Mick West

The commonly cited 5-7% 'unexplained' UAP figure does not demonstrate anomalous cases; it reflects an absence of cases with sufficiently good data, not evidence of something genuinely strange.

I think we've got lots of cases that we can't explain, but not because we can demonstrate it is something amazing.

As public camera technology has improved, UFO photo/video evidence has not gotten better because the effective 'low information zone' has receded outward, so genuinely unresolved sightings are now simply farther away and blurrier.

these are all unidentified things that are in the Liz, the low information zone, and the better cameras are making the Liz just get further and further away.

The Navy GoFast video resolves to something moving fairly slowly, most likely a weather or mylar balloon; this conclusion is shared by AARO, NASA, and Metabunk's independent analyses.

that pretty much resolved to it being something that was moving fairly slowly... probably something just like a balloon like a weather balloon.

The Gimbal video is ambiguous between two hypotheses: a distant plane roughly 30-35 miles away producing an internal-reflection glare that appears to rotate with the camera, or a closer object moving in an unphysical J-shaped path.

about 30, 35 miles away there could be a plane moving away and to the left and that would create essentially the same visuals... the rotation comes from the camera rotating.

The eyewitness account supporting the 'closer object' reading of Gimbal is secondhand: Ryan Graves is relaying what a pilot told him he remembered, more than a decade after the event.

we have Ryan Graves like giving an account that someone told him of what they remember happening... over 10 years ago now.

In the Chilean Navy UFO case, government investigators sequentially eliminated birds, balloons and planes and then declared the object a genuine anomaly; it was later determined to actually be a plane.

the Chilean government investigation into it went through all possible things and they eliminated various things... ended up saying this is a genuine anomaly. Turns out though it was actually a plane.

David Grusch has not presented physical evidence, only stories and secondhand testimony, and says he cannot disclose more in open session.

the fact that David Grush hasn't really presented any evidence. He has just presented stories uh and that we really need to get beyond that stage.

West believes David Grusch should be granted immunity so he can disclose his entire account publicly rather than remaining constrained.

I'd like it if David Gush was given immunity and he could tell his entire story, every single thing that he knows in public.

Jimmy Carter's reported UFO sighting from his own driveway was later attributed, based on time and location analysis, to most likely being the planet Venus or a rocket launch/re-entry.

Jimmy Carter saw a UFO from from his driveway once... People figured out what it was based on the time and location.

Harry Reid was drawn into ufology chiefly by conversations with believers such as Robert Bigelow and Jacques Vallee, not by seeing physical evidence (ships or bodies) himself.

he was just basically convinced not by people showing him actual evidence. He never saw ships or botties or anything like that, but he talked to people.

A 1990s-era program (referred to in the transcript, likely mangled ASR for BAASS/AAWSAP) investigated ostensibly 'supernatural' phenomena at Skinwalker Ranch while being officially categorized as a different, aerospace-related set of investigations.

It was actually listed as a completely different set of investigations into aerospace when actually it was investigating supernatural going on at Skinwalker Ranch.

West thinks it plausible that secret Special Access Programs exist to which Congress was improperly denied oversight access, lending some credibility to part of Grusch's claims, without extending that credibility to claims of alien craft or bodies.

it wouldn't surprise me at all if there is a degree of truth to what David Grush is talking about... that might be a bad thing... in terms of congressional oversight.

West doubts the US government possesses genuinely exotic technology such as antigravity; he believes any secret craft rely on advanced but conventional physics (stealth shaping, drones, deformable wings, embedded sensor 'smart skin').

I don't think that the government actually has anti-gravity or similar technologies... it's essentially just known technology is more advanced.

The 2026 PURSUE file releases are mostly low-value 'noise': many clips are readily explainable (e.g., a balloon with a visible string, an object crossing windmills attributable to parallax/a balloon), with only a few genuinely ambiguous cases left unresolved because the video quality is too poor.

There's very little in there that's actually interesting... some that's obviously a balloon. You could see actually the string on the balloon.

