People would do well to keep in mind the episode of drone hysteria which happened at Gatwick airport in 2018. Hundreds of sightings were reported over a period of several days, shutting down the airport completely.
It was a massive media event, camera crews from every outlet were at the airport, but none ever photographed a drone. None of the radar systems at the airport, nor the military anti-drone systems sent later on, ever picked up anything.
In this article, a professional drone photographer describes mistaking a helicopter for a drone:
> But when he opened up the image on his computer, ready to send to his editors, he realised he’d made a mistake. The image did not show a drone. It was a helicopter hovering 10 miles away; between the darkness and the distance, his eyes had played a trick on him. “If I’m making a mistake – and I fly drones two or three times a week – then God help us, because others will have no idea,” he said. He called police to retract his reported sighting.
Have you been following this news story at all? There are probably hundreds of video clips on social media depicting the same craft. So I'm not sure what the relevancy is of your story.
3 minutes and 7 seconds in this video is a good example of what these typically appear as.
But yes it's most likely a US military drone exercise or active operation (have seen conjecture about a search for something, testing drone capabilities in a noisy RF environment.
The military theory doesn't fit to me on the grounds that at this point they should be just admitting it. They're calling more attention to the drones than they would if they would just say "yup, those are ours". You don't hide things by parading them around in front of people. They've got all sorts of places to secretly fly things and all the permits they need to create whatever RF environment they want in the process.
The military has had all sorts of secret aircraft over the years and they never test them by loitering around civilian areas for weeks at a time making damned sure thousands of people can get photographs and turn it into a national story. There's plenty of things like photos of the stealth aircraft that people accidentally caught and didn't realize what they were until years later when the relevant aircraft become public knowledge, but those were generally obtained despite the precautions taken, not because they were cruising around in major cities in broad daylight.
The fact that this is still one of the best theories I've got despite everything I just said is a sign of how weird this situation is.
With all due respect, this is yet another instance of Hacker News confidently stating very wrong things. My wife ran the operational testing program for a classified Naval aircraft capability for nearly a decade. They flew unmarked planes out of a commercial airport. People photographed them and asked questions all the time. Nobody ever answered them. Neither confirm nor deny is standard practice. If you have something like the U2 flying at 50,000 feet, by all means, hide it. Fly out of Area 51 or whatever. But if you're just modifying standard aircraft and it flies low enough that people are going to see it anyway, the best you can do is keep it out of anyone's hands to physically examine, but you can't keep people from seeing it.
She used to show me speculation just like this on hobbyist observer web forums. People speculating the planes belonged to the CIA, were running cocaine shipments, all kinds of crazy shit. Nobody for whatever reason ever guessed the obvious and only true statement. It was just basic military aircraft testing out new surveillance tech that wasn't ready to field yet. Not "surveillance state monitor the public" shit that Hacker News thinks we're doing, either. Just cranky weird shit like hiring a bunch of people in west Texas to ride around on camels and horses and seeing if you can tell the difference, because it's a lot easier to do that first over territory you control before you try to do it in Iraq.
"civilian areas for weeks at a time making damned sure thousands of people can get photographs and turn it into a national story" was not an extraneous part of my quote. This is not just "not answering questions", this is rubbing it everyone's face, this is running around in the airport shrieking about their secret airplanes and making sure everyone notices them and then telling everyone "oh, but no, those aren't ours what on Earth could they possibly be??!?". This is not how they do things, which your post reinforces, not contradicts. Tell me when anything your wife did ended up on the national news for days at a time like this.
I don’t do anything military or classified or anything, just work for a big tech company. And my employer’s standard policy for anything that leaks through public testing is “say nothing, and if they’re really persistent, issue a one-sentence statement that says nothing”. Confidential stuff I do ends up in the national news all the time, but it turns out that if you’re really boring and don’t engage in a conversation, people forget about you next week.
> The military theory doesn't fit to me on the grounds that at this point they should be just admitting it.
They aren't going to confirm or deny any classified programs that they probably spent billions of dollars on just because the public is spooked.
See also: Mirage Men (2013). The government spent countless hours and millions of dollars to convince one man who saw classified aircraft that what he saw was actually aliens. They even set up a fake alien crash site for him to investigate in order to throw him off.
