My Chat With Luis Elizondo

[Mick West]

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eozxt_HnPu4

 

[Mick West]

(Transcript coming)

 

[Jorrdan]

He failed to address the substance of your explanations of the three videos. He basically just said “our analysis was different”. Obviously he didn’t have a good response. It would be interesting to hear you discuss these with some of the highly qualified government officials who think these videos demonstrate impressive technology.

 

[Mendel]

Great interview!

My takeaway:

• advanced military technology and UFOs are very similar, that's why you have to have secrecy -- the government doesn't cover up UFOs, they cover up what advanced technology they have and know about
• the professionals don't single-source their data about an event
• also, the professionals don't assume the most likely explanation is the correct one, off one piece of data

As amateurs, that's what we're doing, because we don't have access to the wider picture; and that's fine.

 

[Mendel]

He failed to address the substance of your explanations of the three videos. He basically just said “our analysis was different”. Obviously he didn’t have a good response. It would be interesting to hear you discuss these with some of the highly qualified government officials who think these videos demonstrate impressive technology.

The problem is that the analysis itself, the methods to arrive at that analysis, and the data sources that go into that are all classified.

So anything Lou says about the analysis has to be taken with a grain of salt: he says what he has to say in order to not reveal what their internal analysis turned out to be. For that reason, I think it's going to be difficult to get anyone with that kind of access to talk about these things: if they know the classified stuff, they won't want to talk about it; and if they don't know the classified stuff, what good is it?

 

[deirdre]

My takeaway:

• He lied on official government documents (for reasons)
• He released these videos to the public/TTSA for public analysis help.... BUT the whole last half of the video is him telling us that we cannot analyze the videos because we dont have all the other sources of data AND we aren't as smart as his "very qualified" team that already tried to analyze them.
• He put uas, balloons,uav because he didnt want the public to think "UFOs" (as that is classified), but he goes all over national tv saying "it's UFOS" ???? huh?
• He also implied that (paraphrase until transcript) "we dont have enough data to make a conclusion" [if they are balloons, or birds, or camera artifacts... was my impression of the context]... but he simultaneously has enough data to conclude aliens??? huh??

i did only make it to 51 mins then got bored with the song and dance. i only wanted to know if those were the 3 best ufo evidence videos he had, or if they were the ONLY ufo evidence videos he had. which i never got an answer.

 

[abyssal dission]

He released these videos to the public/TTSA for public analysis help.... BUT the whole last half of the video is him telling us that we cannot analyze the videos because we dont have all the other sources of data AND we aren't as smart as his "very qualified" team that already tried to analyze them.

I think the finer point to be made here comes in at the end of the interview where he says that he "doesn't give a damn what people believe," he just wants them (us) to push the government for more info on this stuff - and that basically the videos were meant to get us introduced and the testimony from him and fravor are supposed to inspire us to make a movement to push the government to release more to us about these events. I heard a while back from a family member whom I talked to about these things that thats basically what it sounds like he wants and that we should be careful in considering this route as it may be an action intended to relax classification standards and unfortunately perhaps to the benefit of adversarial nations looking to gain whatever little tid-bits of information they can get about our systems and how they work.

He put uas, balloons,uav because he didnt want the public to think "UFOs" (as that is classified), but he goes all over national tv saying "it's UFOS" ???? huh?

I think the one thing that potentially explains this is the timing. When was this form submitted and when did the interviews occur? Was the form submitted during the wikileaks scandal (he seems to imply yes it was) and were the videos talked about on the news a while after, say, perhaps after the government had time to review its security measure and make improvement and he felt more comfortable telling us more?

 

[Tim Printy]

To be honest, I only watched part of the interview but I got a bit fed up with his song and dance when Mick confronted him with the explanations.

