The photos I've seen posted look very obviously like commercial airliners and helicopters with their navigation lights on. You can even make out the American Airlines livery on the tail!
I live in NJ. I've seen these drones. They are not commercial airliners or helicopters. They are loud, fly low and slow, and make abrupt turns unlike any planes I've seen. Their lights are also very different from other aircraft.
I can see how it's tempting to chalk this up to hysteria, but they are absolutely large drones of some kind.
> I live in NJ. I've seen these drones. They are not commercial airliners or helicopters. They are loud, fly low and slow, and make abrupt turns unlike any planes I've seen. Their lights are also very different from other aircraft.
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.
I've been following the story and this has been discussed on the local Reddit subs. They are almost certainly PteroDynamics XP-4 drones flying from and to the military bases in question for testing purposes. There literally was a public demo of them on the USNS Burlington in Philadelphia a year ago.
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?
Under what circumstances and motivations, exactly, do you think that unlicensed and illegal (clearly not FAA Part 107 compliant) drone operators would be motivated to put blinking white, red and green lights on their mystery drones? Why would they do that?
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.
> can see how it's tempting to chalk this up to hysteria, but they are absolutely large drones of some kind
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.
This story is so strange. I mean the US if im not mistaken allowed a huge white ballon to transverse the country and i heard Trump say that was from China. If that's true we just allowed it fly all over our airspace (weird). Is that not a potential public safety hazard and now these things. So odd nothing is being done like one of our jet fighters going up and shooting one down into a field.
Nah dude, all of these people in the comments thread who live in northern California and have no knowledge of drones beyond playing with a buddy's DJI one time at a cookout are insisting it's your imagination, and that you're gripped by a mass hysteria.
Who are you gonna believe? Them, or your lying eyes?
I have had a bet going with two of my friends on this exact point for almost a week now, and the fact that it is _still_ not been resolved by any agency is insane.
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.
>not all planes that fly need to have flight plans and transponders
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.
> 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.
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.
> the fact that it is _still_ not been resolved by any agency is insane
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.
From what little I've seen on this, it kind of feels like the issue with Priuses acceleration out of control like 15 years ago. It was a huge scandal that lead to multiple Toyota recalls and even a lawsuit settlement and in the end, it seems like it was basically human error.
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.
well, it wasn't a prius originally, it was a lexus that launched off a southern california freeway because they burned the brakes up trying to stop the acceleration.
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!
Most of the Toyota acceleration accidents were almost certainly the result of operator error. The fact that the staistical probablity increased with age gives that away.
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.
I find the discussions on Metabunk.org helpful with news stories like this.
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?
Yeah, that looks pretty damn normal. I mean, what kind of Nefarious Power would send out its Secret Drones with standard wingtip lights and headlights on?
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.)
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
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.
> The pentagon, for example, just declared that they do not know what they are
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.
> The pentagon, for example, just declared that they do not know what they are[1].
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.
The pentagon also didn't tell anyone in the 80s that all the "UFO sightings" in Nevada were test flights of the F-117.
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?
Perhaps its satanic ritualists turned techo-optimists who are attempting to convert the public to their baby killing ways through drone-based mind control.
Just out of curiosity, I took a look at the map for Spring Lake, NJ. There's an airport ~7 miles inland. There's a national guard center just to the south. Just to the north, there's Sylvan Lake that looks like the profile of a jetliner.
What's this got to do with anything? Nothing, but it's no less of an explanation than what these people have proposed.
Lol that one even has a telltale incandescent landing light! It's a weird quirk of the conservative nature of Airlines and the FAA but most planes still rely on a gigantic incandescent light bulb for their landing lights, which is quite distinct nowadays.
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.
Why is that particularly surprising? If the planes were certified with a particular landing light, it's an awful lot of paperwork and STCs to change things out. Plus, you wouldn't just be swapping out the bulb - you'd have to swap out the entire reflector to keep the beam pattern sane. The retrofit LEDs on car headlights regularly demonstrate what happens when you change from a more or less point source of light on the central axis (the filament in an H4 bulb or some other similar type) to a source that's "not that," you get all sorts of weird focus and cutoff issues.
