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The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

vice.com

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Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

#31

Post by the-pigeon »

testis321 wrote: post #8

We might be laughing now, but this kind of things bring us new laws, limitations and regulations. Drones are a great tool, even in the hands of a total amateur. Some regulation is needed (eg. not flying over crowds of people), but otherwise a top-down view shows many, many interesting things, from far crash remains (missing people, atleast finding a body) to illegal dumping operations (eg. a company pouring toxic was…

FCC already has a good solution proposed that will probably be implemented in the next several years.

Put transponders on all drones that must be registered. Then it's easy to track and ID anyone legally flying.

And anything large/long range without a transponder is illegally flying.

Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

#32

Post by ALittleLight »

Trombone12 wrote: post #29
ALittleLight wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you would expect to see in a photograph of a drone at night. A white light certainly seems like a reasonable thing. My drones have lights on the bottom. If you photographed a drone without a light it would look like the night sky. If you photographed a drone with a light it would look like a light in the sky.

And how do you tell it's not one of those lights we've had in the sky for ages if you're driving in your car?

I don't, but I also don't rule out "drone" as a source of light in the sky.

If I was there in person I might notice that the light seemed to be moving quickly through the sky, shifting elevation, or recognize the whirr of a drone's rotors. My eyesight might be able to distinguish the body of the drone, in the sky, at night, behind the light, where the camera might not.

Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

#33

Post by jjwiseman »

ALittleLight wrote: post #15

This seems unbelievably credulous on the part of Vice. On the one hand, we have 23 sightings a week, across the town, from a variety of people, including a helicopter pilot, over a sustained period of time. On the other hand, we have a government report that all of those sightings were of "stars, planets, or hobbyist drones". The people of this town have never seen a star before? Really? Is the government report real…

Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, especially as related to stuff they see in the sky, and even more specifically related to drones.

What seems overly credulous is that people are willing to think there are large groups of drones flying around, and there are no definitive images or video of them.

You might find this post interesting, https://www.metabunk.org/threads/plane-shaped-drone-caught-o..., in which a local news reporter and law enforcement officer think they see a drone, but it is convincingly argued that what they saw was an airplane.

Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

#34

Post by euro_expat »

I absolutely love how HN is all about how the drones had to be real, who could discount all of those eyewitnesses, etc. 2 years ago the sentiment was that Farvor and his pilot buddies don't know shit, must be looking at mirages or psyops stuff. Does anyone here actually think about these things, or is it just a game to disagree with what they read? I'm serious, I see no reason why these hicks in CO get believed and the guys who would actually drop nukes in a war are full of shit, easily mislead, etc.

Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

#35

Post by crispyambulance »

ALittleLight wrote: post #15

This seems unbelievably credulous on the part of Vice. On the one hand, we have 23 sightings a week, across the town, from a variety of people, including a helicopter pilot, over a sustained period of time. On the other hand, we have a government report that all of those sightings were of "stars, planets, or hobbyist drones". The people of this town have never seen a star before? Really? Is the government report real…

There is a precedent for exactly this kind of thing: The Marfa Lights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights). These were strange sighting of moving lights in a desert landscape. They were attributed to UFO's or exotic ball lighting (all this was "pre-drone"). The phenomena were regular enough that some physicists performed a spectroscopic analysis. Turned out, it was headlights of cars in the distance and small campfires.

Lights in a place where you can see very far away tends to confuse our perception of scale, distance and speed.

> I think the reality is investigations are hard and sometimes yield nothing, but that doesn't mean we should jump to preposterous conclusions.

I agree. "Occam's Razor" is wise.

Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

#36

Post by ALittleLight »

jjwiseman wrote: post #33
ALittleLight wrote: post #15

This seems unbelievably credulous on the part of Vice. On the one hand, we have 23 sightings a week, across the town, from a variety of people, including a helicopter pilot, over a sustained period of time. On the other hand, we have a government report that all of those sightings were of "stars, planets, or hobbyist drones". The people of this town have never seen a star before? Really? Is the government report real…

Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, especially as related to stuff they see in the sky, and even more specifically related to drones. What seems overly credulous is that people are willing to think there are large groups of drones flying around, and there are no definitive images or video of them. You might find this post interesting, https://www.metabunk.org/threads/plane-shaped-drone-caught-o... , in which a l…

Eyewitnesses are unreliable, but that does not mean that events attested to by eyewitnesses are likely false, it means that they aren't certainly true.

As I mentioned above, consider the weight of evidence on either side. On the one hand, many eye witnesses many times. On the other hand, a government found no evidence. If that disposes you to conclude that the drones didn't exist, then I think that's probably just too fundamental a difference in our reasoning to reconcile by argument here. For me, I think the government findings are evidence against the drones but not as good as the evidence in favor of the drones.

Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

#37

Post by jshevek »

the-pigeon wrote: post #31
testis321 wrote: post #8

We might be laughing now, but this kind of things bring us new laws, limitations and regulations. Drones are a great tool, even in the hands of a total amateur. Some regulation is needed (eg. not flying over crowds of people), but otherwise a top-down view shows many, many interesting things, from far crash remains (missing people, atleast finding a body) to illegal dumping operations (eg. a company pouring toxic was…

FCC already has a good solution proposed that will probably be implemented in the next several years. Put transponders on all drones that must be registered. Then it's easy to track and ID anyone legally flying. And anything large/long range without a transponder is illegally flying.

I don't think it's a "good solution" for *all" drones to be easily tracked.

Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

#38

Post by phyzome »

ALittleLight wrote: post #15

This seems unbelievably credulous on the part of Vice. On the one hand, we have 23 sightings a week, across the town, from a variety of people, including a helicopter pilot, over a sustained period of time. On the other hand, we have a government report that all of those sightings were of "stars, planets, or hobbyist drones". The people of this town have never seen a star before? Really? Is the government report real…

Well, this is Vice we're talking about. It's a tabloid dedicated to sensationalism, prurience, and cynicism. Don't look to them for high quality journalism or analysis.

Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

#40

Post by ALittleLight »

crispyambulance wrote: post #35
ALittleLight wrote: post #15

This seems unbelievably credulous on the part of Vice. On the one hand, we have 23 sightings a week, across the town, from a variety of people, including a helicopter pilot, over a sustained period of time. On the other hand, we have a government report that all of those sightings were of "stars, planets, or hobbyist drones". The people of this town have never seen a star before? Really? Is the government report real…

There is a precedent for exactly this kind of thing: The Marfa Lights ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights ). These were strange sighting of moving lights in a desert landscape. They were attributed to UFO's or exotic ball lighting (all this was "pre-drone"). The phenomena were regular enough that some physicists performed a spectroscopic analysis. Turned out, it was headlights of cars in the distance and sma…

Okay, there is one and presumably many more examples of people mistaking non-flying lights for flying things. How many times do people accurately identify drones though? I don't mean airline pilots flying into or out of airports overzealously reporting nearby drones, but how frequently does your average person see something they are so confident is a drone they go to the trouble of reporting it to local officials, and turn out to be wrong?

It seems to me, if we had that latter figure, and we knew how many independent reports there were, we could calculate the likelihood that every reporter was mistaken.

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