them are just doing things for their own personal gain and you know right now you've got two political parties and they're saying essentially opposite things so one or both of them is kind of lying to you when they talk about either present a certain figure in a certain way or they they make claims about

what's going on at the border or what's going on with the coronavirus relief program and things like that. You know, you've got people who contradict each other. So politicians are kind of lying to you. Maybe you don't know which ones are lying to you, but politicians are generally not your friend. People become politicians, a lot of them, for their own personal reasons. Some of them are very well-meaning. Some of them are idealistic and they want to actually do good for the country. But either, you know, some of them are not or they become not. And don't trust them. So when you look at something like, you know, Roswell, a long time ago, obviously, and it's very difficult to get a real handle on what happened. Yeah, we know that there was

a bunch of different stories that came out at the start. So they couldn't all be true. So what happened there? You know, was it just mistakes? Or were people lying? And we know that the later story is that the first stories were essentially covers for this project mobile, where they have these microphones on balloons that they were using to listen for nuclear explosions in the atmosphere because they wanted to detect when Russia was letting off nuclear bombs, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do and a perfectly reasonable thing for them to keep secret and to have some kind of cover story for. So these things happen. There's secrecy. And this is one of the big issues in UFOology is that a lot of the questions that people ask are unanswerable

because you're asking them about stuff that is hidden behind the military's war of secrecy. And some of the things might get answered after whatever the statute of limitations is for these things. Like when you're Roswell, more information came out of it about it. But

when you ask people about the Nimitz encounter, there's data there that we just don't have access to because it's classified, because it was recorded on classified systems. And we probably never will. By never, I mean never in the foreseeable you know decade or two. So, but yeah, does that raise to a level of being a cover-up

or some kind of is it the government lying to you or the government just like not telling you stuff because it's secret? Big difference, yeah. Yeah, and that itself is opaque. We don't know the reasons for it and then it allows people to read into these things like the the lack of detail in the UAP report? Is that because there's nothing really interesting there? And it's just like video and radio that was recorded using systems that are classified so they're not going to show them to you. Or is it because it shows a close-up of a flying saucer zipping around and diving into the ocean? It's very easy to imagine it might be one or the other. And if your preference, your personal preference is that it is some kind of UFO zipping around and diving into the ocean,

And yeah, you're probably going to be more likely to believe that's the type of thing that's being covered up. Whereas my personal experience with UFO investigations is that things generally do not turn out to be very interesting. And I actually anticipate all this secret stuff in the secret annex that has been hidden from us to be pretty boring stuff. You know, stuff that's basically like the gimbal video. It's probably the most interesting video that's actually in there. I don't really think they've got anything more interesting than that. interesting well yeah let's fast forward up to that because you bring up a good point of the ambiguity and in you know the new york times before the report came out um they went so far as to even change the

headline of an article um to include you know possible we're not ruling out aliens um but then you've got people like alizondo and even you know uh members of the the national excuse me navy intelligence and whatnot saying we're almost 100% certain it's not black budget u.s tech and it's not foreign adversarial tech and of course that leaves a huge gap between what it could be and what it's not and you know i know you've spoken to zach sioux um who actually i you know we had a good conversation of that's that's almost irresponsible of the military of the government to kind of throw that option out there because then you do get everyone filling in those gaps and you do fuel the conspiracy because of the lack of transparency. Would you agree with that? Yeah, what do you

think about that? I think, but that's kind of missing a few things there. Like when you say it's it's not foreign tech and it's not our own secret tech, you look at the UOP report and the things they listed. And those were, I believe, items three and four. Items one and two in the list, number one was airspace clutter, things like birds, balloons, drones, and debris like plastic bags. They've even listed that. That was the first thing they listed. The second thing they listed is atmospheric effects. Things like inversion layers or ice clouds, things causing radar returns to bounce off or even visual sightings of little white dots in the

the sky and things like that. And the third thing they list is, I believe, U.S. technology, which might be three or four, I can't remember, US technology, like secret programs or maybe SpaceX testing something, something like that. And then they say they don't have enough information. And they have no evidence that that is the case. Then they list foreign adversaries. And they say even less about that.

And then the fifth thing they list is other. But people kind of frame this as. if the only options are US technology, foreign technology, or other. When they missed out the first two things that were listed, the first thing was airspace clutter. People just seeing things like drones and balloons in the air because there's cluttered airspace. The training ranges off Virginia, wherever they are exactly, Virginia Beach,

they have balloons drifting into the air space, and they think that causes an issue. The atmospheric effects, maybe there, There's things we don't understand yet about the atmosphere. That's perhaps some kind of electrical discharge type thing, something, you know, ball lightning type thing that happens. And these are the first two things that they listed. I don't think they listed them just to get them out of the way.

I think they listed them first because those were probably the most common, plausible explanations for these things. So it's not just, you know, three, four, and five. It's one, two, three, four, and five. And you've really got to consider the possibility that most, if not all, of the sightings could fall in the first two categories. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. I think people tend to forget about those first two, for sure. But again, it just, it frustrates me because then you know that most of the UFO community are going to, they always do. They go to alien. And it's hard because, yeah, I, I, I, I, I.

I'm in the UFO world 24-7. So it's, you know, I always keep that door open that some of it might be ET tech that's visited us. But we have absolutely no definitive evidence that that's ever occurred. And then you have the whole idea of connecting alien to UFO. And that's a whole issue in itself. Yeah. And, yeah, the UIP report didn't rule out the possibility of aliens. And that was what the headline.

Yeah, they changed the headline from. in the New York Times, the first headline was something like UAP report finds no evidence of aliens and they changed it to something else like UAP report has multiple and identified craft cannot rule out the possibility of aliens. Which was, I think, almost just like the editors kind of sexing up the story.

They wanted the story to have a more interesting headline. It didn't really change the content of the story. The fact that you have, haven't ruled out aliens is utterly meaningless. If you see a UFO and it's a little white dot and it's zipping around the sky, if it remains unidentified, which obviously all of these cases were, these were the ones that were unidentified, the ones that the cream of the crop, the ones that roast, the top,

the ones that were not filtered out by being identified, if it's unidentified, it's literally impossible to rule out aliens. How could you possibly rule out aliens? So it's kind of a meaningless statement. to say that we haven't ruled out the possibility of aliens. They didn't raise it as a serious possibility, which I think is significant. I think the reason they didn't raise it as a serious possibility is that there wasn't really anything that pointed towards it.

