Had anyone correlated the sightings with weather radar?
I believe weather radar doesn't even see large jet airplanes. They're probably tuned not to see airplanes, you just want to see the weather. So forget about drones.
The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real
51–60 of 83 posts
Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The first historical record of the Marfa lights is that in 1883 a young cowhand, Robert Reed Ellison, saw a flickering light while he was driving cattle through Paisano Pass and wondered if it was the campfire of Apache Indians. Other settlers told him they often saw the lights, but that when they investigated they found no ashes or other evidence of a campsite. So it wasn't car headlights in 1883 and "no ashes or…
>Lights in a place where you can see very far away tends to confuse our perception of scale, distance and speed.
Did the campfire smoke spell out their exact location to nicely make up for the distorted distance perspective for lights at night?
Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real
#53This 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…
This makes Vice look like state media. If they were capable of being real, independent journalists, they'd say "government says there were no drones", not mindlessly parroting.
>CDPS “confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity.” In other words, they found nothing.
This doesn't say "they found nothing." It says "they found nothing illegal."
So what if they're testing drone swarms anyways. It's inevitable.
Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real
#54I'd also like to point out that much of the initial coverage included quotes from people selling "drone defense" services. It seems reasonable that these companies were incentivized to do whatever they could to stir up public fear.
Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you notice in the police report that "someone got a picture of the drones" but it turned out to just be a picture of a "white light in the sky". This would definitely be UFO two or three decades ago. Also the number of spelling and grammatical errors in the sheriff's email was quite... surprising. Or maybe not, for small town police...
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.
I would have found it more convincing if there was video showing "large wingspan drones traveling in groups". Even at night, it should be possible to shoot a video of a group of drones that looks plausibly like a group of drones. But there doesn't seem to be any such video. Aircraft with thermal cameras went up looking for the drones, and didn't find anything.
Multiple government organizations, at the local, state and federal government level, investigated. They claim not to have found any evidence of strange groups of large drones flying around. No physical evidence or recordings exists of groups of large drones flying around. There are eyewitness reports, but they are definitely not independent--People were primed to see drones after the first reports. The local news report is a good example of a relatively easy debunked sighting that seems to have resulted from a strong expectation of seeing drones. And almost all of the reports were debunked, according to government claims.
It's possible there's a large-scale government coverup of a large-scale drone flight operation. The operation must be pretty important for so many levels of government to be convinced to lie about it. Very important, very secret, but for some reason still had to be done over populated areas, continuing for weeks after it became a big story--so it wasn't actually a very high priority to hide the drones from eyewitnesses. Coincidentally, and very luckily for the government coverup, not a single one of the many eyewitnesses has any convincing physical evidence or imagery of the flight operations.
I feel like someone is being overly credulous, but it's not Vice.
Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 13 were determined to be “planets, stars, or small hobbyist drones.” Six were commercial aircraft, and four remain unconfirmed. Sounds to me like a case of one or two guys flying drones sometimes that turned into "What's that light in the sky?! It must be a drone!!"
That would be a completely reasonable explanation and I could see that happening. But, there are some other details about the story that make me think there was more to it than that. There were Sheriffs who reported seeing these fleets of drones. Sheriffs would normally try to calm hysteria rather than contribute to it, and it would be pretty hard to mistake a fleet of drones, not to mention they saw them moving in w…
Imagine how amazing a video showing 17 lights moving in formation would be. The fact that that video doesn't exist is a red flag.
Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real
#57This 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…
"Mass hysteria" is an explanation that seems hard to swallow It sounds like people were making independent reports, it's not like they were all listening to a "War of the Worlds" broadcast and then reporting based on what they heard on the radio. Can it really be called "mass hysteria" if the individuals didn't know about each other's reports? From the original description: On Friday, Myers said he watched eight of t…
Half the population has a phone with a reasonably competent low-light camera in their pocket and yet nobody took a good video of a drone that "didn’t move all night, just hovered over the town"? Bullshit.
Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real
#58This 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…
The people of this town have never seen a star before?
