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The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

• mterrel 7y ago
  Apparently legalizing pot does have some effects. :)
• opwieurposiu 7y ago
  Very common for people to report drones when there are no drones. This is what shut down gatwick airport for 3 days! https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gatwick-drones-never-existed-sussex-police-investigation-footage-couple-released-a8697306.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gatwick-dron...
  • jibbit 7y ago
    It was very interesting to be caught up in a mass hysteria event https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-sussex-42993729 https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-eng...
  • draugadrotten 7y ago
    The article you link mention they found a damaged drone on the ground. That doesn't sound like evidence of "no drones" to me.
    • rwiggum 7y ago
      That's what the article is saying though. That the entire origin story of "drones over Gatwick airport" is that someone found a damaged drone. That doesn't mean that the damaged drone was ever "over the airport", it just means someone found a damaged drone. No mention of how close to the airport, how long the drone had been there, etc. It could have been in a park nearby and someone crashed it into a tree weeks ago and it fell to the ground more recently.
• java-man 7y ago
  CDPS “confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity.” this means the "activity" was legal.
  • deadmetheny 7y ago
    Exactly this. I'm not convinced in the least that nothing happened, merely that nobody was breaking any laws with whatever they were doing.
    • crooked-v 7y ago
      > 13 were determined to be “planets, stars, or small hobbyist drones.” Six were commercial aircraft, and four remain unconfirmed. Sounds to me like a case of one or two guys flying drones sometimes that turned into "What's that light in the sky?! It must be a drone!!"
      • bonestamp2 7y ago
        That would be a completely reasonable explanation and I could see that happening. But, there are some other details about the story that make me think there was more to it than that. There were Sheriffs who reported seeing these fleets of drones. Sheriffs would normally try to calm hysteria rather than contribute to it, and it would be pretty hard to mistake a fleet of drones, not to mention they saw them moving in what they called a "search pattern". The numbers they were talking about were also higher than the number of traditional aircraft than can normally be seen at once, even near major airports with parallel runways in operation. If someone spots a few drones, I could see that being a mistake, but 17 flying in a search pattern? That person saw something exceptional no matter what it was. Given the way that they worded this response, it seems like there was activity and that activity was found to be legal (ie. the operators had the appropriate 107 waivers to operate multiple drones and at night). It could have been your average joe, but that many drones makes it unlikely. What else could it be? Lockheed Martin has a significant presence in Colorado and they hold both of these waivers that are necessary to operate multiple drones and at night (the FAA database is public and I looked in there for anyone who holds both waivers). Lockheed also has a small drone product in production that operates as a fleet with an extraordinary flight time and range using mesh networking: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/indago-vtol-uav.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/indago-vtol-ua... Not to mention, Air Force Global Strike Command, "confirmed that it conducts counterdrone exercises" and it "oversees underground Minuteman silos spread across northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming and western Nebraska, the area where the drones have been spotted nightly the past two weeks" https://gazette.com/military/colorado-drone-mystery-sightings-finally-might-be-solved/article_c8d375be-2e6f-11ea-85b7-2335e1d42476.html https://gazette.com/military/colorado-drone-mystery-sighting... Unfortunately, we'll never know for sure -- it's impossible to prove something didn't happen. All they can do is not find them when they try, and that was over a month after the initial sightings. Of course, it's completely logical not to believe it unless there is definitive proof too.
• dang 7y ago
  The previous thread about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21876818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21876818
• testis321 7y ago
  We might be laughing now, but this kind of things bring us new laws, limitations and regulations. Drones are a great tool, even in the hands of a total amateur. Some regulation is needed (eg. not flying over crowds of people), but otherwise a top-down view shows many, many interesting things, from far crash remains (missing people, atleast finding a body) to illegal dumping operations (eg. a company pouring toxic waste into a river), etc.
  • giancarlostoro 7y ago
    I've seen real estate agents using them for high altitude views of homes all the time. It does make a difference in addition to other pictures of homes. It's a view you otherwise wouldn't be able to see.
  • mterrel 7y ago
    They are a great tool. We know a roofer that's using them to easily inspect and do initial quotes for roof repairs & replacements now...safer, easier, faster. Great idea.
