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Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

theguardian.com

121–130 of 943 posts

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#121
post #13

The photos I've seen posted look very obviously like commercial airliners and helicopters with their navigation lights on. You can even make out the American Airlines livery on the tail! https://www.app.com/story/news/local/new-jersey/2024/12/11/d...

Yeah that's very clearly a helicopter in most of the photos, and the rest could easily be an airliner. At most it might be some knucklehead with an old RC helicopter in violation of FAA regs (flying at night, no remote ID). If you were some foreign adversary why would you put navigation lights on your secret reconnaissance drone?

That's my favorite part of this mass hysteria.

Why would they have nav lights on?! Any lights...

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, also rep. Jeff Van Drew claiming without evidence that the drones are coming from an Iranian mothership off the coast.

Something tells me that if there were so much as an Iranian dinghy sitting off the coast, the military would be extremely aware of its presence. Monitoring absolutely everything that it did.

what/who ever that something is that is telling you that, i'd suggest a better source. it is part of the "game" that militaries the world over try to do things without their opponents knowing they were ever there. international boundaries are 12 miles of water, yet navy submarines get much much closer than that as a matter of course.

do you think the military or any 3 letter agency knows 100% where all foreign spies are within their borders?

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#123

The US military can track and engage ICBMs moving at 15k MPH but can't identity drones above residential neighborhoods in the continental US? They really do believe we're stupid.

Those are different types of radars and they are pointed in different directions.

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#124
post #13

The photos I've seen posted look very obviously like commercial airliners and helicopters with their navigation lights on. You can even make out the American Airlines livery on the tail! https://www.app.com/story/news/local/new-jersey/2024/12/11/d...

People are claiming that these show "mimics," some type of drone designed to look like commercial aircraft.

At that point, how do we know they aren't commercial aircraft mimicking drones mimicking commercial aircraft?

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#125
post #41
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this would be relatively easy to solve with historical ADS-B data correlated to the time and date of the spottings. https://adsb.lol/

AAL578 flew by Tom's River (Bay Shore area, where the photos were taken) around 20:43 on December 8th which is right when the photos were taking, on a heading that would result in an observing on the ground looking at the port side of the aircraft, just as seen in the picture.

I've been waiting for the fans of FlightAware type places to start posting their findings.

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's very clearly a helicopter in most of the photos, and the rest could easily be an airliner. At most it might be some knucklehead with an old RC helicopter in violation of FAA regs (flying at night, no remote ID). If you were some foreign adversary why would you put navigation lights on your secret reconnaissance drone?

That's my favorite part of this mass hysteria. Why would they have nav lights on?! Any lights...

Clearly, my spy craft isn't a spy craft. Look, it has lights on it for Pete's sake.

Plausible deniability

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#127
post #68
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least 6 out of 10 images in the linked article are clearly commercial aircraft.

And those other 4 out of 10 are very clearly not commercial airlines. I live in NJ was very skeptical of this at first, but after seeing the same patterns 5 nights in a row for aircrafts not going towards Newark, I really have a hard time believing it is simply airlines.

Which ones clearly aren't that or a police helicopter?

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in NJ. I've seen these drones. They are not commercial airliners or helicopters. They are loud, fly low and slow, and make abrupt turns unlike any planes I've seen. Their lights are also very different from other aircraft. I can see how it's tempting to chalk this up to hysteria, but they are absolutely large drones of some kind.

Under what circumstances and motivations, exactly, do you think that unlicensed and illegal (clearly not FAA Part 107 compliant) drone operators would be motivated to put blinking white, red and green lights on their mystery drones? Why would they do that? If you're doing to build a drone to fly at night and do clearly illegal things you're going to make the thing matte black and have no lights on it whatsoever.

Or disguise them as birds.

https://www.newsweek.com/china-shows-new-drones-disguised-bi...

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#129
post #69
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the discussions on Metabunk.org helpful with news stories like this. For example here is a clip that a Fox News host recorded. Presented as a drone, but is it not clearly just an airplane filmed flying directly overhead? https://www.metabunk.org/threads/drones-over-new-jersey.1377...

Yeah, that looks pretty damn normal. I mean, what kind of Nefarious Power would send out its Secret Drones with standard wingtip lights and headlights on? Note that in this aviation context, those headlights are more to make the plane itself more visible to everyone else, not to give extra information to its pilot(s). It's hard to make lights bright-enough that they could illuminate something in time for an in-air pl…

That sleigh does have a high visibility red light although the mounting is somewhat unorthodox.

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#130
post #13

The photos I've seen posted look very obviously like commercial airliners and helicopters with their navigation lights on. You can even make out the American Airlines livery on the tail! https://www.app.com/story/news/local/new-jersey/2024/12/11/d...

From what little I've seen on this, it kind of feels like the issue with Priuses acceleration out of control like 15 years ago. It was a huge scandal that lead to multiple Toyota recalls and even a lawsuit settlement and in the end, it seems like it was basically human error.

One person messed up and crashed their Prius claiming the accelerator got stuck and it got picked up by the news. That story then primed other people to start looking for that and from then on anytime a Prius crashed people were looking to blame the accelerator. More people reported their Priuses accelerating out of control which then reinforced the idea even more and so on and so on.

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