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

theguardian.com

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

#761

Post by philistine »

j_timberlake wrote: post #731
gregw2 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How can anyone know these aren't a threat without knowing whose they are?" Easy. They didn't say they don't know whose they are. They could belong to a private contractor who is paid by the military but the military doesn't own the drones nor company (plausible deniability /outsourcing.) Or they could be a friendly country (e.g. UK) red-teaming the US with our consent. I've never heard anyone apply the Five Eyes hor…

"They didn't say they don't know whose they are." The FBI explicitly said they didn't 2 days ago. There's a possibility the FBI is being purposefully left in the dark by other feds, or lying under oath at risk of prison time for perjury, but without any evidence that's just one more of MANY conspiracy theories here.

In the three-letter agency soup, it's very possible another agency called them and said: you guys don't know who these are, and you will never know. But we know.

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

#762

Post by Syonyk »

mrguyorama wrote: post #617
apcragg wrote: 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...

Lol that one even has a telltale incandescent landing light! It's a weird quirk of the conservative nature of Airlines and the FAA but most planes still rely on a gigantic incandescent light bulb for their landing lights, which is quite distinct nowadays. Speaking of which, if it has landing lights or recognition lights or the red/green navigation lights, you can bet it is not a UFO, and probably not a foreign advers…

Why is that particularly surprising? If the planes were certified with a particular landing light, it's an awful lot of paperwork and STCs to change things out. Plus, you wouldn't just be swapping out the bulb - you'd have to swap out the entire reflector to keep the beam pattern sane. The retrofit LEDs on car headlights regularly demonstrate what happens when you change from a more or less point source of light on the central axis (the filament in an H4 bulb or some other similar type) to a source that's "not that," you get all sorts of weird focus and cutoff issues.

Also, consider icing conditions. Any modern airliner is rated for flight into known icing, which includes deicing equipment. A halogen landing light is self-deicing for the most part (airliner landing lights are hundreds of watts, some are closer to a thousand). It will happily keep ice buildup away from the lens, whereas a LED will need some other variety of deicing to keep it clear. This is one of the reasons I use halogen bulbs in my motorcycle - I ride year round, to include in ice and snow (Ural, so has a sidecar, I can drive the sidecar wheel too, it's totally fine in these conditions). A halogen bulb keeps the headlight nicely free of ice buildup. LEDs don't put out enough heat to solve that problem, and it doesn't take that much ice buildup to totally scramble the beam pattern off a good glass lens.

You can get LED retrofit landing lights for smaller planes, and the club I fly with has them - but they're also Cessnas not rated for flight into known icing, so "keeping ice off the landing lights" is not a particular design concern.

Anyway, it surprises me none that airliners are still using halogens for the most part.

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

#763

Post by philistine »

nradov wrote: post #597
potato3732842 wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pay a bunch of money to someone who has a Dash 8 or similar common commercial aircraft. These drones probably don't have 1000mi range. And even if you can't follow one all the way to its destination you can still take some real good pictures with flash and plaster them all over the news and wait for someone to say "I pump fuel and sweep floors at airport X and a bunch of dickbags with black suburbans and bad atti…

A Dash 8 or other similar commercial aircraft lacks the radar necessary to track an aerial target. Most airliners have weather radar but it's not really useful for this purpose. In much of the airspace around that region a Dash 8 would also have to operate under ATC control; the pilot can't just fly wherever without getting violated.

Get your own 1600 miles range black ops drone of your own then.

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

#764

Post by Aloisius »

j_timberlake wrote: post #741
andrewla wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FBI says they're rotary and fixed-wing drones, White House says they aren't foreign adversaries, Pentagon says they aren't USA military Do you have sources for these? Not challenging the assertions, but all I see in the news articles is vague un-attributed paraphrasing of statements. For example you say that the "FBI says they're rotary and fixed-wing drones"; the latest I saw from the FBI was what this article sai…

Skip the articles, go to the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ETJ2d0o3Zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MPJydlIpfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTotPeiMjlc (CSPAN links would be better, but I've already spent way too much time on this.) Would have put sources in if I'd realized I'd get this many views. I also might have mixed up what the Pentagon says vs the Press Secretary, but since they both answer to…

So the FBI didn't actually say they were drones.

