The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real
vice.com
vice.com
On the one hand, we have 23 sightings a week, across the town, from a variety of people, including a helicopter pilot, over a sustained period of time. On the other hand, we have a government report that all of those sightings were of "stars, planets, or hobbyist drones". The people of this town have never seen a star before? Really? Is the government report really more believable?
It sounds like the scene in Men in Black, but even more lame. "No. Those weren't drones. Those were nothing."
"Mass hysteria" is an explanation that seems hard to swallow. These people weren't panicking, they weren't seeing demons or magic, they were making reports of real things (drones) acting in plausible ways. That a group of local government officials couldn't find any evidence doesn't seem to mean anything. What evidence would we expect them to find?
I'd like to know what the usual rate of false drone reports is in a typical town. Is this an average number of reports? More than average, and if so, why?
I work with lots of people who seem to have this attitude. When customers submit bugs that immediately think the customer is imagining the problem, or doing something wrong, or that the bug is magically a transient issue that isn't worth investigating or something like that. I think the reality is investigations are hard and sometimes yield nothing, but that doesn't mean we should jump to preposterous conclusions.
">That’s because the drones never existed."
is absolutely not the same as:
">CDPS confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity."
Basically it could have been legal drone activity by either a company or Govt. agency. My thoughts when I initially heard about this was this could have been a mapping startup or maybe something a larger tech company is testing out.
If this were a crowd of people witnessing something and jumping to a strange conclusion where their beliefs were reinforced by each other's behavior - e.g. we both hear a car backfire, you look scared so I start to run and before you know it we're all talking about how we survived a mass shooting, then sure, I'd accept mass hysteria.
This is very different. It is many independent people over many days making reports of strange, but completely natural phenomenon. Nobody is seeing vampires, they are witnessing drones do the kind of things drones do. That a government agency can't find evidence of illegal drone activity after the fact is interesting, but it's absurd to conclude that this is mass hysteria.
If I flew a drone over you at night, and the police showed up a month later to inspect and found no evidence, would you believe that you had been suffering from mass hysteria?
It sounds like people were making independent reports, it's not like they were all listening to a "War of the Worlds" broadcast and then reporting based on what they heard on the radio.
Can it really be called "mass hysteria" if the individuals didn't know about each other's reports?
From the original description:
On Friday, Myers said he watched eight of the large drones flying along the Yuma County border near the intersection of U.S. 385 and County Road 54. At the same time, a single drone hovered about 25 miles away over the town of Paoli — it didn’t move all night, just hovered over the town — and eight more drones flew over Haxtun, about 10 miles down the road from Paoli, Myers said.
It sounds like military drones, which probably wouldn't be unexpected in Colorado given the amount of military bases there.
So did this credible Myers also demonstrated the about 6 cm diameter binoculars needed to resolve a 20 metre "drone" 25 miles away? Or maybe he was using a 30 cm telescope to resolve a 5 metre drone?
What seems overly credulous is that people are willing to think there are large groups of drones flying around, and there are no definitive images or video of them.
You might find this post interesting, https://www.metabunk.org/threads/plane-shaped-drone-caught-o..., in which a local news reporter and law enforcement officer think they see a drone, but it is convincingly argued that what they saw was an airplane.
As I mentioned above, consider the weight of evidence on either side. On the one hand, many eye witnesses many times. On the other hand, a government found no evidence. If that disposes you to conclude that the drones didn't exist, then I think that's probably just too fundamental a difference in our reasoning to reconcile by argument here. For me, I think the government findings are evidence against the drones but not as good as the evidence in favor of the drones.
Lights in a place where you can see very far away tends to confuse our perception of scale, distance and speed.
> I think the reality is investigations are hard and sometimes yield nothing, but that doesn't mean we should jump to preposterous conclusions.
I agree. "Occam's Razor" is wise.
It seems to me, if we had that latter figure, and we knew how many independent reports there were, we could calculate the likelihood that every reporter was mistaken.
So it wasn't car headlights in 1883 and "no ashes or other evidence of a campsite".
Did the campfire smoke spell out their exact location to nicely make up for the distorted distance perspective for lights at night?
... and also not little green men from Mars nor up-close sightings of ball lighting in 120 years.
The distances here are large (potentially 10's of miles with mountains) and the phenomena occur at dusk/night/dawn. It would be very hard to localize such lights by merely eyeballing it and then walking for hours over rugged desert to where it looked like it came from.
Many UFO reports may be the result of mass hysteria [0]
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-ufo-reports-chang...
>CDPS “confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity.” In other words, they found nothing.
This doesn't say "they found nothing." It says "they found nothing illegal."
So what if they're testing drone swarms anyways. It's inevitable.
