Mick West

Mick West is a British-American former video-game programmer, co-founder of a studio behind the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, who since the mid-2010s has become one of the most influential skeptical analysts of the modern UAP era, applying his 3D graphics and simulation background directly to disputed military footage. He founded Metabunk.org, a forum-based investigation community that crowdsources technical analysis of viral sighting videos, chemtrail claims, and other conspiracy-adjacent phenomena. His most consequential contribution has been detailed frame-by-frame and simulated-camera analysis of the Navy's released 'Gimbal,' 'GoFast,' and other UAP videos, arguing that apparent extraordinary flight characteristics are consistent with parallax, camera rotation, and gimbal-tracking artifacts affecting distant, conventional objects such as aircraft or balloons rather than genuinely anomalous propulsion; he formalized this approach into Sitrec, a free web application allowing anyone to recreate the camera geometry of specific UAP cases. His book Escaping the Rabbit Hole (2018) generalized his methodology into a broader, deliberately non-condescending framework for engaging believers in conspiracy and paranormal claims. West has testified informally to congressional staff and participated in mainstream media UAP coverage, becoming, alongside Sheaffer and Oberg, one of the three or four most frequently cited skeptical voices in 2020s UAP journalism.