The FBI said public reports and eyewitnesses said they're drones.

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

#765

Post by [deleted] »

j_timberlake wrote: post #731
gregw2 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How can anyone know these aren't a threat without knowing whose they are?" Easy. They didn't say they don't know whose they are. They could belong to a private contractor who is paid by the military but the military doesn't own the drones nor company (plausible deniability /outsourcing.) Or they could be a friendly country (e.g. UK) red-teaming the US with our consent. I've never heard anyone apply the Five Eyes hor…

"They didn't say they don't know whose they are." The FBI explicitly said they didn't 2 days ago. There's a possibility the FBI is being purposefully left in the dark by other feds, or lying under oath at risk of prison time for perjury, but without any evidence that's just one more of MANY conspiracy theories here.

[deleted]

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

#766

Post by themaninthedark »

stronglikedan wrote: post #647
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.

If you are US military, your probably won't be flying on Thanksgiving...

If you are a spy trying to look at the activity or capture changes at a site, you probably aren't going to be flying on Thanksgiving since no work was done...

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

#768

Post by throwawaycities »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #726
throwawaycities wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is the protocol when aircraft enter restricted airspace like next to military bases - which has been reported. Besides training, intercepting aircraft is primarily what jets do. In terms of cost, it’s a lot less expensive to scramble jets than the alternative, that’s why that is the protocol for a number of situations including things as mundane as aircraft losing communications. Here there has been signifi…

Picture this. You fly a kite in a park near a military base. Your kite blows over the fence. It is now an unidentified flying object over a military base. Now do you as base commander order jets to be scrambled to respond what could literally be a scrap of trash or some teenager with a dji drone? It is a different situation entirely compared to an actual airplane.

No need to picture a cute hypothetical set of facts that are dissimilar to that actual set of facts.

These are serious military protocols not a academic exercise in a vacuum.

Unauthorized flying of even dji drones near and over military bases is illegal and people get arrested for it. In fact a Chinese citizen was just arrested yesterday for flying a drone over a Space Force base.

Based on reports and video evidence the drones being observed are not common dji drones (certainly not a kite blown over the fence), reports are these are 6-10ft and don’t have any radio frequency. Otherwise they are being reported as specifically going to/coming from military bases.

And though I don’t think it is credible, at least one Congressman is publicly stating these are Iranian military drones being launched from Iranian submarines.

Just seems to me “scrambling jets” seems like something out of a movie to people unfamiliar, but it’s an daily occurrence.

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

#769

Post by joquarky »

btbuildem wrote: post #700
IncreasePosts wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they be interested in a random military installation in New jersey? And not omething on the Pacific coast or Hawaii or Guam or in the Philippines or Japan or Okinawa be more likely?

Because the US is full of infrastructure that is critical but weak, and the JIT supply chain stretched to the thinnest of margins in the name of sacred profit can often be the best point of attack. Remember when Helene ravaged the southeastern US? One of the things that got cut off was a plant producing saline -- turns out, the US gets its saline from three manufacturers, when one went dark, the effects were felt nat…

It feels like a general rule of thumb is that the more efficient you make a system, the more brittle it becomes

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

#770

Post by narrator »

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…

For those who want to know the most consistent UFOlogy angle that wasn't invented last week: Over on 4chan there was an alleged leaker and follow ups back in 2023 who says that there's an underwater ET mothership off the east coast that produces 3-d printed made to order small anti-gravity drones that launch and do various tasks to monitor us. Anything that approaches the underwater mothership is destroyed before they even know they're under attack. They treat us like zoo animals, have been here for at least 100 years, and mostly ignore us except when we get trigger happy with nuclear weapons[1]. This is largely consistent with "The Crowded Galaxy" resolution to the Fermi Paradox[2].

From a UFOlogy angle, America trying to start WWIII with Russia might have something to do with all this uptick in drone activity since there was a huge amount back in the 40s and 50s when we were also at the brink with the USSR.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/4chan-whistleblower-NXjWQaN

[2] https://botsfordism.substack.com/p/the-crowded-galaxy

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