Sadly, this is very believable to me . . . not that they haven't seen a star or a planet, but that they don't really know what they are looking at. People don't seem to look up very often nor do they seem to spend much effort understanding what they are seeing. This past week, we had people claiming that the International Space Station was next to the moon (the children are doing a section on space at school). I am sure I could easily find a couple of dozen people in town who will swear to have seen it. It was Venus.
A large percentage of UFO reports are planets. Another large proportion are regular aircraft (I've seen all the "classic" UFOs, they are all airliners under different conditions). Military flares are another sort of light that tends to hang around in the sky.
There are people who are surprised that you can sometimes see the moon in the daytime . . . I could go on.
Now, in this world some people will mistakenly spot Flying Saucers for the same reasons that people on Earth. In fact, spotting Flying Saucers will be even more likely because everyone will recognize they are real.
Now, in Flying Saucer world, suppose that 93 people, including police officers, over a period of weeks, spotted and reported, sometimes repeatedly, a group of Flying Saucers flying in a pattern - something that it's well known Flying Saucers can do.
Would you conclude that these people are all mistaken and caught up in mass hysteria?
Ultimately, I make no conclusions on this particular case; I merely state that I find it completely plausible that a large percentage of those 93 people were mistaken and caught up in mass hysteria, especially after reports have been in the media.
I agree that nothing is certain about this. I don't completely rule out the mass error or mass hysteria hypothesis either. I just think it's more likely that there were some drones behaving oddly in the area. I doubt the witnesses are exactly right, but I also be doubt they are completely wrong.
This is a false premise. You can extend the anthropic principle to observe that, given the existence of an average rate of false reports, either every town has exactly the average rate of false reports, or some have more. But that's a purely logical dichotomy; only the second option is actually possible.
So a higher than average rate of false reports doesn't actually need a "why" behind it.
Knowing the town has an above average rate of drone reports wouldn't be dispositive. Instead, it would be one bit of evidence to help us weigh competing theories and incline us towards one conclusion or another.
Of course, the other thing it could show is evidence of Vice's conclusion. If this town had roughly the average number of false reports or was even a modest outlier, then that would help reinforce the "no such drones" position.
"They found nothing" is not other words for what the article quoted. Maybe the found something that was not criminal, suspicious or illegal, but still more interesting than stars and airplaines, and they aren't telling.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gatwick-dron...
The next day, the Yuma County Sheriff T.C. Combs received an email from a man who wanted to get deputized in order to “form a special task force dedicated to the clandestine monitoring, capturing, and prosecution of those responsible for the recent public panic. My team will be dedicated to the liberation of our skies,” he wrote, and would be known as “Team Alpha WarHawk.” He identified the strengths of each team member, including his own (“comic relief”). His second in command was the “culinary expert” and was “great, but not amazing. However he’s what we got.” The third member of the team specialized in “weapons/Ammunition expert” but was also “just an all around great guy.” One “recruitment pool candidate” makes a “mean pot of coffee” while another is “the most charming man I’ve ever met.” The lone member with a name of Hispanic origin was their “linguistics expert.” It went on like this.
Drones are a great tool, even in the hands of a total amateur. Some regulation is needed (eg. not flying over crowds of people), but otherwise a top-down view shows many, many interesting things, from far crash remains (missing people, atleast finding a body) to illegal dumping operations (eg. a company pouring toxic waste into a river), etc.
As someone who loves to use them to shoot video instead of using a ladder (for shots 15-20 feet in the air), the insane panic around their use at all has been massively inconvenient: it is illegal to fly one 20 feet off the ground in a national park as a platform for video/stills. This seems crazy to me.
Nothing that low/close poses any threat to anyone.
Put transponders on all drones that must be registered. Then it's easy to track and ID anyone legally flying.
And anything large/long range without a transponder is illegally flying.
this means the "activity" was legal.
Sounds to me like a case of one or two guys flying drones sometimes that turned into "What's that light in the sky?! It must be a drone!!"
There were Sheriffs who reported seeing these fleets of drones. Sheriffs would normally try to calm hysteria rather than contribute to it, and it would be pretty hard to mistake a fleet of drones, not to mention they saw them moving in what they called a "search pattern". The numbers they were talking about were also higher than the number of traditional aircraft than can normally be seen at once, even near major airports with parallel runways in operation. If someone spots a few drones, I could see that being a mistake, but 17 flying in a search pattern? That person saw something exceptional no matter what it was.
Given the way that they worded this response, it seems like there was activity and that activity was found to be legal (ie. the operators had the appropriate 107 waivers to operate multiple drones and at night). It could have been your average joe, but that many drones makes it unlikely.
What else could it be? Lockheed Martin has a significant presence in Colorado and they hold both of these waivers that are necessary to operate multiple drones and at night (the FAA database is public and I looked in there for anyone who holds both waivers). Lockheed also has a small drone product in production that operates as a fleet with an extraordinary flight time and range using mesh networking:
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/indago-vtol-ua...
