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?
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.
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?
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
There is a window of opportunity right now which i suppose everybody is using against each other. The drones, even simple cardboard ones (like those hitting Russian airfields back then. And whatever hit Russian strategic defense missile detection radar - shows how small drones can play big game), flying low and slow can make like couple hundreds miles in several hours on one charge (for more - place charging pads along the way and run your imagination :). They aren't detectable by typically available radar systems. In couple years, optimistically, there would be more widespread deployments of automated anti-drone systems - suitable radars, interceptors, etc. and the window will start to close.
It's very likely there will be 100s of simultaneous attacks (within minutes apart) on many Western targets, both in Britain and USA homeland. Perhaps the Democrats will wake up and realize they naively got US into WWWIII, by not demanding Biden be impeached before he can do more damage. Both Biden and Putin, are old, and near death and have nothing left to lose, and both have been ashamed and humiliated over the past couple of years (Biden for his mental decline and Putin for the loss of life in Ukraine). It will be a miracle if we're not in a hot war very very soon.
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.
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".
I think they're Iran/China conducting a dry-run to see how many they can get over important targets. Once they understand our defense posture they'll send in the real ones which will have either chem-bio or tactical nuke capability and when the all simultaneously detonate no one will know where they came from or what country did it. Biden basically got us into WWIII already. It will be shocking if we don't get attacked, and soon, probably before he's out of office.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.)
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.
> 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".
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.
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?
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!".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What is alarming is how changing a single word can drastically alter crowd's perception.
It hasn't even been established these are drones like you would find from the civilian/military market.
They literally swapped out UAP/UFO with drones and you can see people not even question what is being reported.
I'm sure that with Trump unsealing much of the anticipated documents around Epstein, Diddy, Kennedy, UFO/UAP possibly hinting at extra-terrestrial confirmation, we are going to see even more weird cognitive dissonances.
Always interesting to see the polarized one sided take from HN'ers, I don't know if this is because most are hyper-rational/quantitatively inclined leading to close-minded narrow focus or something else.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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").
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the worst case, if these were to be Chinese military drones, they could now be testing our responses, and we could be in for a really bad time when war does happen. Of course I hope that this is not the case. This is not intended to spread FUD, only to serve as a what-if in risk assessment.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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?
Wow.
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.
1. Local air taxi service is testing, per some random YouTube comment.
> An entire ocean away.
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?
"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?
Yes, he’s clearly making it all up.
>I guess you claim he's being lied to, or making it all up?
Don't forget rank stupidity as a strong possibility.
Congressional reps can be... credulous.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republican-congressman-falls-vi...
Remember Jewish space lasers?
I think social media is really having a detrimental impact on these sort of mass panics.
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.
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.
you mean...it's not "the radical left"?
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.
Done 11 years ago - https://youtu.be/tB8D2QZ9lA4
Drones of today would likely be a fair bit easier to work with.
Just take a clear video of an airplane landing or taking off and that should be enough.
If you look at who is claiming espionage, I don’t think it’s intended to be a plausible explanation - just an excuse to further agitate.
Not commenting on NJ specifically, but there have been drone sightings near sensitive military sites recently, as reported by the military
Here’s one recent example in Virginia:
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/drones-milita...
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”
But you do know about him!
Vanderberg Air Force Base - International espionage attempt at least thats what the news is saying: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/12/11/chinese-citiz...
> there have been drone sightings near sensitive military sites recently
How near is "near"? There's an awful lot of sensitive military sites in the US.
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.
Lots of what is shared is airplanes, but there have been official sources confirming drone sightings too. I haven't seen a drone yet myself tho.
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).
https://apnews.com/article/fbi-drones-new-jersey-a978470fa3b...
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?).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yxDXqU9OQQ
Lots of strange behavior.
EDIT: Downvotes for posting an APNews article and an elected New Jersey Assemblyman that just came out of the government briefing, really?
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yxDXqU9OQQ
Isn't this just the standard politician response? I am angry, this is ridiculous, so on. It might be more useful to actually listen to the hearing.
