9 ms·

Mick West's breakdowns of the Pentagon UAP videos was the nail in the coffin of this era of UFO hype for me. https://youtu.be/Le7Fqbsrrm8?t=665 https://youtu.be

by reso 4y ago

Mick West's breakdowns of the Pentagon UAP videos was the nail in the coffin of this era of UFO hype for me. https://youtu.be/Le7Fqbsrrm8?t=665 https://youtu.be/Le7Fqbsrrm8?t=665 These were supposed to be the smoking gun evidence. UFO believers inside the DoD and as high up as US Senators fought for years to get them declassified. As soon as they were public, they were all quickly identified as sensor glare, bokeh, or mis-understood perspective. More generally this showed how easy it is to misinterpret the information being put out by complex sensors like FLIR, even the operators do it.

wefarrell 4y ago
That explanation fails to account for the multiple other sensors that picked them up, including several different radar systems and the fact that multiple pilots witnessed them with their eyes. However the other sensor data are classified which makes it impossible to draw any conclusions.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  If they release the videos we will know! <videos released> If they release the radar data we will know! <radar data released> If they release ...
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    The original article cites pilots, Congress-people, and members of the intelligence services saying there are hundreds of credible instances of apparently advanced technology documented by eyewitness testimony, video, radar, infrared, etc. Seems completely different than your parody here.
    - simonh 4y ago
      It really isn’t, it’s what’s happened. The recordings released a couple of years ago were also breathlessly reported to be classified smoking gun evidence, confirmed by analysts, that would change everything. Except when we got to actually see them, what we saw was video of pilots patently misreading the sensor data shown in the same recording, and some fuzzy lens flared blobs that could be anything.
      - ALittleLight 4y ago
        That's exactly what's in the article. I could quote it, but I'd basically just be copying and pasting the whole thing. Every element of my previous comment is in the original article. Either the pilots, Senators, and intelligence officials are lying (or absurdly incompetent) or it is as they say.
        simonh 4y ago
        They don’t have to be lying, just mistaken, like the pilots on some if the video we do have. Sometimes people make mistakes, it happens.
        Loquebantur 4y ago
        The idea of multiple military pilots, radar operators, analysts, etc. being mistaken simultaneously in the same way over the course of extended periods of time on multiple occasions is rather concerning. Maybe they should build in a third seat on those planes and staff it with some intellectually adequate people from hacker news? The point isn't pilots and other professionals being perfect, it is about the probability of them being wrong (should be slim). Independent probabilities multiply, making such a confluence of mishaps exceedingly unlikely.
        simonh 4y ago
        Sure, the fact that we have pilots on recordings clearly and obviously misreading instrument data also shown in the same recordings is concerning, but that's where we are. I don't understand how this can be such a huge surprise though. Humans make mistakes, we have multiple layers of checks and controls for the management of complex systems like planes because of this. It's why airliners have co-pilots, it's why we like to have multiple confirmations from different systems before making life or death critical decisions. Yet still friendly fire incidents happen, mid-air collisions happen. Accidents like the shooting down of flight 655 by the USS Vincennes happen, in which a whole bridge crew and leadership with access to all the information misinterpreted it at multiple levels of review. Similar full system failures by multiple personnel simultaneously have lead to warship collisions. It boggles my mind that somehow knowing all of this about the ever present potential for human error, even by highly trained competent people, goes out of the window when it comes to potential "UFO" sightings. All of a suddens military pilots and sensor operators are perfect paragons that never make mistakes and should never be questioned.
    - 4bpp 4y ago
      It's not clear how many independent sources this actually reflects. All that we, as members of the general public, have to go by is a low-quality video, and a bunch of "soandso said that soandso said that soandso saw..."-type reports that involve a chain of "soandso"s not selected for critical thinking (news media, congresspeople) and ending in people that all belong to the same command structure (the US military), which could have any number of reasons, some enumerated downthread, to order them to report independently having seen something - or, even more straightforwardly, to have standing orders that prevent individual personnel from coming forward and saying that to their knowledge no such thing happened if whoever the higher-ups tasked with talking to the media pulled the statement that hundreds of members of the crew independently saw the UFO out of their rear end.
    - low_tech_love 4y ago
