https://www.app.com/story/news/local/new-jersey/2024/12/11/d...
I can see how it's tempting to chalk this up to hysteria, but they are absolutely large drones of some kind.
You better crank out your camera and collect any proof at all,because what you are describing bears no resemblance to the sightings mentioned in the article.
There is a reason why sightings of supernatural fenomenal went down abruptly with the inception of cheap digital cameras.
The point is: the moon is easier to spot, moves less and emits more light.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...
Absolutely not.
I understand the tendency to assume that modern tech would make it relatively easy thing to accomplish but there are considerable challenges with ground-based aerial photography/videography...at nighttime...completely unplanned and unscheduled...by an amateur. Better technology makes the field more accessible in a general way, but there is still a very large barrier of: skill, hardware, and out-right luck involved in good image capture as a medium.
Consider, if you ever look towards the beginning or end of some runways you may see a group of plane spotters setup taking photos and video of the airplanes. The typical hardware used to capture things well is a minimum of: DSLR, tripod, battery extenders (or spares), and good perch to rest during lulls (it's more physically demanding on your arms then you might imagine.) More crucially, this is for airplanes that are taking off and landing 1) in a predictable pattern 2) at routine intervals 3) captured primarily in daylight.
Add in height? Introduce increased shake. Add in darkness? Introduce exposure (hold the camera still, longer to get a brighter image). Add in inexperience? Introduce beginner mistakes. On top of those practical concerns, it's probably also pretty creepy to see these unknown objects/drones/whatever. Fear impacts our ability to react in a helpful way.
Smartphones make it simpler to capture a picture or a video, but there is profound gulf between getting something and something even remotely good.
If you're not sure what I mean, here's a simple test you can try: 1) Grab a pencil and go into a completely dark room like a basement 2) Turn off the flash on your phone 3) Holding the pencil between pointer finger and thumb stretch your hand as far from your body as you physically can 4) Take one photo of the tip of the pencil eraser one-handed.
That is considerably easier than it would be to photograph/video a moving object across the night sky, even if it is perceived as moving "low and slow". Longer exposure times mean the camera has to be held motionless for longer so the camera sensor can "soak up" more light to "expose" the photograph properly. (This is why photos at night feel like they take perceptibly longer to capture than they do in daytime - they do take longer!) Flash can help with nearby subjects, but for objects far away (thousands of feet above you) no amount of flash is going to reach the object to reduce exposure time.
Then, let's make things even worse! The object is moving which means that overexposure will turn that solid object into a blur. This is something that is easily possible[1] when taking photos of the night sky.
[1] https://photographylife.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Sharp...
Sir, if I may? Why don't you just set up, like, a billion video cameras...
In the woods and see if he walks by one?
Ah. That would be very expensive...
And most people who believe in Bigfoot are broke.
Changing the vertical alignment of the wings to horizontal after takeoff is also really cool, an interesting alternative to 4 vertical propellers with a separate pair of wings. It seems to eliminate the extra moving parts to control those vertical propellers.
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?
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.
https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-galaxy...
Phone can do night with just hand jitter ok, can't effectively compensate for target motion.
https://eu.app.com/picture-gallery/news/2024/12/10/drones-in...
And telephoto lenses with the range you mention with fast apertures are not exactly cheap. A 600mm F/4 goes for $12-15K and is still not fast enough for shooting moving subjects in the dark.
At the 11-second mark: https://youtu.be/M186uZ1RCxU?t=11
Any movement of the vehicle whose plate you are attempting to track creates pixelization requiring you sometimes to stitch together multiple frames where individual characters on the plate have become clear in order to read the entire license plate.
Larger film has insanely high resolving power...
https://www.analog.cafe/r/409200000-pixels-with-adox-cms-20-...
Image 8 is too blurry to make out, but it's probably also a plane.
https://www.anthelionhelicopters.com/flight-training/add-on-...
which matches the images as well, with the green light bright, so its likely flying head-on in the picture.
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
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.
https://www.app.com/story/news/local/new-jersey/2024/12/11/d...
Then this article goes on to speculate about scary things.
