I'm kind of unpopular in the UFO
community because a lot of people
say that I'm a bit of a
I'm a bit of a negative outlook and
they prefer things to be aliens.
All the UFO videos we
have are blurry.
And it's not because alien
spaceships are blurry.
It's because when you zoom in, you
see that it's not an alien
spaceship, at least so far.
Science writer Mick West is the
author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole
How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories
Using Facts, Logic, and Respect.
And he runs a popular YouTube
channel where he takes a detailed
look at alleged UFO sightings,
finding that phenomena thought to be
visitors from another planet almost
always have far more pedestrian
explanations.
It's almost like a spiral of lights
rotating. It's very confusing.
But several people on Reddit and
Twitter have already suggested what
I think is the correct explanation.
Flares drop from three small
planes. The only time I can't
explain what a UFO is is when
there's not enough information.
On June 24th, 1947,
a pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw
nine disc shaped objects near
Mt. Rainier, Washington, which was
the first reported UFO sighting, and
one factor in the decision to create
Project Blue Book, a team of
investigators with the U.S.
Air Force that over 17 years studied
the veracity of these claims.
By the time it dissolved in 1969,
the group had studied nearly 13,000
UFO sightings, concluding that
almost all of them could be
attributed to other phenomena.
5%, however, are still unexplained.
The cultural obsession with flying
saucers and alien invaders reflected
Cold War fears of nuclear
annihilation and communist
infiltration.
From the Blob to Close Encounters
of the Third Kind to E.T.
and The X-Files to Men in Black
Hollywood stoked our fascination
with the threat of foreign invasion.
Mikey
or the promise of connecting with
visitors from another world.
We're really looking for some kind
of holy grail of UFO videos,
which should be something that is
unambiguously weird, something
where we can look at this video and
say, Oh, that's definitely something
unusual.
But that really hasn't come along
yet. We're just seeing these fuzzy
blobs in the distance.
This video was leaked and it showed
what looked like flying green
triangles.
It wasn't flying pyramids.
It wasn't anything amazing.
It wasn't UFOs.
It was just a camera artifact caused
by a triangular aperture.
I think I've got a lens here and
it has a triangular aperture.
When you film things through it that
are out of focus, it makes them into
little triangles.
In recent years, the UFO craze has
migrated from the grocery store rag,
the Weekly World to the New York
Times, Time Magazine, Politico
and Forbes in 2017,
declassified video shot in 2004
showed unusual radar readings off
the coast of California that was
captured by U.S.
Navy pilots.
It was covered on 60 Minutes.
So as I'm coming down, it starts
coming up.
So it's mimicking your moves?
Yeah, it was aware we were there.
You'll see how close I get.
So I go like this and it's climbing
still, and it gets right in front of
me. It just disappears.
Disappear. Disappears.
Like gone.
West says that this video, now
known as a Tic TAC UFO sighting, can
easily be explained.
If you actually analyze the video,
you can go in and go frame by frame
and look at what's actually
happening. You see that every time
the object moves.
It's just because the camera is
moving. Because every time you
switch modes on the camera, he
has to recapture the object, which
means the object can keep moving off
to the side. You can look at the
numbers at the top of the screen and
you see the camera is actually
tracking from from right to left.
And at the end of the video,
all that's happened is it stops
tracking.
Now, if you're following an object,
you're looking at, say, a race car
through some binoculars and you
stop rotating your head in
the race track race car, which is
like zip out of your field of
vision.
Mainstream buzz about UFOs reached a
crescendo in 2017
with a New York Times article
headlined Glowing Auras and Black
Money The Pentagon's Mysterious
UFO Program.
It revealed that the Pentagon had
secretly secured $22
million to investigate the subject.
That was one of the biggest stories,
if not the biggest story
that the New York Times digital
edition ever had.
Sky.
It sounds like a plot out of The
X-Files, part of a once
secret government program
to investigate sightings of
so-called anomalous aerial
vehicles in the skies.
The entire government, what they
were doing, they kind
of disguised the program as
if it was just about the future
of aerospace.
And they phrased it as saying, you
know, we are going to study what
needs to happen in aerospace over
the next 20 years.
And then we had these videos, which
actually came from the US government
that appeared to show things that
were really, really interesting.
So that got everybody kind of
talking about it and thinking that
there was something to the story.
Do you think the government knows
more about UFOs or UAPs than
they're letting on?
You know, the government is this
big, you
know, very difficult to get to
grips with, very complicated
organization with lots of moving
parts that they don't talk to each
other. So there are these weird
little corners of it here and there.
And it's not like the entire
Pentagon that's been studying
crashed UFOs.
There's a large body of secrets that
the government has, and partly
this is out of necessity.
There are obvious national security
implications, but also a large part
of it is just the default position
of the government. There's an
excessive amount of secrecy, which
is is a bureaucratic
burden.
It would be great if they would tell
us more about what they know, about
what these videos are, what
analysis they have done.
There are very real issues that you
could say fall under the rubric of
UFOs or UAPs.
If a pilot sees an object
in the sky and they can't identify
what that object is, we can't just
ignore that. We can't just pretend
it didn't happen.
And we know this type of thing
happens a lot because pilots give
these reports.
So in that sense, we need to figure
out what's going on.
The New York Times bombshell led to
a frenzy of new interest.
In 2020, the Pentagon established
a task force to study UAPs or
unidentified aerial phenomena.
And just a year later, with a push
from Senator Marco Rubio, Congress
demanded that the task force release
a report on everything it knows
about UFO sightings.
That report ran just nine
pages.
What's happening in government now
is they're trying to get past some
kind of whistleblower protection.
They're trying to make it so that
people can come forward and tell
their stories of having seen some
kind of UFO without worrying
about non-disclosure agreements.
UAP focused startups are popping up
everywhere with a focus on building
better detection equipment and
software.
Seemingly, their goal is to contend
for military contracts if the
government continues allocating
funding to study the issue.
The big rumor that is getting
everyone excited in the UFO
community right now is the US
government actually has
recovered some kind of material
or technology from crashed
flying saucers.
They think there's a crashed
retrieval program within
the US government.
At a congressional hearing, Deputy
Director of Navy Intelligence Scott
Bray said this wasn't true.
Have we come across any wreckage
of any kind of
object that
has now been examined by you?
The UAP task force doesn't have any
wreckage that isn't explainable,
that isn't consistent with being of
terrestrial origin.
We might get somebody in the
government who says that they were
tasked at some time
to investigate a mysterious piece
of metal or that somebody
in the government thought that this
particular piece of metal came from
a crashed flying saucer.
But that wouldn't be surprising to
me.
If there's something unusual in our
airspace, it certainly warrants
careful study.
But for now, at least, whatever
is out there is far more likely to
be a flare of light, a balloon or
even a plane than visitors from
a faraway planet.
If there's evidence of
new technology flying around in the
skies, anti-gravity, that's worth
billions and billions of dollars.
And we should spend billions
of dollars investigating it.
But we don't. And I think the reason
we don't is that the evidence really
isn't there.
The government knows more about
everything that it's willing to tell
us. It's dubious that it knows
anything about UFOs being aliens,
though.