'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'.
I can't find that? Care to share?
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.
> 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.
Can you site an actual reliable source, and not the mouthpiece of a political party?
If we can't trust the Coast Guard then we are screwed as a country.
If there was such a news source we'd all be reading it and agreeing with one another.
Name one, please.
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.
There is a window of opportunity right now which i suppose everybody is using against each other. The drones, even simple cardboard ones (like those hitting Russian airfields back then. And whatever hit Russian strategic defense missile detection radar - shows how small drones can play big game), flying low and slow can make like couple hundreds miles in several hours on one charge (for more - place charging pads along the way and run your imagination :). They aren't detectable by typically available radar systems. In couple years, optimistically, there would be more widespread deployments of automated anti-drone systems - suitable radars, interceptors, etc. and the window will start to close.
It's very likely there will be 100s of simultaneous attacks (within minutes apart) on many Western targets, both in Britain and USA homeland. Perhaps the Democrats will wake up and realize they naively got US into WWWIII, by not demanding Biden be impeached before he can do more damage. Both Biden and Putin, are old, and near death and have nothing left to lose, and both have been ashamed and humiliated over the past couple of years (Biden for his mental decline and Putin for the loss of life in Ukraine). It will be a miracle if we're not in a hot war very very soon.
They aren't small drones - they seem to be really large, like 4-10 feet wide. It's hard to tell but they definitely are not small.
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.
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".
It's uh, a bit maddening and a bit sad.
I think they're Iran/China conducting a dry-run to see how many they can get over important targets. Once they understand our defense posture they'll send in the real ones which will have either chem-bio or tactical nuke capability and when the all simultaneously detonate no one will know where they came from or what country did it. Biden basically got us into WWIII already. It will be shocking if we don't get attacked, and soon, probably before he's out of office.
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.
Iranian Mothership. For reasons
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!
https://www.app.com/story/news/local/new-jersey/2024/12/11/d...
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'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.
"large drones"
How large is "large"?
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.
No you can't - try it. Take a picture of the moon.
careful, you may get an AI moon to make up for the fact you can't really get a good picture of it.
https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-galaxy...
At least 6 out of 10 images in the linked article are clearly commercial aircraft.
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.
I believe the other 3 pictures are this helicopter: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ab19fa&lat=39.865&lon=-...
Image 8 is too blurry to make out, but it's probably also a plane.
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:
https://www.rdrnews.com/opinion/columnists/drones-mimicry-an...
I'm very sorry, as it's probably a perfectly respectable local news source, but: Did you just link a Roswell newspaper article on UFOs? :)
Sure, I’m not saying there’s nothing, but there’s clearly some component of hysteria.
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.
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.
https://www.app.com/story/news/local/new-jersey/2024/12/11/d...
> Abichandani has no idea as of now whether the drones over New Jersey are swarming drones.
Then this article goes on to speculate about scary things.
ahem, our president-elect. he is not the new president, yet.
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
Yeah they can only shoot down unidentified weather balloons.
He's the one that got elected as a Democratic candidate and switched to the Republican party about a month after he was elected.
Reminds me of the hysteria we had about drones shutting down an airport in the UK, with loads of reported sightings yet no evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident
why hasn’t someone got decent pictures to back this up after five nights?
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.
Which ones clearly aren't that or a police helicopter?
Stop believing your lying eyes for they deceive you.
Here, read this, it will calm your nerves.
If it's got bright lights on it, it's very unlikely to be espionage.
Hiding in plain sight is also a thing.
So is sowing mass hysteria and deepening distrust in authorities.
But they got you to click and flip through the slides
> 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.
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.
Or disguise them as birds.
https://www.newsweek.com/china-shows-new-drones-disguised-bi...
What’s not part 107 compliant? All the activity I’ve heard was fully legal.
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.
Ok, what configuration are these drones? Quadcopters?
Why are they only flying at night? To evade detection? Then why do they have lights?