In next room, I have a nearly 100yo man who, in a small group of people using computers with (literal) core memory, invented the technology, satellites and delivery systems to do Reconnaissance from orbit and more importantly, to spot the first signatures of arial weapons systems, yet downvoted here in the dystopian future when I merely correct the peanut gallery for spreading obvious fiction that America's ability to spot drones does not go back further than 20 years (or that the internal proprietary code of the latest ESP32 series Chinese MCUs has the well known ability to receive firmware updates via RF, even from Chinese balloons, Chinese LEO Starlink competitors and yes, drones).
He pretty much says nothing, and the article uses him as a mouth piece to give other individuals mentioned legitimacy.
Obviously the military can shoot down whatever they want, let alone use EM tech, which is highly effective at grounding drones. Drones keep getting sighted near the exact areas that would be testing out drone militarization, and not getting shot down. Gee, I wonder who's they might be.
People would be so dramatically more informed if they dropped social media and corporate news.
From the WSJ article I mentioned: “ Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the U.S. unless they pose an imminent threat. Aerial snooping doesn’t qualify, though some lawmakers hope to give the military greater leeway”
2) as you probably know, the pilot doesn’t really guide the missile…calling the pilot an idiot just clearly shows you have an axe to grind. Also, it’s not like the seekers are calibrated to take out balloons.
3) regarding EW - the tech is obviously still evolving and not always deployed “ U.S. officials said they didn’t know who operated the drones in Nevada, a previously unreported incursion, or for what reason. A spokeswoman said the facility has since upgraded a system to detect and counter drones.”
Also, it is certainly possible to harden drones against EW as is being done in Ukraine on an evolving basis
Here you have supposedly car sized drones operating, in large numvers, in high risk areas and the government response is nonexistent. Nearby flights have not even been diverted as they do when there's the slightest security risk in an area.
Its probably just drones searching for the source with the secrecy aimed at trying to avoid a mass panic.
Also... why wouldn't the feds just say they're inspecting infrastructure and avoid the entire question...?
IMO this is almost certainly a commercial LIDAR mapping effort plus right wing conspiratorial hysteria.
A single value at a moment in time doesn't mean anything at all. You need to see the variance over time. And you need to trust the source data. The only "dangerously high" readings I saw were from counters that had no name, no history, no identifier, no additional values.
This theory makes no sense from the get-go and this "evidence" is extremely low quality.
You sort of people are so weird.
My original point was and is that there are many laws restricting what the military is able to do domestically.
Though even if such law exists, which it doesn't, then like any law in modern times, or even increasingly the Constitution, if the political establishment deemed it inconvenient then they would simply ignore it, and make up some lies.
And on that note, they are now acknowledging that they are indeed drones. The 'its just airplanes' lie lasted about 5 minutes. These people seriously hold the public in contempt.
Cool, so a simple cursory glance of these mysterious phenomena is enough to immediately call bullshit on 60% of the claims.
That's a heck of a false positive rate, given the fact that this happens before any verification takes place.
If at least 60% of the claims given the same credibility are outright rejected without any effort, what does it say about the claims and those who make them?
https://www.rdrnews.com/opinion/columnists/drones-mimicry-an...
Here, read this, it will calm your nerves.
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.
https://www.newsweek.com/china-shows-new-drones-disguised-bi...
I feel like I've seen a lot of that this time of year ...
https://www.faa.gov/uas/commercial_operators/operations_over...
Of the number of operators who have active BVLOS waivers I am aware of, such as for powerline, pipeline survey and delivery operations, very few or none are trying to also operate at night.
How can you be sure? Are you aware of the speed-size illusion? https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2551105#....
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.
Also, a consensus is building that it's ridiculous for the powers that be to claim they have no clue. This is an underappreciated take. See for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hcdsgf/whatever_this... (https://archive.is/mFMis)
Why are they only flying at night? To evade detection? Then why do they have lights?
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 ;-)
At those distances and with typical thermal imager resolutions, the zoom lens required would cost more than a cheap car..
the reports were "flying around for hours" but that could be exaggeration and it flew a pattern several times over a couple of hours but was landing to swap batteries or whatever. IDK. I think this is all much ado about nothing.