      Exactly, plus my second-cousin and the neighbor of my father-in-law also swear they saw it.
  - wefarrell 4y ago
    to my knowledge radar data has not been released and I don't think it ever will be.
lethologica 4y ago
How can it be sensor glare when the pilots saw with their own eyes these objects?
- godelski 4y ago
  Most of these weren't things pilots saw with their physical eyes. You need to pay attention to the accounts. There are some though, to be clear. But these cases aren't like the ones we're seeing videos of. They are often something that flew between the aircraft vertically. This could easily be a bird (lower altitudes) or even part of a weather balloon that is just in free fall (these are launched all the time and have small payloads that frequently fall into the ocean). There are also tons of surveillance drones (foreign and domestic) and a few of these have been seen at night and when people look through night vision optics they'll see triangular shapes. This is something you can replicate, which builds strong evidence. I don't know if you've ever been in a small private aircraft, but if you have you may have seen another plane crossing your path. It is quite hard to see such an object until it is right on you (thank god for ADS-B). I couldn't imagine the same situation in a fighter jet. Having also seen things like balloons and birds while flying, I can tell you that things don't look the same. Your perspective is really different and optical illusions are abound (people even frequently misinterpret flight paths looking up at planes and birds). Yes, you get training for this, but at the same time that training doesn't break the illusion.
  - neom 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY scrub to 7 minutes in.
    - godelski 4y ago
      > New Radar 80kft in a second? Remember that the speed of sound is ~1.1kfps (at atm). But 80 times that? The sonic boom from that would be INSANE. I'm going with new radar new glitch. Per the video, they don't describe seeing this movement except on radar and, from my understanding, not the other object with their physical eyes but the weapons systems (which the 60 minutes video even shows an example of a glitch with Go Fast).
jossclimb 4y ago
Its speculation that it was sensor glare, boke etc. Hardly convincing at all considering its some YouTuber basing his research on grainy video. Speculation that also does not factor in multi eye witness accounts and radar measurements.
- simonh 4y ago
  They exhibit all the characteristics of bokeh and sensor glare, and it’s speculation that they are anything else. As for instrument measurements, the track that turns out to be a bird is identified as such mainly by simply correctly interpreting the instrument data. So we’re back the square one. All the ‘smoking gun’ evidence turns out to be a damp squib and now we’re just expected to believe unrecorded ‘radar measurements’ and eye witness accounts.
  - POPOSYS 4y ago
    Simon H, your inter-galactical mission has failed! People of planet earth KNOW, that YOU and your friends are HERE and we will not submit to extraterrestrial leadership! Your denial of an obvious fact is evidence of you being part of the extraterrestrial gang that tries to stay in the dark - but it is too late, you can hide in Antarctica or in the oceans, we still know that YOU are here! BTW - would you please like to support us in building better polyphonic analog synthesizers? This technology is stuck in the 80s and we still have limitations in total voice count and number of modulation sources - we need some serious evolutionary jump in this area. Thanks!
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Bokeh and sensor glare doesn't automatically discount the observations It could be a plane (or something else) and reflecting light in a way that causes bokeh/glare Looks like for every ten "I want to believe" person there's also another 'skeptic' that will discard a video for unrelated reasons
- YorickPeterse 4y ago
  I know of eye witnesses that have seen a pig fly, and I have data that shows pigs can fly. Clearly this means pigs can fly.
LatteLazy 4y ago
Thanks, that's an excellent link.
kapral18 4y ago
Check out the debunk of the debunk :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBt4CNHyAck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBt4CNHyAck
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bananabiscuit 4y ago
  Also the debunk of the debunk of the debunk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT1uRf5_dF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT1uRf5_dF4
  - mbfg 4y ago
    Curious, what does a debunk-turtle look like?
- crubier 4y ago
  What a poor debunk of the debunk. I had respect for David Fravor but listening an ex F/A-18 pilot say confidently "There is 0% chance that I'm wrong" and keeping using argument from authority convinced me that he's just wrong.
  - ikrenji 4y ago
    well he literally saw the object with his own eyes. do we have a debunk for fravors mark 1 eyeball sensor?
    - crubier 4y ago
      Maybe listen to the videos? Do you think human vision is something that is absolutely 100% foolproof? Why are there thousands of known optical illusions examples? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_optical_illusions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_optical_illusions Have you heard of spatial disorientation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_disorientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_disorientation Do you think the human eye stereo baseline is large enough to determine the depth of objects more than 15m away?
