He's also a pilot and has been focused on topics like this for two decades - but his arguments don't require taking anything on trust or his authority.

Additionally, he interviews experienced and relevant people, like his most recent video with Alex Dietrich (the second pilot present at the Nimitz "Tic-Tac" encounter).

> trained top gun pilots and the vast infrastructure of the US Navy/Pentagon who analyze this kind of stuff for a living. If they can't explain then I am sure they have considered and debunked trivial explanations that West purports

The filename "gimbal" suggests they might have the same suspicion as West on at least one encounter. Hopefully we'll get details of what they considered in the upcoming pentagon report.

But, even if we do prematurely assume that that the pentagon thinks there's no possible explanations, consider the analogous case of the Chilean Navy UFO video where the Chilean Navy and then a 2 year investigation failed to identify a plane 100 miles away (https://www.metabunk.org/threads/explained-chilean-navy-ufo-...). The pilots are experts but they aren't completely immune from making mistakes.

> in the NYTimes article they explicitly debunk the "weather balloon" hypothesis which has been proposed as a "rational" explanation for these ufos by some.

I assume you're talking about this quote (let me know if not): "One possible explanation — that the phenomena could be weather balloons or other research balloons — does not hold up in all cases"

It's a refutation if someone believed that all cases were weather/research balloons (which I don't think anyone does). And on the flip side there's the implication that some of the UAPs are consistent with weather balloons.

"The problem is that the military don’t want to talk about this, partly because this is a classified system that these are recorded on. It’s called the Raytheon ATFLIR system. And it’s a fairly advanced targeting pod that straps on underneath the planes. And if you look for example videos shot with this on YouTube, you will find, basically, nothing—like a few really grainy ones, because even though I’m sure there’s tens of thousands of hours that have been shot with it, it’s all classified. So they don’t want to talk about it. And if they do analysis of it, that becomes classified by default. So they’re not going to release it. And they’ve actually explicitly said that they do not plan to release the results of the investigation into these videos."