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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 Ai
by apcragg 2y ago
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/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...
- magic_smoke_ee 2y agoYeap. The media people parroting this are morons.
- _djo_ 2y agoSame. This is a ridiculous mass hysteria driven by media sensationalism and ignorant members of the public.
- dylan604 2y agoJust out of curiosity, I took a look at the map for Spring Lake, NJ. There's an airport ~7 miles inland. There's a national guard center just to the south. Just to the north, there's Sylvan Lake that looks like the profile of a jetliner. What's this got to do with anything? Nothing, but it's no less of an explanation than what these people have proposed.
- fourteenfour 2y agoLol, also rep. Jeff Van Drew claiming without evidence that the drones are coming from an Iranian mothership off the coast.
- gowld 2y agoIn his defense, he is a Cold War relic.
- sitkack 2y agoHe was 20 in 1973, that doesn't qualify as a CW relic. Not even a curio.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoSomething tells me that if there were so much as an Iranian dinghy sitting off the coast, the military would be extremely aware of its presence. Monitoring absolutely everything that it did.
- dylan604 2y agowhat/who ever that something is that is telling you that, i'd suggest a better source. it is part of the "game" that militaries the world over try to do things without their opponents knowing they were ever there. international boundaries are 12 miles of water, yet navy submarines get much much closer than that as a matter of course. do you think the military or any 3 letter agency knows 100% where all foreign spies are within their borders?
- bhk 2y agoSomething tells me that if there were a bus-sized Chinese spy balloon floating all the way across the continental US, the military would be extremely aware of its presence. (As I recall they were, but they would not publicly acknowledge it until the public sightings became undeniable.)
- shagie 2y agoOne of the channels that I follow is "What is Going on With Shipping" (its mostly about ocean going supply chain things and started with the Evergiven)... and today's video is: War of the Jersey Shore! | Did Iranian Navy Carriers Launch Drones Over the New Jersey? - https://youtu.be/hTpYN70tZ6Y https://youtu.be/hTpYN70tZ6Y And since this is a "the Iranian mothership off the coast" - the info about where the drone carriers are is presented. The video discretion links to other sites with info. https://x.com/TankerTrackers/status/1866922032681652322 https://x.com/TankerTrackers/status/1866922032681652322 > Iran has two drone carrier vessels; the SHAHID BAGHERI and the SHAHID MAHDAVI. Both are located in the anchorage of Shahid Bahonar, Iran. > We know this because we are looking at them right now.
- IAmGraydon 2y agoYes and where did he even get this from? Why do we have representatives literally making up stories and telling them to the American public? What is actually going on here?
- anigbrowl 2y agoProbably just made it up. He's a naked opportunist and there's no penalty in the GOP (or arguably in Congress in general) for being a shameless liar.
- bhk 2y ago"...without evidence..." What he claimed was "high" (high-level, I assume, rather than intoxicated) and "reputable" sources who needed to remain anonymous told him there was circumstantial evidence of this. I don't see any motive for him to make this up, or for those sources to. Perhaps someone in some agency is jumping to conclusions on partial information. Or perhaps this fits into the pattern of DoD officials, ex-officials, and whistleblowers spinning tales of UAP sightings and an official UAP retrieval program.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago> I don't see any motive for him to make this up To get people to pay attention to him?
- StanislavPetrov 2y ago>I don't see any motive for him to make this up, or for those sources to. To whip up more hysteria against Iran?
- bhk 2y agoMaybe. There's a pattern there, too. For example: https://x.com/mtracey/status/1855682527756697724 https://x.com/mtracey/status/1855682527756697724
- heavyset_go 2y ago> I don't see any motive for him to make this up He's using this as an opportunity to paint the current federal administration, and state administration in NJ, as being incompetent, negligent and putting people in harms way. It's standard politics.
- LAC-Tech 2y agoJaff Van Drew is endorsed by AIPAC and has received just over $100k from them.
- postalrat 2y agoIs that your gut feeling or do you know something the government isn't willing to reveal?
- antonvs 2y agoIt’s essentially a null hypothesis. There doesn’t seem to be any actual evidence of anything. It’s all based on social media posts. It shows all the signs of being a mass panic. The OP article put it like this: > It is not known whether a group or individual might be behind the phenomenon, or whether any credible issue even exists – there has been speculation that the flurry of activity might merely amount to confusion over sightings of regular planes or be the product of social media distortions. If you think there’s some real issue here, can you explain why you think that?
- ungreased0675 2y agoOther than social media, what other sources could the public rely on for something like this? Would local law enforcement observations suffice? What else would be publicly available?