1. He reminded me of a manager, who really does not understand details. As a technician, I have seen that face/response multiple times. You are trying to explain something and they nod their head but, deep down, you know that they have no idea what you are talking about and seem uninterested in learning. I have been in meetings where managers/supervisors simply ask irrelevant questions while you and the engineers try and resolve the technical problem.
2. Showing a bunch of aircraft flashcards is not an example of analysis. I bet you can buy those exact same cards online somewhere. They used to give cards like this to the ground observer corps back in the 40s and 50s. These cards have no bearing in the videos since one object is a dot, another is a very small line, and the third is oversaturated by the thermal image. I would think that real analysts don't bother with such cards since they probably know what a MIG-21 looks like anyway. You don't see fighter pilots pulling up flashcards in the middle of a dog fight! You do give such cards to people who are not familiar with the subject. See #1 where I mention managers with little knowledge on the subject matter. All the cards demonstrate is he needed a crutch to help him learn the subject he was unfamiliar with.
3. When it comes to analysis, he states there were other factors involved in the AATIPs analysis that are not available to the public that demonstrates that the analysis is wrong. I guess my first question to this is, "why did you release the videos in the first place if you are not going to release all of the information?" It seems that it is more a publicity stunt to get money for the TTSA. My second question is, "Did the TTSA do any "analysis" on the videos and why weren't these published?" Once again, if there is no attempt at analyzing these videos, then it was just a publicity stunt. Another thought on this, "What is the difference between data that is unavailable and no data at all?" I am very skeptical that any such analysis was ever done and if there really was any additional data. Remember, we are talking about an individual, who seems to be unfamiliar with the details and was little more than a manager (if he was even that) that quickly left the DOD in order to start a money-making scheme with a singer interested in the subject of UFOs.

 

[Mendel]

Showing a bunch of aircraft flashcards is not an example of analysis.

It's an illustration that the military has people whose job it is to identify aircraft; he mentions that they have people who can look at footage and say, that's a MiG doing a 3G turn seen from a quarter below. It's like showing a multiplication table to illustrate that you have people who can do advanced maths because you can't really show the advanced maths.

The message associated with that was, when it's a military aircraft, we have people who will know that it is (and they won't be using a deck of cards to make that determination).

It also says that fighter pilots are trained to identify other fighters quickly and accurately as a matter of survival -- again, obviously not using a deck of cards, that's just a training tool you start with when you learn that skill.

 

[Mick West]

22:11
You're never gonna touch the fact I never I never went to go speak to to anybody in the press. In fact, I didn't even want to. I would my hope was that when I went with Tom DeLonge, it was going to be somewhat subdued. He asked me said, Hey, do you mind? I'm doing a kind of an internet type announcement for this effort to bring awareness. Do you mind saying a few words? And I saw and I thought, Steve justice were there. And we had some other folks. I said, How? Okay, yeah, I'm, I'm happy to say a few things, how I had worked with me, obviously, on a tip. But I did not reach out to the New York Times, it was not me who discussed with Leslie Keane, initially, anything about the program, she had her own sources. And somehow she had that video, I did not provide it to her. And honestly, and I didn't ask where she got, because I frankly didn't want to know. You know, that really wasn't my business. And I don't want to, you know, overcomplicate things unnecessarily. The bottom line is she asked me to meet with her. I did, I answered her questions. Of course, there were questions I couldn't because I'm not going to talk about anything that's classified. There was my my impression she had spoken to other people, quite a few other people before she had spoken to me because she was asking me some very pointed, very relevant questions. And in fact, a few I was a bit uncomfortable to answer, because it showed that she had a lot more insight into the topic than then I would have expected her to have so she had a pretty decent understanding of, of, of, of that effort already. And I suspect that there were people that had spoken to her.

Content from external source

Interesting that the Dec 16 2017 NYT story said about GIMBAL:

Article:

A video shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. By Courtesy of U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE on Publish DateDecember 16, 2017. .

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20171216172629/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

And about FLIR1/Nimitz

Article:

Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft — including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20171216172629/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

This seems to strongly suggest they got them directly from AATIP, in august 2017. That's the same time Elizondo was still there and the month of the email exchange behind the 1910 form.

