People would do well to keep in mind the episode of drone hysteria which happened at Gatwick airport in 2018. Hundreds of sightings were reported over a period of several days, shutting down the airport completely.
It was a massive media event, camera crews from every outlet were at the airport, but none ever photographed a drone. None of the radar systems at the airport, nor the military anti-drone systems sent later on, ever picked up anything.
In this article, a professional drone photographer describes mistaking a helicopter for a drone:
> But when he opened up the image on his computer, ready to send to his editors, he realised he’d made a mistake. The image did not show a drone. It was a helicopter hovering 10 miles away; between the darkness and the distance, his eyes had played a trick on him. “If I’m making a mistake – and I fly drones two or three times a week – then God help us, because others will have no idea,” he said. He called police to retract his reported sighting.
Have you been following this news story at all? There are probably hundreds of video clips on social media depicting the same craft. So I'm not sure what the relevancy is of your story.
3 minutes and 7 seconds in this video is a good example of what these typically appear as.
But yes it's most likely a US military drone exercise or active operation (have seen conjecture about a search for something, testing drone capabilities in a noisy RF environment.
The military theory doesn't fit to me on the grounds that at this point they should be just admitting it. They're calling more attention to the drones than they would if they would just say "yup, those are ours". You don't hide things by parading them around in front of people. They've got all sorts of places to secretly fly things and all the permits they need to create whatever RF environment they want in the process.
The military has had all sorts of secret aircraft over the years and they never test them by loitering around civilian areas for weeks at a time making damned sure thousands of people can get photographs and turn it into a national story. There's plenty of things like photos of the stealth aircraft that people accidentally caught and didn't realize what they were until years later when the relevant aircraft become public knowledge, but those were generally obtained despite the precautions taken, not because they were cruising around in major cities in broad daylight.
The fact that this is still one of the best theories I've got despite everything I just said is a sign of how weird this situation is.
With all due respect, this is yet another instance of Hacker News confidently stating very wrong things. My wife ran the operational testing program for a classified Naval aircraft capability for nearly a decade. They flew unmarked planes out of a commercial airport. People photographed them and asked questions all the time. Nobody ever answered them. Neither confirm nor deny is standard practice. If you have something like the U2 flying at 50,000 feet, by all means, hide it. Fly out of Area 51 or whatever. But if you're just modifying standard aircraft and it flies low enough that people are going to see it anyway, the best you can do is keep it out of anyone's hands to physically examine, but you can't keep people from seeing it.
She used to show me speculation just like this on hobbyist observer web forums. People speculating the planes belonged to the CIA, were running cocaine shipments, all kinds of crazy shit. Nobody for whatever reason ever guessed the obvious and only true statement. It was just basic military aircraft testing out new surveillance tech that wasn't ready to field yet. Not "surveillance state monitor the public" shit that Hacker News thinks we're doing, either. Just cranky weird shit like hiring a bunch of people in west Texas to ride around on camels and horses and seeing if you can tell the difference, because it's a lot easier to do that first over territory you control before you try to do it in Iraq.
"civilian areas for weeks at a time making damned sure thousands of people can get photographs and turn it into a national story" was not an extraneous part of my quote. This is not just "not answering questions", this is rubbing it everyone's face, this is running around in the airport shrieking about their secret airplanes and making sure everyone notices them and then telling everyone "oh, but no, those aren't ours what on Earth could they possibly be??!?". This is not how they do things, which your post reinforces, not contradicts. Tell me when anything your wife did ended up on the national news for days at a time like this.
I don’t do anything military or classified or anything, just work for a big tech company. And my employer’s standard policy for anything that leaks through public testing is “say nothing, and if they’re really persistent, issue a one-sentence statement that says nothing”. Confidential stuff I do ends up in the national news all the time, but it turns out that if you’re really boring and don’t engage in a conversation, people forget about you next week.
> The military theory doesn't fit to me on the grounds that at this point they should be just admitting it.
They aren't going to confirm or deny any classified programs that they probably spent billions of dollars on just because the public is spooked.
See also: Mirage Men (2013). The government spent countless hours and millions of dollars to convince one man who saw classified aircraft that what he saw was actually aliens. They even set up a fake alien crash site for him to investigate in order to throw him off.
Or the government spent countless hours and millions of dollars trying to convince the public that one man saw a classified aircraft and not actual aliens. /s
And I really can't think of any reason to want something like this to be a national news story, rather than possibly a couple months' worth of entertainment on r/ufos.
You want this to be a thing so badly. But in reality it’s just people mistakenly identifying commercial airplanes as drones and hobbyist trolling the believers.
After seeing that news clip, my only question is “why do they care?”. I’m not saying nobody should care but why do we have citizens on the hunt for drones. From the look of it, the drones don’t seem to be invading citizens privacy, nor does it put them in danger. It’s pretty clear they don’t even know where exactly the drones operate, which is understandable given the conditions. And why does the mayor care? Cities can impose certain restrictions on drone operations but they cannot just ban drones. They don’t own the airspace.
This is up to FAA/FBI/DHS to investigate, if they have reasonable belief laws are being violated or safety is being threatened. Local law enforcement or state agencies can investigate as well but from a different angle (privacy violations, local ordinances, noise complaints, trespassing…).
Aaahahah! The guys who are doing this are absolutely shitting themselves laughing right now, sending the whole nation into UFO panic and getting it on national news and talked about at the highest levels of government for a couple hundred bucks. No drones necessary!
It's fucking genius, and just like magic tricks, it's so simple that everyone overlooks it and jumps straight to "MUST be actual magic/Aliens/secret government program/evil communists!", and for the same reason- people want to get tricked, mesmerized, shocked, see something magical and special, to the point that they become absolutely blind to the most mundane explanations, and that's precisely why it works so well!
Not going to ruin it for them either, if you figure it out you figure it out and then you know, it's pointless telling people anyway because they will just come up with random nonsense to dismiss it because 1) they want to believe so hard, 2) they won't admit they were so easily tricked.
Sorry for being an ass, I'm just finding this situation absolutely hilarious!
The real story here is the apparent... and I use this term very, very deliberately... fecklessness of all the relevant authorities. Apparently... again, a deliberate choice... nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation, or nobody has the technical capability, or something like that. I'm not sure what the problem is, exactly, and that is in some sense now the dominant problem. How can there be no clue by now?
Your sort of post is relevant in the first few days of the story. But if this was the case, with all this attention on it, it should already have been determined. But authorities aren't even floating this as a theory. Basically all they're doing is shooting down (pun somewhat intended) every theory.
That there is this much confusion, days later, is itself now the most important aspect of the story.
And we're getting up to where there are international consequences to this sort of issue, too. If we can't figure out what these drones are in a week, how can we be trusted to defend Taiwan or other allies in a world where "drone swarm" is slowly but quite steadily moving its way up to the #1 most likely attack vector? At some point it stops mattering if maybe it is just helicopters miles away being misidentified, at some point that becomes even worse in some ways than other answers, as it gets hard to claim we're going to be totally awesome at defending you against drone swarms if we can't even figure out in less than two weeks whether or not there are drones in our own airspace.
I don't know what's going on and am not pushing any particular theory. I've got a lot of things in my probability matrix but none of them particularly make any sense at all, which means I'm missing something critical. (Which is hardly a surprise.)
> nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation, or nobody has the technical capability
Well .. SNAFU? This is basically what I'd expect. In these kind of cases there's a steady stream of crank reports from the public which are 100% false positives. The authorities will have a process for routing all the UFO reports to someone who sends out form letters and otherwise ignores them. The actual airspace protection is done by radar and whatever the US calls "QRA".
There's no suggestion or evidence of any damage, so this ranks as a much lower threat than all sorts of other things like celebrity CEO assassins.
In order of decreasing likeliness:
- nothing there
- just regular commercial aircraft
- weird aircraft, but classified, hence the blank response from authorities
SNAFU is high on my list too, though generally I'd expect someone to have jumped in front of this by now. (That may be happening; see the responses from Congress today, which are the sort of thing that would look like.) Again, part of my analysis is the length of time this has been occurring; theories I had in the first couple of days generally involved the problem being only a couple of days old. The longer the mystery persists, the more we have to reconsider such theories.
I don't expect you to believe in aliens. I don't tend to believe in much of anything. But when you have multiple whistleblowers giving testimony to congress that UAPs are operated by non-human intelligence, I think keeping aliens as "just speculative science fiction" is factually incorrect.
Human intelligence should be enough to understand what parallax is and how gimbals and IR sensors work.
All those published videos were no less than a psyop to demonstrate weapons system's capabilities - with the implicit brag that there's even more powerful stuff they're not showing.
Why would they be interested in a random military installation in New jersey? And not omething on the Pacific coast or Hawaii or Guam or in the Philippines or Japan or Okinawa be more likely?
Because the US is full of infrastructure that is critical but weak, and the JIT supply chain stretched to the thinnest of margins in the name of sacred profit can often be the best point of attack.
Remember when Helene ravaged the southeastern US? One of the things that got cut off was a plant producing saline -- turns out, the US gets its saline from three manufacturers, when one went dark, the effects were felt nation-wide. Effects like cancelling surgical procedures for the lack of basic resources, and saline shortages lasting until today.
It would make a lot of sense for foreign adversaries to scope out these weak points, and integrate them into their strategies.
Question: how do you think the US government post-9/11 would respond if they actually didn't know who belonged to these drones and they were less than an hour from Washington DC (given a flight speed of 200mph https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/325_kmh_while_ukra...)? Would they pussyfoot around for a week, then blow smoke up our asses about it or would they immediately eliminate the threat and then blow smoke up our asses about it? I think that someone somewhere knows what's happening and won't tell us but has enough authority to stand down an armed response, which to me sounds like DHS or DoD.
yeah they shot down a friggin weather balloon with a JET, but nothing to worry about with these? they definitely know what they are and they're fine with it. field testing new drone based surveillance systems?
Not even as nefarious as that I don't think. The NJ and NY port authorities have an existing agreement as of Feb 2024 to allow for experimentation and buildout of drone-based last mile delivery systems. I think this is all a case of lazy/sensationalist journalists realizing that if they report "mystery drones" they get to write multiple content-free articles that will generate a lot of attention but if they do the investigative work they'll find a boring answer that costs them attention. Journalism in America being an industry that converts your attention into money.
> The NJ and NY port authorities have an existing agreement as of Feb 2024 to allow for experimentation and buildout of drone-based last mile delivery systems.
And if this were the reason for these particular drones the NJ and NY port authorities don't really have any reason not to just come forward and state as much. You'd think they'd be more than happy to crow about their "innovation hub" and the work they are doing. They've already gone to the trouble of having their Media Relations staff write up the article you cited. Why waste an opportunity certain to have a greater reach now?
Journalists didn't generate this attention, the drones themselves did. The public is genuinely interested and concerned. Journalists may be capitalizing on what the public is already wanting to learn more about, but I don't think they're avoiding investigative work for fear of the public losing interest. There is simply no one they could ask who would be willing to provide them with the truth.
Any journalist who did somehow manage to get the real story would pull the attention from all the other journalists without answers so they've got the incentive, just not the means. All they really can do is repeat what little they are told to a public which has been asking them to give them that information while also pandering to their audience with whatever speculation they think their viewers/readers will want to hear. A large part of journalism in America is entertainment after all. They wont waste this opportunity since they absolutely want attention and money, but they can't take the blame for "content free articles" when no one is willing to provide them with anything but speculation and more questions.
> fecklessness of all the relevant authorities. [...] nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation
Some would see that as an admirable example of a small government not overstepping its bounds.
The local sheriff doesn't have the authority to shoot down aircraft? And doesn't exceed their authority by shooting them anyway? Good job local sheriff.
The FAA has a handful of drone regulation folks? Nowhere near enough for a 24/7 national quick response drone tracking force? Very restrained and cost-conscious, good job FAA.
Congress hasn't authorised the military to spend taxpayer money on a national anti-drone-swarm defence system, and nobody's spent taxpayer money without authorisation? Sensible, we don't need bureaucrats funding their pet projects on the taxpayer's dime.
> Some would see that as an admirable example of a small government not overstepping its bounds.
some would see it as a government in paralysis through bloat and bureaucracy with accountability not being clearly assigned to anyone. This is more likely the case now.
Ah yes, but who is responsible for delegating authority and assigning accountability? Certainly can't trust the government to such tasks. They might try and use bureaucracy.
Lawmakers have created endless nests of ordinance, law, etc deferring responsibility to other aspects of government. Regime change plans generally involve sabotaging resilient systems to make them become brittle. Then you force those systems to bear loads they cannot, destabilize, bring to crisis.
The problem here appears to be conflicts at a state level (safety mandates) and that at the federal level (airspace management, you don't shoot at planes and drones are small planes).
That's the gist of what I've seen with regards to these things. Paralysis and lack of proper chain of command absent disaster, is a sign of impending collapse when there is calamity.
Its unclear who owns the drones but it should be relatively simple with SIGINT to trilaterate the control signal, any decently experienced ham should be able to do that.
If there is no control signal and they are operating autonomous, they should be considered restricted/military weapons with a proper chain of command and oversight. Lawmakers have been paralyzed and unable to keep up for decades though. Its hardly a surprise.
When the costs aren't paid for proper preparation beforehand, the cost is almost always paid in lives.
The type of drones that are small and cheap enough to make a "swarm" lack the range to cross the Taiwan Strait. They would have to be launched from a ship or larger aircraft, which are vulnerable to existing defenses. Lessons from land conflicts in Eastern Europe have very limited relevance to naval conflicts in the Indo-Pacific.
I would not write this.off as hysteria. It's important to consider motivation of potential actors. Every advanced rocket guidance system uses cameras to zero in on its targets during the final approach. You can't rely on GPS at that point. To do a good job you need to know what your target looks like and high resolution drone imagery helps a lot.
My theory was that assuming these are some kind of adversary drone, they seem to have read and understood the law and are making some effort to remain within its bounds so that 4th Amendment and other relevant protections apply to them. That means operating at the legally-allowed altitude, running navigation lights, etc...but then somehow deciding not to run the required ADS-B ID that would, in theory, give away who they are and allow their comings and goings to be tracked.
Causing a collision with another plane that might then fall onto a residential neighborhood is a great way to get the entire weight of the government to come down on you, have the remains of your craft picked apart, and have your cover thoroughly blown. Don't mess with the NTSB!
I realize this theory has holes, but it's what I've got, and I feel like it's making more effort at explanation than e.g. the retired Air Force Major-General who was quoted as saying "they're flying with lights on, they're flying where people will see them; that tells me... there's nothing nefarious about it, or we're dealing with the world's dumbest terrorist."[1]
As to why they don't fly during the day: it seems that they don't want to be seen, and have been observed to "go dark" when confronted.[2] Incidentally, that's also what "The Angry Astronaut" said in his video posted on 1 Dec [3] about the craft he attempted to chase down in the United Kingdom next to the Lakenheath US Air Force installation-- well before this behavior was reported in the USA.
Or not even imagery collection, but testing to see what our response is like. If we're scrambling and unable to explain/contain it, that's useful for an adversary to know a little about our current defensive capabilities.
Or testing our own response. If we want to test what China's response might be, both public and military, but its too provocative to try, we might try it on ourselves.
Some people have the most bizarre hobbies. From photographing bigfoot to ufo's or planespotters. I dont intend to understand all of them but photographing drones might be one of the more moral ones in this century. Just imagine drones filming your living room, or military installations like feared in the article. Having someone record such incidents is appreciated.
Oh yeah I totally get having a niche hobby. I’ve personally considered starting a collection of photos of modified 90s Japanese cars. I take photos all the time of my cat with a “pro” camera but that doesn’t make me a professional cat photographer. Now if I were making money from it on the other hand…
I would be amazed if there’s enough of a demand for drone photos to support someone
Quick summary after following this for a few days:
FBI says they're rotary and fixed-wing drones, White House says they aren't foreign adversaries, Pentagon says they aren't USA military, all 3 insist that there's no indication of a real threat despite the drones being bigger and higher tech than retail drones.
Politicians are PO'd that something about this doesn't add up: How can anyone know these aren't a threat without knowing whose they are? Why isn't anyone bringing them down? Where do they land? Is this similar to the Chinese spy balloon?
I've seen a huge number of theories by now, and not one of them actually fits.
"How can anyone know these aren't a threat without knowing whose they are?"
Easy. They didn't say they don't know whose they are. They could belong to a private contractor who is paid by the military but the military doesn't own the drones nor company (plausible deniability /outsourcing.) Or they could be a friendly country (e.g. UK) red-teaming the US with our consent.
I've never heard anyone apply the Five Eyes horse trading to inter-country UFO-related dynamics of operation but its fairly conceivable and has a bit of precedent, right?
The FBI explicitly said they didn't 2 days ago. There's a possibility the FBI is being purposefully left in the dark by other feds, or lying under oath at risk of prison time for perjury, but without any evidence that's just one more of MANY conspiracy theories here.
In the three-letter agency soup, it's very possible another agency called them and said: you guys don't know who these are, and you will never know. But we know.
Wow, we are getting Cyberpunk lore in real-life? The CIA, FBI, NSA, and DEA all conspired to overthrow the US government in Cyberpunk lore - though not as a united front and they also fought with each other iirc
Fair point. Another option is that the FBI knows more about the nature of the drones (size, lights, other identifiers, etc) either via visual identification or other sensors (classified, at related military installations nearby) sufficiently that they can be confident that there are no, say, explosives or guns attached and thus the drones are "safe". But they still don't know whose they are.
Another option is a variation of the above, where they might have a "person or company of interest" that is too soon to talk about, but they suspect the game being played is that they are owned by some tech startup who is trying to fly their/others drones around to drum up business by scaring people to in turn secure huge military contracts for drone-sensing and drone-countermeasures which they can sell as a solution to the problem/risk they've created. Am I too cynical?
Or as the original poster implied and some statements I've seen are clearer about than others, the wording is just sloppy in distinguishing between: "There is no evidence these drones are a threat/harmful" (ie they have been non-violent, so far) vs "There is not a threat here" (of any kind now or future... "keep calm and carry on"/"Don't panic... because we told you so; we don't see any particular reason".)
A substantial leap. Given that these are flying near military installations, wouldn't the most plausible explanation be that these are test flights? What data would be gathered from low altitude that could not be aggregated from the myriad other sensors in our environments? Or from satellites, etc.?