Or the government spent countless hours and millions of dollars trying to convince the public that one man saw a classified aircraft and not actual aliens. /s
And I really can't think of any reason to want something like this to be a national news story, rather than possibly a couple months' worth of entertainment on r/ufos.
You want this to be a thing so badly. But in reality it’s just people mistakenly identifying commercial airplanes as drones and hobbyist trolling the believers.
After seeing that news clip, my only question is “why do they care?”. I’m not saying nobody should care but why do we have citizens on the hunt for drones. From the look of it, the drones don’t seem to be invading citizens privacy, nor does it put them in danger. It’s pretty clear they don’t even know where exactly the drones operate, which is understandable given the conditions. And why does the mayor care? Cities can impose certain restrictions on drone operations but they cannot just ban drones. They don’t own the airspace.
This is up to FAA/FBI/DHS to investigate, if they have reasonable belief laws are being violated or safety is being threatened. Local law enforcement or state agencies can investigate as well but from a different angle (privacy violations, local ordinances, noise complaints, trespassing…).
Aaahahah! The guys who are doing this are absolutely shitting themselves laughing right now, sending the whole nation into UFO panic and getting it on national news and talked about at the highest levels of government for a couple hundred bucks. No drones necessary!
It's fucking genius, and just like magic tricks, it's so simple that everyone overlooks it and jumps straight to "MUST be actual magic/Aliens/secret government program/evil communists!", and for the same reason- people want to get tricked, mesmerized, shocked, see something magical and special, to the point that they become absolutely blind to the most mundane explanations, and that's precisely why it works so well!
Not going to ruin it for them either, if you figure it out you figure it out and then you know, it's pointless telling people anyway because they will just come up with random nonsense to dismiss it because 1) they want to believe so hard, 2) they won't admit they were so easily tricked.
Sorry for being an ass, I'm just finding this situation absolutely hilarious!
The real story here is the apparent... and I use this term very, very deliberately... fecklessness of all the relevant authorities. Apparently... again, a deliberate choice... nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation, or nobody has the technical capability, or something like that. I'm not sure what the problem is, exactly, and that is in some sense now the dominant problem. How can there be no clue by now?
Your sort of post is relevant in the first few days of the story. But if this was the case, with all this attention on it, it should already have been determined. But authorities aren't even floating this as a theory. Basically all they're doing is shooting down (pun somewhat intended) every theory.
That there is this much confusion, days later, is itself now the most important aspect of the story.
And we're getting up to where there are international consequences to this sort of issue, too. If we can't figure out what these drones are in a week, how can we be trusted to defend Taiwan or other allies in a world where "drone swarm" is slowly but quite steadily moving its way up to the #1 most likely attack vector? At some point it stops mattering if maybe it is just helicopters miles away being misidentified, at some point that becomes even worse in some ways than other answers, as it gets hard to claim we're going to be totally awesome at defending you against drone swarms if we can't even figure out in less than two weeks whether or not there are drones in our own airspace.
I don't know what's going on and am not pushing any particular theory. I've got a lot of things in my probability matrix but none of them particularly make any sense at all, which means I'm missing something critical. (Which is hardly a surprise.)
> nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation, or nobody has the technical capability
Well .. SNAFU? This is basically what I'd expect. In these kind of cases there's a steady stream of crank reports from the public which are 100% false positives. The authorities will have a process for routing all the UFO reports to someone who sends out form letters and otherwise ignores them. The actual airspace protection is done by radar and whatever the US calls "QRA".
There's no suggestion or evidence of any damage, so this ranks as a much lower threat than all sorts of other things like celebrity CEO assassins.
In order of decreasing likeliness:
- nothing there
- just regular commercial aircraft
- weird aircraft, but classified, hence the blank response from authorities
SNAFU is high on my list too, though generally I'd expect someone to have jumped in front of this by now. (That may be happening; see the responses from Congress today, which are the sort of thing that would look like.) Again, part of my analysis is the length of time this has been occurring; theories I had in the first couple of days generally involved the problem being only a couple of days old. The longer the mystery persists, the more we have to reconsider such theories.