Sadly, this is very believable to me . . . not that they haven't seen a star or a planet, but that they don't really know what they are looking at. People don't seem to look up very often nor do they seem to spend much effort understanding what they are seeing. This past week, we had people claiming that the International Space Station was next to the moon (the children are doing a section on space at school). I am sure I could easily find a couple of dozen people in town who will swear to have seen it. It was Venus.
A large percentage of UFO reports are planets. Another large proportion are regular aircraft (I've seen all the "classic" UFOs, they are all airliners under different conditions). Military flares are another sort of light that tends to hang around in the sky.
There are people who are surprised that you can sometimes see the moon in the daytime . . . I could go on.
Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real
#59Earlier 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.
I would have found it more convincing if there was video showing "large wingspan drones traveling in groups". Even at night, it should be possible to shoot a video of a group of drones that looks plausibly like a group of drones. But there doesn't seem to be any such video. Aircraft with thermal cameras went up looking for the drones, and didn't find anything. Multiple government organizations, at the local, state an…
There's no need to think about a government cover up, and I feel like it's a way to phrase the argument such that it appears one either believes in strange drones or a government cover up. You can argue against the "large-scale cover up" and pretend like you are arguing against the existence of the drones, but in reality, you are not. Incidentally, the government has many times tested technologies that it did not acknowledge to the public or to the press.
In reality, the government team investigating said they couldn't find any evidence of illegal drones. You don't have to invoke a conspiracy to explain this - they didn't find any evidence. As I've written before, what evidence would we expect them to find? Drones flying through the air tend not to leave tracks.
Much of what you write here is incorrect. For example, you say that the government investigation found no evidence of strange groups of drones. That's wrong, in the week of January 6 to January 13 the team investigated 23 sightings and listed 4 of them as "confirmed by law enforcement but unable to identify." [1]
You write that the eye witnesses reports aren't independent because they were influenced by earlier reporting. The story was first reported by The Denver Post and in that story there were multiple reports from different people. [2] Subsequent reports may, or may not, be influenced by the initial story, but the multiple reports in the initial are independent.
You say that there is no imagery or photographs of the flight operations. This isn't true. Here's a photo of one of the drones they are investigating [3] and there are news stories referring to the collection of videos and photos though I didn't find them with a Google search. [4]
Regarding your implication that I'm being credulous - I hardly think so. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that many people simultaneously imagined a drone fleet flying over them, but I need better evidence than "a government team investigating weeks later didn't see the drones that weren't there any more". A good video would be more compelling, but it doesn't surprise me that it's difficult to take a good video at night with a phone.
1 - https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/publicsafety/news/updates-i...
2 - https://www.denverpost.com/2019/12/23/drones-mystery-colorad...
3 - https://www.canoncitydailyrecord.com/2020/01/09/colorado-hom...
4 - https://www.denverpost.com/2019/12/31/drone-video-yuma-count...
Re: The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real
#60This 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…
The people of this town have never seen a star before? Sadly, this is very believable to me . . . not that they haven't seen a star or a planet, but that they don't really know what they are looking at. People don't seem to look up very often nor do they seem to spend much effort understanding what they are seeing. This past week, we had people claiming that the International Space Station was next to the moon (the c…
UFOs are a useful analogy. Let's just consider the "flying saucer" class of UFOs that people sometimes claim to see, but let's imagine we live in a world where Flying Saucers aren't just a figment of the imagination but are also mass produced by many companies, built by hobbyists, owned in large numbers by governments and all manner of organizations. Flying Saucers are regularly flown by all these people for reasons ranging from test flights to reconnaissance to just plain fun.
Now, in this world some people will mistakenly spot Flying Saucers for the same reasons that people on Earth. In fact, spotting Flying Saucers will be even more likely because everyone will recognize they are real.
Now, in Flying Saucer world, suppose that 93 people, including police officers, over a period of weeks, spotted and reported, sometimes repeatedly, a group of Flying Saucers flying in a pattern - something that it's well known Flying Saucers can do.
Would you conclude that these people are all mistaken and caught up in mass hysteria?