okdood64 4y ago
> they were all quickly identified as sensor glare, bokeh, or mis-understood perspective False, congressional report shows not all of them can be attributed to that. Mick West does good work, but he's not _neccesarily_ right on all accounts. Definitely good armchair expert porn though.
- simonh 4y ago
  > False, congressional report shows not all of them can be attributed to that. It says it, but does it actually show it? The videos released by the Pentagon that Mick West analysed were also supposed to have been checked by defence analysts.
  - Loquebantur 4y ago
    Why then do you believe Mick West over those professionals?
    - simonh 4y ago
      Because I watched his review analysis, I saw the instrument readings in the video that the pilots were talking about. I've listened to the explanation of what the instrument readings show, including explanatory diagrams, which has been confirmed by other experts on those systems. It's perfectly obvious in the bird video that the pilots are mistaken, their recorded statements are obvious misreadings of the instrument data actually shown in the video. You can go and watch it yourself. This material is in the public domain now.
      - ctvo 4y ago
        > Because I ... lack trust in institutions. I think I'm smarter than experts, and know better with 1/1000th the training, and 0 context they have access to. See my other contributions on covid or the war in Ukraine. (Not targeting you specifically, but the general sentiment)
        4y ago
somenameforme 4y ago
Mick West has one major problem. He takes a video, and works to create any sort of elaborate explanation with zero consideration given to probability or externalities. If he can create the same visual effect he then declares his concept as the "truth", and everything else "debunked." Zero effort is made to challenge his own conclusions or assess their probability. As an example in the Gimbel video [1], he concludes the a pilot is unknowingly locked onto another ship and what's actually showing up is just the exhaust of that ship. Would the military be unable to determine the presence of another ship in their immediate vicinity? The pilots reference a fleet of such ships showing up on instrumentation, as well as implying unusual aerodynamic factors. These factors are all completely ignored. I would put the probability of aliens as something near 0, but I would assess even that probability as higher than 'another ship's exhaust', even if one may be able to create a similar effect through such. I think the best explanation is simply *shrugs*. It's okay to accept uncertainty. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKHg-vnTFsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKHg-vnTFsM --- All that said I'm extremely skeptical of these videos and even testimony for a simple reason. All this stuff started coming out at the same time three other things also happened. There was a leak about a bunch of sci-level research supposedly being done by the military. Shortly thereafter the Navy publicly patented it. Here [2] is a patent on an inertial mass reduction tool. A web crawl for the author's name "Salvatore Pais" is an interesting and utterly bizarre. If we were researching e.g. alien technology, patenting it achieves nothing except advertising it to the world. And that's something you'd actually want to keep secret. This was (and has been) happening also at the time that the US military has began failing to meet recruitment goals, and the endless absurd failures of technology (Zumwalt class destroyers, F-35, submarines running into rocks, ships running into each other, etc) seems to imply there's been a brain drain in the military. I think this is largely just a covert recruiting campaign to get more higher-brow types interested in the military. Come enlist, and build a Stargate! It sounds a whole lot more fun than "Come join us and push ads on people who don't want them." Unfortunately it's also probably completely fake. [2] - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en
- ezconnect 4y ago
  It's also one of the rationale to build the Space Force.
dtx1 4y ago
I deeply hate the laziness that is behind those arguments and the people that follow. Here are some claims of something extraordinary. We have multiple High End sensors Witness this. Your Government is not even recording this data, let alone give it to you. They don't want you to investigate it, they don't want to investigate it themselves yet multiple independent people on different ships and official documentation all tell the same story: Something extraordinary happened. The response? Let's google "$event + debunk" and believe the first Result. Mick Wests Explanation has many issues and straight up ignores multiple facets of the event. But it sure had a great chilling effect on actually figuring out what that was. And why? Because the possibility of something extraordinary happening is unpalatable to the reflexive skeptics. Things are a priori declared to be ordinary and any evidence that doesn't fit that get's ignored.