AARO has released conclusions on some cases (e.g., the Aguadilla, Puerto Rico case) without releasing the full underlying analysis, partly perhaps due to classified content; the Aguadilla case is one where AARO reached the same explanation West and others had already reached independently.

they come to the same conclusion that I did... it certainly wasn't me and I wasn't the first... they kind of release the results rather than release the actual full analysis.

Sean Kirkpatrick co-authored an early, speculative paper with Avi Loeb touching on 'fireball phenomena' and UFO 'motherships' that Kirkpatrick reportedly did not expect to be published in that form, treating it as more of an internal exercise.

he did a paper in the early days with Dr. Avi Loeb on the fireball phenomena and he was talking about... UFO motherships... he didn't realize that Jav was going to publish it.

AARO's public-facing officials, including Kirkpatrick, have stated they found no evidence of aliens or of anything 'unambiguously anomalous,' though some cases needed further investigation and were expected to ultimately resolve to mundane or terrestrial explanations.

everybody from Arro has said... the public facing people have said that they didn't find any evidence of aliens or anything that was unambiguously anomalous.

The original UAP task force (predating AARO) also skewed toward believers, including Jay Stratton, described as strongly believing in the supernatural and associated with the Skinwalker Ranch investigation, making it less skeptical in composition than AARO.

you had people like Jay Stratton who's a firm believer in the supernatural basically... big skinwalker ranch guy who was in charge of the government's investigation.

Avi Loeb's new UAP science panel shows selection bias in its composition: the 'ocean expert' seat went to Tim Gallaudet, described as believing his daughter is psychic and reporting his own supernatural experiences, rather than a mainstream oceanographer with no prior UFO commitment.

why do you pick the one guy who is convinced that his daughter is psychic and talks to ghosts... he's already decided what the phenomena actually represents.

Michael Shermer, the panel's 'token skeptic,' is a social scientist rather than a technical UFO-video analyst, and publicly misapplied a 'calibration sphere' claim in a tweet that was unrelated to what Ryan Graves' pilots, AARO, or Kirkpatrick were actually discussing.

He put out a tweet saying that... this calibration sphere was what Ryan Graves' pilots saw when what he was talking about was completely unrelated.

A UAP science panel member (transcribed only as 'Matthew,' surname unclear, likely Matthew Szydagis) has publicly claimed the government is targeting him with microwave weapons.

he recently came out he thought that the government was targeting him with microwave weapons.

AI-generated fake UFO videos are a smaller problem than commonly feared, because video provenance (multiple independent witnesses/sensors, willingness to be named) will become the key discriminator, and coordinating fake corroborating testimony from several people is much harder than faking a single clip.

then you're going to get AI faking multiple videos, but then you've also got to do the social engineering of getting people to claim that they took those fake videos, which makes it exponentially much more harder.

A 2026 Ukrainian drone strike on a Russian oil refinery produced a flying tank-top explosion that resembled a flying saucer and was independently captured by many people (dashcams, security cameras) from different locations, illustrating the multi-witness/multi-sensor corroboration that genuine UAP evidence almost never has.

the top of this tank flew up in the air... it looked all the world like a flying saucer... caught on video by many people from different locations.

Mick West's 2016-2017 debunking of the Chilean Navy UFO video (showing it was a distant plane) is, per both speakers, essentially resolved.

It was actually just a distant plane. And we were able to prove that pretty conclusively.

Our check Confirmed: the November 2014 Chilean Navy helicopter infrared video was analyzed by Mick West, who used flight-tracking data to match it to a four-engine commercial jet (Iberia flight IB6830) at 15,000-25,000 feet, its aerodynamic contrail and engine heat explaining the thermal signature; CEFAA's original two-year investigation had not identified the object but West's later plane match is treated in the UFO-research community as having effectively resolved the case.

Sources metabunk.org, leonarddavid.com

Fravor's and Dietrich's accounts of the encounter differ materially on duration: Dietrich has described roughly 8-10 seconds from merge-plot to the object departing, while Fravor has described about five minutes with all four aircrew having 'eyes on.'

Dietri account... her experience only lasted... 8 to 10 seconds... Commander Fra says it lasted about five minutes.

