9 ms·
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
by gradus_ad 2y ago
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.
I can see how it's tempting to chalk this up to hysteria, but they are absolutely large drones of some kind.
- Aeolun 2y agoAt least 6 out of 10 images in the linked article are clearly commercial aircraft.
- abuani 2y agoAnd those other 4 out of 10 are very clearly not commercial airlines. I live in NJ was very skeptical of this at first, but after seeing the same patterns 5 nights in a row for aircrafts not going towards Newark, I really have a hard time believing it is simply airlines.
- wbl 2y agoWhich ones clearly aren't that or a police helicopter?
- Aeolun 2y agoSure, I’m not saying there’s nothing, but there’s clearly some component of hysteria.
- abuani 2y agoOh, very much so some elements of mass hysteria. It took the better part of two weeks for authorities to recognize it, then it was "nothing to see here", then FBI is investigating. It sucks that one of our state representatives is out their claiming it's Iran and stoking further tensions. My personal feeling is if it was enemy drones, our military would have already taken them down. It's hard to imagine we'd let this go on for many weeks without a response. But it's also hard to imagine military testing so obviously over public space. So who knows lol
- llamaimperative 2y ago> My personal feeling is if it was enemy drones, our military would have already taken them down I think you overestimate a few things here… the military isn’t constantly monitoring all airspace across the country for drone-sized objects and shooting things down if they don’t recognize them. Perhaps they should be as we enter this brave new world of drone-everything, but they don’t right now.
- abuani 2y agoNJ has some of the leading research centers for the US military, our new president's second estate, and critical infrastructure for telecommunications. Reportedly drones were flying close to all of these spots. I would fully expect our military to be monitoring these parts of the country for drone-sized objects given how effective they have been in waging our wars the past 20 years. So yeah, it's a massive intelligence failure if these are combatant drones.
- dylan604 2y agoahem, our president-elect. he is not the new president, yet.
- vaxman 2y ago20 years lol Off by a factor of 2.5x, but your expectation is reasonable --so is having a Defense Secretary that tells his staff when he's checking into the hospital for a serious medical condition and an airspace that doesn't allow balloons to get within range of broadcasting firmware updates to ESP32s. https://www.app.com/story/news/local/new-jersey/2024/12/11/drones-over-new-jersey-likely-military-or-defense-contractor-expert-pramod-abichandani/76898388007/ https://www.app.com/story/news/local/new-jersey/2024/12/11/d...
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago> Abichandani has no idea as of now whether the drones over New Jersey are swarming drones. Then this article goes on to speculate about scary things.
- _Wintermute 2y agoReminds me of the hysteria we had about drones shutting down an airport in the UK, with loads of reported sightings yet no evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident
- hersko 2y agoIt's not hysteria if UFOs start showing up en-masse and then people start thinking everything in the sky is a UFO. It just means people are more likely to attribute lights in the night sky to this new phenomenon. Of course there will be false positives, but it does not mean the underlying issue exists.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y agoEverything in the sky is a UFO until it's identified.
- ricksunny 2y agoThere is supposed to be an elemwent of 'mimicry' on the part of the Phenomenon. Kelleher in his work with AAWSAP was the most vocal in studying & concluding that aspect: https://www.rdrnews.com/opinion/columnists/drones-mimicry-and-deception-oh-my/article_3227e326-b41a-11ef-beba-635327989fc3.html https://www.rdrnews.com/opinion/columnists/drones-mimicry-an...
- lxgr 2y agoI'm very sorry, as it's probably a perfectly respectable local news source, but: Did you just link a Roswell newspaper article on UFOs? :)
- mp05 2y agoStop believing your lying eyes for they deceive you. Here, read this, it will calm your nerves.
- bee_rider 2y agoMost of us have not actually seen these things. We’ve just seen social media posts about them.
- murderfs 2y agoI believe the other 3 pictures are this helicopter: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ab19fa&lat=39.865&lon=-74.597&zoom=9.3&showTrace=2024-12-09×tamp=1733703784 https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ab19fa&lat=39.865&lon=-... Image 8 is too blurry to make out, but it's probably also a plane.