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 ;-)
What sort of noise do they make? Do they sound like normal drones?
And you recorded if of course!
If all we had to depend on was cell phone footage, I'm not sure I'd believe the moon existed.
Are there any recordings to back up your story?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident
Shooting things down over populated areas is a public safety issue.
Drones flying about may or may not be.
Into a large field or farm
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.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/researc...
I don't think the Coast Guard mistook 12 American Airlines planes for drones following their boat:
https://apnews.com/article/fbi-drones-new-jersey-a978470fa3b...
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):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yxDXqU9OQQ
You keep posting the same stuff multiple times in the thread. It doesn’t help your argument.
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?
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!
That’s known as mass psychogenic illness, and history is full of examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
Otherwise known as gaslighting
Some information about the Toyota cases: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_... page 14 is especially interesting.
And more technical information: https://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRU...
iirc wasn't it the floor mats being designed such that they were prone to interfering with the pedals?
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.
Same. This is a ridiculous mass hysteria driven by media sensationalism and ignorant members of the public.
Lol, also rep. Jeff Van Drew claiming without evidence that the drones are coming from an Iranian mothership off the coast.
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.
https://x.com/TankerTrackers/status/1866922032681652322
> Iran has two drone carrier vessels; the SHAHID BAGHERI and the SHAHID MAHDAVI. Both are located in the anchorage of Shahid Bahonar, Iran.
> We know this because we are looking at them right now.
"...without evidence..."
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.
> I don't see any motive for him to make this up
To get people to pay attention to him?
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?
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?
Probably just made it up. He's a naked opportunist and there's no penalty in the GOP (or arguably in Congress in general) for being a shameless liar.
In his defense, he is a Cold War relic.
He was 20 in 1973, that doesn't qualify as a CW relic. Not even a curio.
Relic from the Cold war, not a relic at the time of the cold war.
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.
Is that your gut feeling or do you know something the government isn't willing to reveal?
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?
The AA livery just means it’s a false flag attack. Truly, we haven’t seen such an invasion in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey since 1938.
I do wonder how many will get the reference.
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.
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?
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/drones-over-new-jersey.1377...
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.)
That sleigh does have a high visibility red light although the mounting is somewhat unorthodox.
this would be relatively easy to solve with historical ADS-B data correlated to the time and date of the spottings.
https://adsb.lol/
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.
I've been waiting for the fans of FlightAware type places to start posting their findings.
There is more evidence here than just pictures from this one article.
The pentagon, for example, just declared that they do not know what they are[1]. Among many other credible sources.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hc1l58/pentagon_no_e...
> There is more evidence here than just pictures from this one article.
What “more evidence”?
All the Pentagon is saying is that there’s no evidence that’s a foreign entity is behind it. Not “more” evidence.
Can you or can you not draw a red line with a blue pen?
> 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.
Could they be defense contractor drones being tested?
The Pentagon - credible!? Ha.
> 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".
https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/remote_id
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...
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.
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?
That's my favorite part of this mass hysteria.
Why would they have nav lights on?! Any lights...
Clearly, my spy craft isn't a spy craft. Look, it has lights on it for Pete's sake.
Plausible deniability
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!".
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.
Well, let's say they are spy craft - seems the "it's not real" narrative is working, no?
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.
>grainy night pictures
Because that's what you get when you point your phone at the sky at night and start recording.
Have you never tried to do this?
Even the moon, the brightest and largest object in the sky, by far, comes out looking really bad on night pictures.
Take the drone, leave the Cannoli
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.
People are claiming that these show "mimics," some type of drone designed to look like commercial aircraft.
At that point, how do we know they aren't commercial aircraft mimicking drones mimicking commercial aircraft?
did yall see the drone outside my house it came down and it said hello and then it touched me
Which picture has the AA livery visible?
6 and 7. If you squint and lean on a bit of confirmation bias, photo 9 looks like a commercial airliner with the Alaska Airlines livery.
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.
