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Mick West is a game programmer, writer, and debunker. Currently runs a few websites including http://MetaBunk.org and http://ContrailScience.com.
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7 years ago
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7 years ago
Hello freak bitches. The community thing I think is like a key thing. I recently did a debunk of a UFO that the Chilean Navy supposedly saw. What was that? I'm not aware of that one. It was like this thing. There was a Chilean Navy helicopter had this infrared camera. And they saw this two black dots off in the distance that looked like a weird thing, like a figure eight type thing flying away. And then it started spraying out this stuff. And they couldn't figure out what it was. And they chased after it, but it was too fast and it got away from them. And the Chilean government has an official UFO investigation team. And they set them on it. And they spent two years figuring out what it was. And they couldn't figure out what it was. And so they said it's a confirmed unidentified object. And then they published their findings. And then I and some other people on Medibunk looked at it and we figured out there was actually just a plane flying away from the helicopter leaving some contrails behind. And we actually figured out exactly which plane it was. And so this got a bit of play online and there was on like Huffington Post and things like that. And some UFO enthusiasts started talking to me. And I joined their groups. And I joined a few of the groups. And then I found myself in this kind of weird corner of the Internet where everybody believes in UFOs unquestioningly. And they're always putting up these photographs of things. And people are like, oh, great capture dude. And it's just something like a street light or something. But they think they have this confirmation bias, this group confirmation bias, where they can't disagree with someone. And they know they're in a safe space. So they can put out whatever theory that they like. And they know that people will be like they're just very supportive of them. Yeah. One that happened a couple of days ago, some woman put up a picture of a strange light that she said was in the sky. And so I downloaded the picture and I boosted the brightness. And I saw it was actually a reflection of something in a security light on a porch. And you could see it was like there was trees behind it. There was a security light and there's this reflection. So I posted that. And then I started getting called like a shill for pointing this out. There's a couple of people who said, oh, yeah, it's just this light. But other people were like, why don't you believe me? Why are you invalidating my claims? And so they want to have these kind of walled gardens where everybody believes the same thing. That's a good way to put it, the walled gardens. It really is a good way to put it because that is what those communities seemed like. And that's one of the things that I found when I did that television show. I still harbored a few conspiracy theories before I did that show. But doing that show for several months and constantly interviewing people who believed in outlandish things, I found the same thing over and over and over again. Illogical people with very little evidence believing things in almost a religious way. And I found it with Bigfoot and I found it with UFOs and I found it with chemtrails and I found it with it was just one after the other in varying stages of ridiculousness. I feel like contrails and chemtrails were the most nutty people. UFO people seem to be the most reasonable because it's the most reasonable theory. And of all of them, the idea that we have spaceships, why doesn't someone else have spaceships? There's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, hundreds of billions of planets in each galaxy. The odds of there being some sort of a life form out there, it's pretty high. But there's nothing. That's the craziest thing. The more I went into, the more I talked to these people, the more I went over all their evidence, air quotes evidence, the more I asked them why they believed things. There is nothing. There's not a goddamn thing that you can put on a scale. There's not a thing that you can weigh. There's not a thing that you can measure. There's not a thing that you can look at a photo and go, wow, that's compelling. There's not one. There's just an idea. And that idea is that there's something in the sky that flies around that we either might catch if you're there at the right place at the right time or not, and that they're from another planet. If you look at what they put forward as the best evidence, it's often like cases from the 60s where there's an eyewitness who said something, like there was some guy on a road who says he blacked out and his car got messed up. It's always that. From the 60s. Well, that's the other thing that I know too much about, psychedelic drugs. And I know about endogenous psychedelic drugs, the brain producing this chemical called dimethyltryptamine that happens when you're sleeping. They've proven that this stuff is produced in the liver and in the lungs, and they believe it's now, they've got evidence that it's produced in the pineal gland. It's a very potent psychedelic drug that your brain produces, and your