- sandos 2y agoI would agree with that! It matches the curvature of the fuselage in one point, and there is an image with faintly visible nav lights on this page: https://www.anthelionhelicopters.com/flight-training/add-on-ratings/ https://www.anthelionhelicopters.com/flight-training/add-on-... which matches the images as well, with the green light bright, so its likely flying head-on in the picture.
- toofy 2y agowhy hasn’t someone got decent pictures to back this up after five nights?
- roflyear 2y agoThe drones only operate at night and it's hard taking good pictures at night with phones (or even nice cameras) - try to take a picture of the moon, which isn't moving, is brighter, etc.. you can tell it's the moon but it's a lot quality picture.
- Aeolun 2y agoDrones are a lot closer than the moon. I’m fairly certain my middle of the line camera can do better than what I see on that article.
- motorest 2y ago> And those other 4 out of 10 are very clearly not commercial airlines. Cool, so a simple cursory glance of these mysterious phenomena is enough to immediately call bullshit on 60% of the claims. That's a heck of a false positive rate, given the fact that this happens before any verification takes place. If at least 60% of the claims given the same credibility are outright rejected without any effort, what does it say about the claims and those who make them?
- bluescrn 2y agoIf it's got bright lights on it, it's very unlikely to be espionage.
- moralestapia 2y agoHiding in plain sight is also a thing.
- numbsafari 2y agoSo is sowing mass hysteria and deepening distrust in authorities.
- bee_rider 2y agoIt sucks that we have to worry that our normally silly and harmless UFO hysteria and other fringe stuff might actually be an influence operation. (Just because tone doesn’t go well over the internet sometimes: Not disagreeing or being sarcastic, commiserating).
- mschuster91 2y agoWell that's the natural result of not doing anything meaningful against Russia and its "plausible deniability" campaigns in well over a decade. Of course Russia and China feel emboldened when they never felt consequences.
- highcountess 2y agoBut they got you to click and flip through the slides
- StanislavPetrov 2y agoAs someone who lives in New York near two very busy airports, I can assure you that after seeing dozens of planes fly over my house every hour, year after year, it isn't hard to figure out what isn't a plane.
- philosopher1234 2y agoAre there any recordings to back up your story?
- walrus01 2y agoUnder what circumstances and motivations, exactly, do you think that unlicensed and illegal (clearly not FAA Part 107 compliant) drone operators would be motivated to put blinking white, red and green lights on their mystery drones? Why would they do that? If you're doing to build a drone to fly at night and do clearly illegal things you're going to make the thing matte black and have no lights on it whatsoever.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoOr disguise them as birds. https://www.newsweek.com/china-shows-new-drones-disguised-birds-1934585 https://www.newsweek.com/china-shows-new-drones-disguised-bi...
- ddtaylor 2y agoIt would allow for different configurations to make identification harder. It's very easy to only operate at night and swap out the color and pattern of the lights constantly. Almost every photo device would capture the light pattern the attacker WANTS them to capture. High quality equipment could get better pictures, but such equipment is often not rolling 24/7 or easy to point at a drone moving fast.
- op00to 2y agoWhat’s not part 107 compliant? All the activity I’ve heard was fully legal.
- walrus01 2y agoFor starters, you need special waivers from the faa to fly at night. If any such waivers existed, I am sure the FAA would have told the news media who are hyping up this story.
- 15155 2y agoThis has not been the case for years. https://www.faa.gov/uas/commercial_operators/operations_over_people https://www.faa.gov/uas/commercial_operators/operations_over...
- carabiner 2y agoOk, what configuration are these drones? Quadcopters? Why are they only flying at night? To evade detection? Then why do they have lights?
- genewitch 2y agoThe videos i saw ostensibly showed what looked like rear fixed wing aircraft, like a small f-16 or something. But you could only make out that detail from the lights, which can be configured however you want to configure them to look, so, technically, it could be a large quadcopter (or octa, or hex) with lights affixed that make it look like a fixed wing aircraft. none of the videos i saw had sound from the drone to verify fixed wing or "copter". regarding night flights, FLIR would work better for certain things at night ;-)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 05 2y ago> FLIR would work better for certain things at night ;-) At those distances and with typical thermal imager resolutions, the zoom lens required would cost more than a cheap car..