Then we have this entirely different story from Phenomenon:

1:08:25
Narrator:
Elizondo his colleagues, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for intelligence, Christopher Mellon, managed to obtain the tapes from the Pentagon, and chose the New York Times to break the story.

Chris Mellon
I received the videos, the now-famous videos in the Pentagon parking lot. From a Defense Department official, I still have the originals in the packaging. This is a case where somebody bent the rules a little bit, and they did so for the larger good. And we're absolutely all better off because of it.

Content from external source

Mellon posted the following pictures on his website, then took them down. They were posted on multiple other sites. One is the original packaging:




Unclassified CDs dated 9/5 and the security bag labeled: "To: L. Elizondo, From: R. Essex, and then "Chris Mellon, 1600 9/7/17" - which all looks like a chain of custody.

So I think this raises a few questions of conflicting accounts.

 

[Mendel]

So I think this raises a few questions of conflicting accounts.

Even if Elizondo gave those disks to Mellon who then passed them on to Keane, Elizondo's account in your interview would be accurate. In fact, he'd especially not want to ask where she got it from if he already knew. So a possible sequence of events is Elizondo passing it on to Mellon passing it on to Keane, who reaches out to Elizondo, who then confirms that these videos are authentic. No conflicting accounts.

 

[jarlrmai]

Maybe should have just nailed him down to Go Fast, spent the whole video on it if required talk him through the maths I get he's not an 'expert' and always just defers to them. However the figures are right there on the screen. It's not about seeing it just a camera view the actual figures are on it. Everything else can be waffled around and claimed to be opinions and extra data etc.

Either the 'finest engineers' are unable to do basic trig or the figures on screen are wrong and this is never mentioned whereas other figures on the HUD are claimed to be correct.

Maybe he wouldn't do the video if this was the format, or would refuse to bring the video up on his own computer etc I dunno.

I know you had a limited time and wanted to cover a lot of areas but 90% of what he says is waffle.

 

[abyssal dission]

Can't forget that at least one video were publicly available on the web since 2009 on that German film student website, supposedly originally uploaded there (an apparent unsecure part of their server) by someone from the nimitz fleet who had the OG recording.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070209104330/http://www.vision-unlimited.de/extern/f4.mpg

I reached out to the owner of this website over facebook about a year or two ago and was told that they had no idea it was there and that it was / must have been uploaded to an unsecure section of their site via FTP. No idea how credible that really sounds, I've never really heard of such an insecure part of a site where just anyone could FTP in whatever file they wanted, seems like a gateway to let all sorts of illegal / unwanted stuff there so you'd think you'd think about that if it were your site.

I have always been a little upset that the video seems suspiciously titled (f4.mpg - referring to the original owner's knowledge that its a recording of an F4 Phantom?) and that it appeared on a student film website of all places. Was the video a fake made by these students? If so did they do it on their own? Or were they paid to produce some sort of propoganda and then told to just say it was uploaded to their site unknowingly? etc.

 

[Rocky]

Mellon posted the following pictures on his website, then took them down.

So why is the date written in a different color marker? [...]

 

[Rocky]

He failed to address the substance of your explanations of the three videos. He basically just said “our analysis was different”. Obviously he didn’t have a good response. It would be interesting to hear you discuss these with some of the highly qualified government officials who think these videos demonstrate impressive technology.

That's because what he knows is "all top secret" and he can't talk about it. LMAO!

 

[Mendel]

So why is the date written in a different color marker?

Because "R. Essex" used the blue marker, and whoever wrote "Chris Mellon" wasn't the same person and didn't write it at the same time.
Why do you think it should be the same marker, under these circumstances?

 

[Jorrdan]

It’s not like they’re doing quantum mechanics when reviewing a video. It’s really not that complicated and a reasonably smart person who does there research can understand how you calculate speed from video and how the gimbal camera works.

