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

711–720 of 943 posts

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

#711

Post by kjkjadksj »

iepathos wrote: post #487
motorest wrote: post #466

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. You better crank out your camera and collect any proof at all,because what you are describing bears no resemblance to the sightings mentioned in the article. There is a reason why sighting…

For real, with everyone having a smartphone with high quality cameras on them there really is zero excuse for there to not be highly detailed accurate videos of this if they are legit especially with people describing them as "low and slow".

You go take that smartphone of yours and try and take a high quality video of just an airliner at night. Its not easy at all. Even in daylight this is like a 35mm lens on a tiny sensor its not the hardware you need to crop out a speck from the sky and show the world what it is. You really need a lens thats about the size of your calf and the sort of camera that goes along with that. And probably a tripod. Not something many have handy.

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

#712

Post by exitb »

tigerBL00D wrote: post #691
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…

I would not write this.off as hysteria. It's important to consider motivation of potential actors. Every advanced rocket guidance system uses cameras to zero in on its targets during the final approach. You can't rely on GPS at that point. To do a good job you need to know what your target looks like and high resolution drone imagery helps a lot.

Why put lights on the drones? Why not map during the day?

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

#713

Post by kjkjadksj »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #568
iepathos wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real, with everyone having a smartphone with high quality cameras on them there really is zero excuse for there to not be highly detailed accurate videos of this if they are legit especially with people describing them as "low and slow".

Smartphone cameras are absolutely useless when it comes to taking useful pictures of distant, moving objects. Even a proper DSLR is extremely difficult to use on a moving object at night due to focus issues.

Not focus issues. Set to infinity it will be fine. But shutter speed issues certainly. When people take sharp photographs at night they generally aren’t handholding a camera and shooting a moving subject. And if they are they are close enough to use flash.

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

#714

Post by cuuupid »

8note wrote: post #456
cuuupid wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Singh earlier today: https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/... > at no point were our installations threatened when this activity was occurring > What our initial assessment here is that these are not drones or activities coming from a foreign entity or adversary > initial assessments are that these are drones and potentially, you know, could be small airplanes > But I think what's also imp…

this is mind you, a specific form of satefy in that they didnt consider it a threat to the US military. thats not to say it wouldnt be healthy for you if it crashed and caught your house on fire. safe is more than "not a threat"

By the same definition every helicopter, plane, kid flying a drone, even car on the road is not “safe.”

It’s the same way I can call a system reliable when it is 3 9’s, but that doesn’t imply 100% guaranteed uptime. Or a statistician can reject a hypothesis that has a low enough p-value but still more than 0. Or how health systems and procedures are considered safe above a threshold, or how we consider condoms safe sex while understanding they are not 100% effective.

I’m finding it frustrating that when it comes to UFOs, people tend to isolate the most remote possibilities.

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

#715

Post by jerf »

nonameiguess wrote: post #692
jerf wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proce…

With all due respect, this is yet another instance of Hacker News confidently stating very wrong things. My wife ran the operational testing program for a classified Naval aircraft capability for nearly a decade. They flew unmarked planes out of a commercial airport. People photographed them and asked questions all the time. Nobody ever answered them. Neither confirm nor deny is standard practice. If you have somethi…

"civilian areas for weeks at a time making damned sure thousands of people can get photographs and turn it into a national story" was not an extraneous part of my quote. This is not just "not answering questions", this is rubbing it everyone's face, this is running around in the airport shrieking about their secret airplanes and making sure everyone notices them and then telling everyone "oh, but no, those aren't ours what on Earth could they possibly be??!?". This is not how they do things, which your post reinforces, not contradicts. Tell me when anything your wife did ended up on the national news for days at a time like this.

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

#716

Post by [deleted] »

paul7986 wrote: post #416
JohnBooty wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we start blasting things out of the sky: - We certainly can't deny that "something" is happening - The US, if not the world, is going to be rocked by (basically) open war in the skies of America - If we fail to down these things, we look like utterly weak fools - Succeed or fail, we reveal our capabilities (or lack thereof) - Legit public safety issue, bullets/shells/missiles/etc that miss these things have to com…

[flagged]

[deleted]

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

#717

Post by ct0 »

bigiain wrote: post #91
soared wrote: post #4

Bit concerning that no government agencies have figured out what’s going on, but hardly seems like there is a reason for a limited state of emergency given there is no known threat at all. My guess is a US company is gathering data and hasn’t admitted to do so without some type of licensing/etc

> Bit concerning that no government agencies have figured out what’s going on I wouldn't be betting against this being a government agency. Anywhere between local cops and black/budgetless agencies you'd go to jail for even having heard of. That, or maybe organised crime. A friend of mine used to have what turned out to be a high level drug dealer living/working a few doors up the street. They'd fly DJI drones off th…

Quite a lot of detail coming from a friend who had a neighbor.

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

#718

Post by jerf »

pjc50 wrote: post #657
jerf wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation, or nobody has the technical capability Well .. SNAFU? This is basically what I'd expect. In these kind of cases there's a steady stream of crank reports from the public which are 100% false positives. The authorities will have a process for routing all the UFO reports to someone who sends out form letters and otherwise ignores th…

SNAFU is high on my list too, though generally I'd expect someone to have jumped in front of this by now. (That may be happening; see the responses from Congress today, which are the sort of thing that would look like.) Again, part of my analysis is the length of time this has been occurring; theories I had in the first couple of days generally involved the problem being only a couple of days old. The longer the mystery persists, the more we have to reconsider such theories.

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

#719

Post by voxic11 »

lupusreal wrote: post #705
pjc50 wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation, or nobody has the technical capability Well .. SNAFU? This is basically what I'd expect. In these kind of cases there's a steady stream of crank reports from the public which are 100% false positives. The authorities will have a process for routing all the UFO reports to someone who sends out form letters and otherwise ignores th…

Foreign drones must be above aliens (but no higher I think.) Foreign drones are known to exist, while aliens are just speculative science fiction.

I assume it was just a joke since the one thing the authorities have been willing to say is that they are definitely not foreign drones.

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

#720

Post by otikik »

ptero wrote: post #579
otikik wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can anyone know these aren't a threat without knowing whose they are? Because they are theirs, obviously. They just won't say it.

Neither FBI nor Pentagon have ability to fly drones in the US airspace at will. On the contrary, they, like everyone else, have to get FAA approvals and those always leak. And usually in fact published by the FAA who needs to warn pilots of potential threats -- one could go to the official FAA website and search those NOTAMs. Ignoring FAA by the FBI or the military just doesn't happen, the price to pay is WAY too hig…

I can imagine a parallel chanel where FAA is informed but NOTAMS are not issued, or issued selectively.
Post reply on HN