Mick West

The above two slides are from a talk by famous UFO investigator Jacques Vallee. The talk came up because scientist Garry Nolan (who sometimes works with Vallee) mentioned a later aspect of the case (a star-shaped mark on a photo and a giant UFO nobody noticed) in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson.

But someone in the comments pointed out the likely cause in April 2022:

The Paisley Wave 4 months ago
With all respect for Dr. Vallee, the 'crosshair' marks may have a simple explanation. Search for images of blowdryers and you'll see many, especially the older ones, have metal crosshair-shaped grills at their openings. They get hot and can burn the skin leaving marks corresponding with their...

As a skeptic, I often have an experience that many people will find familiar. I'm talking to someone. They tell me something I know to be wrong. I explain why they are wrong. They refuse to believe me. I continue to try, sometimes over days or weeks. They still won't get it, and sometimes their false belief becomes even stronger. What is wrong with them?

The inability of the true believer to see reason is a frustrating puzzle. One of the most common questions I get in interviews is, "why do people fall for conspiracy theories?" I explain that it's often just a chain of chance, circumstances, and being in an unsettled time in their life with too much spare time. But that's not the "why" the interviewer is looking for. They want to know what is wrong with the conspiracy theorist. Specifically what is mentally wrong with them.

A Desire to Pathologize​

There seems to be a natural desire to pathologize unconventional beliefs. Many of these conspiracy theories seem...

[Source: WVNY Twitter]

The shape of this UFO is not entirely uncommon, a horizontal-oriented diamond is sometimes seen when distant lights are out of focus. For example, in this "UFO" video of a plane, which is just the out-of-focus lights - an effect called "bokeh"
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ex...fo-burwell-fen-uk-c-130-landing-lights.11959/


What's unusual here is that the shape is dark and slowly moving. Is this a case of "dark bokeh"? I'd never really thought about such a thing before, but of course, it's quite possible. Like here:


I put a fleck...

Travis Taylor (the former chief scientist at the Pentagon's UAP Task Force) made a very specific claim on CBS 8 News Now:

From recent calculations I've done, if this device [i.e. Gimbal], whatever this object is, is further away than 8km, then it has to be at the temperature of the melting point of aluminum, and if it's further than 50km, it's at the melting point of steel. That's how hot it would have to be to show up in this way in this sensor. So, it's not a jet that's 50 miles away, and we are getting glare of it

This comes from work he showed at a recent UFO conference, where he presented an overview of analysis that he claims demonstrates a limit on how far away the Gimbal object can be.

He bases this around a notion of "saturated" that seems poorly defined. Essentially he's using it as a synonym for "overexposed". That means for an individual pixel in an image it's brighter than the maximum value the digital...

Sitrec is a Situation Recreation tool that's just starting out in development. It's born from the Gimbal Simulator, and that's the only situation it's recreating - but eventually I'll extend it to GoFast, Nimitz, Aguadilla, Rubber Duck, mysterious DHS video #4, - and hopefully make it available so others can use it on arbitrary videos. You can see (and use) it here:
https://www.metabunk.org/sitrec/

The goal is to allow real-time analysis and visualization of the possible 3D interpretations that might fit a 2D video (and any other data for a particular case) and see from that what is the most likely scenario.

This is very much a work-in-progress, and not really usable for much right now, but I'm starting this discussion thread to track the progress and get feedback and ideas. The initial goal is to replicate and check the work of @Edward...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs

The "Gimbal" UFO is the poster child of modern UFO videos. Leaked in 2017, and officially released in 2019, it's considered by many to show a genuine anomalous craft, exhibiting flight characteristics beyond current human technology.

But is it? There are four observables in the video, four things you can check yourself, that demonstrate that the most likely thing we are looking at is actually a camera artifact. It's probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it, and rotating only because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.

This does not mean it's not a "UAP", or that it's not unidentified, or that it's not an amazing craft - it just means it's not actually exhibiting any incredible behavior, and so this opens the door to more mundane possibilities, like a distant small jet, just flying away, the...

There's an apparent aricraft with the callsign "AVRORA" that shows up on FlightRadar24. It's the subject of several threads on Reddit, but nobody seems to have figured out what it is.

