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.
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.