Witness: What is it?
Narrator: UFO sightings seem to be more common than ever,
from what look like flying squids
to mysterious floating rings.
Narrator: Unidentified flying objects
are by no means a new phenomenon.
But these days, it's easier for anyone to film them.
And the US government has finally acknowledged
that they exist.
The Pentagon even released UFO videos
captured by the military for the first time ever.
But how can you tell what they are
and whether they're from Earth or somewhere else?
We went through dozens of UFO videos,
some taken by regular people,
others once classified,
to figure out what's really going on.
Mick: One big problem we have with UFOs
is that there's so much evidence,
but there's so much really bad evidence.
Narrator: Mick West is an investigator of UFO videos
with a background in physics and 3D geometry.
He calls all the evidence out there bad
because the videos are often poor quality
or have logical explanations.
Mick wouldn't have been fooled by this.
Mick: This gap in the trails.
And that's something that's obviously very indicative
of a two-stage rocket.
One stage is finished,
they switch it off, they jettison it,
and then they fire up the engines in the next stage.
Narrator: Turns out, there actually was a SpaceX rocket
that launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base that night,
about 130 miles from where the video was taken.
Announcer: Liftoff.
Narrator: In fact, Mick had an explanation
for every single suspected UFO video we showed him.
These are actually pyrotechnic skydivers.
These are people who jumped out of a plane
with flares attached to their ankles,
and they're just basically floating down towards the ground.
Narrator: He's right.
That night, at a college football game in Salt Lake City,
there actually was a pyrotechnic performance
by the US Navy Parachute Team called the Leap Frogs.
Mick: It looks to me exactly like a meteorite.
But we've seen green ones before,
and they look exactly like this,
and they move at about that speed.
Narrator: Other videos from the same night
captured a similar green object in the sky.
And according to NASA,
it was one of the most active periods for meteors that year.
Mick: The green comes from the composition,
the chemical composition of the meteorite.
Witness: That's in the sky right now, everybody.
That's some kind of kite,
some kind of a kite that is being flown.
And we often see kites with multiple streamers behind them.
Narrator: We found that there are plenty of green spaces
and a kite shop around where this video was taken.
And about a month earlier,
a local publication confirmed
that an octopus-shaped kite has been frequently sighted
in the sky, and that an alien invasion is not underway.
Mick: I think probably a Coast Guard helicopter
has dropped two flares from a fairly high altitude.
They're being used to illuminate the surface of the ocean
to try to find a capsized boat or something like that.
When it's, you know,
it's about to go out, you'll launch two more,
and they'll come into view.
There'll be a few seconds where you see four flares,
and then the bottom ones,
which are now lower, will fade out.
Narrator: And there actually is a Coast Guard station
on the beach at Cape Lookout
in the direction of the flare seen in this video.
Mick: This actually is a smoke ring.
It could be something like a gasoline explosion.
The heat makes the smoke ring rise.
And because it's from a centralized location,
you get this vortex, a circular vortex
that goes all the way around,
and you see it rising up just like a regular smoke ring
that someone blows from a cigarette or pipe smoke.
Another way you see these happen
is from transformers exploding.
This is kind of a fairly common thing.
Narrator: These apartment buildings in Russia
are actually near several factories
where something like this could have happened,
as well as a number of firework stores.
And right after this incident in Canada,
it turns out local government officials
tweeted about a power outage.
Mick: It's not unidentified alien phenomena.
The literal definition of UFO
is just an unidentified flying object,
and a bird or a plane in the distance
can be an unidentified flying object.
Narrator: In April 2020,
the Pentagon declassified three videos
taken by the US Navy
and confirmed that the aerial phenomena were unidentified.
Alex Dietrich was one of the fighter pilots
who saw this specific incident happen.
During a routine training in 2004 with the USS Nimitz
off the coast of San Diego,
she watched the object hover over the water
and then suddenly speed out of view.
Alex: We noticed something in the water
that seemed to be disturbing the water
or making it churn.
This white, oblong-shaped object
that was moving very fast.
We don't know what it was.
It could have been a natural phenomenon.
It could have been human activity.
But the point was that it was weird,
and we couldn't recognize it.
Narrator: The video is now known as FLIR1.
But Mick says what we're seeing is just a trick of the lens.
What's actually happening there
is that the camera
was actually tracking this object
the whole time. At the end of the video,
the operator has switched through
these different modes of the video so rapidly
that the camera has just lost lock on this object.
And so it stops tracking it.
The most likely thing would be
that it's some kind of a jet engine,
and we're getting this illusion of motion
from the operator moving the camera around.
You could say it's a UFO because it's unidentified,
but it's probably just another plane.