Seems like the U.S. military has taken to heart that in any near future conflicts, forces of any branch will need to be heavily augmented by drones for reconnaissance, offense, and defense. So, if that's true, I would expect any military site at which personnel are trained to be flying drones constantly. And it serves them no benefit to let everyone know what they're doing. If the U.S. public is "read in", so are all potential adversaries.
> How can anyone know these aren't a threat without knowing whose they are
They are - obviously - lying. This screams secrecy to me. All 3 know that these drones are not a threat. They aren't US military because they are a 3 letter agency program. They know there's nothing to worry about it, but they won't tell you any more details. Which has been the modus operandi for secret services for decades, so I'm surprised it's such an issue?
Exactly. That's what I think it is, government secrecy as their standard operating procedure. When unsure, don't say anything. After all, disclosing the public includes adversaries also knowing.
It seems to me what's happening is a "Streisand Effect" where the whole attitude of "go away, nothing to see here" is in fact maximizing attention and defeating the purpose of hiding this away.
If it were me I'd put a band-aid on a drone, fly it to a person, and say, "we are testing military capabilities to render first aid to our soldiers" or something similar. It's not a lie, it's good optics, adversaries can worry about it... then put whatever it is on ice for a while until the heat dies down
Can you think of a better way to normalize it? Think about the average persons response to online privacy these days for a good indicator about how people will feel about drone monitoring in a few years if this is normalized.
Please don't do this. You're not going to hit a drone at any appreciable altitude from a "high window" with a "nice rifle." One of the first rules of putting bullets downrange is to know what's behind your target, and you simply can't know that when you're shooting into the air.
If history is any indication it will be local police responding to shots fired. Many municipalities in NJ do not allow the discharge of a firearm within town limits. Morris Township has such a law in their code as well.
I don't think you understand. It sounds like you think I'm talking about defending youself against a human. I am not.
If a drone is trying to gain access to your home, do you have the right to defend against it using deadly force? Meaning; Force that would be deadly to a human attacker.
Or they will end up in situation that in most cases will end in their death. Which seems so obvious that they must be suicidal. Law enforcement can bring far more force to bear than a single person can defend against.
Not just that, there are plenty of documented instances of people being shot dead for being suspected of holding a gun. Do people really think they can just shoot a cop, close their front door, and go back to living their life?
All this talk about "2nd amendment is about deposing tyranny" and yet they weren't the ones protesting the wars in the middle east and the Patriot act, two recent and objectively tyrannical acts.
In fact, we know that the gun nuts in the US were broadly on the side of SUPPORTING those two things.
I think you're importing heavy bias into your interpretation. 2A types are interested in deposing tyranny when its directed against them by their own government. Not tyranny anywhere on the face of the Earth. If that's true, and I do believe it is, it is not at all incompatible with foreign wars, whether one believes they're tyrannical or not.
> 2A types are interested in deposing tyranny when its directed against them by their own government
The NRA's complete silence on the murder of Breonna Taylor by government agents, as retaliation for Kenneth Walker exercising his 2A natural right to self defense (at home at night!). I'm unable to find a kind way of explaining that away. "Freedom" culture seems to have become just as post-reality detached from effective values as everything else.
Full transparency: I think the only "Tyranny" that "2A types" care about is a law banning guns. They seem to love the militarization of the police, police having zero accountability ("They do a hard job", so do I but I don't get to shoot someone cause I was spooked and then go on vacation), and literally vote for Trump, who objectively has done more to remove gun rights than any democrat since clinton.
An absurd amount of the most aggressive 2A types are literally just cops, you know, the actual boot that would stand on the neck in any tyranny situation. They'll scream and cry about the ATF and then talk with their cop buddies while smoking some MJ, in a state without recreational cannabis laws.
In short, they are dishonest, whether they are smart enough to realize it or not.
To be clear, I have a lot of guns, but it's not because I have any special love of the US BoR or even a belief that they are useful against state actors. Or, even a real enjoyment of shooting.
I have guns because my neighbors all have guns and think queer/trans/atheist/lefty/etc folks are literally demonic. They are explicitly waiting for any suspension of regular government in which they can play their fantasy of a "purge". I'd much rather be collecting pretty dresses, but this is how it is where I live.
I would say that the parent comment is accurate in noting 2A loving folks don't want government authority applied to -them-, but it's -only- to them and many are living in the privileged fantasy that this power will never be applied to them and only to their grievances- hence the boot licking they do.
I don't think that's dishonesty, I think it is delusional. And they generally go from being "normal conservatives" to out right fascists just as soon as that fantasy weakens even a little.
I like the idea that the government will show up without identifying themselves just so people can live out their fantasy of shooting someone without getting into trouble.
They will absolutely identify themselves. The reason you should be worried is the endless, expensive process you’ll be subjected to after they knock on your door.
I don't know much about america, but after shooting down a secret drone, you really would assume that people knocking at your door really is the situation you think it is ?
You pay a bunch of money to someone who has a Dash 8 or similar common commercial aircraft. These drones probably don't have 1000mi range.
And even if you can't follow one all the way to its destination you can still take some real good pictures with flash and plaster them all over the news and wait for someone to say "I pump fuel and sweep floors at airport X and a bunch of dickbags with black suburbans and bad attitudes have a hanger full of those things".
Since you're replying to a question about tracking fixed wing it's worth mentioning that their range can be well over 1000 miles as some of the Iranian Shahed drones have a range of almost 1600 miles.
That's a 400 lbs, 11 ft by 8 ft UAV powered by a 50 hp gasoline piston engine. It's half the size of a Cessna 172 and makes a similar noise, observers would for sure classify it as an airplane.
A Dash 8 or other similar commercial aircraft lacks the radar necessary to track an aerial target. Most airliners have weather radar but it's not really useful for this purpose. In much of the airspace around that region a Dash 8 would also have to operate under ATC control; the pilot can't just fly wherever without getting violated.
Yeah, unless someone really really big is behind this (or it's aliens), then a US military drone should be able to track and follow one of the unknown drones for a while.
Nah. None of the publicly acknowledged US military drones carries the type of X-band air search radar that would be necessary to reliably track a small aerial target. There is some stuff in development with that capability but it hasn't been fielded yet, and for safety reasons it certainly wouldn't be authorized for flight in controlled civilian airspace or over populated areas.
These are the least-bad theories, but if an agency is desperate enough to deploy the drones night after night even after being noticed, then that's extremely foreboding. What would drive them to do that, a dirty bomb that needs to be found with drone sensors?
Personally I'd rather have evidence of this before dwelling on all the possible tragedies here.
For those who want to know the most consistent UFOlogy angle that wasn't invented last week: Over on 4chan there was an alleged leaker and follow ups back in 2023 who says that there's an underwater ET mothership off the east coast that produces 3-d printed made to order small anti-gravity drones that launch and do various tasks to monitor us. Anything that approaches the underwater mothership is destroyed before they even know they're under attack. They treat us like zoo animals, have been here for at least 100 years, and mostly ignore us except when we get trigger happy with nuclear weapons[1]. This is largely consistent with "The Crowded Galaxy" resolution to the Fermi Paradox[2].
From a UFOlogy angle, America trying to start WWIII with Russia might have something to do with all this uptick in drone activity since there was a huge amount back in the 40s and 50s when we were also at the brink with the USSR.
There used to be no evidence at all, but now you have David Grusch who was given explicit authorization to talk to people in unacknowledged special access programs about UAPs and he said under oath before congress that yes, there are crashed ET craft with biologics in them that have been recovered going back to the 1930s.
Testimony is not evidence, and using the passive voice ("given explicit authorization", by whom? why does this matter?) is an explicit argument from authority. Physical evidence or nothing. There are no shortage of credulous people in the world happy to bask in the glow of attention.
Consider the counter-factual. If indeed there are aliens here, and have been here for decades, why not centuries? Why haven't previous generations found them, and not known their true origin? How curious that these artifacts only started appearing in the space age, when if they had appeared previously they would have been attributed to a religious origin (and not only not suppressed, but shared widely as evidence for God.)
Note: if aliens are here then FTL travel is not only possible but common, and easy, and this would undermine a great deal of verified physics. To get around this you'd need a conspiracy across all physics research (a la the SF novel "The Three Body Problem"). I'd also add that if going to other planets was like sailing a ship, then we could expect (lazy, sloppy) tourists to come around who don't "toe the line" when it comes to staying hidden.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and without it all such claims can be safely ignored (and indeed, can and should negatively impact the people making them).
Grusch was given access specifically by an act of the U.S Congress to investigate UAPs. Watch the CSPAN link of the congressional hearing I provided for the full details.
Read the link to "The Crowded Galaxy" theory for what's probably going on based on that testimony. It answers all your questions. There are probably millions of planets with life in the galaxy. We're not remarkable except with how hyper-violent and invasive our species is, which is why they're keeping an eye on us. We evolved here so we have the right to live here, but we don't have any rights to live anywhere else in the galaxy. Transforming is probably a ghastly notion to them.
The government also studied remote viewing, psychic powers, and tried to control people's minds with LSD. The government has been investigating UFOs since Project Grudge back in the 1940s. None of that is evidence that remote viewing, psychic powers, mind control or UFOs are actually really alien spacecraft.
David Grusch repeating second and thirdhand claims about alien conspiracies is not evidence that those claims are real, nor is investigating UAPs evidence of the existence of alien spacecraft. None of this is actually evidence if anything, it's literally the same non-evidence the UFO community has always believed in as a matter of faith, and insisted that everyone else take as proven, self-evident fact.
Worth remaining a little skeptical. Could be Project Blue Beam, the plan for a fake alien invasion, that's been talked about for literally decades in conspiracy circles.
It's impossible to discover novel phenomenon if you are unwilling to start without evidence. Meanwhile, you yourself _just_ made a meta-theory, without any burden whatsoever.
If they have craft that can travel between solar systems then our military technology is not a threat. Besides, why make your presence known when you can just hide deeper from everybody? People tend to notice with multi-million dollar craft manned by people with families suddenly go missing, especially in American waters at peacetime with modern geolocation and communications technologies installed.
If fully manned Navy frigates and destroyers were vanishing without warning or explanation there is zero chance of keeping a lid on that. Way too many people involved, many of which are civilians.
Ah, E115 aka Moscovium. Highly radioactive, with a half-life of under a second, claimed to be a stable building material. Straight to Bob Lazar levels of kookiness.
Element 115 wasn't a building material, it was supposed to exhibit antigravity properties under the right circumstances and was part how UFOs flew in such abnormal patterns.
> Once again, E115 decays fully (multiple half-lifes, very little left) in mere seconds and is very radioactive.
That said, this only applies to the isotopes we've been able to synthesize so far. It’s not the definitive answer for all possible isotopes. Nuclear physics theories, particularly around the "island of stability," suggest there could be heavier isotopes of Element 115 with more favorable neutron-to-proton ratios. These isotopes might have significantly longer half-lives—potentially lasting seconds, minutes, or even days or weeks.
We simply haven’t discovered these isotopes yet. With better technology and experiments in the future, there’s a chance we might find longer-lived variants of Element 115, but for now, we can only speculate.
Ooh that's a fun rabbit hole, thanks! I'm going to choose to read this like /r/nosleep or SCP - all stories are "true". Suspension of disbelief is the most fun part. I want to know more about these "builds".
1) You don't need a single theory to fit all the evidence — some sightings might be unrelated to others.
2) You don't need a theory to fit all the evidence since, undoubtedly, not all the evidence is accurate. A theory that fit most of the evidence is adequate.
3) We all know people and even photos lie. That gives us quite a bit of leeway to be dismissive of sightings and official responses as well.
Neither FBI nor Pentagon have ability to fly drones in the US airspace at will. On the contrary, they, like everyone else, have to get FAA approvals and those always leak. And usually in fact published by the FAA who needs to warn pilots of potential threats -- one could go to the official FAA website and search those NOTAMs.
Ignoring FAA by the FBI or the military just doesn't happen, the price to pay is WAY too high.
NSA or spooks could theoretically be behind this, but why do it where it annoys people and attracts attention and not in some desert or foreign place? Something doesn't add up.
Isn't airspace around all military installations exempted from this? How would you train your people to use your drones otherwise?
What's more, the feds are clearly signalling that these are ours. As others point out, you can't say its not an adversaries asset unless you know whose it is. Which would suggest either they are flying these illegally, they have some kind of exemption to fly in civilian air space, or they are being flown in military air space that is observable from non-military locations.
They don't need approval for under 400 FT AGL in class G airspace.
The idiots reporting on it have NO idea how high these drones are. And the military has a bunch of carved airspace in various places. I think last time i looked (4 weeks ago), there was some reserved airspace off Cape Hatteras for the US Marines.
To add to your last point, looking at maps of drone sightings in the area, the biggest hotspots are in reserved airspace over military assets, including ones that store and load nukes on ships.
If they were truly a threat, or some random person's drones, they would have been taken care of nearly instantly.
I have personally seen the response of someone flying their drone in that airspace. They do not hesitate to send out goons with guns strapped over their shoulders and megaphones to make it clear that what you're doing is very much not okay.
Last I checked (things could have changed) they do not need approvals for hobbyist use. Official government use and even sponsored research absolutely required approvals. And this is very likely not a hobbyist.
While completely true, it doesn't address the fact that CIA, NSA, FBI and other gov agencies have used their control or secret ownership of 'private' companies to break federal regulations in the past. They _could_ be using some sort of cutout to confuse the ownership/control to get around regulations.
The FBI, NSA, and all other civilian agencies must follow FAA regulations but legally speaking the military doesn't. The military operates aircraft in domestic airspace under a memorandum of understanding with the FAA which basically states that they'll follow the regulations. This makes things easier for everyone and prevents mishaps. But if the military chooses to violate that agreement then there aren't really any enforceable legal consequences.
Same reason the feds didn't say anything about the F-117 in the 80s when hundreds of people in nevada were mistaking it for a UFO: They have no interest in telling the world about the exact nature of their ISR assets.
The US DoD has recognized a lack of capacity and capability in our native drone programs when examined in context of the Ukraine war. They are spending plenty of money to shore of that lack, and not all of the programs and projects they are funding are through Anduril and have literal fan groups.
Why do the theories not fit? And where's the link to the FBI statement? I believe they said "include rotary and fixed-wing" not exclusively, but this is based on reports received. They haven't actually captured one.
included sightings of both fixed-wing and rotary drones, Robert Wheeler, the assistant director of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, said during a Homeland Security subcommittee hearing on security threats posed by drones.
Yeah there's a point quoting, people here don't always watch videos, but thanks for the link.
Article gets the quote slightly wrong, but semantically it's right: some are described as being slightly larger than um um than a commercial uh available drone um fixed Wing as well as rotary
Technically you could say the rotary/fixed-wing is only invoked to describe the class of drones compared to which these reports are larger, not that the reports "include" ("some are described") fixed wing and rotary.
I'm OK with either the weaker (less UFO) or stronger (more UFO) interpretations. How about you?
Heh, those things look super fun. It would be funny if some of these turn out to be that, tho I doubt it.
What's weird is the authorities are saying: "we don't know what they are, but we know for sure they're not a threat." This doesn't make sense. No one is allowing them to be there, it's safer to assume they're a threat until you know for sure what they are.
Yet there are dozens of other agencies that work with the Pentagon that aren’t military either.
These are likely part of an SCI program — either a real op or a training op. Very few people would know what’s going on, so most of the agencies commenting likely are being completely honest based on their own knowledge.
This is government.
FAA NOTAM FDC 4/1797 Restricts the airspace until 20 December.
If they were truly “unknown” then why would the NOTAM arbitrarily end on 20 Dec? If they were unknown, they’d have the NOTAM be indefinite until the situation were resolved.
This is the government clearly stating they can intercept unknown drones in the area.
> UAS OPR WHO DO NOT COMPLY WITH APPLICABLE AIRSPACE RESTRICTIONS ARE WARNED THAT PURSUANT TO 10 U.S.C.SECTION 130I AND 6 U.S.C.SECTION 124N, THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE(DOD), THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY(DHS) OR THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE(DOJ) MAY TAKE SECURITY ACTION THAT RESULTS IN THE INTERFERENCE, DISRUPTION, SEIZURE, DAMAGING, OR DESTRUCTION OF UNMANNED ACFT DEEMED TO POSE A CREDIBLE SAFETY OR SECURITY THREAT TO PROTECTED PERSONNEL, FAC, OR ASSETS.
It's easy to say they're probably no threat. The number of ways for something to be a threat is much smaller than the number of ways of something being a not a threat, therefore the probability of them being a threat is very low.
It's always possible to make a just-so story about them being a threat, and those are the kind of stories that catch people's attention. The odds are they belong to a mapping company, or a drone construction company, or a university or something else completely innocuous.
Why don't we know? Well because it's a big world, and people dealing with actual problems have more important shit to deal with.
What? There are many recreational (small) drone rules with the FAA because they can harm people. A 6 foot drone falling hundreds of feet on someone is obviously a threat.
> despite the drones being bigger and higher tech than retail drones.
How does anyone know how big these are? I've heard reports like this:
1. They looks larger than normal drones.
2. The look like they are operating at a height greater than 400 ft AGL.
How do they know the height? If they don't know the height, they certainly don't know the size. If it looks large, it isn't very high.
If it is large and high, I would think they would get some radar contacts.
If these are heavier than 55 pounds, I think we'd see the FAA jumping all over it. I also don't see why any LE would announce that they are actively figuring it out as they'd want to keep the element of surprise and track the drone back to the operators.
> Why isn't anyone bringing them down?
Only federal authorities can do anything to aircraft. This is in the realm of the FAA.
> How can anyone know these aren't a threat without knowing whose they are?
What kind of threat are we worried about here that wasn't around yesterday (last year)?
> White House says they aren't foreign adversaries
I don't think the military is going to reveal its methods and capabilities.
I think the one thing no one really mentions is the fact that drones are extremely easy to build in the comfort of your living room. If you have a 3d printer, some spare parts laying around and a cheap electronics store around the corner(check, check and check in my case), you can build a drone for less than 300 bucks which is far less than the retail ones - completely autonomous, no radio link needed, takes off, does what it does and lands on it's own with no human intervention.
Delivery success rate is pretty much a random number generator here. Sometimes stuff arrives on time, sometimes it shows up 6 months late, sometimes never. For me it's either the physical store, amazon or mouser.
Did the WH say "these are not foreign adversaries' drones" or did they give some mealy-mouthed nonsense like "there is no evidence that ..." or "we have no reason to believe that ..."? Because those are two very different things.
If you are US military, your probably won't be flying on Thanksgiving...