We see things like these supposedly fast-moving objects. They say they could be. sensor error and they could be observer misperception. This is something that they say very specifically in the page two of the report, the executive summary. They say that it could be sensor error of spoofing or observe a misperception. They give those three things. And those I think are just far more likely explanations than aliens. Now obviously we can't rule out aliens. We can't rule out that we're living in the matrix and somebody at the higher level is tweaking with the codes to send in UFOs from another simulated dimension either. But why do we need to go to those explanations if there's no actual evidence for those that suggests that those are the likely things? Is it actually more likely that it's aliens than the radar not working right?

You look at something like the Nimitz encounter. You know, what's more likely if you just take the one case say that Kevin, day saw something drop from 28,000 feet to 500 feet in 0.78 seconds. The stories varies a bit, but that's roughly that thing. That's something that would be impossible for any craft that we know of. So it's not a current human technology. So it's either, you know, a number of things. It's either somebody, some human has developed some amazing technology or aliens have

this amazing technology, you know, come to a bit. visitors or you know it's some kind of dimensional hologram or something if you go for the more esoteric Jacques valet type explanations or the radar just wasn't working there was some kind of bug in the radar that was causing these glitches and that's what they originally thought you thought originally that it was this this bug in the radar but then of course you layer on these other things you know Frava goes out to look at it and he sees something comes back somebody else goes out takes a video sees something and then the fact that you've got all these things happening at the same time, people start to think, well, you know, it's impossible that that could just be a

coincidence. But then the question there really is, is it, is it impossible? Is it really that much of a coincidence that these things would happen? Like people were getting all worked up about seeing UFOs because the radar has been glitchy for a few days and they go out and they get one crappy video of it and this rather strange sighting of something that Fraver and Dietrich saw, is that literally impossible or could it be something a bit more mundane? Perhaps the radar wasn't working, and perhaps he came across some, I don't know, some tow target balloon or some kind of a, some kind of drone that they were testing or something else was happening.

Yeah, we don't need to say that it has to be aliens simply because the other explanations seem less likely. I think, you know, even if you prefer the aliens thing, you've really got to keep the other explanations on your list as possibilities. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I know. I mean, I think, you know, if you consider yourself a self-proclaimed uphologist or UFO investigator, like your job is to find a conventional prosaic explanation, not to prove little green men are coming here from, you know, Zeta reticuline. Then you start

checking off the boxes. until you get to that. It's still an unknown, but that doesn't still mean it's alien. But, Mick, I did want to, you touched on something really important, and I saw you tweet this recently, because I know there's been a lot of, you know, anger

and, I guess, debate online when it comes to pilots and being, you know, observability. And like you said, misinterpretation or misidentification. And people get really upset because we do kind of hold pilots and, you know, people in the military or whatnot as the most trained observers out there. And I do want to read this verbatim so I get it right. You said in the context of observing UFOs, what training do trained observers receive? What do they think they – or, yeah, what do they receive? What do you personally think they should receive in terms of that?

And do you think, you know, that would help in solving a lot of these cases? Well, the problem here is that pilots are trained to recognize things. So they're trained to recognize things like planes. So they do have training for recognizing planes and judging what its aspect is, you know, which way it's facing relative to you. It's a tail on aspect. It's a side aspect. Is it head on aspect?

Is it going up? Is it going down? That type of thing. But they're trained to do that with planes. I think it'd be very difficult and not particularly useful use of time to train pilots to be UFO observers. Because that's not really part of what a pilot does, is look for UFOs and record them accurately.

The majority of pilots never see a UFO. All the pilots I've talked to have not had a UFO experience. It might seem like there's lots of them, but really, if you look at the number of pilots, it's not very many that actually have these UFO experiences. So, you know, if our primary purpose here was to solve this UFO conundrum, then I would expect pilots to have courses in recording what they saw visually. But that's kind of a bit silly as well. Why are we relying upon the pilots looking at something and then writing

down what they saw why don't we if we if we're going to devote resources to this why don't we get cameras installed in the cockpit so that we can actually you know take video of these things the pilots saw we often see we hear of these things being very close there was one account I think it's kind of grown in the telling of this this spherical object that flew between two planes and I think it was as close as like a hundred feet or something now if if we have had a dash cam in those planes, we would have good footage. So it's kind of a allocation of resources type thing.

I don't think the Navy and the Air Force are going to be training people to look at UFOs unless there's something that will come of it. Now let's say we start having more sightings of say drones from planes because the Chinese are sending in spy drones then maybe then we want to have more specific training on again and looking at what these things are and describing them but yeah drones are fairly easy to recognize it's these these things that that we have have trouble with like i think what i would go back to there is like frayver and dietrich's encounter in what training did david frayvra have that allowed him to see exactly how big this thing was and how it was moving and how far away it was.

Because my theory there is that he misperceived how far away it was and that gave him this illusion of high speed when he moved. You know, it was, it seemed like he was circling him, but I think it was actually stationary and he was circling it and it was just because he misperceived the distance. I don't think there's actually specific training there unless you start training for that exact scenario. Like, you know, if you see a feature,

featureless object, what steps can you take to determine how big it is? You know, that's kind of like, you know, and try to check your assumptions. You maybe you're going to assume that it's the same size as a hornet, but perhaps it may be a different size, so you know, check that out. But just going to touch you back on your first point there, people get upset when I say perhaps the pilots made a mistake. Well, you know, these pilots are tough people. You know, they're men and women who go into battle and they're shot at and they shoot at other people. They're tough people. They can take it. I don't think they're going to get their feelings hurt by me. They should be able to have a

honest discussion about whether they made a mistake or not. And I think David Fraver discussed this issue with Lex Friedman about a year ago, I think. And he didn't seem too upset about it. He just kind of mocked the idea somewhat, but he wasn't like upset. He wasn't, he wasn't crying because I'd hurt his feelings. I think people are rushing to the defense of pilots as if I'd somehow, you know, spat on their grave or something. It's nothing like that. I'm just raising an issue. Could they have made a mistake? And in some cases, I think, yes, they did make a mistake. And in some fairly specific cases, I point out where I think the mistake actually was, like Chad Underwood, I think. I think he lost lock.