- nirvgorilla 4y ago
  Have you read Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World book from 1996? Because this kind of crap always turns out to be garbage. We live on a rock circling a star. The only thing that makes the world more interesting than it really is is our brains that love to make crap up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.™
  - dtx1 4y ago
    When the US Government tells the world that North Korea has exploded a nuclear weapon than i can neither directly measure that myself nor do I have access to the data where and how the US Government knows that happens. Yet we all collectively believe that to be true. The Nimitz incident falls under the same category. I don't know what that was but the "debunking" by Mick West simply ignores most of the little evidence we have. And so, at least 3 People (2 Pilots, 1 Radar Operator) have come forward and told a consistent story of what happened. No one has come forward and claimed they were lying (which would be the most likely explanation). The US Government is spending at least a few bucks investigating this as a result and changes their policies on reporting UFOs. During his presidency Obama himself gathered thousands of documents on Ufos[0] and told us straight up there's stuff out there we can't explain[1]. Is it possible that is all explainable? Sure, for all I know everyone is lying and North Korea doesn't have Nukes. Is it possible that we stumbled upon something extraordinary? Yes. My Argument is simply: Mick Wests "explanations" ignore a lot of the facts out there to give an answer. Any answer. And that answer will do for the people that google $topic+debunk and stop thinking there. The fact that his explanations require you to ignore evidence, believe in really, really weird coincidences and believe that all our modern sensors on f16s and radar boats fail to account for our own planes and pilots can't distinguish our own planes from flying container sized tictacs that they stare at from multiple angles for 5 minutes on a clear day. Even if there is a very ordinary explanation for what happened, Mick West doesn't have it but his bad explanation is enough for those that don't really care and just want to reflexively debunk anything that doesn't fit their world view. If you really care, you can watch him talk with alex dietrich one of the pilots[2]. She explains to him quite well that his "explanations" for what they saw are complete nonesense. But that doesn't get you the headlines as the great debunker. [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmnqd/obamas-presidential-library-has-thousands-of-files-on-ufos https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmnqd/obamas-presidential-l... [1] https://youtu.be/u1hNYs55sqs?t=5 https://youtu.be/u1hNYs55sqs?t=5 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwZU6RiTEAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwZU6RiTEAw
dghughes 4y ago
That just proves they were actually unidentified objects. The flying part was missing since they didn't exist in physical form just glare. UFO fans are already convinced the events are UFOs which to them always means extraterrestrial aliens they just have to prove their point. Like flat Earthers have to prove how they are not wrong.
naasking 4y ago
> Mick West's breakdowns of the Pentagon UAP videos was the nail in the coffin of this era of UFO hype for me. I honestly don't know why anyone thinks West has managed to explain everything. These objects were picked up by multiple sensor systems which wouldn't show the same artifacts. Of the hundreds to thousands of reports, the DoD analysis managed to explain all except something like 14. There's still something to left to explain here.
- msm_ 4y ago
  > There's still something to left to explain here. This is like saying "of the hundreds to thousands of firefox segfaults, the Mozilla programmers managed to explain all except something like 14. Of course, there's something left to explain and improve. But Occam's razor applies, and we prefer simpler answers (like a sensor quirk).
  - naasking 4y ago
    Occam's razor does not let you dismiss observations just because they don't neatly fit into your boxes. It costs nothing to collect the data for the time when a better explanation arises.
raducu 4y ago
I have two EXTREMELY vivid recollection of UFOs that I saw. One as a child of ~6 years of age which I know is true because another witness said it was a signaling flare before I knew what signaling flares were, and as my grandpa correctly pointed out, it looked NOTHING like a signaling flare. The second one is much later, from a time I was obsessed with UFOs, and I don't know if I really saw it or it was a dream. It just bothers me so much that I can't recollect if it was all a dream or not and that I've had this memory for so long.
user8501 4y ago
All of them? Lol, okay. Honestly it’s pretty disrespectful to these pilots, who clearly witnessed something that defies mainstream explanation. Not saying it’s aliens, but secret military projects that use highly classified propulsion technology is just as interesting, and far more concerning.
likeabbas 4y ago
There's compelling evidence that Mick West's assumptions are wrong. https://twitter.com/the_cholla/status/1598090777950793729 https://twitter.com/the_cholla/status/1598090777950793729

