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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 re

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=RDNSOT9rrkYGAUU&start_radio=1 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 seen conjecture about a search for something, testing drone capabilities in a noisy RF environment.

monkeynotes 2y ago
At 3:07 I see an airliner with FAA navigation lights, wings, and a fuselage. How are people not seeing that?
jerf 2y ago
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.
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  The next question after "yup those are ours" is "then why are they there", and they might not wish to answer that one.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    “Training exercise” case closed if they wanted to end it right there.
    - unsupp0rted 2y ago
      That wouldn't close the case for most people. Not that leaving it a mystery like they're doing right now is any better.
      - lxgr 2y ago
        Not sure if most, but definitely many. And I really can't think of any reason to want something like this to be a national news story, rather than possibly a couple months' worth of entertainment on r/ufos.
  - Izkata 2y ago
    "We're using the population to test our new invisibility cloak. It's not going well."
- nonameiguess 2y ago
  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 something like the U2 flying at 50,000 feet, by all means, hide it. Fly out of Area 51 or whatever. But if you're just modifying standard aircraft and it flies low enough that people are going to see it anyway, the best you can do is keep it out of anyone's hands to physically examine, but you can't keep people from seeing it. She used to show me speculation just like this on hobbyist observer web forums. People speculating the planes belonged to the CIA, were running cocaine shipments, all kinds of crazy shit. Nobody for whatever reason ever guessed the obvious and only true statement. It was just basic military aircraft testing out new surveillance tech that wasn't ready to field yet. Not "surveillance state monitor the public" shit that Hacker News thinks we're doing, either. Just cranky weird shit like hiring a bunch of people in west Texas to ride around on camels and horses and seeing if you can tell the difference, because it's a lot easier to do that first over territory you control before you try to do it in Iraq.
  - jerf 2y ago
    "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.
    - freejazz 2y ago
      > was not an extraneous part of my quote It's just more of the same.
    - 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- heavyset_go 2y ago
  > The military theory doesn't fit to me on the grounds that at this point they should be just admitting it. They aren't going to confirm or deny any classified programs that they probably spent billions of dollars on just because the public is spooked. See also: Mirage Men (2013). The government spent countless hours and millions of dollars to convince one man who saw classified aircraft that what he saw was actually aliens. They even set up a fake alien crash site for him to investigate in order to throw him off.
  - willy_k 2y ago
    Or the government spent countless hours and millions of dollars trying to convince the public that one man saw a classified aircraft and not actual aliens. /s
- F7F7F7 2y ago
  You want this to be a thing so badly. But in reality it’s just people mistakenly identifying commercial airplanes as drones and hobbyist trolling the believers. At least it not uncontrollable dancing.
  - willy_k 2y ago
    Hobbyists with car-sized transwing drones?
404mm 2y ago
After seeing that news clip, my only question is “why do they care?”. I’m not saying nobody should care but why do we have citizens on the hunt for drones. From the look of it, the drones don’t seem to be invading citizens privacy, nor does it put them in danger. It’s pretty clear they don’t even know where exactly the drones operate, which is understandable given the conditions. And why does the mayor care? Cities can impose certain restrictions on drone operations but they cannot just ban drones. They don’t own the airspace. This is up to FAA/FBI/DHS to investigate, if they have reasonable belief laws are being violated or safety is being threatened. Local law enforcement or state agencies can investigate as well but from a different angle (privacy violations, local ordinances, noise complaints, trespassing…).
- anarchy79 2y ago
  This is too funny, someone's having a laff!
anarchy79 2y ago
Aaahahah! The guys who are doing this are absolutely shitting themselves laughing right now, sending the whole nation into UFO panic and getting it on national news and talked about at the highest levels of government for a couple hundred bucks. No drones necessary! It's fucking genius, and just like magic tricks, it's so simple that everyone overlooks it and jumps straight to "MUST be actual magic/Aliens/secret government program/evil communists!", and for the same reason- people want to get tricked, mesmerized, shocked, see something magical and special, to the point that they become absolutely blind to the most mundane explanations, and that's precisely why it works so well! Not going to ruin it for them either, if you figure it out you figure it out and then you know, it's pointless telling people anyway because they will just come up with random nonsense to dismiss it because 1) they want to believe so hard, 2) they won't admit they were so easily tricked. Sorry for being an ass, I'm just finding this situation absolutely hilarious!
Aloisius 2y ago
I don't understand. That is clearly just a plane at 3 minutes 7 seconds.
eagerpace 2y ago
Every clip in that video looks like an aircraft to me.
venatiodecorus 2y ago
the military isn't responsible for domestic security/surveillance.