If you are a spy trying to look at the activity or capture changes at a site, you probably aren't going to be flying on Thanksgiving since no work was done...
> FBI says they're rotary and fixed-wing drones, White House says they aren't foreign adversaries, Pentagon says they aren't USA military
Do you have sources for these? Not challenging the assertions, but all I see in the news articles is vague un-attributed paraphrasing of statements. For example you say that the "FBI says they're rotary and fixed-wing drones"; the latest I saw from the FBI was what this article said; that they had lots of reports of sightings but no further information.
The pictures I've seen all look like blurry pictures of helicopters; also occasionally blurry "orbs". Does nobody have access to anything better than this? Is this even a real thing?
(CSPAN links would be better, but I've already spent way too much time on this.)
Would have put sources in if I'd realized I'd get this many views.
I also might have mixed up what the Pentagon says vs the Press Secretary, but since they both answer to Joe, it shouldn't matter much.
‘Pentagon spokesperson Brigadier General Pat Ryder said on Thursday that the US was "aware that [the balloon] had intelligence collection capabilities".
But "it has been our assessment now that it did not collect while it was transiting the United States or over flying the United States".’
When did the pentagon confirm it was not a spy balloon? The article is very short and the meaning is clear, it doesn’t say anything about whether the pentagon thinks it’s a spy balloon.
I agree that sensors could mean anything, and so could “intelligence data” but just because the positive was not confirmed “It’s a spy balloon” doesn’t mean that the negative was confirmed “It’s not a spy balloon”. Personally I am unconvinced either way and actually don’t care whether or not it was a spy balloon, my point is that the bbc article absolutely does not say that the pentagon thinks it wasn’t a spy balloon.
Also keep in mind the US military isn’t necessarily going to be honest about what they think the balloon is and how much they can discern about its purpose.
> Pentagon spokesperson Brigadier General Pat Ryder said on Thursday that the US was "aware that [the balloon] had intelligence collection capabilities". ... He said the efforts the US took to mitigate any intelligence gathering "contributed" to the balloon's failure to gather sensitive information.
So it was a spy balloon but it was off, or it was a spy balloon and on and we outsmarted it, or it was a spy balloon and it malfunctioned at least in part.
Nothing in that source suggests that it was not a spy balloon.
Maybe the article had a different headline and they didn’t read the actual article? I’m baffled how some could read that incredibly short article and come away with any assertion about what the pentagon thinks about the balloon other than that it can collect ”intelligence data”
The photos I've seen posted look very obviously like commercial airliners and helicopters with their navigation lights on. You can even make out the American Airlines livery on the tail!
I live in NJ. I've seen these drones. They are not commercial airliners or helicopters. They are loud, fly low and slow, and make abrupt turns unlike any planes I've seen. Their lights are also very different from other aircraft.
I can see how it's tempting to chalk this up to hysteria, but they are absolutely large drones of some kind.
> I live in NJ. I've seen these drones. They are not commercial airliners or helicopters. They are loud, fly low and slow, and make abrupt turns unlike any planes I've seen. Their lights are also very different from other aircraft.
You better crank out your camera and collect any proof at all,because what you are describing bears no resemblance to the sightings mentioned in the article.
There is a reason why sightings of supernatural fenomenal went down abruptly with the inception of cheap digital cameras.
For real, with everyone having a smartphone with high quality cameras on them there really is zero excuse for there to not be highly detailed accurate videos of this if they are legit especially with people describing them as "low and slow".
The article suggests the drones appear during nighttime with which cameras will struggle. "low" is relative and can mean 200 meters which would be very difficult even for regular cameras (without a tripod), let alone a smartphone.
I’ll stop you there and say there are videos. They just happen to be of naturally-occurring phenomena and captured by inept operators who don’t subscribe to Occam’s Razor.
Smartphone cameras are absolutely useless when it comes to taking useful pictures of distant, moving objects. Even a proper DSLR is extremely difficult to use on a moving object at night due to focus issues.
Not focus issues. Set to infinity it will be fine. But shutter speed issues certainly. When people take sharp photographs at night they generally aren’t handholding a camera and shooting a moving subject. And if they are they are close enough to use flash.
Tbf, smartphone cameras are not really "high quality" in a way that's useful here. Try taking a video of something with small angular subtension like an aircraft at cruising altitude with a cell phone camera.
I'm not arguing that these are or aren't anything interesting, but low, relative to airplanes is still pretty far for cell phone cameras, especially in the dark.
You go take that smartphone of yours and try and take a high quality video of just an airliner at night. Its not easy at all. Even in daylight this is like a 35mm lens on a tiny sensor its not the hardware you need to crop out a speck from the sky and show the world what it is. You really need a lens thats about the size of your calf and the sort of camera that goes along with that. And probably a tripod. Not something many have handy.
>with everyone having a smartphone with high quality cameras on them there really is zero excuse for there to not be highly detailed accurate videos of this
Absolutely not.
I understand the tendency to assume that modern tech would make it relatively easy thing to accomplish but there are considerable challenges with ground-based aerial photography/videography...at nighttime...completely unplanned and unscheduled...by an amateur. Better technology makes the field more accessible in a general way, but there is still a very large barrier of: skill, hardware, and out-right luck involved in good image capture as a medium.
Consider, if you ever look towards the beginning or end of some runways you may see a group of plane spotters setup taking photos and video of the airplanes. The typical hardware used to capture things well is a minimum of: DSLR, tripod, battery extenders (or spares), and good perch to rest during lulls (it's more physically demanding on your arms then you might imagine.) More crucially, this is for airplanes that are taking off and landing 1) in a predictable pattern 2) at routine intervals 3) captured primarily in daylight.
Add in height? Introduce increased shake. Add in darkness? Introduce exposure (hold the camera still, longer to get a brighter image). Add in inexperience? Introduce beginner mistakes. On top of those practical concerns, it's probably also pretty creepy to see these unknown objects/drones/whatever. Fear impacts our ability to react in a helpful way.
Smartphones make it simpler to capture a picture or a video, but there is profound gulf between getting something and something even remotely good.
If you're not sure what I mean, here's a simple test you can try: 1) Grab a pencil and go into a completely dark room like a basement 2) Turn off the flash on your phone 3) Holding the pencil between pointer finger and thumb stretch your hand as far from your body as you physically can 4) Take one photo of the tip of the pencil eraser one-handed.
That is considerably easier than it would be to photograph/video a moving object across the night sky, even if it is perceived as moving "low and slow". Longer exposure times mean the camera has to be held motionless for longer so the camera sensor can "soak up" more light to "expose" the photograph properly. (This is why photos at night feel like they take perceptibly longer to capture than they do in daytime - they do take longer!) Flash can help with nearby subjects, but for objects far away (thousands of feet above you) no amount of flash is going to reach the object to reduce exposure time.
Then, let's make things even worse! The object is moving which means that overexposure will turn that solid object into a blur. This is something that is easily possible[1] when taking photos of the night sky.
I live in the Pacific NW and there are a vast number of people with really good quality trail cameras who put them tied to trees all over the place for deer and elk hunting purposes. If Bigfoot was real, we absolutely would have seen one by now.
I've been following the story and this has been discussed on the local Reddit subs. They are almost certainly PteroDynamics XP-4 drones flying from and to the military bases in question for testing purposes. There literally was a public demo of them on the USNS Burlington in Philadelphia a year ago.
I really like that it switches off the outer pair of propellers in level flight, that's a nice feature.
Changing the vertical alignment of the wings to horizontal after takeoff is also really cool, an interesting alternative to 4 vertical propellers with a separate pair of wings. It seems to eliminate the extra moving parts to control those vertical propellers.
The wing folding mechanism is pretty novel as far as I'm aware. The idea of quad hover to forward flight isn't new or unique but the specific configuration is something I haven't seen before. NASA was working on some that tilted the whole wing not this folding design which uses fewer motors compare to the old NASA Greased Lightning test article.
Osprey has a common power shaft between the engines for fault tolerance, constraining the structure's design, such as the lack of dihedral. This has a different set of design constraints and a different solution to propulsion failure.
> should've already learned this, if they were not so stupid.
The stupid take is the one you propose, it's ridiculous. So USAF has secret decoys in WWII and before, that followed WWII fighters, and hovered over people's houses, among millions of other sightings worldwide? So advanced yet they don't send them to war?
> People should've already learned this, if they were not so stupid.
You're falling in the same trap as conspiracy theorists, though: Putting out almost non-falsifiable statements, and then claiming you know better and are smarter. Either it will be revealed that it was USAF and you can feel smug about being correct, or it will not come out and you can still feel smug about being correct because no one can prove you wrong.
Some of the articles are claiming "SUV sized" drones, but their photos are either of commercial aircraft, or of something that looks to be a DJI Phantom 4, or something much like it.
Have you managed to capture any videos of images of these large, low flying, slow moving drones?
it’s amazing how so many people have seen these truck sized drones but they’ve all somehow failed to get pictures.
i can go outside right now in the dark with this phone i’m typing on and get a solid picture of stuff but somehow they keep showing us pictures that look like 1940s era ufo photo blur.
The same probably happens with blurry small aircraft in the scene. It'll "upscale" (i.e. draw in) all kinds of objects with what it thinks is most likely from the context, from its training set.
I can get an acceptable picture of the moon with my phone (at least when autofocus doesn't decide to do something stupid), yet also I can't get good pictures of birds in nearby trees or urban foxes on the other side of the road.
Phone can do night with just hand jitter ok, can't effectively compensate for target motion.
Probably not with a phone, but "affordable" full-frame MILC/DSLR cameras with 100-400mm or 600mm lenses exist and people have them. Much better chances.
Odd, one of those pictures clearly show either a regular RC helicopter, or a full-scale helicopter. You can see the boom and tail light clearly. And no sound associated with it? There are designs for "silent" blades. I mean theyre not silent, bud at least less noisy.
Even decently fast glass won’t do a good job of capturing drones at night unless there’s a significant amount of ambient light.
And telephoto lenses with the range you mention with fast apertures are not exactly cheap. A 600mm F/4 goes for $12-15K and is still not fast enough for shooting moving subjects in the dark.
I did find it odd when this news reporter said of the craft "it's really difficult to show you with our camera, so we have to show you with our phones." You'd think a broadcast-grade camera rig would be better than a smartphone at this.
In my experience the majority of that 1940s photo blur comes when you crop and zoom what otherwise looks like a beautiful digital photograph. I experienced this quite often when utilizing security cameras to try and read license plates.
Any movement of the vehicle whose plate you are attempting to track creates pixelization requiring you sometimes to stitch together multiple frames where individual characters on the plate have become clear in order to read the entire license plate.
And those other 4 out of 10 are very clearly not commercial airlines. I live in NJ was very skeptical of this at first, but after seeing the same patterns 5 nights in a row for aircrafts not going towards Newark, I really have a hard time believing it is simply airlines.
Oh, very much so some elements of mass hysteria. It took the better part of two weeks for authorities to recognize it, then it was "nothing to see here", then FBI is investigating. It sucks that one of our state representatives is out their claiming it's Iran and stoking further tensions.
My personal feeling is if it was enemy drones, our military would have already taken them down. It's hard to imagine we'd let this go on for many weeks without a response. But it's also hard to imagine military testing so obviously over public space. So who knows lol
> My personal feeling is if it was enemy drones, our military would have already taken them down
I think you overestimate a few things here… the military isn’t constantly monitoring all airspace across the country for drone-sized objects and shooting things down if they don’t recognize them.
Perhaps they should be as we enter this brave new world of drone-everything, but they don’t right now.
NJ has some of the leading research centers for the US military, our new president's second estate, and critical infrastructure for telecommunications. Reportedly drones were flying close to all of these spots. I would fully expect our military to be monitoring these parts of the country for drone-sized objects given how effective they have been in waging our wars the past 20 years. So yeah, it's a massive intelligence failure if these are combatant drones.
I don't disagree with any of this. Obviously drones are an extremely real intelligence and actual security threat that we clearly don't know how to handle.
20 years lol Off by a factor of 2.5x, but your expectation is reasonable --so is having a Defense Secretary that tells his staff when he's checking into the hospital for a serious medical condition and an airspace that doesn't allow balloons to get within range of broadcasting firmware updates to ESP32s.
..and Abichandani is reported to be an actual academic (in drone swarming technology) at a prestigious university that is local to the observations, not an enthusiast or politician!
In next room, I have a nearly 100yo man who, in a small group of people using computers with (literal) core memory, invented the technology, satellites and delivery systems to do Reconnaissance from orbit and more importantly, to spot the first signatures of arial weapons systems, yet downvoted here in the dystopian future when I merely correct the peanut gallery for spreading obvious fiction that America's ability to spot drones does not go back further than 20 years (or that the internal proprietary code of the latest ESP32 series Chinese MCUs has the well known ability to receive firmware updates via RF, even from Chinese balloons, Chinese LEO Starlink competitors and yes, drones).
The military isn’t allowed to shoot down drones in the US. There was a WSJ story last month about drones flying over Langley for 2 weeks. All the general could do is stand on the roof and watch
They shot down at least 3 including one that 100% belonged to a local club, meaning the military had no clue what they were launching missiles at. One was shot down over Lake Huron, and the pilot actually even managed to miss the balloon with his missile. It's like 99 Red Balloons meets Idiocracy.
Obviously the military can shoot down whatever they want, let alone use EM tech, which is highly effective at grounding drones. Drones keep getting sighted near the exact areas that would be testing out drone militarization, and not getting shot down. Gee, I wonder who's they might be.
People would be so dramatically more informed if they dropped social media and corporate news.
1) there was a very public delay to shoot down anything even remotely above people. They just aren’t going to shoot something down over a city
From the WSJ article I mentioned:
“ Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the U.S. unless they pose an imminent threat. Aerial snooping doesn’t qualify, though some lawmakers hope to give the military greater leeway”
2) as you probably know, the pilot doesn’t really guide the missile…calling the pilot an idiot just clearly shows you have an axe to grind. Also, it’s not like the seekers are calibrated to take out balloons.
3) regarding EW - the tech is obviously still evolving and not always deployed
“ U.S. officials said they didn’t know who operated the drones in Nevada, a previously unreported incursion, or for what reason. A spokeswoman said the facility has since upgraded a system to detect and counter drones.”
Also, it is certainly possible to harden drones against EW as is being done in Ukraine on an evolving basis
Just think rationally - in one case you had completely harmless weather balloons, and the government completely freaked out, scrambled fighters and even recklessly launched missiles at them.
Here you have supposedly car sized drones operating, in large numvers, in high risk areas and the government response is nonexistent. Nearby flights have not even been diverted as they do when there's the slightest security risk in an area.
I do challenge you to show me the law stating that the military cannot engage unidentified and non-responsive potentially hostile vessels breaching controlled airspace, let alone with full authority from the CIC. That's just about the dumbest talking point ever.
Though even if such law exists, which it doesn't, then like any law in modern times, or even increasingly the Constitution, if the political establishment deemed it inconvenient then they would simply ignore it, and make up some lies.
And on that note, they are now acknowledging that they are indeed drones. The 'its just airplanes' lie lasted about 5 minutes. These people seriously hold the public in contempt.
Check any radiation map to see what's probably happening. Parts of New York, in the vicinity of the sightings, are showing extremely high radiation levels.
Its probably just drones searching for the source with the secrecy aimed at trying to avoid a mass panic.
Looking at the history of the one counter currently showing elevated levels (northjerseymike), it looks like the current value is well within variance of historical levels. I jumped back 10, 50, and 100 pages and without plotting, it didn't seem anything is notable about more recent data.
Also... why wouldn't the feds just say they're inspecting infrastructure and avoid the entire question...?
IMO this is almost certainly a commercial LIDAR mapping effort plus right wing conspiratorial hysteria.
The pages are sorted by date... I ended up going back roughly 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months.
A single value at a moment in time doesn't mean anything at all. You need to see the variance over time. And you need to trust the source data. The only "dangerously high" readings I saw were from counters that had no name, no history, no identifier, no additional values.
This theory makes no sense from the get-go and this "evidence" is extremely low quality.
Ok so you went back a day, saw the ongoing sky high readings from multiple sources which you were apparently trying to claim didn't exist, now acknowledge they exist, and now you want to claim they don't mean anything. Ok.
It's not hysteria if UFOs start showing up en-masse and then people start thinking everything in the sky is a UFO. It just means people are more likely to attribute lights in the night sky to this new phenomenon. Of course there will be false positives, but it does not mean the underlying issue exists.
> And those other 4 out of 10 are very clearly not commercial airlines.
Cool, so a simple cursory glance of these mysterious phenomena is enough to immediately call bullshit on 60% of the claims.
That's a heck of a false positive rate, given the fact that this happens before any verification takes place.
If at least 60% of the claims given the same credibility are outright rejected without any effort, what does it say about the claims and those who make them?
There is supposed to be an elemwent of 'mimicry' on the part of the Phenomenon. Kelleher in his work with AAWSAP was the most vocal in studying & concluding that aspect:
The drones only operate at night and it's hard taking good pictures at night with phones (or even nice cameras) - try to take a picture of the moon, which isn't moving, is brighter, etc.. you can tell it's the moon but it's a lot quality picture.
It sucks that we have to worry that our normally silly and harmless UFO hysteria and other fringe stuff might actually be an influence operation. (Just because tone doesn’t go well over the internet sometimes: Not disagreeing or being sarcastic, commiserating).
Well that's the natural result of not doing anything meaningful against Russia and its "plausible deniability" campaigns in well over a decade. Of course Russia and China feel emboldened when they never felt consequences.
As someone who lives in New York near two very busy airports, I can assure you that after seeing dozens of planes fly over my house every hour, year after year, it isn't hard to figure out what isn't a plane.
Under what circumstances and motivations, exactly, do you think that unlicensed and illegal (clearly not FAA Part 107 compliant) drone operators would be motivated to put blinking white, red and green lights on their mystery drones? Why would they do that?
If you're doing to build a drone to fly at night and do clearly illegal things you're going to make the thing matte black and have no lights on it whatsoever.
For starters, you need special waivers from the faa to fly at night. If any such waivers existed, I am sure the FAA would have told the news media who are hyping up this story.
I was referring specifically to BVLOS operations at night. It's doubtful if there are any nearby operators of these craft that they're within legit LOS. Combination of BVLOS and night operations is presently only found in very special circumstances and test ranges like at Pendleton.
Of the number of operators who have active BVLOS waivers I am aware of, such as for powerline, pipeline survey and delivery operations, very few or none are trying to also operate at night.
