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Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
- dools 2y ago[flagged]
- silexia 2y agoIt's possible it could have been a trucker with a bad tire throwing extra rocks for awhile, damaging windshields, who then left the area. I'd say that is more probable than collective delusion.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ggm 2y agoTimely, given the "lights in the sky" fever.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- AlexandrB 2y agoI don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting? I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
- jerlam 2y agoThey were primed by social media and other sources to believe it.
- evan_ 2y agoNot to mention, videos of "drones" are hot right now and get a lot of traffic, so if you can convince yourself that the lights you see in the sky above the airport are drones, you too can get some of those eyeballs
- dfxm12 2y agoMost people don't know what airplanes really look like or what lights they have on them. To most people, any flying object is unidentified and any aerial phenomenon is unexplained. We use pennies more regularly than we see airplanes, but how many can pick the right penny from this lineup? https://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/groups/cognition/tutorials/penny/pennies.html https://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/groups/cognition/tutorial... It gets easier to believe when supposed trustworthy sources: news outlets, the government as a whole and even specific senators/ex governors, fan the flames of conspiracy instead of common sense.
- whimsicalism 2y agoi have not used a penny in at least 5 years, i see planes on the daily - but get your point. pennies are useless junk, straight to the recycling bin for me. really epitomizes our dysfunction that we are unable to stop making them
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoI have to keep making pennies to replace the ones you're throwing away! Don't destroy currency! I put mine in baggies and use them as weights
- whimsicalism 2y agodealing with them in any other way is literally not economical to me if it takes more than like a quarter of a second of time.
- ggm 2y agoA quarter of a second or a bit of a second ain't worth a dime.
- outworlder 2y agoAliens are just good neighbors and figured out FAA regulations before visiting.
- refulgentis 2y agoTo me, people are A) out of touch with how degenerate our information environment has gotten B) generally, how little people look into things outside their wheelhouse. It's not any one individual thing. You can even reframe some (one?) of the factors as Great Democracy Saving. But they add up to: it is rational to not really trust anything, and people don't mind if you were wrong if you just didn't trust The Man/They, so there's more incentive to not trust, than trust. Hyperbole from people who should know better doesn't help. Ex. a quite intelligent AI commentator tweeted yesterday, asking why there hasn't been a reckoning for anyone who publicly worried about effects of AI imagery on truth.
- wat10000 2y agoThe Governor of Maryland posted a video of lights in the sky that were very clearly not any kind of aircraft. Because they were stars. Naturally, this dimwit took the opportunity to blame the feds for failing to act. Apparently there are a lot of people out there who ordinarily just never look up in their daily lives. And instead of thinking “I’m not familiar with this stuff so I don’t know what I’m seeing,” they manage to conclude “I’m seeing something strange and nobody knows what it is.”
- ekidd 2y agoEven 30 years ago, if you had a clear sky in countryside, you could see the occasional satellite. Very tiny, much tinier than airplane lights, and surprisingly fast. Today, there are a lot more. And of course there have always been plenty of airplane lights. Not to mention Venus, which more than one fighter pilot has tried to shoot down.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoI got to see an ISS flare once, that was fun
- willy_k 2y agoThere are without a doubt large drones with nav lights flying around multiple states at night now. There are a lot of people seeing drones where they aren’t, too, and it would be odd if that weren’t happening. But to take that and say “nothing to see here” is ignoring the mass of solid video and official non-statement evidence to the contrary. I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at first, but it was too close to the ground (seemed a few hundred feet up at most), had the mismatched light pattern characteristic of trans-wing drones, and moved too slowly for other types of aircraft. And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish. Honestly, it kind of freaked me out having some previously abstract news-cycle object just floating ominously down the road across from me. EDIT: I thought that HN of all places would be able to pick what’s actually happening from what’s not; Mass hysteria occurring and drones being everywhere are not mutually exclusive, and a critical analysis of the info available makes it very clear that there are mysterious drones out at night. Seeing one article about people misidentifying things only tells you that people are misidentifying things, it says nothing about the countless videos showing positively identified drones, and certainly not about the fact that the government has repeatedly stated that there are drones doing this. And given all of that, downvoting someone giving their personal account with reasonable criticality is at best ignorant.
- engcoach 2y agoYou can't gauge the airspeed of an airplane from the ground. What you are observing is the ground speed, which is affected by winds. So a small Cessna flying into a heavy headwind can appear to move very, very slowly relative to the ground.
- willy_k 2y agoI’m aware of that, and I tried to think that was what was happening. But the motion apart from speed was nothing like a typical plane, and the other factors led me to conclude it was a drone. When I say the FAA light patterns were off, what I mean is that it had two red lights on the outside, and two green lights on the inside. AFAIK, the only type of aircraft that might have that configuration is a trans-wing drone.
- mrandish 2y agoIt's also clear that some more recent reports are trolls flying their Costco drones around. Amazingly, as documented on the news and YouTube, there are now people flying their personal drones at night in an effort to find and follow the 'original' drones (!) I assume they are now all following each other around, creating new reports of "Mysterious Drone Swarm Sighted". :-) Of course, not all "Lights in the Sky" are airplanes, helicopters, drones, stars, satellites or reflections of ground-based lights. There was an interesting sighting in Arizona two weeks ago analyzed and explained by the indefatigable Mick West (2 min video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V00KT4PCd-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V00KT4PCd-0.