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.
AAL578 flew by Tom's River (Bay Shore area, where the photos were taken) around 20:43 on December 8th which is right when the photos were taking, on a heading that would result in an observing on the ground looking at the port side of the aircraft, just as seen in the picture.
Yeah that's very clearly a helicopter in most of the photos, and the rest could easily be an airliner. At most it might be some knucklehead with an old RC helicopter in violation of FAA regs (flying at night, no remote ID).
If you were some foreign adversary why would you put navigation lights on your secret reconnaissance drone?
What blows my mind, is that damn near every single person seeing this has a phone that can record video, and the best we can do is grainy night pictures.
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.
there were videos of ostensibly these drones. i've seen two that claimed such, but unfortunately i did not save the videos - dumb. "remote control aircraft" are so low on my radar (PI) that i wrote it off as people scared of their shadow. The original story was it was loitering near some Trump property, and that's why FAA issued a NOTAM for that area. afaik, this is standard procedure? But maybe people don't know that or the news they watch is explaining things poorly. who knows. I just know why i didn't save the videos.
gradus_ad|1 year ago
I can see how it's tempting to chalk this up to hysteria, but they are absolutely large drones of some kind.
motorest|1 year ago
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.
DebtDeflation|1 year ago
paranoidrobot|1 year ago
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?
Aeolun|1 year ago
walrus01|1 year ago
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.
carabiner|1 year ago
How can you be sure? Are you aware of the speed-size illusion? https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2551105#....
JumpCrisscross|1 year ago
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.
keepamovin|1 year ago
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)
carabiner|1 year ago
Why are they only flying at night? To evade detection? Then why do they have lights?
K0balt|1 year ago
keepamovin|1 year ago
taylorius|1 year ago
darkarmani|1 year ago
megablast|1 year ago
philosopher1234|1 year ago
paul7986|1 year ago
JPKab|1 year ago
Who are you gonna believe? Them, or your lying eyes?
gooseus|1 year ago
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.
bragr|1 year ago
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...
tsimionescu|1 year ago
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.
01100011|1 year ago
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.
superfrank|1 year ago
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.
genewitch|1 year ago
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!
IAmGraydon|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
bsder|1 year ago
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.
fdkz|1 year ago
And more technical information: https://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRU...
brandonmenc|1 year ago
plipt|1 year ago
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...
Terr_|1 year ago
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.)
_DeadFred_|1 year ago
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):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yxDXqU9OQQ
bragr|1 year ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs
op00to|1 year ago
jklinger410|1 year ago
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...
antonvs|1 year ago
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.
mrandish|1 year ago
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.
pavel_lishin|1 year ago
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.
Amezarak|1 year ago
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.
block_dagger|1 year ago
mrguyorama|1 year ago
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?
_djo_|1 year ago
fourteenfour|1 year ago
labster|1 year ago
postalrat|1 year ago
j_timberlake|1 year ago
mnky9800n|1 year ago
dylan604|1 year ago
What's this got to do with anything? Nothing, but it's no less of an explanation than what these people have proposed.
mrguyorama|1 year ago
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.
Syonyk|1 year ago
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.
nimbius|1 year ago
https://adsb.lol/
apcragg|1 year ago
Brian_K_White|1 year ago
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.
daemonologist|1 year ago
If you were some foreign adversary why would you put navigation lights on your secret reconnaissance drone?
650REDHAIR|1 year ago
Why would they have nav lights on?! Any lights...
magic_smoke_ee|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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gowld|1 year ago
apcragg|1 year ago
carabiner|1 year ago
AS = Alaska Airlines
carabiner|1 year ago
ImPostingOnHN|1 year ago
_djo_|1 year ago
Eji1700|1 year ago
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.
moralestapia|1 year ago
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.
zombiwoof|1 year ago
genewitch|1 year ago