West puts his analysis out there in response to specific claims people like Elizondo have made. They say the Go Fast video shows a rapidly moving object. West runs the numbers and shows it’s not going very fast at all. It’s just optical illusion because of parallax. West uses the numbers on the the FLIR video to do basic trig. Any high school trig student could use their SOHCAHTOA skills to figure out distance and from that speed. This isn’t high level stuff. It’s just basic math and it’s either correct or not.

Elizondo could have said several things in response: The numbers on the FLIR screen aren’t reliable. Mick made a sloppy math error. He misunderstood what the numbers on the video mean.

He could have given a concrete answer on that but he just said “we disagree”.

The problem is that the analysis itself, the methods to arrive at that analysis, and the data sources that go into that are all classified.

 

[Rory]

My takeaway: if you have a good, non-mysterious explanation for any UAP encounter, it's only because you don't have access to other data (and, no, you can't have access to it, or know what kind of data it is, nor know whether it exists or not).

 

[Dr K]

Sorry, I’m late to the discussion, and know that some of these points have been made above. Still, a few thoughts/questions:

I think it’s tough to argue the specifics of the three videos because the response will always be: “well, we have more info that proves you wrong, but we can’t share it.” As a result, if there is a future discussion, I’d be curious to hear more about some of the topics below:

What is his theory/interpretation as a whole? I know the meta-bunk ethos is more about debunking specific incidents than evaluating broader theories, but I think it’s worth a discussion. A lot of folks in the UFO community fall back on “we don’t know/it’s a mystery/we need more research” storyline. Elizondo/TTSA came back to that a lot on their History Channel show. But this “take-away” is a cop-out -- that’s not how science works (scientists evaluate data AND offer conclusions), and that’s not how the government/military works -- surely they have investigated many possible interpretations of these videos, and have ranked them in terms of likelihood. When the government calls these ‘unidentified’, that’s government-speak for “we don’t want to talk about it,” and not “we have no idea -- it’s probably aliens.”

Mick, if your theory is correct (there are prosaic explanations), then that explains a lot of aspects of the data. That’s why Fravor’s military commanders seemed uninterested -- they also know there are prosaic explanations. And Mr. Elizondo supposedly left the government because they weren’t taking the issue seriously -- well, perhaps they aren’t taking it seriously because they know what’s going on and don’t see compelling evidence of anything unusual. And it explains why the scientific community isn’t terribly interested -- the data just aren’t compelling enough to entertain an extra-terrestrial explanation. At the end of the day, it’s blurry dots on a screen and anecdotal/eyewitness testimony, and probably mis-identification of military technology, or drones, or balloons, or commercial aircraft, etc.

Mr. Elizondo and the (former) TTSA team keep positioning this as a military threat. That’s a great storyline for advancing their agenda of generating interest in the topic. Well, if their theory is that this is an alien intelligence -- they could clearly conquer the earth with little trouble. Their technology must be so far ahead that we could offer little resistance. That war would last five minutes and we’d all be working in the mines (or whatever). The ‘threat’ storyline has been around for a long time -- aliens supposedly hacked nuclear missile sites back in the 70s, and Rendlesham Forest etc., but if they had that ability, why aren’t they doing it all the time? What is their purpose? Mellon has said he thinks the UAPs may be involved in surveying. Surveying they can’t do from space? With the technology for interstellar travel, and the supposed ability to defy physics as we understand it, what data are they collecting from surveying that they haven’t been able to get over the last 20 years?

Along similar lines, The Nimitz incident was in 2004! What’s happened since then? If it’s aliens, they were pretty bold about making their presence known in 2004. Where are all the incidents since? (although they will probably argue that there are lots of subsequent incidents, but we just haven’t heard about them)

Tom DeLonge is clearly on record (Joe Rogan podcast) as saying there are multiple species of aliens on earth, using us as proxies in an interstellar war. OK, well that’s at least a theory of some kind. Why wasn’t that on the History Channel show? If that’s their interpretation of the data, let’s hear more about that.

