UFO Sightings Are Spiking. This Man Has Unraveled the Truth Behind Hundreds of Them

ON A CLEAR, SUNNY DAY IN JULY, Mick West, a former video game programmer, was flying from his home in Sacramento, California, down to Pasadena. From the aircraft, he spied a small, white, elongated object that seemed to be passing over the mountains. Intrigued, he took a short video with his phone. Though he assumed the anomaly was just another airplane, West just couldn’t help himself; he needed to investigate.

When he got to his hotel room, West did what he so often does: a bit of digital sleuthing. First, he uploaded the raw footage to Photoshop to drill down into the image until it resembled a mosaic of zoomed-in pixels. “You have to be very careful about what you’re looking at … for me, that’s the very first step in investigating a case,” he explains. He also downloaded the GPS routes of his plane and a few nearby ones from FlightAware.com, a real-time worldwide flight tracker.

West is a longtime UFO debunker. Retired from the gaming industry in the early 2000s, he’s dealt with about 1,000 UFO cases over nearly a decade, ultimately completing a deeper analysis of about 100 on a pro-bono basis. He examines scoops from official and leaked government reports, sightings trending on social media, emails people send to him, and anomalies posted on popular UFO databases like Enigma and MUFON. He’s even appeared on a History Channel show, The Proof Is Out There, as a forensic video analyst.