- genewitch 2y agowhen i say FLIR i mean the things that militaries use, not the little doodad you plug into a cellphone or a handheld device with a screen and a camera. I was under the impression these things loitered much longer than any commercial quadcopter or normal battery powered aircraft. if my understanding is correct, that leaves two options - a glider, which is weight constrained so probably just a gopro or two, or a fueled aircraft, in which case, FLIR makes sense because that's a decent platform. the reports were "flying around for hours" but that could be exaggeration and it flew a pattern several times over a couple of hours but was landing to swap batteries or whatever. IDK. I think this is all much ado about nothing.
- semi-extrinsic 2y ago
- paranoidrobot 2y ago"large drones" How large is "large"? Some of the articles are claiming "SUV sized" drones, but their photos are either of commercial aircraft, or of something that looks to be a DJI Phantom 4, or something much like it. Have you managed to capture any videos of images of these large, low flying, slow moving drones?
- toofy 2y agoit’s amazing how so many people have seen these truck sized drones but they’ve all somehow failed to get pictures. i can go outside right now in the dark with this phone i’m typing on and get a solid picture of stuff but somehow they keep showing us pictures that look like 1940s era ufo photo blur.
- roflyear 2y agoNo you can't - try it. Take a picture of the moon.
- sethammons 2y agocareful, you may get an AI moon to make up for the fact you can't really get a good picture of it. https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-galaxy-cameras-combine-super-resolution-technologies-with-ai-to-produce-high-quality-images-of-the-moon/?srsltid=AfmBOoreE4Mb2oKg05LaTIoOx-p7K4ga2SS76IgjnrrA7V2E_la62ZMI https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-galaxy...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- HPsquared 2y agoThe same probably happens with blurry small aircraft in the scene. It'll "upscale" (i.e. draw in) all kinds of objects with what it thinks is most likely from the context, from its training set.
- 2y ago
- taylorius 2y agoWhat sort of noise do they make? Do they sound like normal drones?
- JPKab 2y agoNah dude, all of these people in the comments thread who live in northern California and have no knowledge of drones beyond playing with a buddy's DJI one time at a cookout are insisting it's your imagination, and that you're gripped by a mass hysteria. Who are you gonna believe? Them, or your lying eyes?
- nozzlegear 2y agoI don't think your sarcasm adds anything constructive to the discourse. If anything, it makes the person you're replying to look less credible because you're furthering the stereotype of UFO conspiracy theorists touting "trust me bro" evidence and little else.
- paul7986 2y agoThis story is so strange. I mean the US if im not mistaken allowed a huge white ballon to transverse the country and i heard Trump say that was from China. If that's true we just allowed it fly all over our airspace (weird). Is that not a potential public safety hazard and now these things. So odd nothing is being done like one of our jet fighters going up and shooting one down into a field.
- kasey_junk 2y agoShooting things down over populated areas is a public safety issue. Drones flying about may or may not be.
- paul7986 2y agoInto a large field or farm
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- scottyah 2y agoIt's much more valuable to watch it, see what kind of scans are coming from it than to just shoot it down immediately. It is also a bargaining chip for those in international politics. If you're going to shoot it down, it has the same value if you do it immediately or later (assuming any remote wiping/detonation), so either you're paranoid that it poses a legitimate threat or it's beneficial to not shoot it down immediately.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> can see how it's tempting to chalk this up to hysteria, but they are absolutely large drones of some kind It's probably neither enemy infiltration or hysteria, but mis-identified drones and aircraft. (Together with some hooliganism.) Pentagon should investigate. But this is way below the threshold of warranting public alarm. "What is that thing in the sky" is a notoriously terrible game for the public.
- megablast 2y agoAnd you recorded if of course!
- mcphage 2y agoIf all we had to depend on was cell phone footage, I'm not sure I'd believe the moon existed.
- DebtDeflation 2y agoI've been following the story and this has been discussed on the local Reddit subs. They are almost certainly PteroDynamics XP-4 drones flying from and to the military bases in question for testing purposes. There literally was a public demo of them on the USNS Burlington in Philadelphia a year ago.