West's analytical framework for every UAP video is two sequential questions: whether the object demonstrates physically anomalous motion, and only then what it might actually be.

The first one is, is this object on the screen doing anything amazing?... the other question is what actually is it?

West's base assessment of the FLIR1 video itself is that it does not demonstrate anomalous physics and most likely shows a distant aircraft, separate from whatever Fravor's crew encountered hours earlier.

I think it's probably a different thing... it's some type of distant aircraft that's flying away.

The FLIR1 video's apparent rapid 'shoot off' at the end is explained by a camera zoom-level change (roughly 2x to 1x) combined with the camera continuing to drift after losing tracking lock, not by the object accelerating.

The drift that it moved off from left to right was exactly the same as the drift that the camera was moving at.

The same wind/heading data von Rennenkampff's team used to argue for Gimbal's saucer interpretation is also consistent with a balloon drifting with a roughly 100-knot wind at 28,000 feet, per West.

That of course suggests that what we're looking at is actually a balloon.

West's reconstruction of Go Fast's true speed, using the video's disputed range value, is roughly 60 knots (consistent with a small, roughly 3-6 foot diameter object such as a balloon); a collaborator's ('Yannik') reconstruction gives roughly 90 knots, matching period wind speed.

I've done some reconstructions where it's about 60 knots.

AARO's official assessment of the Go Fast video, presented at a recent congressional hearing, is that the apparent high speed is possibly explainable by parallax, and that the video shows no anomalous maneuver.

They just came out at the recent hearing... this is possibly parallax.

A 1994 Nellis/Tonopah restricted-range video shows an object West attributes to a balloon or cluster of balloons; the on-screen range indicator is erratic, and von Rennenkampff's own SitRec reconstruction (built by West) shows a visually apparent sharp turn that Mick treats as unreliable due to bad range data.

I think that's just a balloon or a bunch of balloons floating in the wind... the range data is very inaccurate.

Susan Gough, a Pentagon/DoD spokesperson, told Mick West directly that the Gimbal video was not a training video, contradicting an earlier, unnamed source.

I asked Susan Goant and she told me it wasn't a training video.

Gimbal's apparent rotation is best explained by an optical artifact tied to the camera's internal de-rotation mechanism, evidenced by background light/dark bands rotating with the object, diffraction-spike-like artifacts, occasional mismatch between the object's and horizon's rotation rate, and the rotation's amount/timing matching exactly what the camera needs to de-rotate while tracking a forward target.

The amount that it rotates and the speed and the time is all exactly the same amount that would be required for the camera to have to rotate to traverse the forward-looking direction.

West disputes that the Ariel School (Zimbabwe) children's drawings of the object they saw were identical, characterizing them instead as showing 'huge variety.'

Not not identical. There's a huge variety.

Gimbal's apparent rotation happens in discrete steps rather than smoothly, which West treats as his strongest ('smoking gun') evidence for a camera/tracking artifact rather than a physically tumbling craft.

The smoking gun for me was that it rotates in steps.

Jet-engine exhaust signatures on this camera system get smaller, not bigger, with distance, which West attributes to Raytheon anti-blooming processing and offers as evidence against a straightforward 'point source scales with size' account of Gimbal's shape.

This is a lot further away at the end of it and it gets smaller... they have some anti-blooming effects on there.

Dr. Phil Metzger published analysis (on Twitter/X) arguing the exact pixel position of the horizon line in the USS Omaha video is ambiguous, within about one pixel either side of the object.

Dr. Phil Meta Mets... said it was very ambiguous as to where the actual horizon was.

The USS Omaha thermal camera's tracking symbology showed 'slaved to radar' status, but West argues the operator likely lost the actual radar-designated target and manually joysticked onto a different, more distant object.

We know the symbology. So again this is like the gimbal... it's been done by joysticks and was manually moving the camera around.

USS Omaha, July 2019 off San Diego: a shipboard thermal video shows a heat-source object descending very slowly and shrinking to a point near the horizon before disappearing; the crew's audio references a 'splash' mark, bearing, and range, implying the object entered the water.