by reso 4y ago

wefarrell 4y ago

That explanation fails to account for the multiple other sensors that picked them up, including several different radar systems and the fact that multiple pilots witnessed them with their eyes. However the other sensor data are classified which makes it impossible to draw any conclusions.

KingOfCoders 4y ago
If they release the videos we will know! <videos released> If they release the radar data we will know! <radar data released> If they release ...
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  The original article cites pilots, Congress-people, and members of the intelligence services saying there are hundreds of credible instances of apparently advanced technology documented by eyewitness testimony, video, radar, infrared, etc. Seems completely different than your parody here.
  - simonh 4y ago
    It really isn’t, it’s what’s happened. The recordings released a couple of years ago were also breathlessly reported to be classified smoking gun evidence, confirmed by analysts, that would change everything. Except when we got to actually see them, what we saw was video of pilots patently misreading the sensor data shown in the same recording, and some fuzzy lens flared blobs that could be anything.
    - ALittleLight 4y ago
      That's exactly what's in the article. I could quote it, but I'd basically just be copying and pasting the whole thing. Every element of my previous comment is in the original article. Either the pilots, Senators, and intelligence officials are lying (or absurdly incompetent) or it is as they say.
      - simonh 4y ago
        They don’t have to be lying, just mistaken, like the pilots on some if the video we do have. Sometimes people make mistakes, it happens.
        Loquebantur 4y ago
        The idea of multiple military pilots, radar operators, analysts, etc. being mistaken simultaneously in the same way over the course of extended periods of time on multiple occasions is rather concerning. Maybe they should build in a third seat on those planes and staff it with some intellectually adequate people from hacker news? The point isn't pilots and other professionals being perfect, it is about the probability of them being wrong (should be slim). Independent probabilities multiply, making such a confluence of mishaps exceedingly unlikely.
        simonh 4y ago
        Sure, the fact that we have pilots on recordings clearly and obviously misreading instrument data also shown in the same recordings is concerning, but that's where we are. I don't understand how this can be such a huge surprise though. Humans make mistakes, we have multiple layers of checks and controls for the management of complex systems like planes because of this. It's why airliners have co-pilots, it's why we like to have multiple confirmations from different systems before making life or death critical decisions. Yet still friendly fire incidents happen, mid-air collisions happen. Accidents like the shooting down of flight 655 by the USS Vincennes happen, in which a whole bridge crew and leadership with access to all the information misinterpreted it at multiple levels of review. Similar full system failures by multiple personnel simultaneously have lead to warship collisions. It boggles my mind that somehow knowing all of this about the ever present potential for human error, even by highly trained competent people, goes out of the window when it comes to potential "UFO" sightings. All of a suddens military pilots and sensor operators are perfect paragons that never make mistakes and should never be questioned.
  - 4bpp 4y ago
    It's not clear how many independent sources this actually reflects. All that we, as members of the general public, have to go by is a low-quality video, and a bunch of "soandso said that soandso said that soandso saw..."-type reports that involve a chain of "soandso"s not selected for critical thinking (news media, congresspeople) and ending in people that all belong to the same command structure (the US military), which could have any number of reasons, some enumerated downthread, to order them to report independently having seen something - or, even more straightforwardly, to have standing orders that prevent individual personnel from coming forward and saying that to their knowledge no such thing happened if whoever the higher-ups tasked with talking to the media pulled the statement that hundreds of members of the crew independently saw the UFO out of their rear end.
  - low_tech_love 4y ago
    Exactly, plus my second-cousin and the neighbor of my father-in-law also swear they saw it.
- wefarrell 4y ago
  to my knowledge radar data has not been released and I don't think it ever will be.

lethologica 4y ago

How can it be sensor glare when the pilots saw with their own eyes these objects?