I don't expect you to believe in aliens. I don't tend to believe in much of anything. But when you have multiple whistleblowers giving testimony to congress that UAPs are operated by non-human intelligence, I think keeping aliens as "just speculative science fiction" is factually incorrect.
Human intelligence should be enough to understand what parallax is and how gimbals and IR sensors work.
All those published videos were no less than a psyop to demonstrate weapons system's capabilities - with the implicit brag that there's even more powerful stuff they're not showing.
Why would they be interested in a random military installation in New jersey? And not omething on the Pacific coast or Hawaii or Guam or in the Philippines or Japan or Okinawa be more likely?
Because the US is full of infrastructure that is critical but weak, and the JIT supply chain stretched to the thinnest of margins in the name of sacred profit can often be the best point of attack.
Remember when Helene ravaged the southeastern US? One of the things that got cut off was a plant producing saline -- turns out, the US gets its saline from three manufacturers, when one went dark, the effects were felt nation-wide. Effects like cancelling surgical procedures for the lack of basic resources, and saline shortages lasting until today.
It would make a lot of sense for foreign adversaries to scope out these weak points, and integrate them into their strategies.
Question: how do you think the US government post-9/11 would respond if they actually didn't know who belonged to these drones and they were less than an hour from Washington DC (given a flight speed of 200mph https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/325_kmh_while_ukra...)? Would they pussyfoot around for a week, then blow smoke up our asses about it or would they immediately eliminate the threat and then blow smoke up our asses about it? I think that someone somewhere knows what's happening and won't tell us but has enough authority to stand down an armed response, which to me sounds like DHS or DoD.
yeah they shot down a friggin weather balloon with a JET, but nothing to worry about with these? they definitely know what they are and they're fine with it. field testing new drone based surveillance systems?
Not even as nefarious as that I don't think. The NJ and NY port authorities have an existing agreement as of Feb 2024 to allow for experimentation and buildout of drone-based last mile delivery systems. I think this is all a case of lazy/sensationalist journalists realizing that if they report "mystery drones" they get to write multiple content-free articles that will generate a lot of attention but if they do the investigative work they'll find a boring answer that costs them attention. Journalism in America being an industry that converts your attention into money.
> The NJ and NY port authorities have an existing agreement as of Feb 2024 to allow for experimentation and buildout of drone-based last mile delivery systems.
And if this were the reason for these particular drones the NJ and NY port authorities don't really have any reason not to just come forward and state as much. You'd think they'd be more than happy to crow about their "innovation hub" and the work they are doing. They've already gone to the trouble of having their Media Relations staff write up the article you cited. Why waste an opportunity certain to have a greater reach now?
Journalists didn't generate this attention, the drones themselves did. The public is genuinely interested and concerned. Journalists may be capitalizing on what the public is already wanting to learn more about, but I don't think they're avoiding investigative work for fear of the public losing interest. There is simply no one they could ask who would be willing to provide them with the truth.
Any journalist who did somehow manage to get the real story would pull the attention from all the other journalists without answers so they've got the incentive, just not the means. All they really can do is repeat what little they are told to a public which has been asking them to give them that information while also pandering to their audience with whatever speculation they think their viewers/readers will want to hear. A large part of journalism in America is entertainment after all. They wont waste this opportunity since they absolutely want attention and money, but they can't take the blame for "content free articles" when no one is willing to provide them with anything but speculation and more questions.
> fecklessness of all the relevant authorities. [...] nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation
Some would see that as an admirable example of a small government not overstepping its bounds.
The local sheriff doesn't have the authority to shoot down aircraft? And doesn't exceed their authority by shooting them anyway? Good job local sheriff.
The FAA has a handful of drone regulation folks? Nowhere near enough for a 24/7 national quick response drone tracking force? Very restrained and cost-conscious, good job FAA.
Congress hasn't authorised the military to spend taxpayer money on a national anti-drone-swarm defence system, and nobody's spent taxpayer money without authorisation? Sensible, we don't need bureaucrats funding their pet projects on the taxpayer's dime.
> Some would see that as an admirable example of a small government not overstepping its bounds.
some would see it as a government in paralysis through bloat and bureaucracy with accountability not being clearly assigned to anyone. This is more likely the case now.
Ah yes, but who is responsible for delegating authority and assigning accountability? Certainly can't trust the government to such tasks. They might try and use bureaucracy.