The only openly available price I've seen for such things is from China, and then it's $80k. The Teledyne FLIR stuff is probably quite a bit more expensive.
Although in this case if the person thinks it was low, and slow, that's less remarkable than if it was high and fast, because then it would be giant.
Overall, I'd say we're "converging on truth" because of all the reports. Like sparsity, even if each report is incomplete or has innacuracy overall we can build a picture, which is what we're doing. Killjoy. Hahahaha :)
I know someone who saw an alien spacecraft landing on a distant mountain. Turned out to be Venus :P
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.
Drones flying about may or may not be.
> The Chinese government maintained it was a civilian (mainly meteorological) airship that had been blown off course.
Those who are downvoting and you are in the US i'd love to hear why you have no concern about these things and or no concern the world thinking we let drones fly unabated in our airspace ... prompting various foreign nations to try and do the same over our massive US of A airspace on up into remote-ish Alaska. You have congressman saying scary things while the Pentagon says those congressman words arent true.
I mentioned Trump above (i voted for her) if that was something that triggered some downvotes?
- We certainly can't deny that "something" is happening
- The US, if not the world, is going to be rocked by (basically) open war in the skies of America
- If we fail to down these things, we look like utterly weak fools
- Succeed or fail, we reveal our capabilities (or lack thereof)
- Legit public safety issue, bullets/shells/missiles/etc that miss these things have to come down somewhere, as well as wreckage (if any) it self
These drones, IF hostile are not necessarily the security risk one might think IMO. If we are just leaking radio signals into the air around bases that these things can intercept, then those communications could just as easily be intercepted by people/cars/etc on the ground. And our "near peers" have plenty of satellites overhead.
I am not going to tell you that letting them fly around unmolested is good. It is not. It sucks. But it is probably the least shitty option.
Who are you gonna believe? Them, or your lying eyes?
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.
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...
Wouldn't it be much, much, much easier and less crazy that, if you want to fly a small object at night and hide its exact nature and position, you would just paint it a deep, non-reflective black? Adding lights to an object you want to hide at night is completely crazy.
If you're trying to avoid any detection then you would also want to mask the sound, or else people will be hearing things in the sky and not seeing anything... until they start pointing low-light and infrared cameras at the sky. When that happens the vantablack drones are going to pop against the background and leave no doubt that there is something strange in the sky, since they def won't be looking/moving like bats.
By disguising as planes you blend in with the air traffic for most people, and create confusion and debate with anyone who does notice they are out of the ordinary (exactly what we're seeing now).
Another point is that lights on flying objects in the dark serve a purpose, and if these drones are coordinating with each other, they may be using the lights to maintain formations or avoid running into each other without relying on other communication channels that could give away more information.
I don't think it's insane. We won't get serious about tracking UAVs/drones/RC aircraft until there is an incident. Until then, agencies likely do not have the money, resources, time or motivation to do it.
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.
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!
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.
Well, civil reckless disregard, as it wasn’t a criminal case.
Mostly you have specific inputs from some other tasks and your outputs are consumed by different tasks. So, even though the variables are "global" they generally only have one writer with multiple readers in properly done embedded programming.
What Toyota did was not even in the same universe as "properly done embedded".
It wasn't just one thing. It was a near complete and total disregard for the fact that they were writing code for machines that could kill people.
And more technical information: https://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRU...
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...
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.)
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):
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...
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.
It was a comment on the inability of half of this thread to use basic logic.
I often hear those hyping UFO sightings citing this type of statement by the Pentagon. However, the Pentagon saying the don't know what it is doesn't mean anything. Of course, they don't know what it is. They weren't there. They didn't see it nor have any idea if there was anything unusual seen. The null hypothesis is the still the most likely: this is a result of media hype causing increased erroneous reports of aircraft and hobbyist drones along with false reports by social media attention seekers.
Also, the Pentagon has a consistently terrible track record of failing to properly identify spurious internal lens reflections, digital stabilization artifacts, IR ghosting and gimbal rotation on their own footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs.
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.
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.
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...
