US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery | Hacker News Reader

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

theregister.com

33 pointsBender67 comments

I still haven't seen a convincing drone video.

The last one I saw was someone on Facebook posting what is clearly a video of an airplane coming in for a landing at Newark Liberty International, which is all of three miles away from us.

And you will never see it. The whole source of all this "aliens" hysteria is precisely because all our natural or artificial optics have an outer boundary range, where they still can see something but it is barely resolvable, or barely trackable, or barely visible at all. If the "aliens" were closer to the optics, or the environment conditions were clearer then human could always understand what it was and so the story would die immediately. Or alternative if "aliens" are too far from the optics or the weather is too bad, then there is no record and also no story to be had. "aliens" will always remain right at the edge of the optical capabilities, because that's what they are in 100% of cases - misidentification or optical effects.

PS: I also refuse to use doublespeak and call them OOPS, UAPS and whatever else ufologists have invented to legitimize their lies. They all look for "aliens" and we should call these illusions accordingly.

All you need is press about one mysterious looking unidentified object, and then everyone starts looking up and filming anything creating a snowball effect.

It's frustrating how terrible the captured data is. Don't we have low cost high resolution, high zoom, nigh vision cameras that someone in a hotspot could use?

On the other hand, we have military base ATC shutting down the airspace due to danger caused by numerous drones, so it's definitely not nothing.

We do have high quality images of the drones, the problem is that when someone whips out their camera, it winds up being an aircraft.

Confirmation bias I think

You only see the terrible quality video because if it were high quality, you would be able to identify the object

And thus it would no longer be a UFO

The military can obviously take precautions over nothing. It's made of people. But they're probably just taking precautions over fools flying DJI drones to find the mystery drones.

And yes, there are plenty of good low light cameras out there, but strangely we still don't have good video of unexplainable drones. Maybe they're using cloaking devices! /s

I assume the military is as familiar with ass-covering as anyone else, if not more so.

You're not looking very hard then, as my coworker shared videos from his own back yard with our team

I just saw a video posted to a drone mystery Facebook group where the “drone” had the word “United” emblazoned on the side…

that one is making the rounds - but that is like 1 out of 1000 samples. denialists are leaping onto this post as though it represents the entire situation.

> denialists are leaping onto this post as though it represents the entire situation

Sounds easy to pick out the one which shows the mystery drone and share that then.

Can you share the most convincing video(s) you've seen? I've spent more time than I care to admit combing over these threads on HN and other places, and haven't seen a single video that I don't readily recognize as an aircraft (fixed or rotor) or simple DJI-style quadcopter.

edit: I forgot to mention the category of plainly digitally altered.

That's quite a statement. You make it sound like people haven't done their due diligence unless they have infiltrated your team's internal comms and dutifully searched it for potential drone videos.

I've been trying to look very hard just out of curiosity, and I've drowned in hoaxes.

If you can point some videos of really strange appearances that aren't airliners or other aircraft I'd very much appreciate, right now it's quite hard to find through rummaging the internet, the hysteria has taken over.

We're not disagreeing that people are sharing videos, but they're almost all airplanes, stars, and small civilian drones. I'm certain this is the case with your coworker's video as well.

Ok. I assume he lives in a dense area, near airports, and his videos looked like blurry lights in the night sky, with nothing near them to establish an objective size, or even speed?

can you post them here?

I've seen plenty of them. I am more alarmed by all the denialists out there who are proudly proclaiming that nothing is happening. Airspace above military bases IS being closed due to UAP activity. There are indeed plenty of videos showing obscure behavior, glowing orbs, etc. The signal noise ratio is tough to comb through - and there is a lot of noise - but something is happening.

I think there is drone activity (complete with FAA compliant lighting!) However those 'glowing orb' videos just appear to be people who don't know how to focus their cameras.

And currently, both Jupiter and Venus are very bright and prominent in the night sky.

Do you have any links to share?