It would allow for different configurations to make identification harder. It's very easy to only operate at night and swap out the color and pattern of the lights constantly. Almost every photo device would capture the light pattern the attacker WANTS them to capture. High quality equipment could get better pictures, but such equipment is often not rolling 24/7 or easy to point at a drone moving fast.
> can see how it's tempting to chalk this up to hysteria, but they are absolutely large drones of some kind
It's probably neither enemy infiltration or hysteria, but mis-identified drones and aircraft. (Together with some hooliganism.)
Pentagon should investigate. But this is way below the threshold of warranting public alarm. "What is that thing in the sky" is a notoriously terrible game for the public.
The videos i saw ostensibly showed what looked like rear fixed wing aircraft, like a small f-16 or something. But you could only make out that detail from the lights, which can be configured however you want to configure them to look, so, technically, it could be a large quadcopter (or octa, or hex) with lights affixed that make it look like a fixed wing aircraft.
none of the videos i saw had sound from the drone to verify fixed wing or "copter".
regarding night flights, FLIR would work better for certain things at night ;-)
when i say FLIR i mean the things that militaries use, not the little doodad you plug into a cellphone or a handheld device with a screen and a camera. I was under the impression these things loitered much longer than any commercial quadcopter or normal battery powered aircraft. if my understanding is correct, that leaves two options - a glider, which is weight constrained so probably just a gopro or two, or a fueled aircraft, in which case, FLIR makes sense because that's a decent platform.
the reports were "flying around for hours" but that could be exaggeration and it flew a pattern several times over a couple of hours but was landing to swap batteries or whatever. IDK. I think this is all much ado about nothing.
The only openly available price I've seen for such things is from China, and then it's $80k. The Teledyne FLIR stuff is probably quite a bit more expensive.
It contains speculation about their height and speed. You usually can't estimate those things for a UFO because near, low, and slow looks the same as far, high and fast when you have no idea how big it is or how it "should" behave.
Man you're a killjoy, but you can't really say they can't estimate it as you don't know the specifics of what they saw, so there's speculation on your part too. I'd say you get a rough estimate, but you can't know for sure especially at night.
Although in this case if the person thinks it was low, and slow, that's less remarkable than if it was high and fast, because then it would be giant.
Overall, I'd say we're "converging on truth" because of all the reports. Like sparsity, even if each report is incomplete or has innacuracy overall we can build a picture, which is what we're doing. Killjoy. Hahahaha :)
Yea, maybe he had other information that helped. I'm just sensitive to reports of UFOs that include estimates of those derived quantities because people reporting them never say how they worked them out or what assumptions they were making. They could have reported the more directly observed quantities like angular speed instead of linear speed.
I know someone who saw an alien spacecraft landing on a distant mountain. Turned out to be Venus :P
This story is so strange. I mean the US if im not mistaken allowed a huge white ballon to transverse the country and i heard Trump say that was from China. If that's true we just allowed it fly all over our airspace (weird). Is that not a potential public safety hazard and now these things. So odd nothing is being done like one of our jet fighters going up and shooting one down into a field.
It's much more valuable to watch it, see what kind of scans are coming from it than to just shoot it down immediately. It is also a bargaining chip for those in international politics.
If you're going to shoot it down, it has the same value if you do it immediately or later (assuming any remote wiping/detonation), so either you're paranoid that it poses a legitimate threat or it's beneficial to not shoot it down immediately.
> American officials later disclosed that they had been tracking the balloon since it was launched from Hainan and its original destinations were likely Guam and Hawaii,[a] but prevailing winds blew it off course and across North America.[11]
> The Chinese government maintained it was a civilian (mainly meteorological) airship that had been blown off course.
So weird my comments in this thread here are being downvoted a ton.
Those who are downvoting and you are in the US i'd love to hear why you have no concern about these things and or no concern the world thinking we let drones fly unabated in our airspace ... prompting various foreign nations to try and do the same over our massive US of A airspace on up into remote-ish Alaska. You have congressman saying scary things while the Pentagon says those congressman words arent true.
I mentioned Trump above (i voted for her) if that was something that triggered some downvotes?
overall this says the US will allow undenitified drones in our air space and to fly unabated to our enemies ... one of these or future ones could be weaponized. So its unfathomable to me that they we are letting these things fly unabated in our airspace, as well the govt is providing zero info or re-assurance.
- We certainly can't deny that "something" is happening
- The US, if not the world, is going to be rocked by (basically) open war in the skies of America
- If we fail to down these things, we look like utterly weak fools
- Succeed or fail, we reveal our capabilities (or lack thereof)
- Legit public safety issue, bullets/shells/missiles/etc that miss these things have to come down somewhere, as well as wreckage (if any) it self
These drones, IF hostile are not necessarily the security risk one might think IMO. If we are just leaking radio signals into the air around bases that these things can intercept, then those communications could just as easily be intercepted by people/cars/etc on the ground. And our "near peers" have plenty of satellites overhead.
I am not going to tell you that letting them fly around unmolested is good. It is not. It sucks. But it is probably the least shitty option.
Because they're not threats, and your 'enemies' are just other countries who have resources your country wants, but won't do what your country says. The calls are coming from inside the house.
Nah dude, all of these people in the comments thread who live in northern California and have no knowledge of drones beyond playing with a buddy's DJI one time at a cookout are insisting it's your imagination, and that you're gripped by a mass hysteria.
Who are you gonna believe? Them, or your lying eyes?
I don't think your sarcasm adds anything constructive to the discourse. If anything, it makes the person you're replying to look less credible because you're furthering the stereotype of UFO conspiracy theorists touting "trust me bro" evidence and little else.
I have had a bet going with two of my friends on this exact point for almost a week now, and the fact that it is _still_ not been resolved by any agency is insane.
I also have a couple friends who work at Picatinny as well, and have heard that their civilian security have spotted some (which is strange since their airspace is always restricted), but there haven't been any internal memos regarding them.
Some things I've observed/heard/thought during arguments and searching for evidence in either direction:
1. People need video evidence and assume it's easy to get because everyone carries a video camera with them.
2. Most people have never tried to capture a fast-moving object with lights in the night's sky with a cellphone.
3. People assume everyone else is a complete fucking idiot, including police, the media, politicians, and most every authority on the subject. This is also in both directions, but with my friends they seem to assume that people have coincidentally forgotten what a plane looks/sounds like in the nights sky and decided to report them as "not planes" to the authorities.
4. The skeptical position on this is firmly in the minority across all social media I've seen.
5. Lots of videos are completely indistinguishable from planes, and any that seem "weird" can be easily explained by tricks of perspective.
6. If there ARE drones being operated in a way where they would prefer not be recognized, then it doesn't seem crazy they would put lights on and move in ways that would disguise them as planes.
7. Flight trackers are not reliable because not all planes that fly need to have flight plans and transponders.
I have taken the position that _something_ weird is happening, and that not all of the reports can be explained by commercial/private planes, but I don't mind being wrong so long as a definitive answer is going to present itself.
Anyways, glad to see the discussion has made it to HN so I can crowdsource some more arguments, would love it if you all could help resolve this wager.
>not all planes that fly need to have flight plans and transponders
Technically true but since 2020 almost all aircraft are required to have transponders to fly in controlled airspace. You could have a small GA aircraft without a transponder and only fly in and out of small uncontrolled air strips, but in practice most aircraft are going to have ADS-B out now.
> If there ARE drones being operated in a way where they would prefer not be recognized, then it doesn't seem crazy they would put lights on and move in ways that would disguise them as planes.
Wouldn't it be much, much, much easier and less crazy that, if you want to fly a small object at night and hide its exact nature and position, you would just paint it a deep, non-reflective black? Adding lights to an object you want to hide at night is completely crazy.
This is true, and we had this debate a little bit - disguising is not the same as hiding.
If you're trying to avoid any detection then you would also want to mask the sound, or else people will be hearing things in the sky and not seeing anything... until they start pointing low-light and infrared cameras at the sky. When that happens the vantablack drones are going to pop against the background and leave no doubt that there is something strange in the sky, since they def won't be looking/moving like bats.
By disguising as planes you blend in with the air traffic for most people, and create confusion and debate with anyone who does notice they are out of the ordinary (exactly what we're seeing now).
Another point is that lights on flying objects in the dark serve a purpose, and if these drones are coordinating with each other, they may be using the lights to maintain formations or avoid running into each other without relying on other communication channels that could give away more information.
> the fact that it is _still_ not been resolved by any agency is insane
I don't think it's insane. We won't get serious about tracking UAVs/drones/RC aircraft until there is an incident. Until then, agencies likely do not have the money, resources, time or motivation to do it.
From what little I've seen on this, it kind of feels like the issue with Priuses acceleration out of control like 15 years ago. It was a huge scandal that lead to multiple Toyota recalls and even a lawsuit settlement and in the end, it seems like it was basically human error.
One person messed up and crashed their Prius claiming the accelerator got stuck and it got picked up by the news. That story then primed other people to start looking for that and from then on anytime a Prius crashed people were looking to blame the accelerator. More people reported their Priuses accelerating out of control which then reinforced the idea even more and so on and so on.
well, it wasn't a prius originally, it was a lexus that launched off a southern california freeway because they burned the brakes up trying to stop the acceleration.
Toyota and lexus sometimes have the gas pedal hinged on the floor panel, rather than suspended from piece of metal from up above. If you swap out the stock floor mats for ones not designed with this in mind, during a hard brake your feet can move forward, jamming the floor mat into the accelerator and causing the engine to receive more fuel.
If you'd like a picture, i can go take a picture of the accelerator pedal in my lexus from 2012, and the floor mats which are all but bolted down to prevent this from happening.
as a side note i prefer the hinged design because there's less distance to traverse, i just wish the brake was the same way!
Most of the Toyota acceleration accidents were almost certainly the result of operator error. The fact that the staistical probablity increased with age gives that away.
However, Toyota got convicted because their software development process was so terrible that they were effectively criminally negligent and deserved to get absolutely roasted for it.
Globals are common and even right in this application. However they didn't take proper care in other ways (i'm not clear what I've just been in embedded long enough to know globals are often required despite how hard they are to get right)
Global variables (nee static) are fairly normal in embedded. You want to preallocate all your memory since you generally don't have a heap.
Mostly you have specific inputs from some other tasks and your outputs are consumed by different tasks. So, even though the variables are "global" they generally only have one writer with multiple readers in properly done embedded programming.
What Toyota did was not even in the same universe as "properly done embedded".
"specific inputs from some other tasks and your outputs are consumed by different tasks" sounds a lot like how PLCs work. Just running an infinite loop scanning inputs and triggering outputs in response to the state of the inputs.
In general embedded controllers like this don't have a lot of people working on them. They also have rules (enforced by review which isn't great) about when they can be accessed. In an embedded context you are not allowed to allocate memory (except at startup), so a lot of these globals are just arrays/buffers only used by one function or pseudo class (a class by intent but not actually a class by the language if the language even has a concept of class)
I find the discussions on Metabunk.org helpful with news stories like this.
For example here is a clip that a Fox News host recorded. Presented as a drone, but is it not clearly just an airplane filmed flying directly overhead?
Yeah, that looks pretty damn normal. I mean, what kind of Nefarious Power would send out its Secret Drones with standard wingtip lights and headlights on?
Note that in this aviation context, those headlights are more to make the plane itself more visible to everyone else, not to give extra information to its pilot(s). It's hard to make lights bright-enough that they could illuminate something in time for an in-air plane to avoid it. (E.g. a magical flying sleigh.)
I considered trying some napkin-math for how many calories Rudolph would need to burn running a luciferin reaction like a firefly, but immediately stumbled over the issue of many lumens the FAA would consider acceptable. (Assuming they could be convinced to overlook all the other issues of proper color and signaling etc.)
In another article a Sheriff saw 50 drones coming in from the ocean.
Here a New Jersey elected official talks about the Sheriff/Police helicopter following an unidentified drone, then pull back because they feared for their safety (so low probability it was not something odd but just an American Airlines plane):
My argument that the Coast Guard didn't mistake American Airlines planes for 12 drones following their boat is invalidated because I posted an AP article twice?
> The pentagon, for example, just declared that they do not know what they are
I often hear those hyping UFO sightings citing this type of statement by the Pentagon. However, the Pentagon saying the don't know what it is doesn't mean anything. Of course, they don't know what it is. They weren't there. They didn't see it nor have any idea if there was anything unusual seen. The null hypothesis is the still the most likely: this is a result of media hype causing increased erroneous reports of aircraft and hobbyist drones along with false reports by social media attention seekers.
Also, the Pentagon has a consistently terrible track record of failing to properly identify spurious internal lens reflections, digital stabilization artifacts, IR ghosting and gimbal rotation on their own footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs.
> The pentagon, for example, just declared that they do not know what they are
That is absolutely not what was said in that video. They just said that they're not drones from a foreign entity or adversary, nor are they US military drones.
> The pentagon, for example, just declared that they do not know what they are[1].
This sounds impressive, but people don't seem to realize that there is no USGOV tracking of drone-sized objects in US airspace. Of course they can't say who is doing it or where they're coming from, they also don't know what's going on when you launch a drone from your backyard and fly it around.
The FAA has a database of reports of people illegally flying drones around planes and airports, it's been happening constantly since they've been mass market items and the perps rarely get caught.
>people don't seem to realize that there is no USGOV tracking of drone-sized objects
Anything 250g or heavier has to have Remote ID now. Now that doesn't exclude the possibility of illegal drones without it, but it isn't true that there is "no drone tracking".
Unless there are also receivers for this operated by the government, that's technically not a conflict with the claim. Tracking means you're tracking something, not just forcing them to send a signal. It's only tracking once you receive and process the signal.
What do you think Drone ID is? It’s basically Bluetooth transmissions. Very localized reception and basically impossible to monitor over a wide area without many, many receivers spread out evenly all over the place.
The pentagon also didn't tell anyone in the 80s that all the "UFO sightings" in Nevada were test flights of the F-117.
You know the pentagon doesn't have to tell you (or even the feds!) the truth, right? You know that when they say "We can't track 1 trillion dollars of our budget!" they aren't being fully honest, right?
One of the channels that I follow is "What is Going on With Shipping" (its mostly about ocean going supply chain things and started with the Evergiven)... and today's video is: War of the Jersey Shore! | Did Iranian Navy Carriers Launch Drones Over the New Jersey? - https://youtu.be/hTpYN70tZ6Y
And since this is a "the Iranian mothership off the coast" - the info about where the drone carriers are is presented.
The video discretion links to other sites with info.
Something tells me that if there were so much as an Iranian dinghy sitting off the coast, the military would be extremely aware of its presence. Monitoring absolutely everything that it did.
Something tells me that if there were a bus-sized Chinese spy balloon floating all the way across the continental US, the military would be extremely aware of its presence.
(As I recall they were, but they would not publicly acknowledge it until the public sightings became undeniable.)
what/who ever that something is that is telling you that, i'd suggest a better source. it is part of the "game" that militaries the world over try to do things without their opponents knowing they were ever there. international boundaries are 12 miles of water, yet navy submarines get much much closer than that as a matter of course.
do you think the military or any 3 letter agency knows 100% where all foreign spies are within their borders?
What he claimed was "high" (high-level, I assume, rather than intoxicated) and "reputable" sources who needed to remain anonymous told him there was circumstantial evidence of this.
I don't see any motive for him to make this up, or for those sources to. Perhaps someone in some agency is jumping to conclusions on partial information.
Or perhaps this fits into the pattern of DoD officials, ex-officials, and whistleblowers spinning tales of UAP sightings and an official UAP retrieval program.
He's using this as an opportunity to paint the current federal administration, and state administration in NJ, as being incompetent, negligent and putting people in harms way.
Yes and where did he even get this from? Why do we have representatives literally making up stories and telling them to the American public? What is actually going on here?
It still doesn't make sense. He was elected to Congress in 2018, long after the end of the Cold War. I think GP is just mixing him up with someone else.
It’s essentially a null hypothesis. There doesn’t seem to be any actual evidence of anything. It’s all based on social media posts. It shows all the signs of being a mass panic.
The OP article put it like this:
> It is not known whether a group or individual might be behind the phenomenon, or whether any credible issue even exists – there has been speculation that the flurry of activity might merely amount to confusion over sightings of regular planes or be the product of social media distortions.
If you think there’s some real issue here, can you explain why you think that?
Other than social media, what other sources could the public rely on for something like this? Would local law enforcement observations suffice? What else would be publicly available?
After. They're responding to the public and media uproar, and have to be seen as taking action in response to it, but they're clearly not massively concerned.
I don't doubt that there was some drone activity, but most likely it was regularly authorised operations or testing. Once the hysteria started you may have a few pranksters flying theirs just to add to the uproar.
But when media houses are publishing pictures of what are clearly commercial airliners and passing them off as unidentified drones you know we're in the middle of a mass hysteria moment.
Perhaps its satanic ritualists turned techo-optimists who are attempting to convert the public to their baby killing ways through drone-based mind control.
Just out of curiosity, I took a look at the map for Spring Lake, NJ. There's an airport ~7 miles inland. There's a national guard center just to the south. Just to the north, there's Sylvan Lake that looks like the profile of a jetliner.
What's this got to do with anything? Nothing, but it's no less of an explanation than what these people have proposed.
Lol that one even has a telltale incandescent landing light! It's a weird quirk of the conservative nature of Airlines and the FAA but most planes still rely on a gigantic incandescent light bulb for their landing lights, which is quite distinct nowadays.
Speaking of which, if it has landing lights or recognition lights or the red/green navigation lights, you can bet it is not a UFO, and probably not a foreign adversary.
Why is that particularly surprising? If the planes were certified with a particular landing light, it's an awful lot of paperwork and STCs to change things out. Plus, you wouldn't just be swapping out the bulb - you'd have to swap out the entire reflector to keep the beam pattern sane. The retrofit LEDs on car headlights regularly demonstrate what happens when you change from a more or less point source of light on the central axis (the filament in an H4 bulb or some other similar type) to a source that's "not that," you get all sorts of weird focus and cutoff issues.
Also, consider icing conditions. Any modern airliner is rated for flight into known icing, which includes deicing equipment. A halogen landing light is self-deicing for the most part (airliner landing lights are hundreds of watts, some are closer to a thousand). It will happily keep ice buildup away from the lens, whereas a LED will need some other variety of deicing to keep it clear. This is one of the reasons I use halogen bulbs in my motorcycle - I ride year round, to include in ice and snow (Ural, so has a sidecar, I can drive the sidecar wheel too, it's totally fine in these conditions). A halogen bulb keeps the headlight nicely free of ice buildup. LEDs don't put out enough heat to solve that problem, and it doesn't take that much ice buildup to totally scramble the beam pattern off a good glass lens.