They say splash down mark, splash mark bearing and range. So they think that it's actually gone into the water.

No jets were scrambled in response to the 1994 Nellis/Tonopah sighting despite it occurring in restricted military airspace.

Why didn't they scramble jets and go after it?... nothing happened.

The 2013 Aguadilla, Puerto Rico video is resolved: independent analyses (including West's) and later AARO converge on two tied-together Chinese/wedding sky lanterns as the explanation, and von Rennenkampff fully agrees with this conclusion.

This was all confirmed basically by Arrow analyzing this and coming to the same conclusion.

Our check AARO's official March 20, 2025 case-resolution report does conclude the 2013 Aguadilla, Puerto Rico video shows two small warm objects (not one splitting), most likely sky lanterns drifting with the wind at roughly 8 mph and 600 feet altitude, with the apparent high speed explained by parallax from the surveillance aircraft's own motion -- matching the claim's description of AARO's conclusion. However, the claim that this is fully 'resolved' overstates the consensus: the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies has specifically rejected Ruben Lianza's tied-lanterns hypothesis, arguing the required wind speed is too high for lanterns to stay airborne, that lanterns would appear as two separate objects earlier in the footage, and that the lantern theory does not explain the object's disappearance behind trees and into the water. The claim's assertion that 'von Rennenkampff fully agrees' with AARO could not be independently verified.

Sources aaro.mil, explorescu.org, theblackvault.com

A widely-circulated June 2024 Manchester Airport orb video, initially described by witnesses as 'the size of a small car,' is shown by West's 3D reconstruction from the stated vantage point to be at most about 24 inches in true size; von Rennenkampff agrees it is likely a balloon.

We did very detailed analysis, 3D recreation of this thing from this exact viewpoint... at the most 24 inches.

A raw white-hot orange-light video near a Duke Energy nuclear facility (Southport, NC area) shows three lights forming a triangle; West attributes the brightest light to distant aircraft landing lights, an explanation both agree they lack sufficient time/location data to test conclusively.

The white light at the top... has got two lights which kind of suggests to me that it's the landing lights of a distant plane very far away.

Both speakers agree there is a widely reported, real-time surge in 'drone' sightings over sensitive US airspace (2024-2025, and a similar 2019-2020 Colorado/Nebraska wave), but disagree on whether this reflects a genuine increase in objects or primarily a media-driven reporting contagion ('flap'); both explicitly label the 2019-2020 Colorado wave a 'flap.'

Colorado 2019, 2020 was a flap.

West's own physical replication attempt (building a small egg-in-sling model) suggests the object in the egg video is probably not scale-accurate to an actual egg shape, and might instead be something larger, possibly slung beneath a helicopter and being relocated.

I don't think it's actually an egg shaped thing. I think it might actually be from a helicopter and it might be something being moved.

The apparent visual similarity between the 2008 Iraq video and the Gimbal video is undermined by comparing a white-hot frame (Iraq video) against a black-hot frame (Gimbal), which have inverted/different contrast curves and are not a valid like-for-like comparison; Gimbal's own shape also changes across its footage as the object grows closer.

You're comparing a black hot to a white hot isn't a very good comparison.

The most likely explanation for the Iraq video's object is the landing lights of a distant aircraft, though West concedes he is 'not ready to rule this out' given uncertainty about why lights would appear roughly 100 miles from the Syrian border and their irregular shape.

The most likely thing is essentially the landing lights of an aircraft.

Objects described as evasive are, per West, better explained as evading CAMERAS specifically (a selection-bias effect on what gets recorded) rather than displaying deliberate evasive intelligence, since many close-range sightings occur without any camera present.

They're not really evasive. They're just evading cameras, which this is the flaw in your analytic approach.

West argues UAP evidence overall consists of an accumulation of uncorroborated anecdotes, and that grouping similar-sounding stories together (e.g. all nuclear-adjacent sightings, all shiny-disc sightings) creates an illusion of pattern convergence that dissolves under actual statistical analysis, which he says has not been done.

It seems compelling because you just gather together all the ones that seem similar... do some actual statistical analysis on this and see what comes out.