Chad Underwood filmed the Nimitz TikTok video. And I think he lost lock on the object just because he was flipping around through the camera modes. And then he didn't regain it because he didn't zoom out at the end. And I think he just basically messed up there. But, you know, people will start saying that I'm, I don't know, is this terrible insult. But no, I just think that's what happened. And if you disagree with me, then that's fine. But what am I going to do?

Like, just defaults to believing every single thing a pilot say is because they're a pilot and I might hurt their feelings? No, hurt feelings have no place in this discussion. Let's just focus on the facts and try to figure out what those facts are. I understand that. Facts don't care about feelings. They never have, never will. And, you know, I appreciate that you would take the time to speak to people.

like Alex Dietrich and actually have a conversation. And I know that's kind of, kind of my last personal question for you, Mick, before we do some listener questions, if you don't mind. Dave Fouch, Chris Lito, these guys who have been making these videos lately, talking about, you know, how you're wrong about this or that, or you weren't there. Like, this is, that's euphology, basically.

You weren't there when it happened. You can't tell me what I saw or what I experienced. And I respect that. Like, no, I wasn't. I wasn't there. I can't say you weren't, you know, that you know there's aliens living in a cave in the Mojave desert. Like, I wasn't there when you first saw him or this or that. So it makes sense.

I get the whole you weren't there. But what, where do you lay right now in terms of those who kind of respond to what you bring forward on YouTube or whatnot without even reaching out to you? A lot of them weren't there either. you look at those people there's Dave Falsch who is a guy who repairs Fleer equipment and he has equipment to test and he spent a lot of time in the back parking lot of where he works I believe taking videos of planes trying to disprove my theories which I think he's totally failed to do and just over the years I mean literally years that I've been interacting with him he basically doesn't understand the entire theory that I'm putting forward anyway. So it's very difficult to talk to him. The problem is like people think that he's an expert. He's an expert because he works for a company that does these,

these FLIR systems and he claims to understand them. So because they, they like having experts who disprove what I say, they believe what he has to say. But they don't actually understand it. A lot of the problem I have is that, these issues are complicated and so I have difficulty explaining them to people so people don't understand my explanation and then someone else comes along and they give another explanation and and they say they are an expert but the listeners often don't

understand that explanation either I often challenge people to say what is Dave Falch's objection to the rotating glare hypothesis and when you dig into it he doesn't really have one. He's just saying, oh, you know, infrared is is different to visible light because it's heat and it's not, it's not light. And they don't use lenses. They use mirrors so you wouldn't get glare and narrow field of view so you don't get glare. You know, a bunch of things that are not true and are kind of irrelevant. And it says you couldn't rotate the, the glare with this derotation mechanism. So there's all these little complicated things that, you know, It sounds good when an expert comes along.

But he doesn't really understand the argument I'm making. And this is something, an issue I've had over and over again, is that people come along and they try to debunk what I'm saying without even understanding it. Was Lou Elizondo when he came on my podcast. We discussed the rotating glare hypothesis. He didn't understand it. And he tried to explain to me why I was wrong.

Literally started out right there trying to debunk me. No, Mick, that's not true. So you'd have one rotating thing here and another rotating, and they would both rotate together. And so I told him he didn't understand it and kind of explained it to him. And he did actually listen to me, which was great. But a lot of people won't. They were just steadfastly say,

it's impossible for a glare to rotate independently of the object or independently of the horizon, something like that. And it's because they don't understand what the actual argument is, because it takes some time and effort to get into it. I don't think that David Fravor has really looked into a lot of the stuff that I've done that he just kind of dismisses out of hand, like the FLIR 1 video zipping off. I don't think it's really looked into the issue of it losing a lot. I don't know if even Chad Underwood has really looked into it in great depth. And there was another Fleer expert who was on Jeremy Corbell's show, and he was asked a bunch of questions that were completely the wrong questions.

questions to ask. He was asked, does the derotation mechanism rotate the glare independently of the horizon to which the answer is no? And he correctly answered no and explained why. And people said, oh, then the mix been debunked. But it was the wrong question. So there's a great difficulty here with experts coming in and giving their opinion without actually understanding what the question actually is and what the issue actually is. And these these things can be solved. by talking. I sat down and talked to Chris Lato after one of his videos, and we kind of got into some detail,

and I think we resolved a few things. But now Chris has gone off, and he's done a whole bunch of other videos, and he's got sucked into the SCU's explanation of things, and he thinks the SCU is amazing. And he's just going off saying Mick's wrong without talking to me. Alpha check, another guy on. Twitter. He's an

Egyptologist who's really into using the DCS flight simulator and he's done a bunch of really nice slick videos that explain the links between the FLIR system and the radar system, the essay page and how they all linked together

and tracking and things like that and says that it's debunked me. But, you know, again, he's never actually talked to me. I've been trying to talk to him for quite a while, but he He doesn't seem like he wants to. He just wants to make a video.

But so I think all this arguing via video isn't super productive. It's better to actually have a discussion. And I'd love to have a discussion with, say, David Traver or Chad Underwood. But, you know, they don't want to talk to me. Yeah, it's tough because I understand. And that's why I respect what you do, Nick, because you're willing to say, I want to talk to you about it. Like, let's get as much facts.