Like you said, the signal to noise ratio is really fucking rough right now and I simply cannot find anything interesting in the sea of noise.

The signal to noise of these videos is horrendous.

The top posts on twitter are pictures of lense flares next to the biblical angel Thrones. The next 10 posts are clearly fake or debunked videos of planes.

I’ve yet to see any kind of pattern emerge after two weeks so I’m convinced this is a garbage story at this point.

If you are trying to spy on something at night, why put lights on your drone?

Exactly, yet when you sprinkle in some "when I start filming it the lights go off" anecdotes people go right back into a tinfoil tizzy.

Our adversaries are playing 4d chess...

With lights, we argue about commercial planes and DJIs and whatnot.

Without lights, we know for a fact they're Iranian-piloted spy drones launched from a mothership somewhere in the North Atlantic.

Remember, this is the same region (vaguely) that gave us the Mooninite scare a few years ago.

Viral marketing for Anduril's drone-seeking drone(s)? Whip up hysteria and sell a "solution"?

(So far it seems the beneficiary isn't Anduril but Robin Radar:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/know-special-drone-dete... )

I think right now, the most likely explanation is that people are just seeing things.

Few months ago I was watching Perseids [1]. I was in a field with no street lamps around me, with headphones on, watching the sky for a long time, and suddenly a drone appeared. It seemed to hover maybe 50 meters from me, 20 meters from the ground, moving slowly from the south-west, then circling around me. I wasn't scared, but it was weird.

After 5 minutes (!) I realized it wasn't a drone, it was just a plane landing on the airport located 1 km to north-east. The specifics of the plane route (the runway is oriented from west to east; I saw only one light from the plane) plus the lack of noise (because of my headphones) plus the dark (wrong distance estimates) contributed to this mistake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids

Yep. I live near a major international airport. I see lights in the sky all the time. The last time I walked out my back door, I counted four moving lights - three that were obviously airplanes, and one that was far enough that my eyesight couldn't resolve the obvious red/green blinks, nor the tell-tale airplane shape. But what else is on an approach to a runway, following the others?

I spoke with a friend who consults for the DOJ about this. A few of the things he shared:

1. This is a "slow news day" thing. There is so much drone traffic that people never see, mostly from commercial actors, and this phenomenon has been going on for over a year now.

2. There is absolutely a risk of asymmetric engagements through drone warfare (in fact, this is part of the reason Ukraine has been as successful as they have been).

3. Drone jammers don't work for sophisticated drones. They have onboard AI (not LLM) and can navigate autonomously within areas where they aren't piloted in very complex ways.

He was very bearish on there being an easy fix for increasing drone traffic. Commercial entities don't want the regulation, and it's too cheap for someone to flaunt the law.

If I’m China, I’m funding cheap drones into Europe and the US. Eventually I can use all that video to build models to allow attack drones to function without any need for an external connection at all. But that’s just me…

If you believe you are the first to think of this I have news for you.

Very briefly I worked with a drone company who is in Ukraine, and trust me, if you can imagine it, it's been tried and used.

> 1. This is a "slow news day" thing. There is so much drone traffic that people never see, mostly from commercial actors, and this phenomenon has been going on for over a year now.

It's not slow news, it's "people are shooting CEOs", and "billionaire-backed felon president is on track to dismantle the US" -- they want to distract from that.

It's like how every time there is unrest in the US there seems to be an Area 51 or UFO discussion, and every single time, to include Congressional Hearings, they're nothingburgers. It's a distraction ploy.

https://www.404media.co/the-no-win-mystery-drone-clusterfuck...

Funny how congress members are calling for transponders when drones over 250G have remote id which broadcasts the a unique ID for the drone.

It’s always funny to see which mental patients jump on the latest mass hysteria.

Amazon is selling 1000’s, if not 10,000, drones EVERY SINGLE DAY!