    • sneak 7y ago
      It would be really nice to get a blanket permission for all drone activities under 50 feet AGL. As someone who loves to use them to shoot video instead of using a ladder (for shots 15-20 feet in the air), the insane panic around their use at all has been massively inconvenient: it is illegal to fly one 20 feet off the ground in a national park as a platform for video/stills. This seems crazy to me. Nothing that low/close poses any threat to anyone.
  • the-pigeon 7y ago
    FCC already has a good solution proposed that will probably be implemented in the next several years. Put transponders on all drones that must be registered. Then it's easy to track and ID anyone legally flying. And anything large/long range without a transponder is illegally flying.
    • 7y ago
• nkrisc 7y ago
  Thirty years ago it would have been aliens, right? I'm a little surprised no one reported being abducted by the drones.
  • dmix 7y ago
    Did you notice in the police report that "someone got a picture of the drones" but it turned out to just be a picture of a "white light in the sky". This would definitely be UFO two or three decades ago. Also the number of spelling and grammatical errors in the sheriff's email was quite... surprising. Or maybe not, for small town police...
    • a3n 7y ago
      I've found spelling and grammar errors after very common, even among "smart" people. I think it's just a matter of what you've focused on in your life, purposely or not.
      • mark-r 7y ago
        Some police departments have a cap on the IQ of people they can hire. https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836 https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
    • ALittleLight 7y ago
      I'm not sure what you would expect to see in a photograph of a drone at night. A white light certainly seems like a reasonable thing. My drones have lights on the bottom. If you photographed a drone without a light it would look like the night sky. If you photographed a drone with a light it would look like a light in the sky.
      • Trombone12 7y ago
        And how do you tell it's not one of those lights we've had in the sky for ages if you're driving in your car?
• aaron695 7y ago
  Recently in Australia they have had the Satanic ritual child abuse mass hysteria come around AGAIN. They are still facing prison after 2 years of investigation. We know it happens but we rinse and repeat. Watch out there are two shooters! People loot after disasters! Most of the time there's a chemical leak at a school or business. (ie The plane that dumped fuel over a school recently) Given a day by day counters for the Coronavirus on social media, it'll hit hard. The mass hysteria for the 2019 n-CoV is going to kill a lot more people than the virus itself although you can't slow / stop the Coronavirus without mass hysteria, it's hard to know if it's just collateral damage or an incident in itself.
  • mark-r 7y ago
    Just this afternoon I saw a post on a photography site where someone is worried about cancellation of events he wants to photograph due to Coronavirus, in September and October.
• ALittleLight 7y ago
  This seems unbelievably credulous on the part of Vice. On the one hand, we have 23 sightings a week, across the town, from a variety of people, including a helicopter pilot, over a sustained period of time. On the other hand, we have a government report that all of those sightings were of "stars, planets, or hobbyist drones". The people of this town have never seen a star before? Really? Is the government report really more believable? It sounds like the scene in Men in Black, but even more lame. "No. Those weren't drones. Those were nothing." "Mass hysteria" is an explanation that seems hard to swallow. These people weren't panicking, they weren't seeing demons or magic, they were making reports of real things (drones) acting in plausible ways. That a group of local government officials couldn't find any evidence doesn't seem to mean anything. What evidence would we expect them to find? I'd like to know what the usual rate of false drone reports is in a typical town. Is this an average number of reports? More than average, and if so, why? I work with lots of people who seem to have this attitude. When customers submit bugs that immediately think the customer is imagining the problem, or doing something wrong, or that the bug is magically a transient issue that isn't worth investigating or something like that. I think the reality is investigations are hard and sometimes yield nothing, but that doesn't mean we should jump to preposterous conclusions.
  • crispyambulance 7y ago
    There is a precedent for exactly this kind of thing: The Marfa Lights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights). These were strange sighting of moving lights in a desert landscape. They were attributed to UFO's or exotic ball lighting (all this was "pre-drone"). The phenomena were regular enough that some physicists performed a spectroscopic analysis. Turned out, it was headlights of cars in the distance and small campfires. Lights in a place where you can see very far away tends to confuse our perception of scale, distance and speed. > I think the reality is investigations are hard and sometimes yield nothing, but that doesn't mean we should jump to preposterous conclusions. I agree. "Occam's Razor" is wise.