- labster 2y agoThe AA livery just means it’s a false flag attack. Truly, we haven’t seen such an invasion in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey since 1938.
- ANewFormation 2y agoI do wonder how many will get the reference.
- hindsightbias 2y agoThe Red Lectoids were real!
- j_timberlake 2y agoDid you post this before or after taking the 10 seconds necessary to look up the Pentagon and White House responses to this, or the FBI's?
- _djo_ 2y agoAfter. They're responding to the public and media uproar, and have to be seen as taking action in response to it, but they're clearly not massively concerned. I don't doubt that there was some drone activity, but most likely it was regularly authorised operations or testing. Once the hysteria started you may have a few pranksters flying theirs just to add to the uproar. But when media houses are publishing pictures of what are clearly commercial airliners and passing them off as unidentified drones you know we're in the middle of a mass hysteria moment.
- mnky9800n 2y agoPerhaps its satanic ritualists turned techo-optimists who are attempting to convert the public to their baby killing ways through drone-based mind control.
- gowld 2y agoWhich picture has the AA livery visible?
- apcragg 2y ago6 and 7. If you squint and lean on a bit of confirmation bias, photo 9 looks like a commercial airliner with the Alaska Airlines livery.
- gowld 2y agoAh. Knowing what AA tails look like makes it look likely that the blurry triangle has blue and red in the right places. Without context, it does appear to be a quadcopter-ish shape, but since the caption says the object was at high altitude, it fits a regular airplane well. People live on site watching the object move should certainly know better. (Perhaps they do know, and are intentionally trolling.)
- dylan604 2y ago> People live on site watching the object move should Be careful here. Human eye witnesses are not reliable, especially at night like this. It is very hard to determine size of shapes at night in the dark. It is hard to determine distance which makes something small look like it might be bigger but further away.
- wat10000 2y agoI think “hard” is underselling it. Unless you already know some of the parameters, it is outright impossible to visually determine size, distance, or speed of a distant object in the sky. So many UFO accounts completely fall apart when you realize this.
- murderfs 2y agoI think photos 2 and 9 are actually JetBlue. There weren't any Alaska flights in the area at the time [1], but there were two JetBlue planes flying in the area, before and after an American Airlines jet. If the images were posted in the same order they were taken, this would fit perfectly. 1: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?replay=2024-12-09-01:33&lat=39.978&lon=-74.503&zoom=8.2 https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?replay=2024-12-09-01:33&lat=...
- nimbius 2y agothis would be relatively easy to solve with historical ADS-B data correlated to the time and date of the spottings. https://adsb.lol/ https://adsb.lol/
- apcragg 2y agoAAL578 flew by Tom's River (Bay Shore area, where the photos were taken) around 20:43 on December 8th which is right when the photos were taking, on a heading that would result in an observing on the ground looking at the port side of the aircraft, just as seen in the picture.
- dylan604 2y agoI've been waiting for the fans of FlightAware type places to start posting their findings.
- daemonologist 2y agoYeah that's very clearly a helicopter in most of the photos, and the rest could easily be an airliner. At most it might be some knucklehead with an old RC helicopter in violation of FAA regs (flying at night, no remote ID). If you were some foreign adversary why would you put navigation lights on your secret reconnaissance drone?
- 650REDHAIR 2y agoThat's my favorite part of this mass hysteria. Why would they have nav lights on?! Any lights...
- dylan604 2y agoClearly, my spy craft isn't a spy craft. Look, it has lights on it for Pete's sake. Plausible deniability
- netsharc 2y agoIt'd be more clever to have lights and leave them unilluminated. If caught they can still claim what you're claiming, adding "You just didn't see them!".
- genewitch 2y agoi mentioned elsewhere but if you had a large octocopter (think like 8' across) you could fashion lights to it to imitate other aircraft, like nose and tail and wing markers. My DJI has a front and rear light, the rear one blinks two colors so you know which side is which, my older DJI clone had lights on all four rotors, different colors between front and back (green and red? or am i confusing boat markers, haha). If i wanted to freak a bunch of people out i'd start my design like this, at least. Some aircraft can fly really slow (biplanes, for instance), but the videos i saw of ostensibly these aircraft they were moving too slow to be actual fixed wing aircraft of the shape the were implied to be by the lights. But who knows if the videos were doctored (cropping would fool my brain about relative speeds), or even of the aircraft we're talking about? I didn't save them so i got no idea, sadly.
- jklinger410 2y agoThere is more evidence here than just pictures from this one article. The pentagon, for example, just declared that they do not know what they are[1]. Among many other credible sources. [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hc1l58/pentagon_no_evidence_its_any_foreign_entity_its/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hc1l58/pentagon_no_e...