Lawmakers have created endless nests of ordinance, law, etc deferring responsibility to other aspects of government. Regime change plans generally involve sabotaging resilient systems to make them become brittle. Then you force those systems to bear loads they cannot, destabilize, bring to crisis.
The problem here appears to be conflicts at a state level (safety mandates) and that at the federal level (airspace management, you don't shoot at planes and drones are small planes).
That's the gist of what I've seen with regards to these things. Paralysis and lack of proper chain of command absent disaster, is a sign of impending collapse when there is calamity.
Its unclear who owns the drones but it should be relatively simple with SIGINT to trilaterate the control signal, any decently experienced ham should be able to do that.
If there is no control signal and they are operating autonomous, they should be considered restricted/military weapons with a proper chain of command and oversight. Lawmakers have been paralyzed and unable to keep up for decades though. Its hardly a surprise.
When the costs aren't paid for proper preparation beforehand, the cost is almost always paid in lives.
The type of drones that are small and cheap enough to make a "swarm" lack the range to cross the Taiwan Strait. They would have to be launched from a ship or larger aircraft, which are vulnerable to existing defenses. Lessons from land conflicts in Eastern Europe have very limited relevance to naval conflicts in the Indo-Pacific.
I would not write this.off as hysteria. It's important to consider motivation of potential actors. Every advanced rocket guidance system uses cameras to zero in on its targets during the final approach. You can't rely on GPS at that point. To do a good job you need to know what your target looks like and high resolution drone imagery helps a lot.
My theory was that assuming these are some kind of adversary drone, they seem to have read and understood the law and are making some effort to remain within its bounds so that 4th Amendment and other relevant protections apply to them. That means operating at the legally-allowed altitude, running navigation lights, etc...but then somehow deciding not to run the required ADS-B ID that would, in theory, give away who they are and allow their comings and goings to be tracked.
Causing a collision with another plane that might then fall onto a residential neighborhood is a great way to get the entire weight of the government to come down on you, have the remains of your craft picked apart, and have your cover thoroughly blown. Don't mess with the NTSB!
I realize this theory has holes, but it's what I've got, and I feel like it's making more effort at explanation than e.g. the retired Air Force Major-General who was quoted as saying "they're flying with lights on, they're flying where people will see them; that tells me... there's nothing nefarious about it, or we're dealing with the world's dumbest terrorist."[1]
As to why they don't fly during the day: it seems that they don't want to be seen, and have been observed to "go dark" when confronted.[2] Incidentally, that's also what "The Angry Astronaut" said in his video posted on 1 Dec [3] about the craft he attempted to chase down in the United Kingdom next to the Lakenheath US Air Force installation-- well before this behavior was reported in the USA.
Or not even imagery collection, but testing to see what our response is like. If we're scrambling and unable to explain/contain it, that's useful for an adversary to know a little about our current defensive capabilities.
Or testing our own response. If we want to test what China's response might be, both public and military, but its too provocative to try, we might try it on ourselves.
Some people have the most bizarre hobbies. From photographing bigfoot to ufo's or planespotters. I dont intend to understand all of them but photographing drones might be one of the more moral ones in this century. Just imagine drones filming your living room, or military installations like feared in the article. Having someone record such incidents is appreciated.
Oh yeah I totally get having a niche hobby. I’ve personally considered starting a collection of photos of modified 90s Japanese cars. I take photos all the time of my cat with a “pro” camera but that doesn’t make me a professional cat photographer. Now if I were making money from it on the other hand…
I would be amazed if there’s enough of a demand for drone photos to support someone
It was a massive media event, camera crews from every outlet were at the airport, but none ever photographed a drone. None of the radar systems at the airport, nor the military anti-drone systems sent later on, ever picked up anything.
In this article, a professional drone photographer describes mistaking a helicopter for a drone:
> But when he opened up the image on his computer, ready to send to his editors, he realised he’d made a mistake. The image did not show a drone. It was a helicopter hovering 10 miles away; between the darkness and the distance, his eyes had played a trick on him. “If I’m making a mistake – and I fly drones two or three times a week – then God help us, because others will have no idea,” he said. He called police to retract his reported sighting.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/01/the-mystery-...