Brian Dunning, creator of the Skeptoid podcast, has a documentary out that brings a skeptical, analytical eye to the recent UFO craze – including those three famous UFO videos that got a lot of attention in a 2017 New York Times article. His documentary has the tongue-in-cheek title “The UFO Movie They Don’t Want You To See.” You can find it at www.briandunning.com/ufo. I think more people need to see Brian’s movie; it explained a lot and now I feel like I finally understand those videos. It’s been surprising how little attention the more rational, analytical explanations for those videos have gotten. If you’re someone who’s seen those videos and thought “What the hell is going on?” I think you’ll want to watch Brian’s movie. In this short episode I focus on one specific explanation for one of the videos in question.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video, recommended)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
Related resources:
- My talk with Brian in 2023, where we talk about acupuncture, UFOs, chiropractic work, and more
TRANSCRIPT:
This is the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at examining and better understanding human psychology and behavior. You can learn more about it and subscribe to the podcast on various channels at behavior-podcast.com.
In this episode I’m going to talk about those mysterious UFO videos that were released by the Pentagon in 2017 and that came to prominence via coverage in the New York Times. I’m going to focus on one of them, the video titled ‘Gimbal’ which featured a seemingly strange vehicle flying at fast speeds and seeming to rotate in strange ways.
And just a note that if you’re listening to this on audio, this is heavily video focused so you’ll probably prefer to watch the video version on youtube. It will be okay on audio, as I try to explain things, but video would be better.
In 2023, I interviewed Brian Dunning, who has run the Skeptoid podcast since 2006, examining all sorts of topics with skepticism and critical thinking. As Brian said when i interviewed him, he doesn’t like the term “debunking” to describe what he does, but he has debunked a lot of bad information. I first learned of him when I got interested in the Erin Brokovich case and read his examination of the many mistruths about that case that were contained in the well-known Julia Roberts movie.
Long story short: we are surrounded by bullshit these days. We’ve got the internet and social media, which is just a huge source of bullshit. We’ve got podcasters and influencers who don’t care if they share all sorts of bullshit and bad information with their audience as long as it gets clicks and makes money. We’ve got fictionalized movies loosely based on real events and biased documentaries, and many people trusting that these movies contain real and trustworthy information. Then we’ve got a political polarization problem, which results in many people tending to engage in emotional, team-based thinking, which makes them propagators of bullshit and bad information without knowing it.
And I think Brian Dunning has done some great work helping people navigate all this bullshit. He’s helped me navigate it. I highly recommend signing up to his newsletter, which you can find at briandunning.substack.com. https://briandunning.substack.com/ And I recommend you do a paid subscription; honestly, whatever Brian is making, I think he deserves more money; he’s just done great and important work over the years.
So recently I watched Brian’s UFO documentary, which is titled The UFO Movie They Don’t Want You To See. That’s a tongue in cheek title; just a funny nod by Brian to conspiracy-minded thinking. You can watch the movie on Amazon or with ads on YouTube. You can learn more about it at https://www.briandunning.com/ufo/.
Long story short: if you want to understand those mysterious videos released by the military back in 2017, which got so much attention in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html) and other places, you need to watch Brian’s documentary. It helped explained so much of the mystery there for me, because I did, like a lot of people, find those videos so mysterious. I had a hard time imagining what the explanations could be, based on what i’d seen. So I’m going to share some snippets from Brian’s documentary to give you a little glimpse of some of the explanations, but really you need to go watch the whole thing.
So let’s start with this video; the so-called ‘gimbal’ video, which was taken by Navy pilots and was written about in a 2017 New York Times article titled Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program. Let’s watch some of that.
[PLAY CLIP OF GIMBAL UFO]
Pretty wild looking. If you’re anything like me, you watched that and went “what the hell?” and were very impressed. It’s not just the video itself, but the pilots’ clear shock and confusion at what they’re seeing that really sells it.
Now let’s watch a clip from the UFO Movie They Don’t Want You To See. This is a clip from about an hour in where Brian is talking to a researcher named Mick West about how that object could represent either something very close to the camera or something very far away.
[CLIP FROM BRIAN’S UFO MOVIE]
Let’s stop it there and discuss this, as it goes by rather quickly and the video is counterintuitive. And so much of these explanations come back to the deceptive nature of video. As a video/film major myself, I’m very much aware of how much video footage can be deceptive; people tend to think and say things about how “video doesn’t lie” – but video can actually really distort our perceptions. Sometimes there are multiple explanations and factors involved in why a video seems to us the way it does. A video can lie; or at least, our instinctual interpretation of what a video shows can be very, very wrong.