and data as we can. And, you know, it's just their minds are kind of made up at this point, which is kind of disappointing. And, you know, while I mean, I don't agree with you on everything, I can respect that you have an educated opinion on these things more than I could ever possibly have. So I'm going to be open to that. And I think that's the problem is, you know, again, people are so steadfast in their ways or like you said, maybe they just want to put a response video out there because they know it'll get

traffic. Everyone has their own intentions and motivations when it comes to these sorts of things. Yeah, that's kind of my personal observation on that. But yeah, did you want to respond to that? Sorry. No, I mean, I can have agree with you there. It's people, I think, have different motivations for what they're doing in UIFology. And some people are doing it for clicks. I tend to assume that people are not and I always approach people as if they just want to have an honest dialogue and they want to get to the truth

but if people are kind of deliberately or perhaps not deliberately but they're asking the wrong questions of an expert like so Jeremy Corbell does this all the time Jeremy Corbell won't talk to me he won't even mention my name he doesn't want to give me any publicity but he he will have

an expert on to debunk me when what would be better as if that expert, if you've got an actual FLIR expert, you could talk directly to me and we could go back and forth and we could hammer out where our actual areas of disagreement are

and try to resolve them. And that's something I do in all the interactions I have with conspiracy theories. It's part of the backbone of my book is this method of getting down to some kind of common ground and then trying to identify

the next step up where you actually disagree. So, you know, we agree that, you know, this video was taken by a Navy jet and that it shows something that's probably a flying craft of some sort off in the distance. You know, we could agree about that. And then we start to disagree about does it lose lock at the end on this video,

whatever it is, or is it rotating, things like that. So you say, why do we have a disagreement here? Is it, you know, what's, what am I basing my belief, my opinion on this, this rotation or whatever it is on, and what are you basing yours on? And perhaps, perhaps I'm missing something that you could explain to me. And perhaps you're missing something that I could explain to you or perhaps we're both missing something. Or perhaps we're not missing anything, but we're just failing to communicate. Perhaps we're talking past each other in some way. but that's very difficult to do if all you're doing is putting out a video and waiting

months before you interact with anybody and I put out videos because I'm trying to explain what my my thoughts are on particular theories not trying to argue that you know it's not aliens I'm trying to say this is what I think this video shows but if someone disagrees with me like let's talk let's actually you know discuss what the reason is that you think that this object didn't lose lock or that you think it's a distinct object rotating. And I'll explain why I think the other thing. And then we'll, we'll figure it out. We'll actually move forward. And it's something that happens us a lot is my arguments change and evolve because they get challenged. That's why I like, that's why I like

putting them on Twitter or on Facebook. Some people say, like, oh, Mickey, you should, you should submit your ideas for peer review publication in a scientific journal and then I will read it. That's just nonsense. What's the point of doing that? I spend three months getting a paper out and just so somebody can point out an error in it. I just put the idea out now. Someone can point out the error. I revise it then put it out again. Another person points out the error and we have this discussion about what's actually going on. A whole bunch of people can work on it. More errors will be found it things will get better it will evolve in increments and and improve but if you just start like formulating your theory into a paper it's just it's just a waste of time you know unless you've

actually got some kind of scientific study where you've got testable reproducible results you may as well just stick it on twitter and let people at it because it's going to get a lot better that way it will be a lot better argument at the end of it if it goes through the fire of being critiqued by Twitter and Facebook and Metabunk. Yeah. Yeah, you're kind of chiseling away at the sculpture and trying to get the full definitive statue, I guess. That's a weird analogy.

But Mick, do you mind if we move to some listener questions I have for you here? Yes, go for it. Awesome. What's up, guys, Ryan Sprag here. And I'm just dropping in to remind you about our Patreon campaign. Somewhere in the Skies is always free to consume, but it's not free to create. So if you want to help the show on a monthly basis, we have tons of rewards for you in return, including shoutouts on the show and website, bonus content and episodes, and free merge. Want to be my guest or pick a topic for the show? You can do that too.

So if you'd like to learn more and to help support the show, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Thank you and keep looking up. So Ricardo asks, if you had a chance to analyze classified material, would you look at it, even if that implied that you could not publicly acknowledge that this additional information changed or at least challenged your stance on some cases you personally looked into? Definitely, yeah. I mean, Lou Elizondo isn't allowed to tell us about the classified information that he has, but he doesn't seem to have any problem with here. saying that he believes what he does because of things he has seen. I don't think you can kind of do such a blanket classification that would include me saying,

I've seen things that have convinced me that there's something to this phenomena, example, example phrased. Don't take that one out of context. And that, you know, so yeah, I definitely would look at these things, even if I was unable to discuss the specific or even the nature of them ever again, then I would know. And it would presumably change my approach to everything else if I got some evidence that pointed to a certain outcome.

Gotcha. Yeah, I like that. Nug4T on Reddit asks, do you know anything about the AI project that Elizondo and DeLong have talked about in regards to capturing and analyzing U.S. Do you happen to know if this requires new legislation in regards of using private domestic video? Yeah. Anything on that? Well, what they want to do is they basically, you know, the big problem we have in UFOology is that we get a shitload of UFO reports and UFO videos. And they're nearly all crap.

I mean, let's face it, I mean, 99.99% of them are crap. and there's a small percentage that might not be, but we can't really tell if they're real or not. But it's difficult to find things in this. So the AI idea is something that has only become possible in recent years, is that we train an AI to find interesting cases or to find anomalies. So we show it cases and then we tell it what these cases are. And then we show it some other cases and it tries to see.

you know is this a bird is it a plane is it a balloon can we eliminate it and then it will try to figure out is there actually something unusual going on and you might even just be a kind of a statistical thing like perhaps there's more things going on near nuclear power stations or something like that but you can train ii to do things like that you can train it to look at videos i don't think there's any issue with using public video uh i think either it's going to be very video that's kind of in the semi public domain, like YouTube videos and things like that. I don't just know if there's a specific thing that says you couldn't download a YouTube video to analyze it.

It doesn't seem to make any sense. But a lot of this stuff is stuff that people submit to online databases like Mufon. They probably would be given permission for researchers to look at that video. So I think it's a good idea. I doubt it's going to come to anything. I don't think you have a broad enough or an accurate enough collection net right now to actually get the data. If you had a network of cameras and radar around the country that were recording 24-7, kind of like the Galileo project, maybe you could get some quality data.

But I don't think you could really get anything useful if you took, like, say, all 120,000 cases. that are in the Mufon database right now. I really doubt very much that there's anything, even the most advanced AI could pull out of that. It's certainly the way to go. Right. But you're right. It's challenging when you don't really have a base level

to kind of work off of. So I totally get that. What do you think about the Galileo project and what Avey Lobe is doing? Is that something you would support? I mean, not like financially, or anything. But, like, is that something you think is worth the time, the effort, the money?