brain produces it during REM sleep. So these people, they all take naps. And during these naps, they have these crazy fucking dreams. And it's entirely possible that during these dreams, what happened is they got some endogenous DMT dump, whether they were under stress or whether they just had an erratic dump of this human neurochemical that entered into their bloodstream, whatever it is that caused it. All these fucking UFO abductions, all of them, almost exactly happen at night. And they happen while these people are sleeping. Wouldn't you just assume that you were dreaming? Why wouldn't you assume you were dreaming? Yeah, I used to have these kind of night terror hallucination things, which were kind of like that. And it was always the same type of thing. It was like a giant spider coming down from the ceiling towards me. You couldn't move? I was like frozen for a second, and then I would jump out of bed and turn on the light and look for the spider. And it happened all the time. And I knew, because there was no spider, that it wasn't real. But I could see if someone was having a different type of hallucination that seemed a bit more real and then it came in between sleep cycles for them, then tell it, yeah, because it seemed completely real. I used to have them all the time, and it was always like, it was horrible. It was this giant, really realistic spider. And it wasn't like I was dreaming somewhere else. I was in the room, and I could see it like I was seeing something crawling across the table right here. It was this hallucination. I don't really get them anymore. I don't know what it was. My brain spixed itself or whatever. Well, it's probably a lot. It has to do with being young and confused and hormones and nerves. And then also, like, your brain starts filling in the blanks. If you don't have a very good understanding of the universe, you know, your brain, your imagination runs wild. It was very confusing to me doing that television show. And it really changed me a lot. And it changed me to the point that people started accusing me of being co-opted by the government. That the government threatened my family and told me to stop talking about conspiracies. And then the idea that I wouldn't say that if that was the case. You don't think I would fucking tell everybody if someone threatened my family because I was talking about UFOs? I'd be telling everybody. I'd be like, hey, man. I would tell all my friends. I'd be like, dude, they fucking threatened me because I was talking about UFOs. This shit is real. Hangar 18. Area 51. I think there was a paper a while ago published on how many people it would take to cover up certain conspiracy theories. And the probability of none of those people ever talking. And it's just ridiculous. You can't have tens of millions of people in on a conspiracy. What do you think happened at Roswell? Roswell, New Mexico, the one, that's the big one. July 1947, the UFO crashed. I think it's what they said it was. It was those balloons that they were using to detect Russian nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. And it was a secret program. So they weren't allowed to tell anybody about it. So they came in. They picked up the remains of the balloon. And then the story just took off. That's a funny one, though. Boy, that's made a whole town famous for UFOs. If you go there now, they have like alien themed gift shops. They're milking it. It's like you said earlier. People make money out of something and then they get stuck into that. Because they're making money out of it, they're motivated to promote whatever it is. If it's Bigfoot or if it's aliens. Have you ever seen anything in all of your years of trying to debunk these things that made you question whether or not this was a legitimate phenomena? The chemtrail thing? Anything. Beautiful, chemtrail, things like that. With UFOs, there's always things that you can't explain. There are things that are unidentified. But there are usually plausible explanations for them. Whenever I'm given something like a mysterious thing, I like to list all the explanations that I can think of. Maybe none of them are perfect fits that you can guarantee this is what the explanation is. But it being like a ghost or an alien spacecraft as an explanation is usually pretty close to the bottom. You start out saying, oh, it's a balloon or it's a bird or it's a drone or it's CGI or it's something somebody faked afterwards. Or it's an alien spacecraft or in between that, oh, it's something else that we don't know what it is. Is there any evidence in terms of UFOs that's interesting? To be honest, I haven't really looked into the whole sphere of UFOology. I know a lot of people have. But just looking at the quality of the best cases they put forward, like I mentioned earlier, some guy in 1964 got his car beat up on a road. These are like the top 10 best cases and this was like number two or something. What about Bob Lazar? You ever look into that guy? I don't know. Bob Lazar is a guy who supposedly worked at Area 51 and became a whistleblower. No, I haven't. But something you see in the 9-11 community and in the chemtrail community is people becoming celebrities. And then they kind of start going on road shows and they go to conventions and they speak and then they write books and then they start doing things and they get sucked into their beliefs.