You can get LED retrofit landing lights for smaller planes, and the club I fly with has them - but they're also Cessnas not rated for flight into known icing, so "keeping ice off the landing lights" is not a particular design concern.
Anyway, it surprises me none that airliners are still using halogens for the most part.
AAL578 flew by Tom's River (Bay Shore area, where the photos were taken) around 20:43 on December 8th which is right when the photos were taking, on a heading that would result in an observing on the ground looking at the port side of the aircraft, just as seen in the picture.
Yeah that's very clearly a helicopter in most of the photos, and the rest could easily be an airliner. At most it might be some knucklehead with an old RC helicopter in violation of FAA regs (flying at night, no remote ID).
If you were some foreign adversary why would you put navigation lights on your secret reconnaissance drone?
i mentioned elsewhere but if you had a large octocopter (think like 8' across) you could fashion lights to it to imitate other aircraft, like nose and tail and wing markers. My DJI has a front and rear light, the rear one blinks two colors so you know which side is which, my older DJI clone had lights on all four rotors, different colors between front and back (green and red? or am i confusing boat markers, haha).
If i wanted to freak a bunch of people out i'd start my design like this, at least. Some aircraft can fly really slow (biplanes, for instance), but the videos i saw of ostensibly these aircraft they were moving too slow to be actual fixed wing aircraft of the shape the were implied to be by the lights. But who knows if the videos were doctored (cropping would fool my brain about relative speeds), or even of the aircraft we're talking about? I didn't save them so i got no idea, sadly.
It'd be more clever to have lights and leave them unilluminated. If caught they can still claim what you're claiming, adding "You just didn't see them!".
My favorite part is the part when they say "Aha! It's camoflauge! It LOOKS like an aeroplane but in fact it's a disguise!". I mean, what's next, a helicopter is chasing a drone and they say "Aha! The alien craft has disguised itself as one of our helicopters chasing one of our drones, who would suspect that!"
Anyway the non-alien conspiracy theories are along the lines of radiation sniffers for a suitcase nuke, drone tests for material transport between bases & offshore navy ships, red team vs blue team drone tests.
I think photos 2 and 9 are actually JetBlue. There weren't any Alaska flights in the area at the time [1], but there were two JetBlue planes flying in the area, before and after an American Airlines jet. If the images were posted in the same order they were taken, this would fit perfectly.
Ah. Knowing what AA tails look like makes it look likely that the blurry triangle has blue and red in the right places.
Without context, it does appear to be a quadcopter-ish shape, but since the caption says the object was at high altitude, it fits a regular airplane well.
People live on site watching the object move should certainly know better. (Perhaps they do know, and are intentionally trolling.)
> People live on site watching the object move should
Be careful here. Human eye witnesses are not reliable, especially at night like this. It is very hard to determine size of shapes at night in the dark. It is hard to determine distance which makes something small look like it might be bigger but further away.
I think “hard” is underselling it. Unless you already know some of the parameters, it is outright impossible to visually determine size, distance, or speed of a distant object in the sky. So many UFO accounts completely fall apart when you realize this.
I know. Some people have REALLY gotten into it though:
> I'm a professional videographer by trade. I filmed these things for 6 hours last week. High native ISO, tripod, 400mm lens, new camera model. No one here will believe me (especially those who have not witnessed this first hand) but they mimic planes when filmed. With my naked eye they are more abstract. Some where as close as 100ft to me. Then once they are within a certain range or a camera is pointed at them they mimic aircraft. So many people online are mocking those that say this, but I'll take the downvotes. I'm a professional in my field and know what I'm describing is accurate. You just need to see it to believe it. My footage would just be mocked as plane footage. I need to go back out there but with a flight tracker app in real time as hard proof.
I'm guessing the camera sensor is catching more light, detail, than what the guy is seeing with his own eyes, possibly because he hasn't waited long enough for to adjust to the darkness.
Human eyes also have blind spots called Scotomas- our brains do some sort of calculation to make us not notice the fact our eyes have blind spots. I imagine if your brain is wired to do the calculation "wrong" in this scenario you end up seeing things differently than a camera would.
What blows my mind, is that damn near every single person seeing this has a phone that can record video, and the best we can do is grainy night pictures.
I mean fucking hell we've got people in this thread saying "yeah but they don't move like that" ,which fine, cool, and yet somehow the only stuff circulating is pictures?
This whole thing reeks of overreaction to something small signal boosted by filtering of bad data. Send a clear video "oh that's obviously a helicopter". Send some barely readable photo "MASSIVE DRONE SIGHTING", put it on the front page.
there were videos of ostensibly these drones. i've seen two that claimed such, but unfortunately i did not save the videos - dumb. "remote control aircraft" are so low on my radar (PI) that i wrote it off as people scared of their shadow. The original story was it was loitering near some Trump property, and that's why FAA issued a NOTAM for that area. afaik, this is standard procedure? But maybe people don't know that or the news they watch is explaining things poorly. who knows. I just know why i didn't save the videos.
Seems like an opportunity for a training exercise. Have the FAA put a TFR in place and let the national guard interdict, ECW and such. Take control, land it in the x-ray scanner, check for explosives then take it apart and get telemetry data. The US taught Ukraine how to do this with great success. If no joy on ECW, disassemble them in the sky.
If the drones were legit they would be broadcasting their ID as would the controllers and they would be within visible range unless they have the approved part 107 on file or part 107 waiver and approval for long range drone usage.
If these are not really drones and it is just mass hysteria the national guard would rule that out rather fast. As a bonus there is no added cost to the tax payer aside from the small fuel expense to route around the TFR which pilots are accustom to. This is just swapping out one training exercise with another.
I disagree, for the same reason the US doesn't send an SM-6 up to greet every plane without an IFF turned on. It's an expensive exercise in endangering human lives, not a valiant defense of homeland security. Understanding the battlespace is a crucial part of modern warfare and soldiers aren't going to blind-fire on a weird drone unless it presents an immediate, credible threat.
Take the AIM-120s off your F-16 and put a FLIR pod on it, track the drones to wherever they land. Record the platform, dazzle it if it's got cameras or EO sensors, and send a few decoys out if you want to bait it into revealing last-resort defenses against a JDAM-like weapon. Then, you destroy it. Hell, if it's an unmanned naval platform you could also just send a couple Marines out in a Chinook to lift it to the Pentagon. America's weapons are nice, but we can do a lot more than just blow stuff up.
A 30mm round plowing through someone’s living room because some bath water IQ nitwit thought they saw an alien is not a valid use of government resources. Even if they’re from Jersey.
You send in a supersonic fighter because no conventional drone is going to escape it. Dogfighting it isn't necessary, it's doubtful they'd detect you at all if your fighter is loitering at 10,000ft. Eventually the drone is going to run out of power, and you can keep sending more fighters to relieve whichever jet is on duty (if necessary).
Apaches are cool and all, but if cost is your concern then it's probably cheaper to send a single pilot in a single-seat F-16 even if the avgas costs more. Even if you gotta wait 4 hours for your target to go home, it's still probably cheaper than a single AMRAAM.
What it would come down to is that an Air National Guard unit is well prepared to intercept something in the sky (although a slow, low flying drone might be tricky). It's pretty extreme to actually do that, of course, and just observing the thing would always be an option.
An Army National Guard unit might have Apaches available, but putting one in the air in short order to perform air intercepts is not their mission.
Drones are generally too slow and have too small of a radar footprint to engage with a fighter jet. Helicopters are a better tool. Unless they're very large drones than most missiles on the jet won't really be applicable. You can't shoot down a tiny front with radar or heat seeking missiles.
Most plausible theory I have heard yet. [1] disclaimer: prepper channel, some here may perceive it as nutty. Nuke sensors would explain why the guard is not touching them.
As a follow up, it's being communicated that we knew about these drones for 6 years. Not sure I buy it. They have been showing up in multiple states, not just the army post that had the TFR. Or it's mass hysteria.
At the risk of being labeled a kook or an idiot, I photographed drones flying over my suburb of Boston neighborhood a few weeks ago. This was about 6am, definitely drones not regular aircraft. I assumed it was something flying out of Hanscom or the city mapping streets. And yes I took photos not video, sorry.
It was an odd sight at that hour of the day. I wanted pictures as something to talk about with friends. I really wish I had been astute enough to take video.
yah did better than I'd have, friend. I'm sure I'd have just been all like "oh lookie here, a drone flying around at 6am, unusual and cool!" and then gotten on with my day, ha!
I'm not sure the man is capable of reflection. I think all we can say is that he's reliably unpredictable. Perhaps he will do something different this term.
Of course there's the chance that something is actually going on.
But if there isn't, telling people that there's been some strange lights in the sky is a pretty good way to get people to look up at night and receive even more reports about just that.
Adding tho this; It’s clearly some business that hasn’t been forthcoming about their activities up to now. The drone delivery company Wing.com got a lot of pushback from the public about how noisy their drones are, and spent a lot money making them quieter. Same will happen here.
This is the biggest mass hysteria I can remember. People are sharing video of things that are very obviously airplanes and helicopters. I'm sure there are some drones but that isn't 95%+ of what people are seeing.
This is honestly terrifying, because it's baffling people can't determine what is generally regular aircraft (some of these videos are SO obviously planes coming in for a landing, with jet engine noises and all) and the other is that eventually some nut is going to open fire on a commercial airliner just coming in for a landing because they think it's China or aliens or something. That won't take down the plane but could hit someone inside. People need to chill.
I think drones are a new threat for various reasons (look at Ukrainian war footage, it's absolutely terrifying) but while I'm sure there were -some- drones, probably a mix between government and hobbyist...uh, the overreaction to it is seriously worrying. The US is turning into a land of paranoia.
Side note, it's very difficult to determine the size and altitude of something even in the daytime, so at night it's even harder. These "car sized" drones could literally just be the size of a larger DJI drone. The media and government officials feeding into this is bad.
While your concern is still totally valid, if a civilian mistakes a 747 for a drone and shoots at it with anything but a laser, they’re gonna miss lol. It will probably be out of range in fact.
In other words, if you’re within 1km (0.6 miles) of a large passenger jet, you’re absolutely not mistaking it for a drone.
You clearly haven't seen the videos of people that are just clearly observing large passenger jets coming for a landing for a drone. Also, they probably will miss, but that bullet is landing somewhere. A plane coming in for a landing pass was just shot at (and hit) recently in Haiti, so it's not impossible.
For starters the Pentagon's AARO office, which is over monitoring UAPs has told reporters they have received 0 reports regarding UAPs over this "drone" stuff. Second, while I don't live in New Jersey, I have friends that do live in this area, and they have told me it's mostly mass hysteria. So, I venture to guess you're quite wrong.
Finally, I think it's quite dangerous if people are saying we should shoot down unknown aircraft, especially when it's very likely commercial airliners. That is not just conjecture, that is what people are saying online and to reporters -in person-. Seems like an important part of my post, which you seem to have conveniently ignored. Get just one person hyped up and they could shoot off in the air, and even if they don't hit the aircraft, that bullet it landing somewhere.
AARO is waiting for reports for something that is in the news? They have no field investigation teams? If China/Russia is flying drones over military bases they will wait for a report to investigate? Do they investigate anything at all or just file the reports and think about them? Seems like a very passive organization. The first report they put out seemed very flawed, it had an "artists rendering" of a graph!
The concerns about it being a foreign power seem misplaced. Shouldn’t the main concern with drones be domestic terrorism? A civilian could easily buy a small fleet of drones, equip them with small IEDs or sarin gas, and fly them into otherwise secured areas with large crowds. Are there any procedures in place to prevent this?
Wouldn't a novice likely die synthesizing the amount of sarin needed to kill a large group of people? Then attaching a disbursement mechanism to the drone to make it into a gaseous form, etc. Seems like a lot of high risk effort to maybe have it work.
As for IEDs, the drones used in the Ukraine war use what look to be very effective munitions, and they seem to be only effective against a single target really.
Is that really of concern?
And its not like drones that can carry things are cheap, nor is the way you are hypothesizing about them being used.
That's not true. They have drones that can drop multiple rpg warheads or grenades. Imagine a bunch of drones each with ten grenades dropping them over Times Square. I doubt there is anything the NYPD would be able to do.
> A civilian could easily buy a small fleet of drones, equip them with small IEDs or sarin gas, and fly them into otherwise secured areas with large crowds.
Easy? Is sarin gas freely available at big-box retailers?
Don't underestimate hackers. The internet is supercharging hobbyist hackers in many domains, including electronics, chemistry and bioengineering.
I doubt the precursors to nerve gases(the worst ones, anyway) are readily available, but they are probably a handful of undergrad-level reactions away from easily available chemicals.
yeah there's a lot of very very skilled people in these kinds of hobbies. A large RC Airplane + Ardupilot can be turned into a cruise missile pretty easily. The HPR rocketry crowd can get past the karman line and active stabilization (basically guidance but just straight up) is a thing now so decent range surface-to-surface guided missiles are pretty doable technically. The fortunate thing is these people also care deeply about their hobby and, besides, they just aren't mass murderers.
The drones have been appearing very consistently, if there were the slightest concern of foreign military drones, then military jets would have been scrambled to intercept - there have been no such reports.
I saw a video of some pentagon rep commenting on these sightings over military bases. They basically said ‘we say we don’t know because any old joe shmoe can fly a drone suddenly next to a military base and have it enter restricted space and in that moment no one knows what it is.’ Then they went on to mention how if they respond with force e.g. shooting down a drone like this there is risk of where missed bullets land. And if it turns out to be some kids air hogs plane that blew into a base then that’s a really sorry excuse for using ordinance. So they are taking a position that there is no threat and no response needed until there is indeed a threatening action. And just flying around is not deemed as that.
Yes, that is the protocol when aircraft enter restricted airspace like next to military bases - which has been reported.
Besides training, intercepting aircraft is primarily what jets do. In terms of cost, it’s a lot less expensive to scramble jets than the alternative, that’s why that is the protocol for a number of situations including things as mundane as aircraft losing communications.
Here there has been significant reporting, so it would be a national security risk and national embarrassment for the Country if the military was unable to demonstrate air superiority when our territorial sovereignty is violated by drones.
Unless you’re familiar with different FAA and NORAD protocols than I am, which it doesn’t seem like you are, the most likely explanation is they are military craft and exercises.
Picture this. You fly a kite in a park near a military base. Your kite blows over the fence. It is now an unidentified flying object over a military base. Now do you as base commander order jets to be scrambled to respond what could literally be a scrap of trash or some teenager with a dji drone? It is a different situation entirely compared to an actual airplane.
No need to picture a cute hypothetical set of facts that are dissimilar to that actual set of facts.
These are serious military protocols not a academic exercise in a vacuum.
Unauthorized flying of even dji drones near and over military bases is illegal and people get arrested for it. In fact a Chinese citizen was just arrested yesterday for flying a drone over a Space Force base.
Based on reports and video evidence the drones being observed are not common dji drones (certainly not a kite blown over the fence), reports are these are 6-10ft and don’t have any radio frequency. Otherwise they are being reported as specifically going to/coming from military bases.
And though I don’t think it is credible, at least one Congressman is publicly stating these are Iranian military drones being launched from Iranian submarines.
Just seems to me “scrambling jets” seems like something out of a movie to people unfamiliar, but it’s an daily occurrence.
Airforces do a lot of ceremonial flyover stuff just to train and keep pilots' hours up. I doubt flying to deal with drones, even just for training, is a big lift.
As I mentioned in another comment, police departments have been using drones for around 10 years. That's not to mention all the other professional and amateur use. I personally know at least a handful of people who regularly fly theirs. Most major metro areas are going to have drones flying all over the place. So what I'm saying is...why is this interesting?
From the videos, these don't look like traditional photography drones, they are much larger. My money is on eVTOL aircraft. There are hundreds of companies developing them and most are completely unknown to the public.
One of them is probably intensifying their testing program and doesn't want news to leak out too early.
AH-64 Apache helicopters sound similar to most every other turbine engine helicopter. I doubt that you could distinguish between them, especially not at any distance.
Do you think that is is possible that someone can? Just not me? Or literally impossible?
I would also encourage you not to make assumptions about the background of a random person on the internet.
My dad can identify fighter aircraft by engine sound alone, he is/was just really really into military aircraft. He gave me a CD once of mp3s of just the sound of jets flying by. To me, it was just a headache generator hah.
I don't doubt for one second you can identify an Apache by sound.
Blurry video clips trend on social media > local news talks about it > people report to state and local government > national news talks about it > people report to national agencies > national agencies shrug > people say it must be aliens, Iranians, or the CIA.
A few thousand people might have seen a drone, but a few million people saw a politician going on national television claiming there's an Iranian mothership off the coast.
That's what I'm saying. Drones are so common that you can buy them at Walmart, and I would be willing to bet that people reporting large drones are just not able to properly judge scale in the sky. What's next, people panicking because they are seeing cars driving around the streets?
Bit concerning that no government agencies have figured out what’s going on, but hardly seems like there is a reason for a limited state of emergency given there is no known threat at all.
My guess is a US company is gathering data and hasn’t admitted to do so without some type of licensing/etc
> Bit concerning that no government agencies have figured out what’s going on
I wouldn't be betting against this being a government agency. Anywhere between local cops and black/budgetless agencies you'd go to jail for even having heard of.
That, or maybe organised crime. A friend of mine used to have what turned out to be a high level drug dealer living/working a few doors up the street. They'd fly DJI drones off the balcony and hover them where they could monitor the roads leading in and out of the area, presumably watching for cops. One night an unexpectedly large amount of unmarked cars all converged on that property, followed about 90 seconds later by about a dozen fully lit up and sirening cop cars. The occupants of the first batch of unmarked cars swept up about 8 people running away when the lit up marked cars turned into the street.
That's the beauty of things like this. Most local municipalities are just not equipped for this type of situation. The feds are, but the locals have to become aware, realize they can't do anything, and then request help. A mayor calls the governor, the governor calls the feds. That's the hierarchy, and that's pretty much what happened.
There was an article 1-2 days ago saying that one was in the area of a LifeFlight helicopter, preventing the safe operation of that medical transport. There has been a threat articulated. It may not be a true report and the response may not be proportional/appropriate to the threat, but to say there is zero threat is wrong.
Also, reportedly these are the size of SUVs. I don’t believe you need that much of an investment for “gathering data”.