You know, it's being funded by Harvard, essentially. And, you know, private donors as well. Yeah, I don't think it is. I think it's mostly private stuff. And, you know, his discretionary spending that he has, he can do whatever project he likes because he's a ten-year professor. I think, I doubt anything will come of it. I don't think that it's very likely that you would get enough of these high-powered telescopes around the country to find anything of interest based on just the frequency of the sightings of UFOs.

I don't really see anything happening other than getting close-up photographs of birds and balloons and planes and drones and plastic bags. And then other things. You will have photos. you will have photos of things where it's just too far away even for this 50,000 dollar telescope or half a million dollar

telescope that he wants to use for the project there's always going to be something that's too far away and you've got these limiting factors like distance obviously but the atmosphere the atmosphere distorts things if you're looking from the ground or something that's 20 miles away through the atmosphere you can't get close enough picture of it

because the atmosphere is too wobbly So I think it's unlikely that anything will come of it. I don't really mind private individuals spending their own money on something like that. It would be fun. And I think it would be good. If you do get a lot of these cameras out there, what's going to happen is it's just a little bit more evidence of absence from absence of evidence. If UFOs were flying around up there in any kind of frequency, we'd be getting photos of them. and the absence of evidence

kind of indicates that there's not very many of them, if any. And I think that's what's going to happen with Project Galileo. People are kind of throwing the money away, I think, but it will at least get you a bunch of close-up photographs of things, and it would be good examples. You can say, like, this looks like a white blob on my iPhone, but with this amazing telescope, we can see it was actually a plane or it was actually a drone

or it was actually a solar balloon or whatever it was. Interesting. Yeah. And, you know, I've heard you bring up, too, that, like, you know, the wonder of magic can be just as powerful as the wonder of science. And, you know, that's, if that's what we get, maybe they capture some amazing weather anomaly that we've never, you know, seen before. And that could be just as exciting and cool, in my opinion, as possibly a craft from another,

whatever, interstellar object or whatever. whatnot. Yeah, I mentioned something in another podcast, I think, with UFOJ, about a thing called the Crown Flash, which I'd encourage anybody to look up on YouTube. Crown Flash is this amazing atmospheric phenomena that looks like aliens having some kind of battle on top of a cloud, but it's just a natural phenomenon, but it's something that was never recorded on a video until about 10 years ago. But it's, you know, there are things in the atmosphere that we don't fully understand. We don't fully understand how crown flashes work.

We can tell there's some kind of combination of charged particles and ice cloud orientation and stuff like that, but we don't know the exact mechanism. So that there could well be interesting things that get

discovered. Maybe we'll discover there's a lot more, you know, plastic bags floating around in the sky than we actually thought that there were, or there are some high-flying birds that are responsible for some of this but yeah i think the likelihood of being able to catch one of the very elusive um uapes is pretty low yeah hey that's why i got into all this make plastic bags up in the air i've got plenty of them in the trees here in new york city it's an interesting

environment we have here um well on a personal level audrey on facebook wants to know how is the exposure experience positive and and negative attention affected you on a personal level. Did you ever feel like calling it quits and just walking away from the UFO community, or I guess the conspiracy community overall? Occasionally, but that's not really because of the reaction I get. It's more because it becomes a little stagnated and a little boring. If nothing's really happening in a field, I kind of get a bit bored with it.

I went with chem trails a while back. I believe in like 2010, I think I was getting really bored with chemtrails. And then this story came along of this, what looked like a missile being shot off the coast of Los Angeles. And it was really interesting. And everybody was really into solving it. And I ended up on CNN explaining it was just a contrail. I remember that. Yeah.

Yeah, a long time ago. So, yeah, the reactions I get from people, I don't mind. It's understandable that some people are going to have negative reactions. there are some people who have very strong beliefs that the government is lying to them and so they think I'm defending the government which I'm not they think I'm some kind of government shill that I'm being paid to do this and I can understand why they're thinking that from their point of view if they believe that the government is telling you all these lies and they would have to have these shills to help spread the lies I could see why they would

They would think, you know, I would be one of them based on their beliefs. I mean, they're wrong. But I understand it. And if someone has had a personal experience with a UFO, if they saw like, you know, a TR3B fly over their house or their car or whatever or even just a simple light in the sky or a V-shaped in the sky or something like that, and they know what they saw, they think they know what they saw. and then I come along and I start saying things like, oh, it's easy to misperceive things or misremember things.

They get angry at me and I understand that because I'm saying that they didn't see what they saw and they know they saw what they saw. So I can understand why people would get angry at me. So I've actually got a lot more pushback in terms of emotional engagement from the UFO community than I have from the 9-11 and chem trails and flat earth. conspiracies. I think because people feel like I'm personally attacking them because they have some kind of personal involvement in this. A lot of people, even if they haven't seen a UFO, they've been really into it since they were young. And so it's this kind of foundational, almost religious

level belief that they have that is very difficult for them to accept that they might have been wrong about it. And so they don't, they don't like hearing the things that I am saying. So it's understandable. And I don't mind when people get angry at me. I just, you know, I know that it's coming generally from, from a place of honesty. And if they're just being an asshole, then I just block them and move on. So it doesn't really bother me.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting how much emotion plays into this and belief. I think belief is probably the worst word to have in the UFO field. because it's nothing but a subjective truth. And once you bring religion into anything, you're going to rile up people's emotions because it's literally the framework in which they've based the whole faith on.

So when someone challenges that, I can understand why people get passionate about it. But like we said earlier, facts don't care about your beliefs or what you feel. That's simply the, that's what it is. Yeah. And, you know, to get to those, what the goal here is for me is to get to some kind of shared understanding of the facts. You know, it's fine.

If I figure out what something is, but no one believes me, that's kind of pointless. There's two parts to debunking. You know, one is trying to figure out what's actually happening. And then the other part is trying to explain it to people. And the second part is actually kind of 90% of it. And once you figure something out, then you're done. but then you've got a whole world left who hasn't figured it out and doesn't understand your explanation or hasn't heard of your explanation and you've got to try to communicate it's to them but i i think it can be done like people uh people generally do want to know what's actually going on it's just tricky to get past these defenses that they put up and you know perhaps i'm wrong and perhaps by then talking to me you could explain to me why i'm actually wrong David Fravor come and explain to me why I'm wrong about the gimbal rotation.

