Mick West

Mick West is a British-American former video game programmer, co-founder of Neversoft (Tony Hawk's Pro Skater), and arguably the most influential UAP skeptic of the modern era. Through his site Metabunk and its analysis tools, he has produced widely cited prosaic explanations for much of the best-known UAP footage.

West retired young from games and turned to investigating conspiracy theories, starting with chemtrails. His method: reconstruct exactly what a camera system would record given known physics, geometry, and metadata, then compare.

West's analyses argue that FLIR1's apparent maneuvers track camera behavior, Gimbal's rotating shape matches a patented glare artifact of the ATFLIR pod's de-rotation mechanism, and GoFast's racing object is a slow balloon-like target made fast-looking by parallax, a reading AARO's own 2024 analysis matched. He identified the Navy pyramid footage as bokeh of ordinary lights, explained viral cases from Aguadilla to the "jellyfish" video (a windshield water smear, in his reading, or thermal artifacts), and built the Sitrec tool that reconstructs sensor geometry, which researchers on all sides now use. He engages pilots and advocates directly, including public exchanges with David Fravor and appearances alongside proponents, and has commented case-by-case through the PURSUE releases.

West's claim is minimal: famous footage has mundane candidate explanations that must be eliminated before anomaly claims stand, and eyewitness kinematics are unreliable. His contribution is that a functioning adversarial process exists at all.

Advocates accuse him of explaining videos while ignoring correlated radar and multiple-witness testimony, of "debunking by possibility," and of never accepting any case. Pilots have called his aerodynamic readings naive. West responds that he addresses the evidence actually available to analysis, and that possibilities are exactly what un-anomalous cases are made of.

West continues Metabunk and Sitrec work, the first analyst quoted whenever new footage drops.