Breakdown of the Pentagon UFO videos with Mick West

What Hacker News said

Strong rec reso · 2023-02 · on “As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)”

Mick West's breakdowns of the Pentagon UAP videos was the nail in the coffin of this era of UFO hype for me. [this video] 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.

Recommends lwansbrough · 2021-01 · on “US Navy – Tic Tac UFO – High frequency gravitational wave generator”

This whole thing has a very boring, very likely answer described in this video: [this video] Essentially, there are a few different perspective/camera quirks coming together in these videos which can (apparently) trick even well trained pilots.

Recommends reso · 2023-02 · on “As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)”

Gofast, FLIR and Gimbal all have very compelling explanations: [this video] Mick West has reported on this all over the place.

Cites godelski · 2021-01 · on “CIA Releases UFO Documents”

With the time thing, that would suggest that these events are uncommon. In that case it would be reasonable that the gov doesn't know what's going on either and that these visitors aren't here for the long hull. Of course, assuming these are visitors and not natural or man made phenomena. But I'll wait for the cell phone events. You suggest it should happen within my lifetime. As was posted in another comment I'm going to post this video. And don't dare claim someone hasn't looked up the links and articles just because they don't agree with you. Do it if they demonstrate that they didn't (there's a big difference and the former is going to piss someone off and is against HN's good faith rule

Cites simonh · 2021-05 · on “UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low”

It doesn't take incompetence to make a mistake, any of us can make mistakes even in things we're highly competent in. Optical artefacts are particularly difficult to account for. Take Go Fast for example, they're highly competent experienced aviators, but they still very clearly completely misidentified what, in hindsight, is obviously a bird. Clearly if trained operators can make a mistake like that, other mistakes are possible, so you can't just discount the possibility as absurd. [this video] I can easily see someone thinking an image is of a near object when it's actually a far object, and we know for a fact that highly trained operators can make terrible mistakes using complex tracking equip

Cites jasonwatkinspdx · 2021-06 · on “I’m a Physicist Who Searches for Aliens. U.F.O.s Don’t Impress Me”

The videos have been explained: [this video] The pentagon released them because they were getting sick of FOIA requests from the mob of people the To The Stars folks have been rallying. GAO is currently reviewing the contracts granted to those folks as well.

Cites notJim · 2021-06 · on “No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal”

A lot of these videos have already been debunked as being visual artifacts from the cameras or parallax. [this video]

Cites ljf · 2024-10 · on “US Government UAP Footage”

Interesting Gimble is in there - much of what is 'interesting' about this video has been debunked by Mick West: [LINK] [this video]