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.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...
The point is: the moon is easier to spot, moves less and emits more light.
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...
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
Phone can do night with just hand jitter ok, can't effectively compensate for target motion.
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-...
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.
https://www.rdrnews.com/opinion/columnists/drones-mimicry-an...
Here, read this, it will calm your nerves.
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.
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?
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...
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.
I feel like I've seen a lot of that this time of year ...
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
Drones flying about may or may not be.
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.
> The Chinese government maintained it was a civilian (mainly meteorological) airship that had been blown off course.
- 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.
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?
Who are you gonna believe? Them, or your lying eyes?