You know the pentagon doesn't have to tell you (or even the feds!) the truth, right? You know that when they say "We can't track 1 trillion dollars of our budget!" they aren't being fully honest, right?
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.
(As I recall they were, but they would not publicly acknowledge it until the public sightings became undeniable.)
do you think the military or any 3 letter agency knows 100% where all foreign spies are within their borders?
What he claimed was "high" (high-level, I assume, rather than intoxicated) and "reputable" sources who needed to remain anonymous told him there was circumstantial evidence of this.
I don't see any motive for him to make this up, or for those sources to. Perhaps someone in some agency is jumping to conclusions on partial information.
Or perhaps this fits into the pattern of DoD officials, ex-officials, and whistleblowers spinning tales of UAP sightings and an official UAP retrieval program.
He's using this as an opportunity to paint the current federal administration, and state administration in NJ, as being incompetent, negligent and putting people in harms way.
It's standard politics.
To get people to pay attention to him?
To whip up more hysteria against Iran?
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?
I don't doubt that there was some drone activity, but most likely it was regularly authorised operations or testing. Once the hysteria started you may have a few pranksters flying theirs just to add to the uproar.
But when media houses are publishing pictures of what are clearly commercial airliners and passing them off as unidentified drones you know we're in the middle of a mass hysteria moment.
What's this got to do with anything? Nothing, but it's no less of an explanation than what these people have proposed.
Speaking of which, if it has landing lights or recognition lights or the red/green navigation lights, you can bet it is not a UFO, and probably not a foreign adversary.
Also, consider icing conditions. Any modern airliner is rated for flight into known icing, which includes deicing equipment. A halogen landing light is self-deicing for the most part (airliner landing lights are hundreds of watts, some are closer to a thousand). It will happily keep ice buildup away from the lens, whereas a LED will need some other variety of deicing to keep it clear. This is one of the reasons I use halogen bulbs in my motorcycle - I ride year round, to include in ice and snow (Ural, so has a sidecar, I can drive the sidecar wheel too, it's totally fine in these conditions). A halogen bulb keeps the headlight nicely free of ice buildup. LEDs don't put out enough heat to solve that problem, and it doesn't take that much ice buildup to totally scramble the beam pattern off a good glass lens.
You can get LED retrofit landing lights for smaller planes, and the club I fly with has them - but they're also Cessnas not rated for flight into known icing, so "keeping ice off the landing lights" is not a particular design concern.
Anyway, it surprises me none that airliners are still using halogens for the most part.
What the Pentagon does not say is that they don't exist or are just ordinary planes.
Why wouldn't they say that if there was any remote chance to sell it, even if they were trying to lie about something? Hell especially then.
If you were some foreign adversary why would you put navigation lights on your secret reconnaissance drone?
Why would they have nav lights on?! Any lights...
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.
Plausible deniability
Anyway the non-alien conspiracy theories are along the lines of radiation sniffers for a suitcase nuke, drone tests for material transport between bases & offshore navy ships, red team vs blue team drone tests.
1: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?replay=2024-12-09-01:33&lat=...
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.)
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.
AS = Alaska Airlines
> I'm a professional videographer by trade. I filmed these things for 6 hours last week. High native ISO, tripod, 400mm lens, new camera model. No one here will believe me (especially those who have not witnessed this first hand) but they mimic planes when filmed. With my naked eye they are more abstract. Some where as close as 100ft to me. Then once they are within a certain range or a camera is pointed at them they mimic aircraft. So many people online are mocking those that say this, but I'll take the downvotes. I'm a professional in my field and know what I'm describing is accurate. You just need to see it to believe it. My footage would just be mocked as plane footage. I need to go back out there but with a flight tracker app in real time as hard proof.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NJDrones/comments/1hcon8h/comment/m...
I'm guessing the camera sensor is catching more light, detail, than what the guy is seeing with his own eyes, possibly because he hasn't waited long enough for to adjust to the darkness.
Human eyes also have blind spots called Scotomas- our brains do some sort of calculation to make us not notice the fact our eyes have blind spots. I imagine if your brain is wired to do the calculation "wrong" in this scenario you end up seeing things differently than a camera would.
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.
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.