UFO myth-buster reveals the loopy encounter even he can’t clarify

A top UFO debunker has revealed the bizarre case that still puzzles him to this day. 

Scores of people, including military experts, have recorded eerie videos appearing to show UAPs – unidentified aerial phenomena – over the years and often seek answers by posting them online.

Mick West, of Sacramento, California, uses a range of tools to help explain these mysteries – but has been stumped by one Navy video of a UFO that was leaked by The New York Times. 

The footage released in 2017 had been taken by a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot two years earlier and appears to show a UFO following the jet from the USS Theodore Roosevelt after the object had been detected by radar off the East Coast. 

In the infrared cockpit video, the incredible high-speed object seemingly breaks the laws of physics – with the two pilots heard debating whether or not it was a drone. 

Combing over the footage, West, who often relies on data surrounding the video to debunk recorded events, investigated the clip and tried to work out the rotation of the camera and the glare on the lens. Still, he was left with no answers. 

West is now hoping to gain access to the original radar data instead of the analysis the government released so he can recreate the phenomenon – and rule out any reasonable explanations.

As part of his approach, West uses multiple tools including FlightAware, Flight Radar 24 and Invisor, an app that gives information on video, audio, and photos such as resolutions and the date they were taken. 

But his biggest resource is Sitrec – a tool he designed himself that stands for ‘situation recreation’ – which integrates flight data, video and satellite imagery to paint a full picture, he told Popular Mechanics. 

‘You have to be very careful about what you’re looking at…for me, that’s the very first step in investigating a case,’ West, who has investigated around 1,000 UFO cases, told the outlet. 

Last month, the former video game programmer spotted a white, elongated object from a plane window while he was flying to Pasadena and took a quick video of it. 

He thought was just another airplane – a conclusion he would be right about – but he found himself needing to investigate the matter personally, he told Popular Mechanics. 

When he got to his hotel room, he used Photoshop to closely look at the image and downloaded the GPS routes from his flight and a few others in the area from FlightAware.com. 

In order for West to find an answer, he has to look at simultaneous events and see how they all fit into the bigger picture.

His plane wasn’t the only in the air, so he had to look at other flight paths, as well as  weather phenomenon and satellite data. 

He also looks closely at the video angle, In his case, he knew the video he took was several thousand feet above ground and the object was below him.  

He used Flight Aware 24 to configure where other nearby planes were so he could ‘figure out what’s actually in the air at a particular time,’ he told Popular Mechanics. 

West then zoomed in on his own flight and found the exact location of his plane when he took the video. 

‘I knew I was sitting on the right side of the plane,’ he told the outlet. 

The map showed him a ‘likely contender’ – a plane that had taken off from LA’s Van Nuys Airport. 

‘That matches what we see in the video,’ he told Popular Mechanics. 

He then used Sitrec – which an unidentified organization paid him to develop and make publicly accessible – to point the camera from his plane directly down onto where the other plane was traveling. 

‘I set the camera to point from my plane to the other two. One of them matched exactly. It was a small Cessna,’ he told the outlet. ‘This confirms that this was the plane I was actually looking at.’

One Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UPA) – the term that took over for UFO in 2023 – that piqued West’s interest appeared in footage the Chilean Navy caught of a black blob leaving streaks behind it in 2014, he told Popular Mechanics. 

The Chilean military investigated the footage for roughly two years and boldly determined it to be aliens. 

However, West, thanks to Sitrec, came to a more reasonable conclusion and documented his investigation on YouTube. 

He determined the black blob to be a plane that had just departed from Santiago Airport. He claimed the reason it appeared black in the footage captured by the Navy was because it was taken on a thermal camera and the plane was hotter than the surrounding area. 

‘It’s not an intuitive thing, and if you don’t delve too deeply into it, [you’ll be wrong],’ West, who programmed Tony Hawk’s Pro Series games, told the outlet. 

As for the streaks the Navy recorded, he explained that these were just the airplane’s engines leaving contrails. 

West claimed that the Chilean Navy also got the flight path wrong.

‘They thought they were looking at an object that was moving left to right.

‘In fact, what they were looking at was this plane, just departed from Santiago Airport that had looped around to gain height over the mountains,’ he said. 

Using his program, he was able to successfully simulate the plane’s movements by accounting for the camera angle and matched it to flight records. 

West thinks his video game programming days helped condition him for the life of debunking UFOs as he spent ‘an inordinate amount of time on this trivial little thing, this one intractable little bug that is just causing this problem’ during his former profession. 

‘It can be very difficult to figure out… but you have no choice,’ he told Popular Mechanics. 

He finds debunking claims of alien sightings has the same rigor as programming a game and tied with his fascination with conspiracy theories, it ignited his passion for investigating UAP. 

However, other experts remain convinced that UFO activity is real and seemingly has some connection to nuclear sites. 

The former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Lue Elizondo, agreed that there ‘seems to be a lot of correlation’ between UFO appearances and nuclear sites.

And independent researcher Robert Hastings, who has been working toward full government disclosure of UAP activity, said in 2010, ‘Declassified US government documents and witness testimony from former or retired US military personnel confirm beyond any doubt the reality of ongoing UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites.’

Now, new research — in the form of three studies helmed by a retired US Air Force staff sergeant, Larry Hancock, and a data analyst affiliate with Harvard’s UFO-hunting Galileo Project, Ian Porritt — shows that not only has there been unusual activity around nuclear weapons and facilities, it has shifted over the years.

At first seemingly interested in the production of nuclear weapons, UFO sightings later sprang up around silos and bomber bases.

‘You would see this interest at silos when they were being installed before ‘the activity would drop off,’ Porritt previously told the DailyMail.com.

Eerily similar to these encounters are the instances of UAPs following fighter jets that were disclosed by the UAP Task Force, including a ‘giant Tic Tac’ UFO witnessed by Navy veteran fighter pilot Commander David Fravor in 2004.

Fravor’s fellow co-pilot Chad Underwood witnessed the ‘perfectly white’ wingless oblong captured by his cockpit’s in-flight video.