71–80 of 83 posts
Very common for people to report drones when there are no drones. This is what shut down gatwick airport for 3 days! https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gatwick-dron...
The best part of the article, I can't believe no one has mentioned it yet: The next day, the Yuma County Sheriff T.C. Combs received an email from a man who wanted to get deputized in order to “form a special task force dedicated to the clandestine monitoring, capturing, and prosecution of those responsible for the recent public panic. My team will be dedicated to the liberation of our skies,” he wrote, and would be…
Is this a reference to some movie? Or just a peculiar email?
Earlier 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…
... and also not little green men from Mars nor up-close sightings of ball lighting in 120 years.
The distances here are large (potentially 10's of miles with mountains) and the phenomena occur at dusk/night/dawn. It would be very hard to localize such lights by merely eyeballing it and then walking for hours over rugged desert to where it looked like it came from.
Very common for people to report drones when there are no drones. This is what shut down gatwick airport for 3 days! https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gatwick-dron...
The article you link mention they found a damaged drone on the ground. That doesn't sound like evidence of "no drones" to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
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…
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…
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…
They are a great tool. We know a roofer that's using them to easily inspect and do initial quotes for roof repairs & replacements now...safer, easier, faster. Great idea.
As someone who loves to use them to shoot video instead of using a ladder (for shots 15-20 feet in the air), the insane panic around their use at all has been massively inconvenient: it is illegal to fly one 20 feet off the ground in a national park as a platform for video/stills. This seems crazy to me.
Nothing that low/close poses any threat to anyone.
Earlier 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…
Sheriffs (and similar such professionals) are no more immune to the effects of mass hysteria than most other people.