What's truly staggering is just how gullible and lacking in critical thinking abilities most people are. They just want to believe something, so they find a way to believe it. If you're interested in marketing, times like these give you some pretty interesting ideas.

MD's previous governor can't tell the difference between drones and freakin' Orion. Expecting the general public to be any better is just going to leave you sad and disappointed.

If they were hostile—clearly they're not intending to be secret, since they have bright lights. So if they're not trying to spy, what else might they be doing? The most likely explanation I can think of is, they're trying to provoke a reaction, to see what defenses the US has against hostile drones. So you can take that information and build defenses for your drone.

So maybe shooting them down isn't the best idea, unless they begin to pose a more direct threat.

There is no mystery, except for how millions of people think blurry videos of regular passenger aircraft, radio towers in fog, and dudes flying DJI phantoms at night are mysterious.

And the media is stoking the flames of this hype train as fast and hard as they can for those sweet sweet clicks.

Saw news article where the author spent 5 minutes to look up the object on ADS-B tracking site and it was just a plane. Even reach out to the pilot who confirmed it was his plane.

They've shut down airspace around military bases for no reason?

The military doesn't magically know what's going on better than random civilians, and in many cases is risk averse and paranoid, subject to hysterias and fads just as much as everyone else. They do have some non-public sources of data like air search radars.

All this to say, temporary airspace shutdowns don't convey any useful signal about the existence of uaps or foreign drones.

Q) ZID/QFALC/IV/NBO/A/000/999/3949N08402W005 A) KFFO B) 2412140400 C) 2412140800 E) WRIGHT PATTERSON CLASS D AIRSPACE CLOSED DUE TO SECURITY THREAT M1133/24 NOTAMN

Q) ZID/QXXXX/IV/NBO/A/000/999/3949N08402W005 A) KFFO B) 2412140403 C) 2412140800 E) CAUTION: USE EXTREME CAUTION; HEAVY UAS ACTIVITY IN KFFO SURFACE AREA”

People flying DJI Phantoms near a military base and the base suspending operations is not "no reason".

It's not "Eyerainian Turrists"

And it is certainly not aliens.

It's dumbasses flying DJI Phantoms near an airport.

Shutting down airspace around Joint Base McGuire–Dix–Lakehurst makes sense if gunnery is happening.

It's easy to do, it typically doesn't impact much, and it's great ass-covering.

If my child tells me she saw a werewolf outside, I'll bolt the door, regardless whether I believe there's a werewolf - or a dog, or a coyote, or a Bigfoot - out there.

Posts with much more comments than upvotes seem to get buried.

I’m surprised someone hasn’t simply flown their toy drone directly into one of these things to bring it down and inspect.

People have tried that. Supposedly, their drones are disabled when they get close.

rope a dope - we should all be looking what ELSE is going one while we are staring at the sky :)

I used to be amused at all the silly medieval peasants and their weirdness, like witch burnings or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518

I am no longer amused.

The official information seems to boil down to:

1. The drones are not ours (Unites States).

2. They are not from a foreign country.

3. We don't know what they are.

4. There is nothing to worry about.

Who wants to bet that 1 and 3 are lies?

Difficult to see how if 1 and 3 are lies, then 4 isn’t also a lie. Either they’re dealing with a threat, which is something to worry about, or they’re not but are nevertheless lying to the public, which is something to worry about.

If you don't know what something is, then how do you know it's not a threat?

That’s a different question. I was operating under the assumption (from your original post) that 1) and 3) are lies, and inferring from there that 4) would also be a lie.

That doesn’t imply that if 3) is true that it’s not a threat.

Although, haha, now that I read again, my original conclusion is wrong. If 1) and 3) are lies then that means the drones belong to the USG and they know it. Therefore that would mean that the drones really aren’t a threat. At least not to the USG.

[0] is the most recent federal government statement. AFAICT, among your claims it only claims (4).

[0]: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/dhs-fbi-faa-dod-joint-statement...

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