> Also, reportedly these are the size of SUVs. I don’t believe you need that much of an investment for “gathering data”.
A drone of such size has larger payload, further range and greater persistence than a smaller craft. Since the operator hasn't been identified we don't have an answer to their mission yet.
Mystery drones this size have been a story in other areas in the USA over the preceding year without as much attention. They were never identified, and a motive never ascertained.
Yet this incident has happened several days in short succession in highly populated states/areas, and police have made public statements about this particular offender multiple times.
Once it gets some media traction / popular mindshare, it’s more likely to get policy makers to try and do something, even if that is a “limited state of emergency”.
Do you presume government agencies just always know what's going on everywhere? I'm not the least surprised that the government hasn't spent any resources finding out who's flying drones around if they haven't caused any damage or been in airspace they're not allowed to be in.
>My guess is a US company is gathering data and hasn’t admitted to do so without some type of licensing/etc
My guess is "Flowers By Irene" or more likely someone contracted to do stuff on their behalf for optics/politics reasons. Real companies that do drone stuff are pretty by the book because they know the fed crosshairs are on them.
That's my impression as well. They could be tracking individuals or materials of interest coming from the ports which is why they're over NJ specifically.
I'm far from an expert but looks more or less like a garden variety quad-copter. Maybe a somewhat larger one. You guys are really seeing them all over the place? That's the start of a good sci-fi movie. Let's see if we find something out. Is it possible people are just a lot more sensitive to seeing drones that are around anyways?
I mean, drones are pretty cheap, yeah? Why not just join the fun? Buy a drone, follow one of these other ones around, see what happens. Worst case: Some army dude knocks on the door and says to stop it, maybe you gotta pony up to a lawyer. Best case: Your new alien friends have great new schnapps on the intergalactic party-barge.
A lot of people here are writing this off as hysteria.
I don't know if this is anything nefarious or not, but I would note that being suspicious of these things is often a good thing, not a bad thing.
Even Michael Shermer, the famed skeptic, wrote a book on how suspecting conspiracy is often a valid default stance. Abstract from his book:
"One reason that people believe these conspiracies, Shermer argues, is that enough of them are real that we should be constructively conspiratorial: elections have been rigged (LBJ's 1948 Senate race); medical professionals have intentionally harmed patients in their care (Tuskegee); your government does lie to you (Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Afghanistan)"
There are obviously people that always suspect conspiracy, and that's not good. But it's equally not good to always suspect a benign explanation, which is the majority of this thread.
Just adding a different perspective to this community.
I do find it rather hard to make sense of the antagonism here. My only guess is people feel the need to distance themselves from the "sheep" and do so by ridiculing them from their ivory tower. In some cases it's the same thing, but there's a political bent added to it ("some people" from "that side").
They more or less did say that. They said that people are reporting these things but they haven’t detected anything. If you read between the lines, I think they’re insinuating this is mass hysteria but need to continue investigating to be sure.
This sounds like uneducated people seeing two things: consumer drones and just normal aircraft. They sell drones both online and at your local electronics store. Also, how would someone know it's "car sized" or any other size without a radar? Just looking isn't good enough.
Consumer drones have collision lights that look all fancy. They are also in the FAA jurisdiction so there's nothing the locals can do to stop it because it's not something they deal with, even if flying at night is illegal for non commercially licenced UAV operators.
If it's a secret drone then it doesn't have collision lights. If it doesn't have lights you can't see it at night.
Even after watching the videos I think you can figure this out a priori without the videos - drones exist and people have them, lots of them.
The idea that mystery nefarious drone operators would be sending up things with blinking red and green navigation lights on them is patently absurd. As others have pointed out in this thread, there's a lot of more mundane explanations.
Also it can depend on what people consider nefarious. For a long time I noticed drone coverage over my area regularly at night, which how they were operating over a populated area would be illegal for a civilian. Eventually I figured it out to be law enforcement drones. It's perfectly legal for there to be cop drones but people might consider them nefarious and law enforcement has been taking a boiled frog approach to drone acceptance.
it seems the videos posted with blinking red and green navigation lights are actually not representative of the drone sightings authorities are investigating but instead represent a side effect of the mania with people posting videos of private aircrafts as everyone is looking up and trying to record the “drones” but doesn’t realize the aircraft have been there all along and first they are paying attention.
It could be some politicians are leveraging the situation to get stricter drone laws passed. It should be unnerving to all of us that any semi-intelligent person with a few thousand bucks could weaponize a drone and send it off to wreak havoc. I'm not a drone enthusiast, but it seems like the level of regulation and enforcement has fallen way behind the access to the technology.
Exceedingly unlikely in my opinion, I've seen pictures/videos of these mystery drones and they look exactly like commercial aircraft white, red and green navigation lights. Or the red and green lights you would see on the end of the arms on a COTS DJI/Autel/competitor type UAV.
Reminds me of the Chinese balloon incident of 2023 [1]
Unsubstantiated theory, but maybe a foreign adversary scanning ground for targets? Critical east coast transmission lines and substations in NJ possibly a target?
Secret Service will deploy drones to watch Trump during golfing vacation
The Guardian in 2024 (this submission):
Concerns have focused on drones spotted near the Bedminster golf course of president-elect Donald Trump, as well as sensitive infrastructure including electric transmission sights, rail stations and police departments.
After the Butler assassination attempt, there have been numerous criticisms that the FBI did not use surveillance drones on the site. I would not be surprised if 50% of drone sightings are government surveillance drones and the rest are just hobbyist photographers etc.
It's planes from most of the footage I saw, at best maybe there was A legit unknown drone flown over some sensitive site (which happens) and someone hyped it into hysteria probably fueling trolls with drones to add to it.
Also iirc there is a funding bill for anti-drone programs gummed up in congress so I am sure anyone looking to get it passed isn't in a rush to quell this just yet.
The government will finally get all these local yokel politicians to put a cork in it and stop fanning hysteria when some idiot puts a bullet hole in a cessna thinking it is an Iranian drone from a mothership off the east coast.
Common, "false flag" or deception tactic in military simulation. Leaving the lights on would be a good deception/psyop tactic. If these are adversaries, they are sure learning the rate of response by military forces.
Why are we just looking up at the sky and wondering what they are? Send up a few AI assisted hunter drones to go find them and see. Then track, photograph, disable as needed.
i said the same up-thread, just get some drone racers to intercept and film them. At the very least you'll get closer footage than cell phones on the ground.
Based on all the sightings and someone flying a drone next to these things, the size of these "drones" is much bigger, like the size of a car! Additionally, drones can hover for less than an hour. These "drones" stay floated for many hours on end!
These should be called UFOs, not drones. The light on them and their shape make them look like regular drones, but I think these crafts are much more than the regular drones that the media has called them.
> Additionally, drones can hover for less than an hour. These "drones" stay floated for many hours on end!
I think this is misinformation stemming from today’s meeting with NJ mayors. There was a statement that they are seen for 7 hours at a time. At no point did they say the same drone stayed in the air for 7 hours. I believe they were stating that the sightings start after sundown and go on for around 7 hours. Of course the internet took this and ran with it as the internet does.
Funny, I just posted this story a couple of days ago. I think it was from 2014. There was a lot of noise about this sort of tech and then it just went quiet. I really doubt this tech is going unused. I suspect something like this was used to track down the CEO killer recently(with a parallel constructed cover story).
While I do believe that whatever is happening will largely be explained by selective attention and confirmation bias, here is at least one instance of a drone sighting on the final approach path to JFK over a landing airplane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQiSkTVeN78
Why not? Technically it's possible, and while consumer drones often have altitude (above ground) limits, I wouldn't be surprised if these can be modded out.
So I think that's the most likely explanation – surely the US military would not have their drones fly around in an active final approach path of a major civilian airport...? And if it was a foreign military, I really hope that the US wouldn't be as casual about it.
I hope Americans are wise enough now to not believe things like this are from Iran. Remember there are powerful foreign interests in the US who desperately want you to fight Iran on their behalf - don't listen to them, your lives are worth more than that.
We routinely underestimate the factionalism that exists in the collective US 'deep state'.
The CIA vs Pentagon vs FBI vs whatever else natsec department that was once set up for a singular purpose before expanding scope into everything else.
There isn't a central controller seeing everything - just a President (whoever that is) sitting on top of a herd of out-of-control broncos desperately trying not to fall off. These drones are almost certainly US origin, but the departments don't talk to each other, so when one says they don't know anything about it, I'm inclined to believe that it is actually the case
TIL (from that page): "Flying drones at night without a waiver from the FAA is a violation of federal law" -- perhaps relevant to the top level article
You don’t need any prior approval under 107 to fly at night. You don’t need a part 107 license to fly at night if you’re flying for “fun”. You simply need lights.
Someone make a FOIA request to the FAA for AANC and 'FAA Drone Zone' authorizations for flights in areas experiencing drone sightings. Be very specific with like 'AANC and 'FAA Drone Zone' authorizations for the ABC affected area and in force during XYZ specific timeframe (and break out each night, preferably in separate FOIA requests). My guess is that would shed some light on things. 'ABC' above would need to be the specific official FAA name for the AANC or FAA Drone Zone.
Yeah. The feds follow paperwork. I was once able to get a request filled about a meeting that I knew would cover a topic they denied knowing anything about. Guess what was in the meeting file? Them talking about said topic.
Edit: if this is a normal drone company with a process, they are going to be filing these requests. You don't mess with the FAA. The drones have their lights on, I'm guessing they are also filing their paperwork.
I fly drones, sometimes even to me a drone can look suspiciously unnatural. Especially at night the way the drone moves abruptly with all the led lights, its difficult to judge its distance.
But ... what if Aliens and Ghosts are the same thing? DaDaDa!
Guided missiles have been illegal for consumer use for decades, and nobody cared. It makes sense that those are a military weapon. I also think drones are a military grade weapon. I've been saying for the past 24 years drones should be illegal. After 9/11 2001, I started saying that. I've also said they will not be made illegal util there's a massive terror attack proving their lethality to the lethargic naive public, who seems to think they're a toy, or that we need Amazon to fly one package at a time, which is nonsense.
Lethal action will occur when seen as a solution regardless of the tools available. It's happened throughout human history, and will likely keep happening until we can solve our problems without it.
Once a high profile attack or assassination happens with remote operated vehicles (drones or high-speed model jets), everyone's minds will change in a heartbeat. For now yeah most people think of drones as toys. It's just a failure of imagination and a failure to predict the obvious future events that are certain to unfold.
>Once a high profile attack or assassination happens with remote operated vehicles (drones or high-speed model jets), everyone's minds will change in a heartbeat
Pretty much any high-profile assassination with drones would probably have the support of at least half the population (or even more, in the case of the recent healthcare CEO assassination).
The US has been murdering civilians overseas with drones for over a decade.
Also, domestically, we have all sorts of school shootings, etc, that don’t make the news.
I’m sure if someone in power wanted to ban commercial drones, they could run a propaganda blitz and get the outcome you describe, but we’re pretty much a post-truth society at this point.
For those thinking they’re off the shelf drones or some other type of consumer drone, they’ve been reported to be the size of an SUV.
Also I learned from the a recent JRE with Marc Andressen that the US really doesn’t make consumer drones domestically because of regulations but China is allowed to import them here. But still not to say someone isn’t making them at home on their own.
This is all quite very strange. I’ve been down multiple decision trees. Especially since this has been going on for weeks in NJ and then months in the greater vicinity.
So this is out there but the late John Keel who investigated UFO's and the paranormal during the 20th century believed that these phenomena aren't even physically there.
It's some kind of trick that an unknown entity plays on people. Like Bigfoot, lochness monster etc. It's possible the drones don't physically exist. Yet we can see and hear them.
The government might know this. Hence lack of response
Those floating balloon things we saw previously, the ones which were shot down, I had a thought they could be used as floating drone platforms. Like the carrier in Starcraft. The whole thing can silently float for days, the drones can awake and deploy, surveil, return, then float away silently. It could then scuttle itself in the ocean where a waiting ship can salvage it.
It'd be a lot more subtle to just have a spy on the ground operating a drone from nearby, looking like just another careless hobbyist flying where they shouldn't be.
Small drones don't have much range, and balloons could have ended up hundreds of miles off target.
The most plausible explanation is that people who know nothing are in hysterics over legally operated and licensed aircraft.
ATC has radar, military bases have radar. If there were threats, they would see them and do something about them. Folks are reporting to their state senators? and some whacky congressmen have said some absurd things, but no one who is actually responsible cares and folks are trying to spin it like they're clueless.
This is the equivalent of calling the FBI because you're a pepperpot and you saw someone you didn't recognize walking down the street.
Drones near sensitive power infrastrucure... like those transmission sites will all the equipment are all over the place. And police stations? Give me a break.
There's probably some unlicensed or amateur operators doing slightly inappropriate things, but silly people are trying to frame it like some kind of attack.
Also some of them are certainly just ordinary airplanes.
ATC and military bases only have primary radar covering a tiny fraction of US territory. Most of what people think of as radar relies on active transponders to work. Or it's ADS-B output and not radar at all.
Suppose I have a strong blue laser and point it at said unrecognized drones. Would I be in trouble? How long should we wait an answer from the government before we can "fight back"?
I seem to have found the original source of the claimed sightings that has lead to this massive case of hysteria. It's a Twitter/X account called @rawsalerts. Here's the post:
There is zero evidence to support any of the claims made in this post, and it seems to have spread virally from here. It appears that rawsalerts posts disinformation and then it is disseminated through a massive network of fake news sites and fake social media accounts. Just do a google search for "rawsalerts" to see what I mean. It looks like much of its content is constantly reposted by NewsBreak, which has been noted as a disinformation/fake news site set up by China.
Yes it's mass hysteria, but most cases of mass hysteria are seeded by a real event. So I'm guessing some agency or police force ran some drones, they were spotted, it hit social media, and became a mind virus.
you'd probably need active radar if it isn't transmitting anything, unless you had a extremely high gain and directional passive radar system (i do, but i've never tried to track anything small, but i can see commercial jets just fine).
The Hydra (it's changed names so many times) can do passive radar, which you can probably make active with a tx switch and a transmitter. Passive radar works thus: you aim a directional antenna in one direction, toward some transmitting signal (FM radio, television, whatever), and aim your passive detection antenna in the other direction. The signal from behind will hit whatever you're aiming at and possibly reflect some of the signal back to you, and the hydra radio software can detect "echos" of that sort and put them on a chart with relative sizes and speeds and "distance" as well.
Honestly, this looks like a some kind of a training exercise, probably a contractor working with the DOD or another acronym agency. From the videos, they're definitely quadcopter drones, definitely larger than most hobby drones (and def above the size you need to file a flight plan with the FAA). What's puzzling to me is that they run with all lights on, at night -- as if being seen was a goal.
I imagine part of a training exercise could be to learn how local authorities respond to such aircraft activity. If you see what the Ukrainians have been able to accomplish using this type of tech (with a lot of cottage-industry DIY-type contributions) in an active theatre of war, it should give you pause.
For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told: if you'd seen the sky, you had the scoop. The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one's great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn't know what.
Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame. We'd been surveyed—whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone's guess.
So somehow people are seeing these widespread, commercially available aircraft flying around their town and the most plausible explanation they can come up with is international espionage?
What 'commercially available' aircraft can operate for at least 6 - 7 hours, sized up to 6 feet, not always detectable by FLIR, evade detection by helicopters, don't always use lights, have a range of at least 15 miles, are not obeying FAA line of sight regulations for night flights (all per the statewide briefing provided to NJ legislators yesterday: https://x.com/DawnFantasia_NJ/status/1866896860578717994) , and are assessed by the Pentagon yesterday (https://www.youtube.com/live/gSIKXMt4qHk?si=HafZLJzX8lUqQvrd...) to not originate in the US or any other nation?
What extra-terrestrial amazon.com or Weyland-Yutani intergalactic commerce do you have access to haha? :)
Also, videos of the 'drones' show them hovering for long periods, so they're not conventional fixed wing craft. I think local officials should put together some investigative task forces using local scientists, engineers and commercial providers that have access to good electronic intelligence surveillance capabilities and get more data so we can see more and know more about this.
> are assessed by the Pentagon yesterday to not originate in the US or any other nation
To be clear, they stated that “these are not US military drones”, and that they have no evidence that they are from a foreign entity or adversary, which is very different from what I interpreted you as saying.
Why would one believe that US intelligence agencies have no information about extensive reports of drone activity near military installations? Given that this has been happening for a couple weeks now, and the military has said “these are not a threat”, the clearly more plausible explanation is that they know what these are, and they aren’t saying.
This is what the military does when they are testing classified military technology. “It’s not ours. It’s not the enemy’s. It’s not a threat. Nothing to see here.”
You'd hope they'd have sensors and analysis capable of forming some conclusions, such as tracing the drones to a origin point, or classifying based on signature, etc.
They've haven't provided much and there's a lot of questions unanswered, but they've said unequivocally what they think the origin is not.
For clarity the exact words the Pentagon staff in the video used are:
"at this time we have no evidence that these activities are coming from a foreign entity or the work of an adversary...these are not US military drones"
I guess "US commercial drones" is the gap or intersection of the relevant Venn diagrams, but that doesn't make sense. Why would you test them over a military base?
I think we can apply some Gaussian blur and assume the statement is an approximate fit to the meaning by remembering that: this was a statement provided by a human in real time, ad libbing in response to a press question. They didn't spend hours drafting it to elucidate all possible logical connections and deftly conceal the unstated meaning by crafting some inference puzzle. Hahaha! :)
Communication between people is successful miscommunication. It's not an API - remember that, engineer! :)
Not "military" drones seems very very open to interpretation. Is DARPA Military? Or is military being used in a generic sense of the dictionary definition vs. the US government budgetary definition?
If anduril, for instance, sends the US military some new drones to try out, it is not technically a false statement for the military to say they aren’t military drones.
confirmed that jesus has returned as an alien to bring about the apocalypse.
but uhh, the most standard thing is that its some weather balloon put up by an undergrad student
who isnt aware of the relevant regulations theyre supposed to be following and whod really prefer to ask forgiveness than permission
Basically yeah, there's some room for interpretation, but the key thing is the exact words the Pentagon spokesmen used are:
"at this time we have no evidence that these activities are coming from a foreign entity or the work of an adversary...these are not US military drones"
The linked video starts at the relevant timestamp.