The track initially looks like a standard trans-pacific route, but it's not. There's only two segments, one in the Arizona desert, and one off the coast of the Russian Kamchatka peninsula. There's no data for the path in-between (which is just an interpolated great circle).

The Kamchatka location just shows up as occasional sporadic results, over several days, with very low air speed.

The Arizona segment is very different, a steep slope and several tight turns of a 0.5 mile diameter circle at about 26 knots

(These tracks are extracted from the raw JSON files using a custom Python script)

What could this be? I think there's a few options, in no great order

1. ADS-B Spoofing - i.e. not...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPGmUF6R3CY

This was a relatively straightforward case. The object looked like a Tic-Tac shaped blob. Initially I thought it was fake, but then it quickly became apparent it was a real object (or at least a really good 3D fake).

The low resolution, sharpening, and digital zoom make bright white shapes turn into blobs. Here on the right there the buildings and the racetrack, with the object overlaid at the same resolution.

Sharpening makes it worse at this scale, as it adds dark pixels which make it look bigger. See the gaps between the buildings.

Tracking down the plane was a simple matter as they gave the flight number, date, location, and view direction.

Article:

tic tac ufo seen (video...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu0EemWzZpM

Article:

1. The UAP/Light came from above and stopped/hovered near FL37, about the same altitude as the aircraft, shone a light on the 767 and briefly approached the aircraft. Then it instantly matched the speed, and heading of the aircraft and maintained a consistent separation.

a. The light descended vertically, stopped abruptly, and shone a light on the 767 causing the crew to believe that there was another airliner on a collision heading with its landing lights on.

b. It changed direction from vertical descent to a sudden stop/hover, to approaching the aircraft briefly, to taking the same heading and speed of the aircraft at about the same altitude and an estimated distance of 1-2k ft.

c. It matched the altitude, speed, and heading of the aircraft, 575mph and at 37,000ft for over...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHZn29dqy-I

In the "small, or far away" category this video is quite popular. It shows a light close to the horizon. The light hovers, pulsating, then suddenly moves to the left. It hovers for a while more and then ascends vertically. When it moves it leaves a trail of light.

Pretty amazing, if it were actually way out over the ocean. However, a simpler explanation occurred to me when I noticed the people walking on the beach path. If we think the object as being directly above them instead of above the horizon, then it suddenly snaps into something simpler. A drone.



The light trail, first of all, is just a common artifact of webcams like this. In low light, they build up the image using image persistence. This creates trails around anything that's...

[Thread Updated, October 20, 2021]

Robert Salas' claims about UFO deactivating Nuclear weapons are once again bouncing around the media. A lot of the older analysis of these claims is getting lost to Internet decay, so I've gathered here the key resources that help understand the story from a skeptic's perspective.

James Carlson's highly detailed (357 Pages) "American, Credulous - Establishing the Truth Behind the Echo Flight Incident of March 16, 1967"

Article:

The Echo Flight Incident holds a sad place of pride in Robert Hastings’ history of UFO interest in the marching forth of nuclear arms around the world, UFOs and Nukes, but as we shall see, his general disregard for anything approaching a generally accepted standard of proof ensures that his magnum opus will be forever classified as an interesting but...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5Q82LsMPjQ



A 1080p50 video. Location and time on screen identifies it as taken from "IRONS12"


Which is this plane:

(Note the camera)

video description

My apologies for the bullshit but the footage was removed by YouTube so I am attempting to post again. I am finally proud to present to you guys the very FIRST legitimate footage of a genuine UAP craft tracked for over 40 minutes by the department of Homeland Security using FLIR optics system in black hot mode. The footage was captured by an RC-26 reconnaissance plane looking for drug smugglers somewhere over Tuscon Arizona. The object was spotted 20 minutes into the footage and was tracked for a full 40 minutes until the footage ended...

If you are short on time, then I made a one minute video explaining this:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bFfuIidCK0

Background: Infrared footage from the Chilean Navy appears to show some kind of flying object that briefly leaves a trail behind it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry..._us_586d37bce4b014e7c72ee56b?lciacn1ruwjkmx6r (.", "\.)

At 1:52 pm, while filming the terrain, the technician observed a strange object flying to the left over the ocean. Soon both...