    • ALittleLight 7y ago
      Okay, there is one and presumably many more examples of people mistaking non-flying lights for flying things. How many times do people accurately identify drones though? I don't mean airline pilots flying into or out of airports overzealously reporting nearby drones, but how frequently does your average person see something they are so confident is a drone they go to the trouble of reporting it to local officials, and turn out to be wrong? It seems to me, if we had that latter figure, and we knew how many independent reports there were, we could calculate the likelihood that every reporter was mistaken.
• basicplus2 7y ago
  "These aren't the drones you are looking for.."
• newnewpdro 7y ago
  "That’s because the drones never existed." This is the kind of narrative embarrassed authorities push when they've utterly failed. "Nothing to see here, move along." Legally, the drones never existed, otherwise the authorities have to admit incompetence and an inability to defend against and investigate this sort of activity. It's far more plausible that multiple hobbyists have been simply playing with drones in the area. They are after all fairly popular, and to assert the drones never existed is to also assert that absolutely no hobbyists are flying drones at night in the area. How can you possibly assert that?
• perl4ever 7y ago
  Username checks out.
• mirimir 7y ago
  I love the quote from Sheriff Combs. It's priceless. That guy has quite the sense of humor. Reminds me of Tommy Lee Jones in "Men in Black".
• exabrial 7y ago
  Had anyone correlated the sightings with weather radar?
  • semi-extrinsic 7y ago
    I believe weather radar doesn't even see large jet airplanes. They're probably tuned not to see airplanes, you just want to see the weather. So forget about drones.
• euro_expat 7y ago
  I absolutely love how HN is all about how the drones had to be real, who could discount all of those eyewitnesses, etc. 2 years ago the sentiment was that Farvor and his pilot buddies don't know shit, must be looking at mirages or psyops stuff. Does anyone here actually think about these things, or is it just a game to disagree with what they read? I'm serious, I see no reason why these hicks in CO get believed and the guys who would actually drop nukes in a war are full of shit, easily mislead, etc.
• shrubble 7y ago
  There is so much military and government in the state of Colorado that the concept that 'authorities were baffled' is laughable. Anything that was happening in the air, someone knew about. Whether they were able to speak on the record about it is a different matter.
• droithomme 7y ago
  The article didn't convince me at all that it was mass hysteria, in fact that conclusion seems fairly specious.
• hexane360 7y ago
  I'd also like to point out that much of the initial coverage included quotes from people selling "drone defense" services. It seems reasonable that these companies were incentivized to do whatever they could to stir up public fear.
• alecjaco 7y ago
  Move along sir, nothing to see here
• c3534l 7y ago
  The best part of the article, I can't believe no one has mentioned it yet: The next day, the Yuma County Sheriff T.C. Combs received an email from a man who wanted to get deputized in order to “form a special task force dedicated to the clandestine monitoring, capturing, and prosecution of those responsible for the recent public panic. My team will be dedicated to the liberation of our skies,” he wrote, and would be known as “Team Alpha WarHawk.” He identified the strengths of each team member, including his own (“comic relief”). His second in command was the “culinary expert” and was “great, but not amazing. However he’s what we got.” The third member of the team specialized in “weapons/Ammunition expert” but was also “just an all around great guy.” One “recruitment pool candidate” makes a “mean pot of coffee” while another is “the most charming man I’ve ever met.” The lone member with a name of Hispanic origin was their “linguistics expert.” It went on like this.
  • 333c 7y ago
    Is this a reference to some movie? Or just a peculiar email?
    • c3534l 7y ago
      It sounds like it would make a good movie, but it doesn't ring any bells.
• shadowprofile77 7y ago
  So, all of a sudden large numbers of people (among them some, like a helicopter pilot, with presumably much greater than average experience in noting different kinds of aerial phenomena) start misidentifying the stars or suffering mass hysteria or whatnot for the first time in their lives in a single concentrated space of time over a fairly specific geographical area? I'm sorry, that sounds even less plausible than them having actually seen something unusual. This is not to say that they witnessed actual UFOs or literal phantom drones but it still doesn't seem to add up to believable in the way the government report tries to paint it.
• dr-detroit 7y ago
  "Nothing to see here... get back to twitter/facebook." says the typical Hacker Newsie.
• Jamwinner 7y ago
  This kind of 'Journalism' exemplifies my feelings about vice news. Sensentional, missing the point of the core premise, and sporting a profoundly misleading headline.
• Awelton 7y ago
  "You didn't see anything, and here is a crappy vice article to prove it"