"are assessed by the Pentagon yesterday... to not originate in the US or any other nation" = "the Pentagon claims to actively know that the drones aren't from any publicly-known line of drone models"
Well that's not exactly what they said. Here's the transcript:
"at this time we have no evidence that these activities are coming from a foreign entity or the work of an adversary...these are not US military drones"
Right but how would you know how the other person interpreted it? What you said is not what I said. What I said is just a paraphrase of the Pentagon statement. How is it very different hahaha? :)
Honestly you can drive down the Gowanus expressway any day of the week in NYC and see these mysterious large drones somehow sitting up in the air for HOURS, silently. You can see their lights as they hover, if you are coming from the tunnel to the verazzano bridge. What kind of battery tech do they have! Who flies them??
At times like this it's helpful to use a simple, three point framework: [1] What do we know? [2] What is noise? [3] What is the boring explanation?
For [1], we know there are likely _some_ drones. We know drones are a very hot topic for defense at the moment and that countries are heavily investing in this area. We know that these systems need very heavy testing for coordination, surveillance, etc. and we know that other countries have conducted these in urban areas. We also know that these drones have been seen often nearby military installations. We know that our government is claiming to have no idea what these are, but has declared them safe and does not intend to take them out. We know that Ukraine (backed by the US) has used drones pretty successfully against Russia. We know that Israel has used drones successfully against targets across the region. We also know that the US is deploying pretty heavily in PACOM, and we can see that there are a wide array of large value contracts regarding drones being handed out to defense contractors.
For [2], there is SO much noise. A congressman immediately blaming Iran (a country an entire ocean away that is incurring heavy regional losses). The news and mass hysteria online that it's aliens. People confusing helicopters and planes for drones, but with just enough actual drone footage in the mix to false flag. Pretty much everyone looking at the skies which will greatly increase incidence. Just enough counter culture online that these are kids drones, regular planes, helicopters. Lots of varying narratives coming from different branches of military and law enforcement.
That's all very interesting, but if you subtract [2] from [1] you get a very boring explanation, [3] that these are likely our own drones being tested. I've seen this boring explanation get dismissed as technically the US has testing sites, but these are typically for bombs, and drones are best utilized in populated areas or for surveillance (both of which are hard to test in the desert). I also see dismissals of this as "the military would have said something by now," but they have: they've declared these "safe." If they were testing out new functionality on cutting edge tech they wouldn't admit to it, no matter how many likes a tweet gets or how many videos get posted online.
There is also no way a state government, governor, or law enforcement would know about this (yeah, even the FBI) because drone programs in the US are coordinated by intelligence agencies that are very secretive and don't like to share information among themselves.
The problem with the "secret testing over civilian areas" idea is that it's self-contradicting.
So you think the military and intelligence has technology that is so secret they won't admit to it, but they're so uninterested in protecting that they're testing them willy nilly over populated areas??
The other contradiction is risk: so you have an aerial technology test and you do it over US civilian populations and military bases over long periods in large numbers, not caring about risk of an object crashing, nor of triggering a mistaken response or misinterpretation by US or another nation, and without a NOTAM to protect aircraft?
None of that scans.
The other point is this is not limited to New Jersey and the United Kingdom.
> So you think the military and intelligence has technology that is so secret they won't admit to it, but they're so uninterested in protecting that they're testing them willy nilly over populated areas??
The explicit purpose of most advances in drone technology over the last ~20 years is not to be the biggest baddest weapon in the sky, but to be a hard to catch camera that sees everything and knows everything. That is also the biggest drone program that I am aware of and the explicit purpose of Maven.
> The other contradiction is risk: so you have an aerial technology test and you do it over US civilian populations and military bases over long periods in large numbers, not caring about risk of an object crashing, nor of triggering a mistaken response or misinterpretation by US or another nation, and without a NOTAM to protect aircraft?
The latter part of your question is the answer to the former. If we conduct tests abroad, we risk a response or the tech getting stolen. We need somewhere to test it, so we test it here. There is pretty low risk of these crashing, and civilians would not have the technology needed to down these drones (this capability would be pretty thoroughly tested in unpopulated areas).
We do issue NOTAMs when drones are in airspace, these are low flying and so do not warrant any notice.
That's fair about NOTAM's if they are low flying, how do you know they're low flying?
Your answer sounds official. Is this an official answer from someone in the military or IC? You say "these drones" - do you know unequivocally what they are?
How does the purpose of the Maven drone program you mention resolve the contradiction of testing a classified program that cannot be acknowledged, over civilian areas willy nilly? What is the purpose of a secret surveillance platform that is now an international news story? That goes against how such platforms are protected. So many contradictions.
These were also spotted in the UK over multiple bases (RAF Lakenheath, etc). Even if this were a test of our own technology, there's a lot of risk, and a lot of unknown and concern among officials who are in the dark, which creates more risk. It does not scan.
I don't really think you've provided answers that resolve these questions. I think it's legitimate that everybody has questions and there's a lot unknown. You seem to be saying you have the answers. Is that how you feel? Is that what you're saying?
All of the media sightings I have seen about these so far has been low flying. I don't deny that we have very high flying drones but I doubt they would be tested without NOTAMs (over CONUS).
> Your answer sounds official. Is this an official answer from someone in the military or IC?
Not official - I have not been part of the IC for about a year now. I can't talk about my background there without doxxing.
> How does the purpose of the Maven drone program you mention resolve the contradiction of testing a classified program that cannot be acknowledged, over civilian areas willy nilly?
I don't think I can answer this without doxxing or leaking, but there are a lot of public communications on MSS, its goals, what it involves, etc. and its recent expansions.
> These were also spotted in the UK over multiple bases (RAF Lakenheath, etc). Even if this were a test of our own technology, there's a lot of risk, and a lot of unknown and concern among officials who are in the dark, which creates more risk. It does not scan.
I haven't seen any reports of these; my gut reaction would be to suspect these are not drones and just regular aircraft. I wouldn't rule out drone tech (UK is in FVEY) but don't think it is likely.
I'm not saying it is necessarily ethical or a correct thing that these programs have such infrequent and limited oversight. I'm just quoting the reality (at least up to last year).
> You seem to be saying you have the answers. Is that how you feel? Is that what you're saying?
I'm just applying a framework that typically works for me and my existing knowledge of these programs. I'm not actively in the IC and can't definitely say I'm 100% right, but I don't see any other explanations at this point.
If you are looking for 100% answers there are probably entire chatrooms and threads dedicated to this on chatsurfer by now :)
100% answers? I'm the one asking the questions, you're the one who seems confident. I just wanted to understand from what basis your confidence arises.
I can't accept the blanket "trust us, we're the IC", because it's not credible. More so because how credibility has been surrendered by officials in IC on this topic through historical deception on UAP/UFO/NHI. Even more so when there's a motivation to lie to protect the secret that you don't control your skies, when that's your mandate.
There has to be a reckoning with truth if we hope to advance, and I actually see the Pentagon statement as +ve progress on that. In the larger context of this story, it's a bit of an acapella solo atop a harmony of voices from military saying "We don't control our airspace. There's unknown objects arising from non human intelligence." People include: Ryan Graves, Tim Gallaudet, Luis Elizondo, Chris Mellon, Jay Stratton, David Grusch, Karl Nell.
It's disappointing that with your IC "frameworks" you didn't even realistically consider "other explanations"; maybe such possible blindspots have been part of the problem institutionally, which is sad - because those are the ones who should be on top of it.
Or maybe you're just being a good soldier and still have NDAs, or never knew. Anyway, if you're interested I encourage you to go down that UFO/NHI rabbithole! Fascinating stuff. I bet you'd do great work on it, too, with you analytic skills. Give it a try maybe :)
There's plenty in this comment to get you started. So...go for it! :) And the UK stuff can be searched easily, for example: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-air-force-drone-sightings-uk... and if you're keen on rabbitholing here's two more to suck you in :)
> So you think the military and intelligence has technology that is so secret they won't admit to it
It’s more like “does not have to disclose anything so chooses not to”.
When you are in the long game of keeping your information and intentions secret, you don’t reveal anything if you don’t have to. They do need to test low flying aircraft in populous areas. They don’t need to say anything about it.
It’s like when you’re a kid, and your friends are trying to get you to admit who you have a crush on. If you actually want to keep it secret, you have to provide the same response to every question they ask, otherwise you are revealing information. If you say “no” truthfully to some questions but then refuse to say “no” untruthfully to other questions, then they can just pepper you with enough questions to triangulate what they want to know. Or you can just say “no comment” to everything but people take that worse.
Fort Dix, which is an airforce base, is in New Jersey. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was them. There was an incident some years ago when a very strange supersonic noise blasted out from that area and the government was very quiet about it.
I haven't been highside in almost a year now so I don't purport to know the actual operation behind this, BUT I would place my money on testing surveillance systems and on-device tracking modules. CDAO has been investing very publicly in these areas alongside the Maven program and TF Lima. They need a lot of good data on populated areas to make this work; they also can't risk testing this in warzones where a downed drone will both [1] leak advances in technology we have made since Reapers and [2] expose the on-device models they have in place. Could even be a vendor trying to evaluate their models; there is nothing particularly illegal about these drones.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Fort Dix, is in fact, Joint Base McGuire–Dix–Lakehurst, or as the DOD has recently taken to calling it, JB MDL. Fort Dix is not an army base unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning tri-force base hosted by the Air Force and including units from all six service branches.
I feel like you already have decided that this is safe and then are using "boring" explanations to back that narrative. This is easy cause nothing bad has happened in a while so it's less cognitive dissonance to go with that narrative.
Have you even tried coming up with boring explanations on how this could be not safe?
Also why specifically boring explanations? Plenty of incidents have dramatic explanations. How do you know when to pick what? Is the idea most incidents have boring explanations? And what happens when there is a black swan and you fuck up because you only relied on boring explanations? Shouldn't you be doing some sort of probability distributions instead?
If the military proclaimed these drones safe and are not shooting them down like crazy, these drones are likely reasonably safe, and are not an enemy that the US military, arguably the top one in the world, would fight.
A possible bad explanation: the US military actually would love to shoot down these drones, but cannot, because e.g. they are known to contain smallpox virus, dangerous radioactive contaminants, etc. These would be released at the slightest attempt to sound alarms or interfere. Someone caught them unawares and is now enjoying impunity.
A worse version: the US military and/or government is complicit, actually overrun by aliens / reptiloids / crackpots, and is allowing an invasion.
Etc.
Which version looks more plausible, any of these, or that the US military is testing something that can fly, but keeps the lips tight?
A spokesperson said that there was no proven harm done or something to that effect, as i particularly noted this oddball statement for what it was.
Please do go back and confirm.
I also think that any threat actor would attempt to dampen down alarm. GIVEN Putins proclivity and capabilities in convincing a cerain percentage of decadent western nations (tm) populations of certain scenarios in world power mongering, i dont see a brazen foreign drone surveillance campaign as out of the question.
Mind you, i did not allege that this is such, but that dismissal of such is currently impossible and unwise.
I believe they very explicitly said they pose no threat and also explicitly ruled out foreign entities and adversaries.
I talked about this in another comment but Putin/Russia and Iran could never be contenders for this. If it was a foreign entity it would pretty much be limited to China in terms of capability & readiness.
Without referring to anything specific about this case, things usually have boring explanations because what makes an explanation boring is that it is expected and empirically likely.
“The most likely explanation is the most boring one” is practically a tautology, because “boring” practically means “likely” in regards to explanations of events.
The DoD has very publicly stated that these are safe; I know Americans have a lot of distrust in their military but when it comes to matters of national security and defense the intel community is more or less omniscient.
Knowing the current capabilities of the military, there is also no possibility that this is not safe and yet cannot be handled after this long, which kinda rules out any boring explanation.
When it comes to matters of UFOs, drones, and lights in the sky, it has only ever been a boring explanation. I think people want very much for it to be fantastical, but often times the boring reality is still very dramatic if you step back and consider we're talking about secret testing of highly advanced drones.
By the same definition every helicopter, plane, kid flying a drone, even car on the road is not “safe.”
It’s the same way I can call a system reliable when it is 3 9’s, but that doesn’t imply 100% guaranteed uptime. Or a statistician can reject a hypothesis that has a low enough p-value but still more than 0. Or how health systems and procedures are considered safe above a threshold, or how we consider condoms safe sex while understanding they are not 100% effective.
I’m finding it frustrating that when it comes to UFOs, people tend to isolate the most remote possibilities.
Ever heard of submarines and ships. the Congressman said he heard from a good source there was an Iranian "mothership" on the East Coast. I guess you claim he's being lied to, or making it all up?
With everything intel-coded you can quickly figure out what is actually happening by applying the three point framework:
[1] What we know: Iran does not have a strong drone program, and it is almost impossible to get a ship that close to our shores without it being blown to literal bits by our 3 navy's.
[2] Noise: Congress has almost no insight into what the DoD does outside of hearings and oversight committees; Jeff Van Drew is on none of the committees that oversee any of our drone programs or space command, nor do these meet on a frequent enough cadence for them to have weighed in intel already. He's also a gun nut pro-lifer who has voted with Russian interests in the last two votes, and I doubt he would receive many markings or special briefings from intel agencies. The Pentagon (which currently directly oversees TF Lima, is where CDAO is based out of, and collaborates closely with SPACECOM) has also very publicly shot down these claims.
This release just links Iranian technology to UAVs used against Ukraine; they are nowhere near the capabilities of top military powers. The only country that can claim the #2 spot on the list is China.
To give you an idea of the comparison, Iranian drones are not even close capability wise to a Reaper. The Reaper is damn near EOL as it was developed in 2007(!) and is basically caveman technology compared to what we are currently running.
they are nowhere near the capabilities of top military powers
Russia is a top military power, and they use Iranian drones.
BTW, I didn't say they were number 2, I said they were battle tested unlike other top programs, like China'. Iran's drones are currently actively being used in two wars (vs Ukraine, vs Israel).
I don't think there are Iranian drones in NJ, but it isn't because they don't have a capable program. It's because it makes no sense.
Russia is not a top military power when it comes to technology, and probably not manpower after bleeding out in Ukraine.
There are plenty of advanced drone programs that are "battle tested." They are successful and so you do not hear about them :)
I maintain the Iranian drone program is incapable. They are very similar to the Ukrainian drones, botched together and little more than big model airplanes with explosives inside. They neither have the capability to get a ship onto our shores, nor to launch drones undetected, nor to pilot them undetected, nor to evade our defenses and intelligence network.
Whatever these drones are they're smart enough to vanish once we try to tail them. It's likely not simply Iranian tech. Remember China and Iran are allies, and sharing technology. If China wanted to prove something to the USA, they could easily let Iran do it, simply to cause less of an "International Incident" if the truth comes out of what's going on. My hunch is that it's a Chinese Technology Demonstration, and the "mothership" might be nothing more than a cargo container on a cargo ship. That would go totally unnoticed by our military sensor arrays.
"He made it up" certainly seems more likely than Iran, what, retrofitting one of their old Kilo class D/E subs to be a drone mothership that's just lurking off the coast?
How much time did he get on fox news? How many new followers on social media?
This is the game they are playing. The attention game. Just like the kid who misbehaves so people pay attention to him. This is what social media has done to our society.
But there's also a reason CNN (and most MSM) have lost all credibility. People finally realized which side has indeed been lying basically nonstop for the past 10 years.
I’ll admit that were I seeing such stories in my area, I’d be hard pressed not to hang some bit of a Halloween costume on a drone and send it around the neighbourhood.
Vernor Vinge called it Belief Circles. And in Rainbows End he tells a story of how to get them to stampede in one direction or another to suit anyones agenda. But on the flip side, once you create a herd of domesticated animals (side note: always useful to deeply understand how the process of animal domestication works), Stampedes can start from just one individual getting scared by their own shadow. To keep things from going out of control, the herd manager is then programmed (or "learns"), to get the herd to run in circles. They eventually get tired. And the story ends happily ever after.
Most of the coverage I saw online was from local affiliate stations. A deliberate attempt to alarm the public seems more likely than many of the theories offered.
When the Ukraine war started, there were drone sightings reported near the airport and some energy installations in Stockholm, Sweden. Then there suddenly were tons of sightings, everyone was talking about possible Russian drone operations. Many are still unexplained but a whole bunch turned out to be other things, birds, ambulance aircrafts. I think the consensus now is that there was just a few, non state, drone flights and the rest were just mass hysteria.
Traditional media is also involved, I've overheard Fox News hosts definitively state we're under invasion, blame Biden for it, and explain why Trump will fix it.
The Guardian is publication reporting the information. If you click the link at the top, open the website, and read the article, you will see who is quoted as making the claims.
The quotes seem to indicate that they don't care about drones. The context surrounding the quotes is all The Guardian's.
He emphasized there was “no known threat to the public at this time”.
Etc...
Then quotes of one word end quote two words not quoted, then a few more quoted words. Or a sentence that's clearly drawn without context.
Typical modern reporting. The people being quoted don't have the time to care if they were lied about.
So, yes, if you click the link, you'll see who is quoted making the claims, but there is no reason to think that they actually made those claims. Only that those people don't care enough to stop their workday and refute every piece of media trash with their name in it that probably didn't even make it to their desk.
A graduate student in Minnesota flew to a naval base in Virginia, used a consumer drone to photograph the area, then attempted to board a flight to China before he was caught by authorities.
His defense was that he was a fan of boats and drones, and as his lawyer said:
“If he was a foreign agent, he would be the worst spy ever known”
New Jersey is essentially one big sensitive site. Between Picatinny Arsenal, Joint Base McGuire-Dix, NWS Earle, and all the other smaller sites, you’re about 15 miles away from any one site and if you’re near civilization you’re much closer. Add in other sensitive sites like power stations and reservoirs, and the entire state is “sensitive”. This smacks hard of manipulation and agitation. 99% of the sitings shared with me have been airplanes.
Which models? What are the specific dimensions? I assume if you're confident they're widespread, commercially available, you know what kind of aircraft we're dealing with. I'd hope you can help me demystify further what's going on in the controlled airspace near military installations.
There was also a lot of drone sightings reported last week in Britain of similar fear, drones near a US military base somewhere in UK, think it was also in the Guardian.