With the proliferation of cell phones, why hasn’t there been a proliferation of high-quality videos showing UAPs? The same can be said for Bigfoot -- why was there one “great” video (the Patterson/Gimlin film) 50 years ago, but everything since has been blob-squatches, despite the proliferation of cell phones and trail cams? That’s why the bigfoot community has increasingly gotten into “woo” explanations.

I believe Mr. Elizondo said in your interview that he “wasn’t getting paid for this.” But he presumably was getting paid by TTSA, and presumably he was paid by the History Channel. And presumably he’s paid for appearances at UFO conferences. It seems to me that the TTSA team engineered the release of the videos, and then joined a for-profit company whose explicit goal was to generate public interest in the topic, and they profited via their TV show. That is now more clear than ever as the sole remaining purpose of TTSA is entertainment given their recent streamlining. What happened to their divisions devoted to materials, for example? They never found any -- at least not any ever published or submitted for peer review. Amount of actual compelling data uncovered by TTSA: zero. But mission accomplished for driving public interest in the topic.

I could be wrong, but weren’t all three videos taken as part of training exercises? And does that mean the fighter jets aren’t armed? If so, that would be a perfect time for the government to experiment with technologies for creating the impression that there are hundreds of radar targets. Or radar targets that supposedly drop from space to the ocean surface. Or some kind of air/sea (“trans-medium”) balloons/drones. The UFO community often says the government/military would never test a technology on another group within the government/military without their knowledge, but I think history disproves that.

Also, was Mr. Elizondo also involved in Skinwalker Ranch? If not, what’s his take on that? That was clearly part of the genesis of this program via the Harry Reid/Robert Bigelow combo. If someone says aliens from another planet are visiting us -- ok, maybe, at least that’s conceivable is a science-driven view of the universe. But if you are talking about haunted ranches and immortal wolves etc. -- then you are going down a whole different rabbit hole. Again, what’s their theory that would tie together all of their supposed data?

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

It's time to point to this again:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/bl...s-ufo-disclosure-enterprise.9155/#post-213742

It's just the same old thing.

 

[Ravi]

It's time to point to this again:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/bl...s-ufo-disclosure-enterprise.9155/#post-213742

It's just the same old thing.

Cannot agree more. We seem to be stuck in an endless loop. A new generation picks it up, forgets all about the older research, and there you go again. It is tiring.

 

[Mendel]

My takeaway: if you have a good, non-mysterious explanation for any UAP encounter, it's only because you don't have access to other data (and, no, you can't have access to it, or know what kind of data it is, nor know whether it exists or not).

I've all but convinced myself that the "hidden evidence" isn't data so much as eyewitness accounts. It seems to me that Elizondo is trying to build up his pilots as experts (that's what his aircraft identification cards schtick is for), and I suspect that, intuitively, he credits their accounts more than the technical analyses of the data. This may be caused by him understanding these witnesses better than the technical analyses, and he defends this stance internally by explaining that we don't have access to all of the interviews that have been done (because they're classified), so we can't be as convinced that these witnesses accounts are correct as he is.

The problem with that is that eyewitnesses' accounts are horribly inaccurate in the context of criminal trials, and this inaccuracy can be exacerbated by mismanagement of the witnesses: by the information they're exposed to, by the way they're interviewed, etc. Juries love witnesses, but many procedural rules exist precisely because witnesses can easily (and inadvertantly!) manipulated into testifying to things that did not happen.

And that aligns with how conspiracy theories spread: people who don't have the education to understand a technical analysis instead believe other people (multipliers) whom they trust, and this trust stems from those multipliers affirming pre-existing beliefs or fears. If these beliefs or fears are irrational, cue the rabbit hole.

tl;dr (classified) witnesses are more convincing, but data (and analysis) is more correct