godelski 4y ago
Most of these weren't things pilots saw with their physical eyes. You need to pay attention to the accounts. There are some though, to be clear. But these cases aren't like the ones we're seeing videos of. They are often something that flew between the aircraft vertically. This could easily be a bird (lower altitudes) or even part of a weather balloon that is just in free fall (these are launched all the time and have small payloads that frequently fall into the ocean). There are also tons of surveillance drones (foreign and domestic) and a few of these have been seen at night and when people look through night vision optics they'll see triangular shapes. This is something you can replicate, which builds strong evidence. I don't know if you've ever been in a small private aircraft, but if you have you may have seen another plane crossing your path. It is quite hard to see such an object until it is right on you (thank god for ADS-B). I couldn't imagine the same situation in a fighter jet. Having also seen things like balloons and birds while flying, I can tell you that things don't look the same. Your perspective is really different and optical illusions are abound (people even frequently misinterpret flight paths looking up at planes and birds). Yes, you get training for this, but at the same time that training doesn't break the illusion.
- neom 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY scrub to 7 minutes in.
  - godelski 4y ago
    > New Radar 80kft in a second? Remember that the speed of sound is ~1.1kfps (at atm). But 80 times that? The sonic boom from that would be INSANE. I'm going with new radar new glitch. Per the video, they don't describe seeing this movement except on radar and, from my understanding, not the other object with their physical eyes but the weapons systems (which the 60 minutes video even shows an example of a glitch with Go Fast).

jossclimb 4y ago

Its speculation that it was sensor glare, boke etc. Hardly convincing at all considering its some YouTuber basing his research on grainy video. Speculation that also does not factor in multi eye witness accounts and radar measurements.

simonh 4y ago
They exhibit all the characteristics of bokeh and sensor glare, and it’s speculation that they are anything else. As for instrument measurements, the track that turns out to be a bird is identified as such mainly by simply correctly interpreting the instrument data. So we’re back the square one. All the ‘smoking gun’ evidence turns out to be a damp squib and now we’re just expected to believe unrecorded ‘radar measurements’ and eye witness accounts.
- POPOSYS 4y ago
  Simon H, your inter-galactical mission has failed! People of planet earth KNOW, that YOU and your friends are HERE and we will not submit to extraterrestrial leadership! Your denial of an obvious fact is evidence of you being part of the extraterrestrial gang that tries to stay in the dark - but it is too late, you can hide in Antarctica or in the oceans, we still know that YOU are here! BTW - would you please like to support us in building better polyphonic analog synthesizers? This technology is stuck in the 80s and we still have limitations in total voice count and number of modulation sources - we need some serious evolutionary jump in this area. Thanks!
raverbashing 4y ago
Bokeh and sensor glare doesn't automatically discount the observations It could be a plane (or something else) and reflecting light in a way that causes bokeh/glare Looks like for every ten "I want to believe" person there's also another 'skeptic' that will discard a video for unrelated reasons
YorickPeterse 4y ago
I know of eye witnesses that have seen a pig fly, and I have data that shows pigs can fly. Clearly this means pigs can fly.

LatteLazy 4y ago

Thanks, that's an excellent link.

kapral18 4y ago

Check out the debunk of the debunk :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBt4CNHyAck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBt4CNHyAck

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bananabiscuit 4y ago
Also the debunk of the debunk of the debunk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT1uRf5_dF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT1uRf5_dF4
- mbfg 4y ago
  Curious, what does a debunk-turtle look like?
crubier 4y ago
What a poor debunk of the debunk. I had respect for David Fravor but listening an ex F/A-18 pilot say confidently "There is 0% chance that I'm wrong" and keeping using argument from authority convinced me that he's just wrong.
- ikrenji 4y ago
  well he literally saw the object with his own eyes. do we have a debunk for fravors mark 1 eyeball sensor?
  - crubier 4y ago
    Maybe listen to the videos? Do you think human vision is something that is absolutely 100% foolproof? Why are there thousands of known optical illusions examples? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_optical_illusions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_optical_illusions Have you heard of spatial disorientation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_disorientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_disorientation Do you think the human eye stereo baseline is large enough to determine the depth of objects more than 15m away?