The clickbait site "National File" posted this false headline (and sub-heading):

Article:

Pfizer Is Now Developing A Twice-Per-Day COVID Pill That Must Be Taken Alongside Vaccines
Pfizer is so confident the pill will be approved and likely mandated that it has started production before the end of clinical trials

This has been shared on social media, usually without any context, making it seem like it's a pill everyone will be mandated to take twice a day forever in addition to the vaccine.

In reality, this is an antiviral drug, a protease inhibitor, currently called PF-07321332, which is designed to treat patients who are ill with COVID-19. Pfizer promotes it as a potential "a novel oral therapy that could be prescribed at the...

I found the above meme on Facebook, and reposted it on Twitter. I should relaly not have been surprised, but I got quite a bit of negative reaction from people saying I was spreading disinformation. But I think it's essentially true, even if the 99.2% figure is a little high although the 99.2% figure is out of date . But let's fact-check with sources. Firstly the first five "Who has been vaccinated" - which might seem uncontroversial, but people were still pushing back at some.

1. Donald Trump and every other living US president.
That's Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton and Carter.

Article:

Published March 1, 2021
Updated April 17, 2021
Former President Donald J. Trump and his wife, Melania, quietly...

The above still image from a video was the one chosen by some media outlets a few years ago (2014) to illustrate the story "VIDEO: Birdwatcher spots UFO in skies above Burwell- and has the footage to prove it!." And why not, it looks like a weird diamond shaped craft, almost a flying saucer.

This old story wasn't on my radar until I made a comment on Twitter, wondering why (with their binoculars and long-lens cameras) birdwatchers didn't see UFOs (implying the the question of why there are no god photos of UFOs). Of course people then Googled "birdwatcher UFO" and that's about the only story that pops up, so it was gleefully offered as a counter-example by at least...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF3w0kI53aU



Just looks like Venus at sunset? But when zoomed in, it takes on all kinds of shapes


I've got a P900. To me these all look like some kind of optical distortions of a small light source (i.e. Venus). However I've not seen anything this extreme before, and I wonder what's actually going on. The shapes seem relatively stable, so that seems to rule out the normal atmospheric turbulence. Camera shake and zooming don't really seem to change the shape, and we don't see it actually change shape often, that seems to be off-screen.

It's possible someone is deliberately inducing the distortion with something on the...

Article:

So here’s the deal. I did find one, you know, piece interesting, it appears that there is a blinking what appears to be like a plane going overhead. I don’t know, if that was a plane, I’m making the assumption It was a plane. But you know, remember when you go back into history with UFOs, I mean, we’re talking as far back as they’ve ever been recorded, there have always been blinking UFOs, I’m not going to count that out. I’m gonna say I don’t know. But it appears to me that the VIPR team individual, they’re focusing on the UFOs, and then a plane happens to pass above, which was kind of interesting, because it’s different looking. It’s blinking, it’s going. So that was neat. He didn’t focus in on it, as far as I can tell. And I was told that if it was an object of extreme interest, the individual would have focused in on it. So as far as the...

One of a set of four photos (attached in zip file, original webp, converted to PNGs).
Source: Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/o9a39j/here_ya_go_guys_deleted_pictures_from_the/

What looks fake to me is the grain. It looks like the photoshop "Add Noise" filter, which adds noise at pixel resolution, rather than some actual film grain. So you get lots of random short lines.


Here, I've recreated it on the left, with the "photo" on the right.

By comparison, here's a crop of photo I scanned in at 600dpi


Film grain is there, but fuzzy, not pixel aligned noise.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FuVClipbh4

Article:

Puthoff was the brains behind what the intelligence community referred to as the “remote viewing program,” and he worked with an informal group of colleagues on a range of paranormal issues, a team that Vallée termed the “invisible college.” Over the next half-century, Puthoff would help to keep interest in UFOs alive inside the government.

In 1995, Project Stargate ended in failure. Government interest in UFOs and the paranormal might have faded away just as surely if not for the interest of a wealthy hotel magnate, Robert Bigelow, who had spent a lifetime obsessed with the paranormal and became a patron of UFO conspiracy theorists. Bigelow went into business with Area 51 conspiracy nut Bob Lazar, and he funded the research of dubious alien abduction...