monkeynotes 2y ago

At 3:07 I see an airliner with FAA navigation lights, wings, and a fuselage. How are people not seeing that?

jerf 2y ago

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.

unsupp0rted 2y ago
The next question after "yup those are ours" is "then why are they there", and they might not wish to answer that one.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  “Training exercise” case closed if they wanted to end it right there.
  - unsupp0rted 2y ago
    That wouldn't close the case for most people. Not that leaving it a mystery like they're doing right now is any better.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Not sure if most, but definitely many. And I really can't think of any reason to want something like this to be a national news story, rather than possibly a couple months' worth of entertainment on r/ufos.
- Izkata 2y ago
  "We're using the population to test our new invisibility cloak. It's not going well."
nonameiguess 2y ago
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 something like the U2 flying at 50,000 feet, by all means, hide it. Fly out of Area 51 or whatever. But if you're just modifying standard aircraft and it flies low enough that people are going to see it anyway, the best you can do is keep it out of anyone's hands to physically examine, but you can't keep people from seeing it. She used to show me speculation just like this on hobbyist observer web forums. People speculating the planes belonged to the CIA, were running cocaine shipments, all kinds of crazy shit. Nobody for whatever reason ever guessed the obvious and only true statement. It was just basic military aircraft testing out new surveillance tech that wasn't ready to field yet. Not "surveillance state monitor the public" shit that Hacker News thinks we're doing, either. Just cranky weird shit like hiring a bunch of people in west Texas to ride around on camels and horses and seeing if you can tell the difference, because it's a lot easier to do that first over territory you control before you try to do it in Iraq.
- jerf 2y ago
  "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.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    > was not an extraneous part of my quote It's just more of the same.
  - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
heavyset_go 2y ago
> The military theory doesn't fit to me on the grounds that at this point they should be just admitting it. They aren't going to confirm or deny any classified programs that they probably spent billions of dollars on just because the public is spooked. See also: Mirage Men (2013). The government spent countless hours and millions of dollars to convince one man who saw classified aircraft that what he saw was actually aliens. They even set up a fake alien crash site for him to investigate in order to throw him off.
- willy_k 2y ago
  Or the government spent countless hours and millions of dollars trying to convince the public that one man saw a classified aircraft and not actual aliens. /s
F7F7F7 2y ago
You want this to be a thing so badly. But in reality it’s just people mistakenly identifying commercial airplanes as drones and hobbyist trolling the believers. At least it not uncontrollable dancing.
- willy_k 2y ago
  Hobbyists with car-sized transwing drones?

404mm 2y ago

After seeing that news clip, my only question is “why do they care?”. I’m not saying nobody should care but why do we have citizens on the hunt for drones. From the look of it, the drones don’t seem to be invading citizens privacy, nor does it put them in danger. It’s pretty clear they don’t even know where exactly the drones operate, which is understandable given the conditions. And why does the mayor care? Cities can impose certain restrictions on drone operations but they cannot just ban drones. They don’t own the airspace. This is up to FAA/FBI/DHS to investigate, if they have reasonable belief laws are being violated or safety is being threatened. Local law enforcement or state agencies can investigate as well but from a different angle (privacy violations, local ordinances, noise complaints, trespassing…).

anarchy79 2y ago
This is too funny, someone's having a laff!

anarchy79 2y ago

Aaahahah! The guys who are doing this are absolutely shitting themselves laughing right now, sending the whole nation into UFO panic and getting it on national news and talked about at the highest levels of government for a couple hundred bucks. No drones necessary! It's fucking genius, and just like magic tricks, it's so simple that everyone overlooks it and jumps straight to "MUST be actual magic/Aliens/secret government program/evil communists!", and for the same reason- people want to get tricked, mesmerized, shocked, see something magical and special, to the point that they become absolutely blind to the most mundane explanations, and that's precisely why it works so well! Not going to ruin it for them either, if you figure it out you figure it out and then you know, it's pointless telling people anyway because they will just come up with random nonsense to dismiss it because 1) they want to believe so hard, 2) they won't admit they were so easily tricked. Sorry for being an ass, I'm just finding this situation absolutely hilarious!

Aloisius 2y ago

I don't understand. That is clearly just a plane at 3 minutes 7 seconds.

eagerpace 2y ago

Every clip in that video looks like an aircraft to me.

venatiodecorus 2y ago

the military isn't responsible for domestic security/surveillance.