UAP Evidence & Analysis | Mick West

Per GEIPAN (the French government UAP office), across decades of cases about 59% were explained, 34% were not workable due to inadequate data, and about 7% remained unexplained.

over decades of cases about 59% were explained, 34% were not workable because the data was inadequate. Only about 7% remained unexplained.

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.

During the Nimitz 'Tic Tac' encounter, Fravor descended slowly and carefully toward the ocean because pilots can suffer an altitude-judging illusion when looking down at a featureless sea surface.

he's flying down towards the ground... decreasing altitude... there's basically an illusion where if you're just looking at the surface of the ocean, you won't know how high you are.

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.