Have you read Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World book from 1996? Because this kind of crap always turns out to be garbage. We live on a rock circling a star.
The only thing that makes the world more interesting than it really is is our brains that love to make crap up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.™
When the US Government tells the world that North Korea has exploded a nuclear weapon than i can neither directly measure that myself nor do I have access to the data where and how the US Government knows that happens. Yet we all collectively believe that to be true.
The Nimitz incident falls under the same category. I don't know what that was but the "debunking" by Mick West simply ignores most of the little evidence we have. And so, at least 3 People (2 Pilots, 1 Radar Operator) have come forward and told a consistent story of what happened. No one has come forward and claimed they were lying (which would be the most likely explanation). The US Government is spending at least a few bucks investigating this as a result and changes their policies on reporting UFOs. During his presidency Obama himself gathered thousands of documents on Ufos[0] and told us straight up there's stuff out there we can't explain[1].
Is it possible that is all explainable? Sure, for all I know everyone is lying and North Korea doesn't have Nukes. Is it possible that we stumbled upon something extraordinary? Yes. My Argument is simply: Mick Wests "explanations" ignore a lot of the facts out there to give an answer. Any answer. And that answer will do for the people that google $topic+debunk and stop thinking there. The fact that his explanations require you to ignore evidence, believe in really, really weird coincidences and believe that all our modern sensors on f16s and radar boats fail to account for our own planes and pilots can't distinguish our own planes from flying container sized tictacs that they stare at from multiple angles for 5 minutes on a clear day.
Even if there is a very ordinary explanation for what happened, Mick West doesn't have it but his bad explanation is enough for those that don't really care and just want to reflexively debunk anything that doesn't fit their world view. If you really care, you can watch him talk with alex dietrich one of the pilots[2]. She explains to him quite well that his "explanations" for what they saw are complete nonesense. But that doesn't get you the headlines as the great debunker.
> When the US Government tells the world that North Korea has exploded a nuclear weapon
We do have the proof that North Korea and nuclear weapons exists. The US government could be lying about the tests like it lied about iraqis WMD but 1/ there are other sources 2/ its in the domain of plausability anyway.
At the reverse, alien origin of UFO relies on unproved and impossible facts: 1/ the existence of life outside earth, 2/ the existence of technology outside earth, 3/ the possibility of FTL travel, 4/ the regulat visit of alien on earth, 5/ having a technology good enough to be almost undetected but not completely 6/ having an irresistible urge to crash in the US
Not regular, we just have to notice them at least once
5/ having a technology good enough to be almost undetected but not completely
Which is literally what every stealth tech we have made is.
6/ having an irresistible urge to crash in the US
There's probably 10x more UFO reports coming from outside the US, especially south america, than from inside the US and I have made no claim that I have heard any good evidence that any crashed UFO has been retrieved (though we have crashed some mars rovers in our time so it's not out of the realm of possibility that an alien species might crash their stuff on our planet)
I wouldn't trust the US Govt to lie straight in bed.
This is why we have multiple confirmations and public databases:
The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) was set up in 1996 with its headquarters in Vienna, Austria. It is an interim organization tasked with building up the verification regime of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) in preparation for the Treaty's entry into force, as well as promoting the Treaty's universality.
All six nuclear tests by North Korea were clearly detected by Australia’s IMS seismic stations,” Zerbo said.
Making my point for me, all that Data could be trivially faked, in 5 years probably by telling chatGPT10.3 "Make a website proving that North Korea exploded nukes" and I have 0 way to verify any of this.
Yet I believe that those Sensors Measured what they did and north korea did in fact explode a few nukes.
How would chatGPT "trivially fake" paper readouts digitised and signed in real time from multiple sensor sites controlled by multiple independent countries and legal jurisdictions?
> and I have 0 way to verify any of this.
That would be because you haven't joined any geophysical data organisations .. and that'd be on you.
I notice "argument from personal ignorance" is common in "believer" circles (not just of aliens, but of all kinds of conspiracy theories). If you happen to be well educated enough to provide a detailed explanation of why a particular thing they've said doesn't hold water, it's frustratingly common for them to fall back on "well I'm not an expert, I don't know all the details, I'm just asking questions." Somehow it never occurs to them not to make wild assertions when they "don't know all the details".
But that is not my argument. I am not an expert in Seismic Sensors, yet I believe the experts that tell me this happened. The military Experts directly witnessing the Nimitz events and the sensors they are trained on tell me something really extraordinary happened. The best "ordinary event misinterpreted" explanation comes from a game developer turned professional skeptic that ignores a heap of evidence and direct testimony from the experts. I tend to believe the experts with the caveat that the best explanation I can think of is either:
a) they witnessed an alien probe, potentially the equivalent of a mars rover from an advance civilization or
b) this is a big Psyop by the CIA.
I believe North Korea has nukes on the same premise that it's more likely a diverse set of experts saw what they saw and interpreted the sensors they work with every day correctly than that it's all a big psyop by the CIA to fake NK Nukes. Where do you see the difference between both cases?
The only thing that makes the world more interesting than it really is is our brains that love to make crap up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.™