Of course the government can control the weather, what are you on about:
> In the United States, cloud seeding is used to increase precipitation in areas experiencing drought, to reduce the size of hailstones that form in thunderstorms, and to reduce the amount of fog in and around airports. In the summer of 1948, the usually humid city of Alexandria, Louisiana, under Mayor Carl B. Close, seeded a cloud with dry ice at the municipal airport during a drought; quickly 0.85 inches (22 mm) of rain fell.[77]
> Major ski resorts occasionally use cloud seeding to induce snowfall. Eleven western states and one Canadian province (Alberta) had ongoing weather modification operational programs in 2012.[78] In 2006, an $8.8 million project began in Wyoming to examine cloud seeding's effects on snowfall over Wyoming's Medicine Bow, Sierra Madre, and Wind River mountain ranges.[79]
> In Oregon, Portland General Electric used Hood River seeding to produce snow for hydro power in 1974-1975. The results were substantial, but caused an undue burden on the locals, who experienced overpowering rainfall, causing street collapses and mudslides. PGE discontinued its seeding practices the next year.[80]
> In 1978, the U.S. signed the Environmental Modification Convention, which bans the use of weather modification for hostile purposes.[81]
> As of 2022, seven agencies in California are conducting cloud seeding operations using silver iodide, including the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which began employing the technique in 1969 to increase the water supply to its hydroelectric power plants, and reported that it results in "an average of 3 to 10% increase in [Sierra Nevada] snowpack".[82]
I literally agree with the second sentence. Humans control fire. If we can make it rain whenever we want we also control the weather. If they didn't they wouldn't need laws preventing them from overdoing it.
I mean there were 12 drones following a Coast Guard lifeboat. Doubt the Coastguard crew mass hysteria'd themselves into thinking 12 nearby 737s were following their boat (unless they just raided some Colombian drug submarine prior to coming into port).
And the official government response is super odd. Police were following a drone (that is totally safe we are told) then called the helicopter back because he felt unsafe. But the drones are safe (except if you are a police helicopter?).
'We don't know what these drones are, where they come from, so we followed one, then we... just stopped following it'.
That's not the normal Police/Sheriff response, no.
There are multiple New Jersey state government officials that attended this government hearing retelling that the Police/Sheriff said a Police helicopter did just stop following the unknown drone because 'the Police/Sheriff felt unsafe'.
> There are multiple New Jersey state government officials that attended this government hearing retelling that the Police/Sheriff said a Police helicopter did just stop following the unknown drone because 'the Police/Sheriff felt unsafe'.
Sorry I don't have Twitter and didn't save the link. Believe the one was a female New Jersey elected official. I suggest you start with looking up responses of officials from the meeting today if you don't believe this Assemblyman.
To be fair helicopters are held aloft by man's engineering hubris and blatantly flaunting gravity. Taking a drone to the tail rotor may not be entirely healthy to the crew of the chopper.
Oh, my understanding was that they manage to fly because they’re so ugly that the ground wants nothing to do with them and pushes them away. I stand corrected :D
Helis have to get out of the vicinity of drones all the time, it's a safety thing. If a drone suddenly flies into heli rotor, what do you think happens?
Somebody died near where I live because LifeFlight aborted after a drone was spotted by the heli. Firefighters abort flights for drones too, it's really serious.
> And the official government response is super odd. Police were following a drone (that is totally safe we are told) then called the helicopter back because he felt unsafe. But the drones are safe (except if you are a police helicopter?).
A misguided drone flying into a helicopter does seem unsafe. Just because something isn’t a threat to a ground pedestrian does not mean it can’t be a threat to a whirlybird.
The actual quote from the Coast Guard says they saw some drones but they weren't a threat. The Congressman is that one that says the Coast Guard says they were followed by drones.
It was Biden HIMSELF who originally said giving Long Rang Missiles, Tanks, and American Fighter Jets to Ukraine would start WWIII. lol. So your quip carries very little weight.
Oh, here, I'll make you feel better. Go check sub of the alien/ufo subreddits. Literally you'll see comments that amount to "my life sucks and is boring, this would be exciting even if bad".
No. Only about 64% of all American voters participated in the election - the rest stayed home. Of those, Trump actually got just under half of the popular vote, albeit by an extremely slim margin of about 48%.
"Voters" doesn't always mean "eligible voters". "Those who cast votes in the election under discussion" seems a reasonable sense of the term in this context.
You are correct that he got the plurality and not the majority of the popular vote.
It is obviously not true that only 64% of voters who cast votes in the 2024 election cast votes in the 2024 election, so some meaning slipped here, somewhere.
I'm having a hard time imagining how you'd accurately measure who a non-voter would have voted for. Like how would you verify if someone is even eligible to vote? Lots of Americans (Eg green card holders, kids, felons) can't vote. Also 2% is way smaller than the Lizardman’s Constant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
It isn't pointless pedantry. The claim was that "a bit over half of all American voters" voted for Trump. This is simply factually untrue, as nowhere near all American voters even voted.
>I'm having a hard time imagining how you'd accurately measure who a non-voter would have voted for.
No claims are being made about the hypothetical votes by non-voters, so whether and how that metric can be measured isn't relevant to the claim being made, which is about people who actually voted. This is measured through a count of the actual votes tallied by state.
>Like how would you verify if someone is even eligible to vote?
Every state has their own methods to determine voting eligibility. This isn't relevant to the claim being made, as the set of "all American voters" is presumed to be equal to the set of "all eligible American voters."
>Lots of Americans (Eg green card holders, kids, felons) can't vote.
Individuals who cannot vote are also not relevant to the claim made, which is about the set of people who actually did vote, and what fraction of the entire electorate they represented.
Yeah the avg person in the US is in a state of complete terror because grades better than C's in high school make you an uncool nerd. Imagine thinking everything is made of magic and people who try to explain basic science are trying to lie to you with confusing gotcha arguments. We are absolutely cooked.
Some people report erratic motion of the objects which you wouldn't expect from a normal plane or helicopter.
If the lights on the things are blinking, I have a possible explanation for the erratic motion.
I've found that if I'm in a dark place with a green LED that is blinking and there is not enough light to see anything but the LED then the LED appears to jump around erratically.
I'll see it come on and go off and I'm sure that I am continuing to stare at the now off LED but when it comes on it is somewhere else. If I'm about 40 cm from the LED it can appear to have jumped up to maybe 15-20 cm.
It can be quite disconcerting if there is a series of apparent jumps in the same direction, because each time I have to move my eyes/head in the same direction to recenter the LED, and after 4 or 5 jumps it feels like I should be turned significantly but I can tell that I'm actually still looking mostly straight ahead.
If I arrange for their to be some faint light in the closet so that I can see even hints of the other things in there when the LED is off then I can actually keep staring at the LED's position.
I believe this phenomenon is due to saccades [1]. Our eyes normally jump around randomly when we are looking at things. We can override that and force ourselves to stare at a point. My guess is that we need some reference in the field of view to focus our attention on to be able to do an override.
I'd guess that this same effect could happen with a blinking object in a dark sky.
What pisses me off is when the pentagon says "we don't know, but don't worry everything having to do with the security of the U.S. is perfectly fine!" Don't lie to me.
There are people in the government who know exactly what these are, and why they are not threatening. I assume the vague non-response is because if they reveal this information, the very next question is “how do you know this”? And the answer to that question involves revelations that could very possibly lead to upheaval and civil unrest.
In short, they’re at a total loss on how to respond to this phenomenon, because the answer opens a big ol’ can of worms, or Pandora’s Box, or pick your metaphor.
FWIW, the “drones” (they’re not drones though some present as such) are the opposite of a threat. They’re here to help, if they’d be allowed to. Can’t wait to hear the justification for why they haven’t been allowed to. grabs popcorn
What really amazes me is that society feels that we're in such a perilous state that they've deluded themselves into believing we're all going to be saved by little green men. If you think about it, it's the same reason humans invented god, but for the antitheistic.
I wonder if this is happening: "Hey US military drone manufacturers! You are allowed to test your drones at night. Don't say anything publicly. Start RIGHT after the Nov 2025 election. STOP right when Trump gets in office. Extra points if you put big lights on them."
Let's keep the citizens starting at the night sky and scratching their head.
It happened right after election. If they few in the day time, it would be easy to find out they are military test drones. The citizens wouldn't be as distracted.
One question I have but which may be impossible to answer is whether there is some level of confirmation bias here. Frankly every drone sighting is mysterious to me. I don’t know whose it is.
So yes, they are drones but maybe this is only one standard deviation from normal? Many non-military people own drones.
Israel has been mounting guns and speakers on long-distance quadcopters and shooting at Gazans. Only a short time until that tech becomes widespread. Israel seems to be a proving ground for mass population terrorizing tech like this. I'm having a hard time seeing how society is not going to devolve into capitalist tech fascism as we lose all our privacy and tech becomes more powerful than our governments, aka the will of the people.
> A retired surgeon who volunteered at a hospital in Gaza has told MPs that Israeli drones would target children who were lying injured after bombings.
So is Iran just going to be the default bogeyman until they drum up enough negative sentiment for a war?
Iran doesn't really have any military projection. It can't even move equipment and people into countries it's close to (Syria, Iraq), let alone the US. Why would they take the risk of doing this? It's obviously bullshit.
Isn't it true about Afghanistan in 1999 and probably now too?
A lack of military projection doesn't mean that your country can go in and rout out all insurgency. It just means that Afghanistan isn't going to be able to wage war on US soil from Afghanistan.
I agree with you in general, except for one important point - I think it will work again. Plenty of people will see through the lie, but enough will buy it that they’ll get their war.
They look like airliners, drones, and helicopters depending on when you see them. They are large, noisy, and carry FAA compliant lights.
They aren’t secret, per se, but the military is more interested in understanding the perception of their use than it is in sharing exactly what it is they are up to, as usual.
The ones shown in video all emit light. I'm sure if I had something nefarious
in mind that wasn't spreading fear among passers by, I'd turn the damn drone
lights off. They behave like their owners want them to be seen.
It's quite possible their only task is to fly around and make sure people see
them, as a form of less violent terrorism that rather counts on news channels
and social media to spread fear.
I’m thinking the same thing. An engineered form of mass hysteria. The goal is to make us feel that the threats are all around us, leading to hypervigilance and societal fracture.
How strange we get great footage out of Ukraine but no one in New Jersey can get a photo that's not shakey rubbish that looks like an airplane, or helicopter or Xmas lights or Sasquatch walking down the street with a glow in the dark cock ring.
Mustn't have the latest cellphone? I hear smart phones have cameras. They sound as good with technology as HN commentators.
A single balloon that maybe was a surveillance balloon traversed the US, did nothing, and then was shot down over water? Then the US was so panicked it shot a few million dollars of missiles at balloons elsewhere that definitely did not originate from China?
The Shift! Galactic Federation! Let me go watch some funny youtube vids about this new (to me) insanity. Flat earthers always crack me up; good comedy, so this should be good too.
I see a lot of whining about skydaddy god and the kid he had killed. If I want lame fairy tale religion, I would open up X. This is just a very uninspired retelling of the bible in alien form; not even funny; the person who wrote this is either a bad fantasy/scifi writer or mentally ill (or both).
From what I understand of the situation, I will stake the claim that the Galactic federation stuff is closest to the truth of what's happening here. It's wild to suggest, I know.
It will not be possible for most members of the community who don't follow the UAP phenomenon to understand why.
But all of of the information is out there, and if this event catalizes curiosity in you, then you will do your own research and come to the conclusion that, reality might very well be this weird.
I've always found these stories as mere fascinating sci-fi what ifs, but as more of these events unfold I've got to admit there might be something to it.
The lore theory is this: that there is a sort of trickster phenomenon at play whose goal is to subvert our understanding of the physical world, and to get us to start asking metaphysical questions about the nature of reality. Questions that can only be answered by "looking within".
> Interestingly, almost all of the objects posted to this and similar subs (especially /r/NJDrones) violate FAA requirements in one or more obvious ways.
I'm aware how crazy all of this sounds to the uninitiated. But I've studied the phenomenon from all angles. At this point the most parsimonious explanations trend towards the fantastical. Of course we can still be wrong, but as the OP says, as time comes and more events of this sort come to light, I think it will eventually lead to the inescapable conclusion that the world and our place in it may not be as it seems.
>And another event from the 1800s of craft that is era-appropriate, mimicking airships of the time:
You do realize that's because those too were cases of mass hysteria, and the delusions matched what they knew to be airborne at the time - airships. Now all you see on the news is drones and suddenly everyone is having drone-flavored mass hysteria.
> I've studied the phenomenon from all angles.
Give me your most convincing evidence. I've seen none so far.
It is strange these "drones" can fly over US airbases and the world super power can do nothing about them. If GF parked a mothership today it would cause mass delusions and chaos due to human programming. They approach softly and slowly and dont violate free will. This phenomena will only get more and more widespread because it is time...
https://x.com/Kabamur_Taygeta/status/1867170042695061603
If the Pentagon says they are not from Iran or other adversaries and a super power defence force can do nothing to stop them or protect airspace then what other answer is left. Think logically and without delusion. https://x.com/Kabamur_Taygeta/status/1866959297600503921
> DroneUp Delivery was working on mock deliveries for Walmart and had set up a delivery point outside of Mr Winn’s ... home
> The defendant stated he had past experience with drones and believed they were surveilling him
The question I'm left with after reading that article - was this test delivery point for a single trial run, or did this company choose one random location and then repeatedly send tests there over and over? If it's the latter, that seems like it should also warrant criminal charges.
Companies should not be sending UAVs to anyone’s property without permission, period. This stuff needs to get sorted out in law and these bozos need to back off.
Shooting large, apparently car-sized, stuff down over populated areas isn't a good idea.
As an aside, I presume at this point, the military and FBI are stationing their SIGINT aircraft over the area and probably have a good idea what's going on but aren't saying publicly. These things are emitting electromagnetic energy in more ways that one, eg. radios and electric motor RF signatures.
Not confirmed but not unsubstantiated. A coast guard ship filed reports of them both arriving from out at sea and returning to sea. Also several local sheriffs have observed the same.
The War Zone is always a reliable source for national security related reporting -
"Shot down" with what? Surface-to-air missiles? Duck hunters with shotguns? Attack helicopters with miniguns?
Whatever you spray into the sky (to knock a drone out of it) will also fall back to earth, plausibly generating civilian casualties on the ground. (And if you use lasers - high power laser beams have plenty of safety issues, too.)
Ukraine's capabilities in that domain are plausibly far more advanced that America's.
Also - costs, casualties, & collateral damage may be far more acceptable in an active war zone, and against drones which are busy killing people & destroying valuables whenever they are not shot down.
Ukraine's capabilities mostly consist of ramming a cheap drone into an expensive one.
This is one of those times when the US has a Maginot Military - massively overpowered against traditional threats, inexperienced when dealing with something like this.
This is not a trivial problem. A cheap drone with a relatively small explosive payload flown into an air intake can take down a military aircraft and cause serious problems for an airliner or private jet.
An airfield is the ideal place to do that, because aircraft are most vulnerable during takeoff and landing.
A few people and a hundred drones launched from a few km away can significantly delay incoming and outgoing flights.
Equip the drones with weapons - or larger explosives - and it's potentially Pearl Harbour.
That's kind of reductive. I know some people who have, uh, relevant experience. The cheap drones are pretty comprehensively engineered and they're complex in the same way that a ballpoint pen is not as trivial to manufacture as it looks.
Shotguns are being used for that purpose. Single buckshot from the top of a AR barrel are in vogue too.
Someone should use a cheap arduino and a mike for aiming and shooting at fpv quadcopters.
I really don't understand why that's not here yet. They can literally convert a toy from github.
They are "being used" but shotguns are the last line of defense. Good luck stopping a little FPV drone with one. If you do not disable it by 50ft you dead. And you have like 10% odds. Way better than 1% odds you might have with a rifle or nothing but...
Jamming is first line of defense, a million times more effective FWIW.
One counter measure is no counter measure. If you look at toys like https://hackaday.com/2023/06/13/arduino-powered-missile-syst... and scale it up with bigger and stronger servo's for holding a shotgun instead of fake missiles; you'll have a second war - with the arms industry. For a bonus you'll also win the war of economy because the bill of materials costs less than a mad maxed FPV drone given you source the shotgun from the land.
It's always wrong (in every possible way) to be the first one to engage hostilities. To be morally in the clear, you should always wait for the other side to engage first. If we didn't follow this doctrine, we would've already had a nuclear holocaust. Warmongers and civilization don't mix.
We don't know anything about their capabilities as individual drones or as a cluster of drones. For all you know, when you shoot one, the other ten take that as declaration of war.
We should follow the drones to see where they land, and continue the investigation from there.
There is no evidence that the drones carry WMDs, or that they're dangerous like Iran. If we had reason to believe that the drones are associated with WMDs, then it would be okay to neutralize them, but we don't. Because of false assertions about WMDs, we've already had one unnecessary war in Iraq. How many more do you want?
The US military can track and engage ICBMs moving at 15k MPH but can't identity drones above residential neighborhoods in the continental US? They really do believe we're stupid.
Truth is, a Patriot system would probably also miss something like this unless it had special SHORAD or CIWS defenses alongside it. A lot of these drones are going to be invisible to conventional radar if they want to be.
I am very certain I know what this is, and sorry, it's not aliens. I've seen this before and people were freaking TF out back then, too. That one is still labeled unexplained. It's not hard to figure it out.
I'm actually loathe to spoil it in case they're doing this as a prank (and they definitely are) because it's such a genius fucking way to throw a whole nation into full UFO panic for a few hundred bucks, and very easy to do completely undetected. (No, not drones)
I bet I'm not the only one who figured it out, especially on here.
I'm guessing you mean the reports are fake, or at least the ones seeding the panic, generated by bots, social media ads, or something. Once you hit a critical mass, hysteria kicks in, and the chain reaction becomes self-sustaining. A psy-ops weapons test, basically. I think this is very possible, and yes it could be a prank in this case, but it should not go unpunished if so.
> On Wednesday, the Pentagon responded and addressed the baseless claims from one Republican New Jersey congressman that the drones were from an “Iranian mothership” lying off the coast of the state.
A lot of people in power seem to be panicking because so many international conflicts are dying down in recent months. After a Ukraine-Russia ceasefire how is the military industrial complex going to sustain itself? We need a new boogeyman, asap.
It was a massive media event, camera crews from every outlet were at the airport, but none ever photographed a drone. None of the radar systems at the airport, nor the military anti-drone systems sent later on, ever picked up anything.
In this article, a professional drone photographer describes mistaking a helicopter for a drone:
> But when he opened up the image on his computer, ready to send to his editors, he realised he’d made a mistake. The image did not show a drone. It was a helicopter hovering 10 miles away; between the darkness and the distance, his eyes had played a trick on him. “If I’m making a mistake – and I fly drones two or three times a week – then God help us, because others will have no idea,” he said. He called police to retract his reported sighting.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/01/the-mystery-...
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