- coliveira 2y ago[flagged]
- mjfl 2y agoThen Senators should stop blaming Iran for them. It’s irresponsible
- hoppyhoppy2 2y agoThat was a US Representative, not a Senator, but point taken
- throwaway48476 2y agoThey get money from the 'war with Iran' lobby. From their perspective such statements are rational.
- keepamovin 2y ago> should've already learned this, if they were not so stupid. The stupid take is the one you propose, it's ridiculous. So USAF has secret decoys in WWII and before, that followed WWII fighters, and hovered over people's houses, among millions of other sightings worldwide? So advanced yet they don't send them to war? The energy required for some UFO manoeuvres is far above what we know how to create: https://youtu.be/HlYwktOj75A?si=Q68f2ODxgO_IpGlv&t=770 https://youtu.be/HlYwktOj75A?si=Q68f2ODxgO_IpGlv&t=770
- matsemann 2y ago> People should've already learned this, if they were not so stupid. You're falling in the same trap as conspiracy theorists, though: Putting out almost non-falsifiable statements, and then claiming you know better and are smarter. Either it will be revealed that it was USAF and you can feel smug about being correct, or it will not come out and you can still feel smug about being correct because no one can prove you wrong.
- carabiner 2y ago> low and slow How can you be sure? Are you aware of the speed-size illusion? https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2551105#:~:text=Large%20objects%20are%20perceived%20to,causes%20of%20railway%20crossing%20collisions https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2551105#....
- motorest 2y ago> 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 sightings of supernatural fenomenal went down abruptly with the inception of cheap digital cameras.
- iepathos 2y agoFor 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".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- The_Colonel 2y agoThe article suggests the drones appear during nighttime with which cameras will struggle. "low" is relative and can mean 200 meters which would be very difficult even for regular cameras (without a tripod), let alone a smartphone.
- jahnu 2y agoEven taking a picture of the moon with a typical phone results in a white mushy blob.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y agoUnless you have a Samsung phone… https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moon-photos-ai-galaxy-s21-s23-ultra https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...
- K0balt 2y agoThese are being extensively tested in the area: https://pterodynamics.com/ https://pterodynamics.com/
- keepamovin 2y agoPlease take my upvote for your first hand account over someone's speculation. What do they sound like?
- foxglacier 2y agoIt contains speculation about their height and speed. You usually can't estimate those things for a UFO because near, low, and slow looks the same as far, high and fast when you have no idea how big it is or how it "should" behave.
- keepamovin 2y agoMan you're a killjoy, but you can't really say they can't estimate it as you don't know the specifics of what they saw, so there's speculation on your part too. I'd say you get a rough estimate, but you can't know for sure especially at night. Although in this case if the person thinks it was low, and slow, that's less remarkable than if it was high and fast, because then it would be giant. Overall, I'd say we're "converging on truth" because of all the reports. Like sparsity, even if each report is incomplete or has innacuracy overall we can build a picture, which is what we're doing. Killjoy. Hahahaha :)
- foxglacier 2y agoYea, maybe he had other information that helped. I'm just sensitive to reports of UFOs that include estimates of those derived quantities because people reporting them never say how they worked them out or what assumptions they were making. They could have reported the more directly observed quantities like angular speed instead of linear speed. I know someone who saw an alien spacecraft landing on a distant mountain. Turned out to be Venus :P
- keepamovin 2y agoIt's not just NJ, here's one weirdn in Miami: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hcfaqw/glowing_orb_flies_by_miami_balcony_a_few_hours_ago/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hcfaqw/glowing_orb_f... (https://archive.is/VPxBG https://archive.is/VPxBG) (from tiktok account jessica.leigh) Also, a consensus is building that it's ridiculous for the powers that be to claim they have no clue. This is an underappreciated take. See for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hcdsgf/whatever_this_uapdrone_in_nj_is_its_about_to_blow/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hcdsgf/whatever_this... (https://archive.is/mFMis https://archive.is/mFMis)
- darkarmani 2y agoThat sounds like a legal height then.