okdood64 4y ago

> they were all quickly identified as sensor glare, bokeh, or mis-understood perspective False, congressional report shows not all of them can be attributed to that. Mick West does good work, but he's not _neccesarily_ right on all accounts. Definitely good armchair expert porn though.

simonh 4y ago
> False, congressional report shows not all of them can be attributed to that. It says it, but does it actually show it? The videos released by the Pentagon that Mick West analysed were also supposed to have been checked by defence analysts.
- Loquebantur 4y ago
  Why then do you believe Mick West over those professionals?
  - simonh 4y ago
    Because I watched his review analysis, I saw the instrument readings in the video that the pilots were talking about. I've listened to the explanation of what the instrument readings show, including explanatory diagrams, which has been confirmed by other experts on those systems. It's perfectly obvious in the bird video that the pilots are mistaken, their recorded statements are obvious misreadings of the instrument data actually shown in the video. You can go and watch it yourself. This material is in the public domain now.
    - ctvo 4y ago
      > Because I ... lack trust in institutions. I think I'm smarter than experts, and know better with 1/1000th the training, and 0 context they have access to. See my other contributions on covid or the war in Ukraine. (Not targeting you specifically, but the general sentiment)
      - 4y ago

somenameforme 4y ago

Mick West has one major problem. He takes a video, and works to create any sort of elaborate explanation with zero consideration given to probability or externalities. If he can create the same visual effect he then declares his concept as the "truth", and everything else "debunked." Zero effort is made to challenge his own conclusions or assess their probability. As an example in the Gimbel video [1], he concludes the a pilot is unknowingly locked onto another ship and what's actually showing up is just the exhaust of that ship. Would the military be unable to determine the presence of another ship in their immediate vicinity? The pilots reference a fleet of such ships showing up on instrumentation, as well as implying unusual aerodynamic factors. These factors are all completely ignored. I would put the probability of aliens as something near 0, but I would assess even that probability as higher than 'another ship's exhaust', even if one may be able to create a similar effect through such. I think the best explanation is simply *shrugs*. It's okay to accept uncertainty. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKHg-vnTFsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKHg-vnTFsM --- All that said I'm extremely skeptical of these videos and even testimony for a simple reason. All this stuff started coming out at the same time three other things also happened. There was a leak about a bunch of sci-level research supposedly being done by the military. Shortly thereafter the Navy publicly patented it. Here [2] is a patent on an inertial mass reduction tool. A web crawl for the author's name "Salvatore Pais" is an interesting and utterly bizarre. If we were researching e.g. alien technology, patenting it achieves nothing except advertising it to the world. And that's something you'd actually want to keep secret. This was (and has been) happening also at the time that the US military has began failing to meet recruitment goals, and the endless absurd failures of technology (Zumwalt class destroyers, F-35, submarines running into rocks, ships running into each other, etc) seems to imply there's been a brain drain in the military. I think this is largely just a covert recruiting campaign to get more higher-brow types interested in the military. Come enlist, and build a Stargate! It sounds a whole lot more fun than "Come join us and push ads on people who don't want them." Unfortunately it's also probably completely fake. [2] - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en

ezconnect 4y ago
It's also one of the rationale to build the Space Force.

dtx1 4y ago

I deeply hate the laziness that is behind those arguments and the people that follow. Here are some claims of something extraordinary. We have multiple High End sensors Witness this. Your Government is not even recording this data, let alone give it to you. They don't want you to investigate it, they don't want to investigate it themselves yet multiple independent people on different ships and official documentation all tell the same story: Something extraordinary happened. The response? Let's google "$event + debunk" and believe the first Result. Mick Wests Explanation has many issues and straight up ignores multiple facets of the event. But it sure had a great chilling effect on actually figuring out what that was. And why? Because the possibility of something extraordinary happening is unpalatable to the reflexive skeptics. Things are a priori declared to be ordinary and any evidence that doesn't fit that get's ignored.

