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There is a precedent for exactly this kind of thing: The Marfa Lights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights). These were strange sighting of moving lights in a desert landscape. They were attributed to UFO's or exotic ball lighting (all this was "pre-drone"). The phenomena were regular enough that some physicists performed a spectroscopic analysis. Turned out, it was headlights of cars in the distance and small campfires.

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.

Okay, there is one and presumably many more examples of people mistaking non-flying lights for flying things. How many times do people accurately identify drones though? I don't mean airline pilots flying into or out of airports overzealously reporting nearby drones, but how frequently does your average person see something they are so confident is a drone they go to the trouble of reporting it to local officials, and turn out to be wrong?

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.

> The first historical record of the Marfa lights is that in 1883 a young cowhand, Robert Reed Ellison, saw a flickering light while he was driving cattle through Paisano Pass and wondered if it was the campfire of Apache Indians. Other settlers told him they often saw the lights, but that when they investigated they found no ashes or other evidence of a campsite.

So it wasn't car headlights in 1883 and "no ashes or other evidence of a campsite".

>Lights in a place where you can see very far away tends to confuse our perception of scale, distance and speed.

Did the campfire smoke spell out their exact location to nicely make up for the distorted distance perspective for lights at night?

> So it wasn't car headlights in 1883 and "no ashes or other evidence of a campsite".

... 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.

Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, especially as related to stuff they see in the sky, and even more specifically related to drones.

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.

Eyewitnesses are unreliable, but that does not mean that events attested to by eyewitnesses are likely false, it means that they aren't certainly true.

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.

The people of this town have never seen a star before?

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.

UFOs are a useful analogy. Let's just consider the "flying saucer" class of UFOs that people sometimes claim to see, but let's imagine we live in a world where Flying Saucers aren't just a figment of the imagination but are also mass produced by many companies, built by hobbyists, owned in large numbers by governments and all manner of organizations. Flying Saucers are regularly flown by all these people for reasons ranging from test flights to reconnaissance to just plain fun.

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?

I see your point, but I think the fact that drones unequivocally exist makes it more likely that people will mistakenly attribute something they see but don't understand to them, not less.

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.

If 92 out of 93 witnesses were wrong that would mean that the strange drones were there to be correctly witnessed.

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 makes Vice look like state media. If they were capable of being real, independent journalists, they'd say "government says there were no drones", not mindlessly parroting.

>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.

Agreed, Vice is usually good stuff.

I couldn't agree more wth you, how dumb do they think people are to write off dozens of eye witness accounts to hysteria, And I really disagree with this statement Vice makes:

">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.

Fairly well documented throughout history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness

Have you actually read through these cases? Looking through all the cases in the 2000s they are all basically cases of hypochondria on a larger scale. There's no instances of mass independent sightings of UFOs there. Just because you can't explain it doesn't mean it didn't happen.. It's OK to say we don't know.

There's an example in the 1950-2000 section:

  Many UFO reports may be the result of mass hysteria [0]

Granted, these weren't all independent sightings. So you're right, I agree. We don't know for sure.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-ufo-reports-chang...

"Mass hysteria" is an explanation that seems hard to swallow

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.

He said "drone", and surely it wasn't simply a point light that Myers observed, but rather a perceptibly extended object at least?

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?

Half the population has a phone with a reasonably competent low-light camera in their pocket and yet nobody took a good video of a drone that "didn’t move all night, just hovered over the town"? Bullshit.

It is interesting to see that this argument is quite a widespread one nowadays.

* https://xkcd.com/1235/

> 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?

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.

This depends on the rate. If the average report rate is X per person with a standard deviation of Y, and this town has X+ZY reports where Z is a big number, then yeah, that kind of would require an explanation.

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.

Learn about mass hysteria. This is exactly what happens. It's very easy for our brains to misinterpret things to match our expectations. If you believe there are swarms of drones you'll see them in things that aren't drones.

I have read about mass hysteria and it doesn't seem plausible to me.

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?

No, but just because someone says something happened "independently" doesn't mean it was/is.

Well, this is Vice we're talking about. It's a tabloid dedicated to sensationalism, prurience, and cynicism. Don't look to them for high quality journalism or analysis.

From the article in brackets to perserve their quoting: [CDPS “confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity.” In other words, they found nothing.]

"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.

A person is smart, people are dumb panicky animals and you know it. And they panic the most when secrets need to be kept secret.

Eye witness testimony is the lowest form of evidence.