- block_dagger 2y agoThe Pentagon - credible!? Ha.
- antonvs 2y ago> There is more evidence here than just pictures from this one article. What “more evidence”? All the Pentagon is saying is that there’s no evidence that’s a foreign entity is behind it. Not “more” evidence.
- Amezarak 2y ago> The pentagon, for example, just declared that they do not know what they are[1]. This sounds impressive, but people don't seem to realize that there is no USGOV tracking of drone-sized objects in US airspace. Of course they can't say who is doing it or where they're coming from, they also don't know what's going on when you launch a drone from your backyard and fly it around. The FAA has a database of reports of people illegally flying drones around planes and airports, it's been happening constantly since they've been mass market items and the perps rarely get caught.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gradus_ad 2y agoI 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.
- 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
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- plipt 2y agoI find the discussions on Metabunk.org helpful with news stories like this. For example here is a clip that a Fox News host recorded. Presented as a drone, but is it not clearly just an airplane filmed flying directly overhead? https://www.metabunk.org/threads/drones-over-new-jersey.13770/page-8#post-329956 https://www.metabunk.org/threads/drones-over-new-jersey.1377...
- Terr_ 2y agoYeah, that looks pretty damn normal. I mean, what kind of Nefarious Power would send out its Secret Drones with standard wingtip lights and headlights on? Note that in this aviation context, those headlights are more to make the plane itself more visible to everyone else, not to give extra information to its pilot(s). It's hard to make lights bright-enough that they could illuminate something in time for an in-air plane to avoid it. (E.g. a magical flying sleigh.)
- wbl 2y agoThat sleigh does have a high visibility red light although the mounting is somewhat unorthodox.
- Terr_ 2y agoI considered trying some napkin-math for how many calories Rudolph would need to burn running a luciferin reaction like a firefly, but immediately stumbled over the issue of many lumens the FAA would consider acceptable. (Assuming they could be convinced to overlook all the other issues of proper color and signaling etc.)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- carabiner 2y agoPeople are claiming that these show "mimics," some type of drone designed to look like commercial aircraft.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y agoAt that point, how do we know they aren't commercial aircraft mimicking drones mimicking commercial aircraft?
- carabiner 2y agodid yall see the drone outside my house it came down and it said hello and then it touched me
- _djo_ 2y agoSuch people are idiots, to be blunt.
- carabiner 2y agoI know. Some people have REALLY gotten into it though: > I'm a professional videographer by trade. I filmed these things for 6 hours last week. High native ISO, tripod, 400mm lens, new camera model. No one here will believe me (especially those who have not witnessed this first hand) but they mimic planes when filmed. With my naked eye they are more abstract. Some where as close as 100ft to me. Then once they are within a certain range or a camera is pointed at them they mimic aircraft. So many people online are mocking those that say this, but I'll take the downvotes. I'm a professional in my field and know what I'm describing is accurate. You just need to see it to believe it. My footage would just be mocked as plane footage. I need to go back out there but with a flight tracker app in real time as hard proof. https://www.reddit.com/r/NJDrones/comments/1hcon8h/comment/m1q2uvg https://www.reddit.com/r/NJDrones/comments/1hcon8h/comment/m... I'm guessing the camera sensor is catching more light, detail, than what the guy is seeing with his own eyes, possibly because he hasn't waited long enough for to adjust to the darkness.
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- superfrank 2y agoFrom what little I've seen on this, it kind of feels like the issue with Priuses acceleration out of control like 15 years ago. It was a huge scandal that lead to multiple Toyota recalls and even a lawsuit settlement and in the end, it seems like it was basically human error. One person messed up and crashed their Prius claiming the accelerator got stuck and it got picked up by the news. That story then primed other people to start looking for that and from then on anytime a Prius crashed people were looking to blame the accelerator. More people reported their Priuses accelerating out of control which then reinforced the idea even more and so on and so on.
- brandonmenc 2y agoiirc wasn't it the floor mats being designed such that they were prone to interfering with the pedals?
- IAmGraydon 2y agoThat’s known as mass psychogenic illness, and history is full of examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
- throwawayq3423 2y agoOtherwise known as gaslighting
- genewitch 2y agowell, it wasn't a prius originally, it was a lexus that launched off a southern california freeway because they burned the brakes up trying to stop the acceleration. Toyota and lexus sometimes have the gas pedal hinged on the floor panel, rather than suspended from piece of metal from up above. If you swap out the stock floor mats for ones not designed with this in mind, during a hard brake your feet can move forward, jamming the floor mat into the accelerator and causing the engine to receive more fuel. If you'd like a picture, i can go take a picture of the accelerator pedal in my lexus from 2012, and the floor mats which are all but bolted down to prevent this from happening. as a side note i prefer the hinged design because there's less distance to traverse, i just wish the brake was the same way!