nirvgorilla 4y ago
Have you read Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World book from 1996? Because this kind of crap always turns out to be garbage. We live on a rock circling a star. The only thing that makes the world more interesting than it really is is our brains that love to make crap up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.™
- dtx1 4y ago
  When the US Government tells the world that North Korea has exploded a nuclear weapon than i can neither directly measure that myself nor do I have access to the data where and how the US Government knows that happens. Yet we all collectively believe that to be true. The Nimitz incident falls under the same category. I don't know what that was but the "debunking" by Mick West simply ignores most of the little evidence we have. And so, at least 3 People (2 Pilots, 1 Radar Operator) have come forward and told a consistent story of what happened. No one has come forward and claimed they were lying (which would be the most likely explanation). The US Government is spending at least a few bucks investigating this as a result and changes their policies on reporting UFOs. During his presidency Obama himself gathered thousands of documents on Ufos[0] and told us straight up there's stuff out there we can't explain[1]. Is it possible that is all explainable? Sure, for all I know everyone is lying and North Korea doesn't have Nukes. Is it possible that we stumbled upon something extraordinary? Yes. My Argument is simply: Mick Wests "explanations" ignore a lot of the facts out there to give an answer. Any answer. And that answer will do for the people that google $topic+debunk and stop thinking there. The fact that his explanations require you to ignore evidence, believe in really, really weird coincidences and believe that all our modern sensors on f16s and radar boats fail to account for our own planes and pilots can't distinguish our own planes from flying container sized tictacs that they stare at from multiple angles for 5 minutes on a clear day. Even if there is a very ordinary explanation for what happened, Mick West doesn't have it but his bad explanation is enough for those that don't really care and just want to reflexively debunk anything that doesn't fit their world view. If you really care, you can watch him talk with alex dietrich one of the pilots[2]. She explains to him quite well that his "explanations" for what they saw are complete nonesense. But that doesn't get you the headlines as the great debunker. [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmnqd/obamas-presidential-library-has-thousands-of-files-on-ufos https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmnqd/obamas-presidential-l... [1] https://youtu.be/u1hNYs55sqs?t=5 https://youtu.be/u1hNYs55sqs?t=5 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwZU6RiTEAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwZU6RiTEAw

dghughes 4y ago

That just proves they were actually unidentified objects. The flying part was missing since they didn't exist in physical form just glare. UFO fans are already convinced the events are UFOs which to them always means extraterrestrial aliens they just have to prove their point. Like flat Earthers have to prove how they are not wrong.

naasking 4y ago

> Mick West's breakdowns of the Pentagon UAP videos was the nail in the coffin of this era of UFO hype for me. I honestly don't know why anyone thinks West has managed to explain everything. These objects were picked up by multiple sensor systems which wouldn't show the same artifacts. Of the hundreds to thousands of reports, the DoD analysis managed to explain all except something like 14. There's still something to left to explain here.

msm_ 4y ago
> There's still something to left to explain here. This is like saying "of the hundreds to thousands of firefox segfaults, the Mozilla programmers managed to explain all except something like 14. Of course, there's something left to explain and improve. But Occam's razor applies, and we prefer simpler answers (like a sensor quirk).
- naasking 4y ago
  Occam's razor does not let you dismiss observations just because they don't neatly fit into your boxes. It costs nothing to collect the data for the time when a better explanation arises.

raducu 4y ago

I have two EXTREMELY vivid recollection of UFOs that I saw. One as a child of ~6 years of age which I know is true because another witness said it was a signaling flare before I knew what signaling flares were, and as my grandpa correctly pointed out, it looked NOTHING like a signaling flare. The second one is much later, from a time I was obsessed with UFOs, and I don't know if I really saw it or it was a dream. It just bothers me so much that I can't recollect if it was all a dream or not and that I've had this memory for so long.

user8501 4y ago

All of them? Lol, okay. Honestly it’s pretty disrespectful to these pilots, who clearly witnessed something that defies mainstream explanation. Not saying it’s aliens, but secret military projects that use highly classified propulsion technology is just as interesting, and far more concerning.

likeabbas 4y ago

There's compelling evidence that Mick West's assumptions are wrong. https://twitter.com/the_cholla/status/1598090777950793729 https://twitter.com/the_cholla/status/1598090777950793729