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