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Comment by apcragg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I think “hard” is underselling it. Unless you already know some of the parameters, it is outright impossible to visually determine size, distance, or speed of a distant object in the sky. So many UFO accounts completely fall apart when you realize this.

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