- gooseus 2y agoI have had a bet going with two of my friends on this exact point for almost a week now, and the fact that it is _still_ not been resolved by any agency is insane. I also have a couple friends who work at Picatinny as well, and have heard that their civilian security have spotted some (which is strange since their airspace is always restricted), but there haven't been any internal memos regarding them. Some things I've observed/heard/thought during arguments and searching for evidence in either direction: 1. People need video evidence and assume it's easy to get because everyone carries a video camera with them. 2. Most people have never tried to capture a fast-moving object with lights in the night's sky with a cellphone. 3. People assume everyone else is a complete fucking idiot, including police, the media, politicians, and most every authority on the subject. This is also in both directions, but with my friends they seem to assume that people have coincidentally forgotten what a plane looks/sounds like in the nights sky and decided to report them as "not planes" to the authorities. 4. The skeptical position on this is firmly in the minority across all social media I've seen. 5. Lots of videos are completely indistinguishable from planes, and any that seem "weird" can be easily explained by tricks of perspective. 6. If there ARE drones being operated in a way where they would prefer not be recognized, then it doesn't seem crazy they would put lights on and move in ways that would disguise them as planes. 7. Flight trackers are not reliable because not all planes that fly need to have flight plans and transponders. I have taken the position that _something_ weird is happening, and that not all of the reports can be explained by commercial/private planes, but I don't mind being wrong so long as a definitive answer is going to present itself. Anyways, glad to see the discussion has made it to HN so I can crowdsource some more arguments, would love it if you all could help resolve this wager.
- bragr 2y ago>not all planes that fly need to have flight plans and transponders Technically true but since 2020 almost all aircraft are required to have transponders to fly in controlled airspace. You could have a small GA aircraft without a transponder and only fly in and out of small uncontrolled air strips, but in practice most aircraft are going to have ADS-B out now. https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/research/airspace https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/researc...
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- Eji1700 2y agoWhat blows my mind, is that damn near every single person seeing this has a phone that can record video, and the best we can do is grainy night pictures. I mean fucking hell we've got people in this thread saying "yeah but they don't move like that" ,which fine, cool, and yet somehow the only stuff circulating is pictures? This whole thing reeks of overreaction to something small signal boosted by filtering of bad data. Send a clear video "oh that's obviously a helicopter". Send some barely readable photo "MASSIVE DRONE SIGHTING", put it on the front page.
- zombiwoof 2y agoTake the drone, leave the Cannoli
- genewitch 2y agothere were videos of ostensibly these drones. i've seen two that claimed such, but unfortunately i did not save the videos - dumb. "remote control aircraft" are so low on my radar (PI) that i wrote it off as people scared of their shadow. The original story was it was loitering near some Trump property, and that's why FAA issued a NOTAM for that area. afaik, this is standard procedure? But maybe people don't know that or the news they watch is explaining things poorly. who knows. I just know why i didn't save the videos.
- moralestapia 2y ago>grainy night pictures Because that's what you get when you point your phone at the sky at night and start recording. Have you never tried to do this? Even the moon, the brightest and largest object in the sky, by far, comes out looking really bad on night pictures.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoI don't think the Coast Guard mistook 12 American Airlines planes for drones following their boat: https://apnews.com/article/fbi-drones-new-jersey-a978470fa3bb07ed3e98c5b7c18f0abb https://apnews.com/article/fbi-drones-new-jersey-a978470fa3b... In another article a Sheriff saw 50 drones coming in from the ocean. Here a New Jersey elected official talks about the Sheriff/Police helicopter following an unidentified drone, then pull back because they feared for their safety (so low probability it was not something odd but just an American Airlines plane): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yxDXqU9OQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yxDXqU9OQQ
- op00to 2y agoYou keep posting the same stuff multiple times in the thread. It doesn’t help your argument.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoMy argument that the Coast Guard didn't mistake American Airlines planes for 12 drones following their boat is invalidated because I posted an AP article twice?
- bragr 2y agoWhy not? The navy confused infrared lens flairs of UFOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs
- hersko 2y agoThis would be convincing if the pilots who captured the video didn't see it with their own eyes.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoThe Pentagon says they are not our military, and probably not foreign. What the Pentagon does not say is that they don't exist or are just ordinary planes. Why wouldn't they say that if there was any remote chance to sell it, even if they were trying to lie about something? Hell especially then.
- mrguyorama 2y agoLol 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 adversary.
- Syonyk 2y agoWhy 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.