Not to mention, Air Force Global Strike Command, "confirmed that it conducts counterdrone exercises" and it "oversees underground Minuteman silos spread across northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming and western Nebraska, the area where the drones have been spotted nightly the past two weeks"
https://gazette.com/military/colorado-drone-mystery-sighting...
Unfortunately, we'll never know for sure -- it's impossible to prove something didn't happen. All they can do is not find them when they try, and that was over a month after the initial sightings. Of course, it's completely logical not to believe it unless there is definitive proof too.
Sheriffs (and similar such professionals) are no more immune to the effects of mass hysteria than most other people.
This is the kind of narrative embarrassed authorities push when they've utterly failed. "Nothing to see here, move along."
Legally, the drones never existed, otherwise the authorities have to admit incompetence and an inability to defend against and investigate this sort of activity.
It's far more plausible that multiple hobbyists have been simply playing with drones in the area. They are after all fairly popular, and to assert the drones never existed is to also assert that absolutely no hobbyists are flying drones at night in the area. How can you possibly assert that?
They are still facing prison after 2 years of investigation.
We know it happens but we rinse and repeat. Watch out there are two shooters! People loot after disasters! Most of the time there's a chemical leak at a school or business. (ie The plane that dumped fuel over a school recently)
Given a day by day counters for the Coronavirus on social media, it'll hit hard. The mass hysteria for the 2019 n-CoV is going to kill a lot more people than the virus itself although you can't slow / stop the Coronavirus without mass hysteria, it's hard to know if it's just collateral damage or an incident in itself.
Anything that was happening in the air, someone knew about. Whether they were able to speak on the record about it is a different matter.
This would definitely be UFO two or three decades ago.
Also the number of spelling and grammatical errors in the sheriff's email was quite... surprising. Or maybe not, for small town police...
I think it's just a matter of what you've focused on in your life, purposely or not.
If you photographed a drone without a light it would look like the night sky. If you photographed a drone with a light it would look like a light in the sky.
If I was there in person I might notice that the light seemed to be moving quickly through the sky, shifting elevation, or recognize the whirr of a drone's rotors. My eyesight might be able to distinguish the body of the drone, in the sky, at night, behind the light, where the camera might not.
Multiple government organizations, at the local, state and federal government level, investigated. They claim not to have found any evidence of strange groups of large drones flying around. No physical evidence or recordings exists of groups of large drones flying around. There are eyewitness reports, but they are definitely not independent--People were primed to see drones after the first reports. The local news report is a good example of a relatively easy debunked sighting that seems to have resulted from a strong expectation of seeing drones. And almost all of the reports were debunked, according to government claims.
It's possible there's a large-scale government coverup of a large-scale drone flight operation. The operation must be pretty important for so many levels of government to be convinced to lie about it. Very important, very secret, but for some reason still had to be done over populated areas, continuing for weeks after it became a big story--so it wasn't actually a very high priority to hide the drones from eyewitnesses. Coincidentally, and very luckily for the government coverup, not a single one of the many eyewitnesses has any convincing physical evidence or imagery of the flight operations.
I feel like someone is being overly credulous, but it's not Vice.
In reality, the government team investigating said they couldn't find any evidence of illegal drones. You don't have to invoke a conspiracy to explain this - they didn't find any evidence. As I've written before, what evidence would we expect them to find? Drones flying through the air tend not to leave tracks.
Much of what you write here is incorrect. For example, you say that the government investigation found no evidence of strange groups of drones. That's wrong, in the week of January 6 to January 13 the team investigated 23 sightings and listed 4 of them as "confirmed by law enforcement but unable to identify." [1]
You write that the eye witnesses reports aren't independent because they were influenced by earlier reporting. The story was first reported by The Denver Post and in that story there were multiple reports from different people. [2] Subsequent reports may, or may not, be influenced by the initial story, but the multiple reports in the initial are independent.
You say that there is no imagery or photographs of the flight operations. This isn't true. Here's a photo of one of the drones they are investigating [3] and there are news stories referring to the collection of videos and photos though I didn't find them with a Google search. [4]
Regarding your implication that I'm being credulous - I hardly think so. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that many people simultaneously imagined a drone fleet flying over them, but I need better evidence than "a government team investigating weeks later didn't see the drones that weren't there any more". A good video would be more compelling, but it doesn't surprise me that it's difficult to take a good video at night with a phone.
1 - https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/publicsafety/news/updates-i...
2 - https://www.denverpost.com/2019/12/23/drones-mystery-colorad...
3 - https://www.canoncitydailyrecord.com/2020/01/09/colorado-hom...
4 - https://www.denverpost.com/2019/12/31/drone-video-yuma-count...
I'm honestly more surprised the vice editor left out a [sic] after "fdar", did they really miss that one?