We'll figure it out. It's not a battle. It's something that we can get together and mutually try to figure things out. What is the problem with these numbers or whatever it is or this particular interpretation? Or what am I missing? What are you missing? Yeah, we can work it out. Yeah.

And I feel in this field, everyone proclaims that I just want the truth. I just want to know the truth behind all this. But then, you know, even if they got that truth, they're not going to like it. They're not going to be satisfied. And I always struggle with that because I feel like so many in this field say, I want the truth about what UFOs are. Yeah. But they don't really. I mean, I shouldn't say that.

That's a sweeping assumption. But you know what I mean? Like they want the truth. But then when it comes to them, they don't accept it. But the truth is complicated. Yeah. If people say the government should tell us the truth about UFOs, but they're kind of expecting a simple truth,

like UFOs are visiting alien crafts, and we don't think they're dangerous. Yeah, the government comes out and says that. That's the truth that people are looking for. But the truth more likely is that pilots see a whole bunch of different things in the sky, and we don't know what they are a lot of the time. because there's insufficient information. Some of them kind of look like

their weird moving objects. That probably is the truth. The UAP report and the conclusions of the UAP report are that exactly and that is probably the truth that the government has about UFOs. So when you ask,

the government needs to tell us the truth about UFOs, the UAP report could be that truth. It probably is the truth. but how do you explain that? How do you persuade people of that when there's all this stuff that's behind this wall of secrecy? Yep, yep, good point.

Well, that kind of bleeds into this next one. Serenity 404 on Reddit asks, do you follow any particular objective methodology process or checklist when you debunk stuff? Or let's see here, stuff, or if you just subjectively freestyle every debunk. And does your approach even accommodate extraordinary conclusions like aliens or stuff like that? They make a good analogy here too.

I just want to stress this. Let's see. Like aliens or if such conclusions are inherently unattainable in your mind, like a maze without an exit, they say. Well, my problem solving methodology. It came from this book I have on my bookshelf. One second. Yeah. The book is called How to Solve It by G. Polia.

And it's this, you know, it's a fairly old book that's from the Open University, which is this kind of, it's online now, but it used to be a TV university. And it has a checklist in it. It falls open on it, which is, you know, how to actually solve problems. You know, how to solve a problem. And, you know, it just lists a number of simple steps. that you go through. And it's aimed at mathematical problems, but the fundamentals of the methodology remain the same. And one of the most important things is to look at the problem and see if it

reminds you of something else. The biggest part of my methodology for solving UFOs is to recognize things within the data, the video or the photo or whatever it is. And even if it's just a small part of it, if you can't recognize the whole thing, I say someone posts a jagged V of white dots moving across the sky, I can immediately recognize that as being some high-flying birds, because I see high-flying birds all the time here. And I've seen lots of videos of them, I know exactly what they look like. and I know that that would be the number one explanation.

But if it's, say, just two white dots moving from the sky, that's something that resembles the other thing, but it's less definitive, but still you've found something that you've recognized that it's two dots in a kind of a diagonal line moving across could be birds, so that becomes a possibility. Now, mathematical problem solving is nice because there's usually only one answer, and you're just working to unearth this.

answer and it's got all the data's right there on the page and you don't have to go anywhere. It's a lot messier when you've got UFOs. So one of the biggest parts of my methodology is what I call Orchamic ranking, named after Occam's Razor. The Occam's Razor is like the explanation with the fewest things that need adding to it is more likely the simpler explanation and the better explanation. And what I do is I try to think of all the possibilities that something might be, no matter how outrageous seeming. You get a white dot in the sky.

What could it be? You know, it could be a fake video. It could be a bird. It could be a UFO. It could be an alien spaceship. It could be a hologram. It could be a ghost. It could be a fairy.

It could be a drone. You know, there's all these possibilities. and then you make a list of these. And then you can sort the list by just applying Occam's razor to any two of these things. And you say you've got, at the top of the list, you've got, say, a balloon or a fairy. And you think which one of those is more likely? It's going to be the balloon. So I'm going to stick the balloon on top and the fairy moves down the list.

And you do what's called a bubble sort where you just keep doing this until the list is in order. And it's quite a straightforward system. and it just means that you get a good idea of the range of possibilities. Now, when something's unknown, it doesn't mean that you don't have any idea what it might be. It means that you're not really narrowing in on one explanation. There's a bunch of possible explanations. But you never want to rule anything out.

So you always keep things on the list that are a bit less likely. But usually what will happen is something will bubble to the top. but you've always got to keep revisiting all these other things on the list. And then you get new information, you get new data, or you perform experiments, you try to figure out, like, if I held my camera this way, will this white dot in the sky move in the same way that it does in this video? And if it does, then perhaps two things will flip positions in the list, and perhaps they won't. But as you get more and more data coming in, the list may change,

and things may separate out more. and the one thing may become much more clearer as the most likely explanation. But it's actually quite rare for you to be able to eliminate things. And I try to shy away from premature elimination of hypotheses and keep everything on the table and then just keep getting more data and seeing how the list changes. And that's basically my methodology. if you kind of ignore all the other stuff,

which is stuff from experience. It's difficult for someone to come in who knows nothing at all about analyzing photos and videos and 3D trajectories and then say, how do you do this? It'd be a very complicated and tedious thing for me to describe. But the basic thing is, let's see, do you recognize things and think of possible explanations,

make a list, and when new data comes in, revise the list and never take anything off the list. Interesting. Right. And of course it's not perfect, but, and UFOs tend to be one of the most rebellious things out there when it comes to that. Yeah. I mean, see, if you had a very simple, if you had a very simple methodology that you could apply to every single case, then, you know, we wouldn't be in this situation. We, we have UFOs because they're in the low information zone. They, a UFOs, is only a UFO because it's ambiguous data. And if you've got something that's ambiguous data,

that means there's multiple possible explanations. And it might be that there's an unknown explanation is the most likely thing. Something else is the most likely thing. If you can't figure out, if we actually had sensor data and video that showed a 40-foot wide Tick-Tac moving across the ocean surface,

then that would be very difficult for me to explain with a list of possibilities. And right there, then something else is going to be the number one explanation. What is that something else? It's a advanced technology drone or it's an alien spaceship. Those things will leap to the top. But most of the time, the data is very ambiguous. We don't have high fidelity, multi-sensor data of something doing something amazing. we have crappy video of blurry blobs

or we have eyewitness accounts from 20 years ago so there's always going to be these these ambiguous cases where making a list of possibilities is really what you should be doing yeah and I know you've stressed too like the clear photos of UFOs are the boring ones it's the ambiguity that excites people most and that's tough because yeah you want it to be Yeah, but why is that? A clear photo of a UFO should be the exciting one.

