Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 943 posts

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

#641

Post by left-struck »

Out_of_Characte wrote: post #632
left-struck wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Professional Drone photographer Please tell me that’s someone who takes photos using drones not photos of drones - for a living

Some people have the most bizarre hobbies. From photographing bigfoot to ufo's or planespotters. I dont intend to understand all of them but photographing drones might be one of the more moral ones in this century. Just imagine drones filming your living room, or military installations like feared in the article. Having someone record such incidents is appreciated.

Oh yeah I totally get having a niche hobby. I’ve personally considered starting a collection of photos of modified 90s Japanese cars. I take photos all the time of my cat with a “pro” camera but that doesn’t make me a professional cat photographer. Now if I were making money from it on the other hand…

I would be amazed if there’s enough of a demand for drone photos to support someone

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

#642

Post by axegon_ »

j_timberlake wrote: post #501

Quick summary after following this for a few days: FBI says they're rotary and fixed-wing drones, White House says they aren't foreign adversaries, Pentagon says they aren't USA military, all 3 insist that there's no indication of a real threat despite the drones being bigger and higher tech than retail drones. Politicians are PO'd that something about this doesn't add up: How can anyone know these aren't a threat wi…

I think the one thing no one really mentions is the fact that drones are extremely easy to build in the comfort of your living room. If you have a 3d printer, some spare parts laying around and a cheap electronics store around the corner(check, check and check in my case), you can build a drone for less than 300 bucks which is far less than the retail ones - completely autonomous, no radio link needed, takes off, does what it does and lands on it's own with no human intervention.

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

#643

Post by mrguyorama »

j_timberlake wrote: post #510
x-_-x wrote: post #432

I guarantee it's some local police agency that got them donated by the military.

Pretty terrible guarantee to make since the Pentagon already said it wasn't their drones.

It's hilarious to watch UFO conspiracy theorists say "I believe what the Pentagon has said" and not explode in a puff of hypocrisy.

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

#644

Post by jerf »

rozab wrote: post #607

People would do well to keep in mind the episode of drone hysteria which happened at Gatwick airport in 2018. Hundreds of sightings were reported over a period of several days, shutting down the airport completely. It was a massive media event, camera crews from every outlet were at the airport, but none ever photographed a drone. None of the radar systems at the airport, nor the military anti-drone systems sent late…

The real story here is the apparent... and I use this term very, very deliberately... fecklessness of all the relevant authorities. Apparently... again, a deliberate choice... nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation, or nobody has the technical capability, or something like that. I'm not sure what the problem is, exactly, and that is in some sense now the dominant problem. How can there be no clue by now?

Your sort of post is relevant in the first few days of the story. But if this was the case, with all this attention on it, it should already have been determined. But authorities aren't even floating this as a theory. Basically all they're doing is shooting down (pun somewhat intended) every theory.

That there is this much confusion, days later, is itself now the most important aspect of the story.

And we're getting up to where there are international consequences to this sort of issue, too. If we can't figure out what these drones are in a week, how can we be trusted to defend Taiwan or other allies in a world where "drone swarm" is slowly but quite steadily moving its way up to the #1 most likely attack vector? At some point it stops mattering if maybe it is just helicopters miles away being misidentified, at some point that becomes even worse in some ways than other answers, as it gets hard to claim we're going to be totally awesome at defending you against drone swarms if we can't even figure out in less than two weeks whether or not there are drones in our own airspace.

I don't know what's going on and am not pushing any particular theory. I've got a lot of things in my probability matrix but none of them particularly make any sense at all, which means I'm missing something critical. (Which is hardly a surprise.)

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

#645

Post by wrigby »

wholinator2 wrote: post #628
cheschire wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you think of a better way to normalize it? Think about the average persons response to online privacy these days for a good indicator about how people will feel about drone monitoring in a few years if this is normalized.

[flagged]

Please don't do this. You're not going to hit a drone at any appreciable altitude from a "high window" with a "nice rifle." One of the first rules of putting bullets downrange is to know what's behind your target, and you simply can't know that when you're shooting into the air.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire#Injuries

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

#647

Post by stronglikedan »

j_timberlake wrote: post #501

Quick summary after following this for a few days: FBI says they're rotary and fixed-wing drones, White House says they aren't foreign adversaries, Pentagon says they aren't USA military, all 3 insist that there's no indication of a real threat despite the drones being bigger and higher tech than retail drones. Politicians are PO'd that something about this doesn't add up: How can anyone know these aren't a threat wi…

> Pentagon says they aren't USA military

But they apparently didn't fly on Thanksgiving, which is an interesting coincidence if true.

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

#648

Post by Gwiz462 »

wholinator2 wrote: post #628
cheschire wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you think of a better way to normalize it? Think about the average persons response to online privacy these days for a good indicator about how people will feel about drone monitoring in a few years if this is normalized.

[flagged]

Maybe that is why they are only being tested in the Coastal states.

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

#649

Post by jerf »

ninininino wrote: post #635
rozab wrote: post #607

People would do well to keep in mind the episode of drone hysteria which happened at Gatwick airport in 2018. Hundreds of sightings were reported over a period of several days, shutting down the airport completely. It was a massive media event, camera crews from every outlet were at the airport, but none ever photographed a drone. None of the radar systems at the airport, nor the military anti-drone systems sent late…

Have you been following this news story at all? There are probably hundreds of video clips on social media depicting the same craft. So I'm not sure what the relevancy is of your story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT9rrkYGAUU&list=RDNSOT9rrkY... 3 minutes and 7 seconds in this video is a good example of what these typically appear as. But yes it's most likely a US military drone exercise or active operation (have…

The military theory doesn't fit to me on the grounds that at this point they should be just admitting it. They're calling more attention to the drones than they would if they would just say "yup, those are ours". You don't hide things by parading them around in front of people. They've got all sorts of places to secretly fly things and all the permits they need to create whatever RF environment they want in the process.

The military has had all sorts of secret aircraft over the years and they never test them by loitering around civilian areas for weeks at a time making damned sure thousands of people can get photographs and turn it into a national story. There's plenty of things like photos of the stealth aircraft that people accidentally caught and didn't realize what they were until years later when the relevant aircraft become public knowledge, but those were generally obtained despite the precautions taken, not because they were cruising around in major cities in broad daylight.

The fact that this is still one of the best theories I've got despite everything I just said is a sign of how weird this situation is.

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

#650

Post by andrewflnr »

left-struck wrote: post #625
rozab wrote: post #607

People would do well to keep in mind the episode of drone hysteria which happened at Gatwick airport in 2018. Hundreds of sightings were reported over a period of several days, shutting down the airport completely. It was a massive media event, camera crews from every outlet were at the airport, but none ever photographed a drone. None of the radar systems at the airport, nor the military anti-drone systems sent late…

>Professional Drone photographer Please tell me that’s someone who takes photos using drones not photos of drones - for a living

Probably. At least, I know that job definitely exists.
Post reply on HN