So as you’re watching this video, instead of thinking about it as something up close, imagine it as something fixed, in the distance. Something on the horizon. Such an object would stay in the same place on the screen. As Mick West says, it could either be something close and moving fast, or something far and not moving at all.
Now, you may be thinking; but it’s staying the same size; that means it must be an object traveling near us. If it were something far away, it would be smaller or getting smaller if it was receding. The fact that it stays the same size supports our instinctual interpretation that it’s an object somewhat near the camera, moving at high speed. But Mick says it’s not an object we’re seeing; it’s likely an glare of infrared light, and a glare can be quite large. So as you’re watching this, imagine it’s just some sort of glare far away on the horizon; something many miles away. Imagine you’d put on some infrared specs and were just seeing some sort of bright, amorphous glare from something hot far away.
So now we get to the infamous rotation; the thing that made it seem extra weird. Let’s watch what he says about that:
[CLIP FROM BRIAN’S UFO MOVIE]
So, to sum up: the nature of the video system is that it must rotate in order to keep a static image of the thing it’s tracking. This makes sense as the jet is moving very fast, which makes it require various advanced rotation systems to keep its static shot. And every lens has various traits and imperfections, so as the camera lens rotates, the artifact, the glare, rotates also. Think of your own camera phone; you’ve probably noticed it has little ways it distorts light and that as you rotate your phone those distortions rotate with the camera.
So let’s watch that video again, and this time imagine you’re watching some heat glare from a distant jet and that the camera lens is rotating, causing the artifact to rotate.
The documentary goes into more detail about that video. As far as I’m concerned, they explained away the mystery of that video. The only remaining questions I have about that particular video is why the pilots thought it was so strange; wouldn’t they have seen other artifacts like that? Has anyone asked them or other pilots about that and the commonness of that?
Another interesting thing about the ‘gimbal’ video is that one of the pilots mentions that they saw a fleet of those objects. We don’t see those in the camera system, though, so we don’t know what he’s referring to. But it seems possible if they saw other ones on their visual tracking system, then maybe it was a fleet of jets that had several infrared glares. I don’t know, though. That’s another thing I’m curious about.
The full documentary has several other interesting explanations of the other well known videos that were released in 2017. The documentary also delves into some of the more famous UFO myths and stories that are often told by UFOs fans and alien-visitation true believers. I watched the movie with a couple UFO buffs and they found it very interesting and educational.
After watching Brian’s video, the main question I and my friends had was why we hadn’t heard these explanations before. It struck me as so strange that I hadn’t seen these explanations in major newspapers, or hadn’t seen the military trying to explain these things.
I asked Brian why that was and he wrote me the following:
Journalists absolutely have reported it — it just doesn’t make the headlines because it’s the least sensational version of the story.
And if you read the reports from AARO (https://www.aaro.mil/ All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office), it’s clear they’ve come to the same conclusion, and sound like they have watched Mick West’s videos, though that’s obviously not the only way to come to the right conclusions.
The reason the UFOlogists continue screaming that the government won’t give this the attention it’s due is that they don’t like what the government concluded when they did give it the attention it’s due.
Again, that was Brian’s message to me. It seems like a lot of things these days, more sensational stories travel faster and get the most attention. More sensational stories are spread around by various other news channels and podcasters and influencers; the more serious and skeptical work gets far less attention; maybe it’s mentioned in an article but, because it’s not as exciting, nobody’s talking about it on youtube or instagram or facebook or whatever; the multitude of shitty news sites don’t want to talk about the more analytical and boring stuff as much.
All in all, this was a bit of a journey for me. Back when I interviewed Brian Dunning in 2023, we talked about a range of things, including acupuncture, chiropractor work, and UFOs. Back then I was actually a pretty firm believer that something very strange was happening with these UFO videos and UFO sightings. To be clear: I still think it’s possible something strange is happening; more even than the rather weak video evidence, I find some of the reports by experienced jet pilots about multiple sightings of objects, like those featured on the 60 Minutes episode about UFOs, to be interesting and unusual. But Brian’s work has helped me approach this entire topic with a lot more information and healthy skepticism. More importantly, my journey on learning about these UFO videos has helped me approach other topics with more skepticism, as it’s easy for me to remember the feeling of getting so excited and going with the crowd about the UFO videos, and then coming back down to earth a bit.
So thank you for your work, Brian Dunning. If you liked this, please go watch Brian’s movie and become a paid subscriber to his substack https://briandunning.substack.com/. He deserves your money and support. Also, check out my talk with Brian in 2023; we talk about various topics and also about the meta-level topic of why people are so gullible.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. Thanks for your interest.