But when it's clear, you can identify it. It's not unidentified anymore. Ambiguity is UFOs. We should rename it ambiguous flying objects, AFOs. Because that's the issue here. It's not just simply they're unidentified. Like it's a plane, I don't know what type of plane it is. We'd no idea what it is at all.

Is it a flying object? Is it an optical effect? Is it an illusion? Is it really far away and very large? Or is it closer and is it small? It's ambiguous, ambiguous flying objects. And it's, they're always going to exist. It's impossible to get rid of ambiguous flying objects

because no matter which camera you have, there's always going to be something that's just a little bit further away than the resolvable range of that camera. You know, the Project Galileo is going to return photographs of things that are 20 miles away. And they're just too far away to see the details. They're going to be, it's going to give you more ambiguous photographs. Yeah.

And, you know, I made peace a long time ago, Mick, that I'm probably never going to know what UFOs are. Because like you said, they are ambiguous and they always will be. But, hey, I'm enjoying the journey. It's fun. I've got a few little fun questions. I could shoot at you. rapid fire if you don't mind. And before we wrap things up here.

So uplifting tweets on Twitter, and I'll actually lump this with the next one. I Jove Zero-Zer1 on Twitter. They ask, who's your favorite personality in the UFO Twitter world or community? And what are your favorite UFO books if there are in? Well, my favorite UFO book is the UFO Handbook by Alan Hendry, which was published in I think 1977 and I like it because it's a great in 1979 it's a great

kind of investigation of the state of ufology at the time and it was written by a guy who was working with Alan J. Allen was it Jay Allen Hynek director of the Center of UFO Studies at the Center of UFO Studies and he's a guy who's interviewed a thousand people about the UFOs and his goal loads of really interesting stuff in it

and it's got like checklists for what to do when you see a UFO and all these different individual cases and then all these these IFOs that they have like it has photographs of things that are identified. And I find it just very interesting because it's very useful because it covers a lot of

really good data, really good information. But it's also just fascinating because it's timeless. Even though it was from 1979, what is that? That's like over 40 years ago. It feels like it could have written this year. It feels like it's a book that's just describing the current situation.

The only real difference is that we have a lot more cameras now. That's the one change that we have, but everything else in it seems very, very similar. So highly recommended book, I don't think it's in print anymore, hence I've got this crappy old library copy that I bought on online somewhere. And my favorite people in UFOology, I think the crowd at the Unidentified Celebrity Review, there are a lot of fun. Lewis and Michael and Rather and the others, they put on a good show. But that's going to be interesting itself, isn't it? It's like they put in a good show. It's all great entertainment and everything.

Is it actually progressing the scientific research into UFOology? Yeah, there's lots of characters in the UFO scene and you know, UFO Jesus, Ryan Robbins is a good guy. Ashinic, I love him, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And lots of people like, it's a fun community, which is a blessing in a curse in a way. If you've got a community, you kind of get this little bit of group think, I think. and you get these

you get cliques and schisms as well where people, they form groups and then they start arguing with each other and they break up and someone does something and they go from one direction and it becomes more about people than it does about the science

which I think is a bit of a problem and people start being advocates for one particular interpretation you know, some people think what's his name? That's who I can't remember his name now the guy in the desert uh blah blah blah blah so you

how could you forget that you know i know i know i'm terrible with names bob lazar becomes a polarizing figure and you get the bob lazar fans versus the you know people who think bob lazar is a hoaxer uh people and it just becomes you get these arguing over over minutia i mean i saw you know a lot of these podcasts like like this one that becomes like discussing individuals like valet and things like that and the background of louis elizondo and we really should be getting into the science the actual nuts and bolts what are these what's the data that we have what does the data show let's do the math and let's let's let's move on let's be productive and it's become a bit of a show i think which you know it's fine but it's it's not really my

seen. I like analyzing videos. I get that. You know, and I, as someone who's like 240 episodes in or so, like I am at least here on someone in the skies trying to make a stride to have a more scientific approach and talk to more scientists because it's so hard, Mick, I've noticed because you have someone like the late Stanton Friedman who was a huge advocate of the ETH hypothesis. when it came to the source of UFOs saying skeptics will, when they can't, you know, argue the data, they'll attack the person. But then there's the flip side of that as well, where a lot of this does become just talking about the people instead of the actual data. So where is that, that middle ground? I'm still trying to find it here on somewhere in the sky. I know Ruiz is too.

Yeah. There's the issue, the ad hominin attacks, ad homin attacks where you're attacking the person instead of the argument. Big no-no. We should never do it. But there's kind of the opposite of that, where we have this argument from authority, where someone makes a claim because they're an expert or they have a specific type of experience

or because they are the ones who were there and saw something. So if someone is making an argument that's saying, I am an expert, therefore this is correct, then you kind of have to address. that issue are they actually an expert it's if they're not actually presenting a reason why they think it's correct then I think it does become a valid point that you have to counter you know David Fraver said said he he knew he was right about the Nimitz encounter what he saw was this this object that circled him and flew away rapidly because he had 12 years

experience flying planes. But when he was asked, like, how did he determine how far away it was? He just said, you know, it's basically experience. So questioning that assertion, I think, is a valid thing. You can't just go on the data if other people are making arguments that do not rely on data or do not actually have any logic in them. and they're just saying, oh, I know what I saw. If someone says they know what they saw,

it still is a valid point to question that they might not have seen what they thought they saw. I'm sure that they're being honest. I'm sure their recollection is that they saw this particular thing in a certain way, but their interpretation might not be correct and their memory might not be correct. And it is a valid thing to go on that. But when you're going to deeper things like Lou Ellis, Alizondo, is it good that he uses a sock puppet account on Twitter or not? Things like that.