Narrator: Another video released by the Pentagon
was taken on a training flight
off the USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2015
near the coast of Florida.
Mick has a similar explanation for this video,
which is known as Gimbal.
You see these clouds kind of whizzing by.
It doesn't mean they're actually whizzing by.
This is just the parallax effect.
It's the motion of your plane
creating a kind of apparent motion in this object.
Narrator: Parallax effect is what happens
when you're looking out a car window
and objects that are closer to you
seem to be moving much faster than ones that are far away.
Mick: But the interesting thing about this video
really comes later, when the object appears to rotate.
And I think what's actually happening here
is we're not seeing the rotation of an object,
but what we're seeing
is the infrared glare of a very hot object,
and specifically a jet engine.
And because the camera behind it is rotating,
that just causes the glare to rotate.
Narrator: This number at the top of the screen
shows that the camera starts off
pointing 54 degrees to the left.
As that number changes, it means the camera is shifting.
The moment it transitions from left to right,
the glare rotates, too.
Mick: It will do it at about zero degrees.
And that's what we see.
Narrator: The third declassified video
was also taken in 2015
by pilots training off the USS Theodore Roosevelt
along Florida's coast.
An object seems to be moving rapidly near the water.
The video is known as GoFast.
Narrator: And Mick says it's actually not that exciting
when you break down its mathematics.
The negative 22 degrees means the camera
is pointing 22 degrees below horizontal.
The 4.1 means the distance in nautical miles to the object.
And 25,000 is the altitude of the plane in feet.
Mick: We can use all of that
to find where is this object in space?
It's just high school trigonometry, essentially.
Here is a distance, and it's an angle,
and it's this sine of the angle
multiplied by the distance.
Narrator: It turns out the object
isn't actually down by the water,
but rather halfway between that and the plane.
It's also not moving very fast,
just about the speed of the wind.
Mick: What's the most likely thing?
It's probably a weather balloon,
which is a pretty boring explanation.
Narrator: So if these videos
actually have boring explanations,
why hasn't the government said so?
Mick: There's a wall of secrecy around these things
in the military.
Not because they're trying to protect the aliens,
but simply because it's just the default position
to keep everything secret.
Narrator: The Department of Defense told Insider
that any investigation into these videos
would remain classified
"to protect our people and intelligence methods,"
and to avoid revealing anything
"that may be useful to potential adversaries."
In November 2021, the DoD announced
that a new group would be working across government agencies
to look into cases of unidentified airborne objects.
It was a response to an earlier intelligence report
that called for more funding and resources
to assess these kinds of sightings,
which could fall into one of five categories.
Mick: The first one being this airborne clutter,
things like birds and balloons.
The second one being atmospheric phenomena,
which is things like clouds
or other types of optical reflections and refractions
and phenomena in the sky.
And then this possible secret technology
that the US military is testing,
or perhaps SpaceX is testing something, like a drone.
Then there's possible foreign military involvement.
And then they have a final category of other,
which I guess would include aliens and things,
but they never mention aliens.
Narrator: Still, over half of Americans
the Pew Research Center surveyed in 2021
believe that aliens have visited Earth,
and they found ways of collecting their own evidence of it.
In this online forum called UFO Stalker,
sightings are mapped in real time,
with over 5,000 recorded just this last year.
Some astronomers have voiced their theories as well.
When a flat, cigar-shaped object zipped
and tumbled through our solar system in 2017,
Harvard professor Avi Loeb suggested it was an alien probe.
Its high speed and unique trajectory
in and out of our solar system
prove that it wasn't bound by our sun's gravity.
Perhaps it is artificially produced.
And we should check whether it has
any radio communication signals coming out of it.
Narrator: A later study
found that there were no artificial emissions
coming from it, leading most scientists to believe
it was likely a shard of rock or a cloud of dust grains.
But it was still the first time an object
from another star system had been detected,
and it became known as 'Oumuamua,
which is Hawaiian for scout
or visitor from afar arriving first.
TV reporter: Now here on this map are pinpointed locations
where some 30 saucers have been sighted
and are still unexplained.
Narrator: The thing is, Mick actually does believe
that extraterrestrial life exists somewhere in the universe.
Mick: The big question really is,
are they visiting Earth right now?
And you know, secondary question is,
have they visited in the past?
I don't see the evidence yet.
What would make something unambiguous
would be perhaps much more clarity,
much higher-resolution video, or ideally two videos,
one from one angle and position,
one from a different position,
so you could triangulate where this object was in space.
And once you can do that,
then you can say 100% that this object
was making this maneuver.
That for me will be the gold standard
of a genuinely interesting UFO video.
Maybe aliens are visiting,
but they're doing it very, very quietly,
and they're not leaving any evidence at all.
So I'll believe it when I see it.