1: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?replay=2024-12-09-01:33&lat=...
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.
AA = American Airlines
AS = Alaska Airlines
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.
Some action is already being taken; supposedly the GREMLIN program is being rolled out in areas where sightings are most common: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/military-ufo-gremlin/
> If no joy on ECW, disassemble them in the sky.
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.
F-16 seems like overkill for a drone. Send up the Apaches.
Let's not forget it took how many sidewinders to take down the Chinese balloon? More than 1 makes someone look foolish.
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.
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.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Lwfn134LqdEp6xbG9
I wish we as people could have meaningful conversations on the internet.
To clarify some common logical issues I see spread across dozens of responses in this thread:
Drones != Quadcopters
Drones COULD use a housing to mimics common aircraft or helicopters.
The military and FBI do not commonly monitor ALL airspace at all times beyond air-traffic radar.
The government is not a hive-mind and individuals only know what they know despite the fact the are asked to make statements.
What is alarming is how changing a single word can drastically alter crowd's perception.
It hasn't even been established these are drones like you would find from the civilian/military market.
They literally swapped out UAP/UFO with drones and you can see people not even question what is being reported.
I'm sure that with Trump unsealing much of the anticipated documents around Epstein, Diddy, Kennedy, UFO/UAP possibly hinting at extra-terrestrial confirmation, we are going to see even more weird cognitive dissonances.
Always interesting to see the polarized one sided take from HN'ers, I don't know if this is because most are hyper-rational/quantitatively inclined leading to close-minded narrow focus or something else.
> I'm sure that with Trump unsealing much of the anticipated documents around Epstein, Diddy, Kennedy, UFO/UAP
I think the only cognitive dissonance is expecting Trump to unseal anything he didn't already unseal in his first 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.
Seems rather eerie reading some of the eyewitness reports. I'm reminded of the mystery airship flap of the late 1800's into the early 1900's. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_airship
https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29...
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.
> 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?
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.
> black/budgetless agencies you'd go to jail for even having heard of.
Well stop telling people about them!!!
Quick, how do I unread that comment??
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.
Things like that happen all the time.
https://www.faa.gov/uas/resources/public_records/uas_sightin...
Keep in mind most of this stuff never gets reported.
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.
What makes you think that they don’t know? Isn’t it common for the military to lie about what they know?
With amounts of cameras everywhere I'd thought it would be easy to spot.
>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.
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").
Sad to see what HN is slowly devolving into.
This is the "Iraq has WMD" for this generation.
It's just laying the ground work for some insidious nonsense.
I'm already seeing the propaganda wheels rolling on X blaming Iran.
i'm reminded of a story from around 2012? about an aerial surveillance program where they recorded a bird's-eye view of the city [1?]
they used the footage to solve some cartel murder by playing the footage in reverse to track the origin of the killers
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lowrider
why are we ignoring occam’s razor here? clearly this is santa testing new sleigh models.
What if it's just someone testing a New Year's drone show?
The Guardian in 2017 (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/03/secret-servi...):
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.
There was a similar phenomenon a few years back in Colorado: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Colorado_drone....
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 haven't needed a waiver since 2021. Now you can get near real-time approval to fly at night under Part 107.
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.
> 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.
A more accurate headline would be …prompts one New Jersey legislator on social media to call…
A practical question, beyond the questions of whose drones these are: what are they looking for?
Social media impressions/likes.
That's usually what drone videos are for, isn't it?
Presumably something with a heat signature since they're operating at night.
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.
They're just looking for the Situation or Snooki out on the Shore. Someone forgot to tell them what decade it is.
Just a reminder that Chinese Spy Balloons were a conspiracy too, laughable. And then...
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.
A _lot_ of hobbyists (me included) disagree with you on this one. I think the current Remote ID law (controversial, yes) is a reasonable balance.
The BlackFly is an Ultralight Aircraft originally designed by OPENER in Canada, and is a single-seat personal aerial vehicle (PAV).