It's just like, you know, why even talk about that? It just becomes this big drama that, you know, people are talking about the person without even getting close to the actual subject, which is, you know, are these UFOs performing amazing maneuvers? And that's based on the data. Yep. I think a lot of people get involved in this UFO Twitter. sphere because of the drama.

Like it gives them something to do for the day. And yeah, look, we're all creatures of, we like drama. There's a reason, you know, theater exists and a reason we like arguments and everything. But, yeah, I think that often clouds the actual discussions being had. And it, like you said, it becomes way more about that. And it shouldn't be. It really shouldn't be. And this goes for any community or subculture.

Like, this isn't just. euphology. I don't want people to think we're bashing just the UFO community. I'm sure this happens in the skeptic world as well, where you start attacking the person instead of what they're actually bringing forward. Yeah, in the skeptic community, there's a big issue with stuff like political correctness and gender issues and things like that. And this kind of camps, you know, it's the grumpy old men on one side and saying, well, why can't we have things loud the way they were? And then you've got the younger crowd coming in and saying, you know, you've got to use the right pronouns, things like that. And then people start arguing about that, you know, the issues of

gender equity and gender identity within the skeptical community. And it's kind of like, it's a distraction, but you know, they're raising valid points. But now we're just talking about the social aspect of it and the political aspect of it and, you know, what's going on in this organization and how should skeptics present themselves in public and what, what issue should we address. Whereas, you know, I'm a nuts and bolts guy. I like to look at videos of UFOs and figure out what they are. I like to dig into claims that people make about vaccine statistics and see whether the numbers add up. You know, I like to do that type of thing. And this other stuff is a bit of a distraction. Not to say that there are people aren't raising valid issues, but,

you know, it's not helping figure out what UFOs are. Right. Right. And it's transcends the topic you're ultimately kind of brought everyone together you know yeah of course we should care about people's um you know issues with race gender sexuality like there's a time in a place for that and there is a time and a place for that in these fields but like you said like you that's not what you focus on and i'm sure you have your own personal thoughts and beliefs and convictions when it comes to all that but like you said that's not why you're in the ufo world and why you're having these conversations. So I get that.

I get that. Well, I have one more fun question to wrap things up here, Mick. Let's see, smiles defy gravity on Reddit asks, do you have any plans to make any more computer games or video games? And if so, I'd personally like to see him create a good UFO simulation game like Roswell, where you play the ET pilot who survives. Yeah, I think someone asked me on UCR. Yeah, I think what might be likely is I would do some kind of UFO scenario recreation software.

I'm kind of interested in getting into virtual reality because I think a huge issue of UFOs is this disconnect between seeing things on a two-dimensional screen and the actual reality of what people actually experience. and if you can instead of recreating an experience by drawing diagrams or even making a 3D simulation, if you can do it in virtual reality, I think that will be super useful for people getting perspective on what actually happened. You go back to some of the, let's say the classic swamp gas thing back from, I believe it was Jay Alan Heineck gave it.

an explanation of a couple of sightings as being possibly swamp gas. And part of that was because he kind of triangulated where this light was. And in one case, at least it was over some swamp area. But people took this more generally and they thought it sounded ridiculous. But perhaps if you could actually recreate in virtual reality what the people in that farmhouse saw and the people on the other side of the swamp saw and then do things. where you can kind of fly around the entire scene and view it in 3D, you might understand how it could possibly have been such a thing.

Or you go back to, say, the Phoenix lights. You've got video of these lights over this ridge of mountains. Perhaps if you could simulate the possible scenarios of like flares or alien spaceships or secret technology ships in some, kind of virtual reality environments, you might get a much better sense of what people saw. People talk about a lot, like something flew overhead, and they say it was the size of a football field. When it would be literally impossible for it to be the size of a football field based on their actual

description, because they're usually looking at something that's fairly small, angularly. But if you just got these verbal descriptions, and you end up drawing diagrams of it, it's very hard. But I think if you had the virtual reality thing and you could recreate what they actually saw and get them involved in that, that would be a good way of actually getting a much better model of what actually happened and helping them understand what they might have seen

and helping other people understand what they might have seen. So if I do any UFO-related programming, I think it's probably going to be UFO virtual reality recreations. Oh, my God. I've like electricity just searched through me at the excitement of that. That's genius. Like talk about putting yourself in the shoes of a witness. Like now you can have that concept.

Take the data. Take the testimony or the cockpit. Exactly. And recreate that scenario. Obviously it won't be perfect. But it's fun and it's a way to try to understand it better. You need to patent that right now. And I know you'll raise millions.

to have that become a reality. I should crowdsource it. Love it. Well, Mick, this has been fascinating. You've been so gracious with your time, man. We covered a lot, and I know there's a lot of questions we all still have of, you know, all these videos that have come out and everything

and where this whole UFO thing is heading. But I just want to thank you for the work you've done. I know you get a lot of flack in the community. And again, I don't agree with everything you've come up with, but neither do you agree with everything everyone else has come up with. But it's essential what you're doing. Yeah, thank you. And yeah, I think what's really essential is trying to have the dialogue with people.

Like I said earlier, like if it's just like some guy making videos here and another guy making videos there, it's always guys making these videos. it we'd get a lot, we'd be a lot more productive if opposing positions would actually get together and discuss and that's what I think, you know, might be something that we should try to focus a little bit more on in the future rather than just going back and forth with dueling videos. Exactly. Well, I mean, I appreciate you having this discussion with me today. And last question, of course, where can we find everything you're up to, your book, and yeah, everything in between.

Where can we find that? Well, you can just go to Twitter at Mick West, you know there. And that's pretty much the bill will lead you to anything you want. So you can go to Mickwest.com, and he has a long list of my other stuff as well. And my book is called Escaping the Rabbit Hole. If you want to try to talk to your friends who are stuck in conspiracy theories, this is the book that tells you how to do it, or one of several books. But you can just find me on Google. Mick West, there's not very many others.

Good, good, yeah. And I know a few friends and family who could probably learn a lot from your book. So I'm going to definitely make sure they check that out. But Mick, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me today. Yes, I'm with this guys.