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

> American officials later disclosed that they had been tracking the balloon since it was launched from Hainan and its original destinations were likely Guam and Hawaii,[a] but prevailing winds blew it off course and across North America.[11]

> The Chinese government maintained it was a civilian (mainly meteorological) airship that had been blown off course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident

Guided missiles have been illegal for consumer use for decades, and nobody cared. It makes sense that those are a military weapon. I also think drones are a military grade weapon. I've been saying for the past 24 years drones should be illegal. After 9/11 2001, I started saying that. I've also said they will not be made illegal util there's a massive terror attack proving their lethality to the lethargic naive public, who seems to think they're a toy, or that we need Amazon to fly one package at a time, which is nonsense.

At times like this it's helpful to use a simple, three point framework: [1] What do we know? [2] What is noise? [3] What is the boring explanation?

For [1], we know there are likely _some_ drones. We know drones are a very hot topic for defense at the moment and that countries are heavily investing in this area. We know that these systems need very heavy testing for coordination, surveillance, etc. and we know that other countries have conducted these in urban areas. We also know that these drones have been seen often nearby military installations. We know that our government is claiming to have no idea what these are, but has declared them safe and does not intend to take them out. We know that Ukraine (backed by the US) has used drones pretty successfully against Russia. We know that Israel has used drones successfully against targets across the region. We also know that the US is deploying pretty heavily in PACOM, and we can see that there are a wide array of large value contracts regarding drones being handed out to defense contractors.

For [2], there is SO much noise. A congressman immediately blaming Iran (a country an entire ocean away that is incurring heavy regional losses). The news and mass hysteria online that it's aliens. People confusing helicopters and planes for drones, but with just enough actual drone footage in the mix to false flag. Pretty much everyone looking at the skies which will greatly increase incidence. Just enough counter culture online that these are kids drones, regular planes, helicopters. Lots of varying narratives coming from different branches of military and law enforcement.

That's all very interesting, but if you subtract [2] from [1] you get a very boring explanation, [3] that these are likely our own drones being tested. I've seen this boring explanation get dismissed as technically the US has testing sites, but these are typically for bombs, and drones are best utilized in populated areas or for surveillance (both of which are hard to test in the desert). I also see dismissals of this as "the military would have said something by now," but they have: they've declared these "safe." If they were testing out new functionality on cutting edge tech they wouldn't admit to it, no matter how many likes a tweet gets or how many videos get posted online.

There is also no way a state government, governor, or law enforcement would know about this (yeah, even the FBI) because drone programs in the US are coordinated by intelligence agencies that are very secretive and don't like to share information among themselves.

Isn't it true about Afghanistan in 1999 and probably now too?

A lack of military projection doesn't mean that your country can go in and rout out all insurgency. It just means that Afghanistan isn't going to be able to wage war on US soil from Afghanistan.