It appears a few clowns are illegally flying something similar in the US air space, and over populated areas (FAA will hit hard on this point.)
That odd looking air-frame design is very similar, and a simple phone call may put the drama to rest. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivotal_BlackFly
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?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_inciden...
You can see these things with satellites
Or airplanes. Like the ones flying overhead all the time in N.J.
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.
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.
Oh, like the gas stations in TaleSpin.
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!
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.
>Iran doesn't really have any military projection.
I'll take "things people said about Afghanistan in 1999" for 400!
Just to be clear, I fully agree with your sentiment. Probably not Iran or any other foreign power.
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.
This. Blame Iran by default is getting really tiresome at this point
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.
> This is the biggest mass hysteria I can remember.
The biggest panic about unidentified flying objects in New Jersey since October 30 1938.
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.
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.
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.
The real drones go dark and evade helicopters.
What if the lights are how they are controlled and pass data, rather than an RF link?
That's as plausible as them beaming spy data directly into the operator's brains via midichlorians.
What if the moon were made of cheese?
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.
What kind of equipment (available to civilians) can capture accurate and useful data about of UFO size, distance, and trajectory/heading?
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.
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tag/hydrasdr/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic
Exactly my thought! It feels very much the same.
a recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42225609
Just wait. Some startup will confess, just like many of the balloons were hobbyists, students, and clubs.
In the worst case, if these were to be Chinese military drones, they could now be testing our responses, and we could be in for a really bad time when war does happen. Of course I hope that this is not the case. This is not intended to spread FUD, only to serve as a what-if in risk assessment.
Our response to a Chinese drone invasion on CONUS would be some fun spicy RVs from a Trident II.
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.
The whole appeal of their defense industry is that they have people to test their weapons on
Wait until you hear that the US mounted hellfire missiles on a drone in 2001 and shot at trucks/people in Afghanistan.
Or it is only "terrorizing" to a population when you use bullets instead of enormous bullets that also kill everything in a 30m radius?
Both are obviously terrorism
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.
Those are different types of radars and they are pointed in different directions.
Quadcopters occupy the same flight regime as most clutter does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clutter_(radar)
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.
Based on this post they're right.
Martians!
Why are they not being shot down at the very least?
The FAA looks down on people shooting at flying objects they can barely recognize, as this guy learned the hard way: https://www.yahoo.com/news/retiree-shot-walmart-delivery-dro...
> 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.
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.
RIP the SkyCircles accounts on Twitter.
Some of these photos are of passenger planes. I think most agree that shooting down passenger planes is bad.
Also rather hard to accidentally do if you have equipment capable of shooting down aircraft.
Nothing these drones are doing are illegal.
Why? Just follow them and see where they land / head to (they can't fly forever) and ask some questions to the owners.
supposedly they originate and return to somewhere out in ocean. presumably boats or submarines.
Unsubstantiated rumors. I say they come from mole people underground. The same reliable source as your information i’m sure.
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.
I don’t think anyone has the tools to go to an area after a spotting and capture/destroy them quick enough.
Not to mention that it's illegal to shoot down aircraft
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.
According to this logic we should wait untill Iran creates a nuke and only then destroy their nuclear facilities, right?
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?
Gravity
"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.)
If Ukraine is any indication you shoot them down with other drones.
No one in Ukraine is in the habit of shooting down commercial airliners and helicopters, though.
No they used Buk missiles instead.
where they = the Russian military or Russian-military aligned terrorist groups.
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.
But yeah, Maginot Military sounds about right.
But they engage only big drones. Like reconnaissance Orlan or Zala, maybe lancet. No one is shooting down fpv quadcopters, not yet.
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.
> Duck hunters with shotguns?
Duck Dynasty season 12 is going to be a doozy
The sightings will increase until there is only 1 logical explantion. https://x.com/Kabamur_Taygeta/status/1866781757191729285
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.
That you’re delusional?
These "drone" sightings will increase until there is no other explanation. https://x.com/Kabamur_Taygeta/status/1866781757191729285