- lm28469 2y agoSame reason people hearing moose or coyotes think they're about to get attacked by a skin walker: ignorance and being primed by social medias
- Lerc 2y agoThe problem is that too many people don't know what 'normal' is and nobody can pay attention to everything all of the time. When attention is drawn to something, and without the ability to judge if something is unusual, the inclination is to believe that noticing for the first time is the same as occurring for the first time. The additives added to tap water to make them generate rainbows is a good example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIYZvr3ueGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIYZvr3ueGw There is a BBC Radio program called More or Less, which covers analysis of statistics in the media. They have a motto "Is that a big number?" which is a great starting point for any investigation, essentially asking if the observation is what you would expect if nothing newsworthy were occurring. It's worth keeping that idea floating in your head.
- shreddit 2y agoEven then my first thought would be “military” or “idiot with a plane license” before worrying about “attack of the flying saucers”. I worry more about things I can’t see…
- op00to 2y agoObviously they would have lights to blend in with all the other air traffic! /s
- 1970-01-01 2y agoThe scientific term is collective hysteria or mass-hysteria. https://dictionary.apa.org/collective-hysteria https://dictionary.apa.org/collective-hysteria
- icameron 2y agoPeople noticing lights in the night sky is timely, with the darkest weeks of the year.
- 1attice 2y agoI take it, sotto voce, that this is about the New Jersey drone sightings?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fshafique 2y agoWhat if we are living in a simulation and the new pitted glass texture was rolled out, but our collective memories weren't updated?
- seattle_spring 2y agoPatch V1954.1: New normal map support for car windshields. Requires DirectX9 or later.
- dave4420 2y agoWhat if they switch the simulation off an hour after we notice?
- chiffre01 2y agoThe TLDR cause was: The windshield pitting epidemic was a case of collective delusion, where heightened awareness, media influence, and misattributed environmental factors led people to notice and misinterpret existing, ordinary damage as a mysterious phenomenon.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- glial 2y agoYes, probably -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- outworlder 2y agoNice. That probably explains why, say, we start seeing a model car everywhere the moment we decide to buy one.
- nom 2y agoThis article was likely posted because of the drone sightings. People started looking more.
- jerf 2y agoIt might be better to say that it was a case of a collective shattered delusion, where the delusion was "my windshield normally is not pitted". In modern parlance, it was a collective "can't unsee" moment. A delusion would imply that people were claiming their windshields were pitted and they weren't... but I'm sure they were.
- lolc 2y agoDon't be splitting hairs. The delusion is that the pitting happened recently and wasn't there before.
- thmsths 2y agoThe conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".
- nilsbunger 2y agoIt’s been fascinating to watch this play out with the drone stories in NJ too. Despite all our amazing tech, we still can’t tell truth from fiction.
- raddan 2y agoI assume this is why this was posted on HN. My first thought when I heard the drone stories was “you’re just noticing them now?” Anyone who has ever spent any time watching the skies knows that there is an amazing variety of things in the sky. To be honest I am kind of surprised that the current hysteria revolves around something plausible (foreign drones) given that past hysteria has been about the totally implausible (alien UFOs… or angels… or whatever).
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoThe implausible thing there is that if it really was an Iranian mother-drone ship etc, it'd be shot down ages ago. But it's a convenient story for parties that want to portray the US as incompetent, even if said parties have tentative alliances / shared interests with Iran.
- lazide 2y agoWhy do you think introverts are the way they are?
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoThis happens all the time. See: drone sightings right now. Previously: Havana syndrome.
- mikestew 2y agoIn the context of the fact that, according to TFA, the pits were there all along: you'll really notice how pitted your current windshield is when you go get a new, crystal-clear one. The folks in TFA just skipped the "go get a new one" step, and for the first time took a really hard look at their windshield.
- ricardobeat 2y agoSome of the pictures in the article show several golf-ball-size holes in the windshield though. Not something that would go unnoticed. Was windshield glass not laminated in that era?
- mikestew 2y agoWindshields should have been laminated back then (a lot of manufacturers were using it in the 1930s). It's oddly difficult to find when it was required in automobiles in the U. S. But in reference to the picture I'm pretty sure you're talking about, even if the glass were laminated it should have spider-webbed. I have no idea what would have caused what is in that photo. I mean, it could have been just plain vandalism that was blamed on the "mysterious" pitting phenomena.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoI'm only seeing the one picture with that kind of damage (the first one); the other one has circles drawn around the pitting to highlight them, indicative that they're pretty small to begin with.
- delichon 2y agoThe story completely misses that this period coincides with a temporary expansion of the habitat of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ The devil of the trees and terror of all loggers, forest rangers and apparently windshields.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lbeckman314 2y agoA Tree Octopus Renku by Lyle Zapato [0] wisteria on pine -- a tree octopus climbs there's a spectacle! I am one of today's lucky 10,000 — thank you! [1] [0] https://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=201104210388.a_tree_octopus_renku https://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=201104210388.a_tree_octopus_... [1] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- TheGRS 2y agoI'm assuming you posted this because of the drone sightings right?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- djeastm 2y agoGood post. It's important to understand that there's really not that much new under the sun and we've never been that great at understanding large social phenomena.
- hedora 2y agoI don’t think that’s a reasonable summary. This stuff has been well understood for millennia.
- whimsicalism 2y agomust be the drones
- itsanaccount 2y agoSince we all know what this is actually commenting on, I'll answer that directly. The noise on the UFO topic has reached a massed hysteria pitch. When that happens, the overall signal to noise ratio of internet sourced sightings goes from "very poor" to "nearly invisible." I blame a lot of that on the recent congressional hearings bringing stories to the public's front of mind. But. And I think its a very very important but, these sightings of phenomena go back decades, and just because the public at large is not a reliable reporter, does mean there are not many, many kernels of truth of an unexplained, repeated phenomena. And otherwise you can always, always be skeptical, but at what point does skepticism stretch into denial? IR cameras recording rocket impacts aren't mass hysteria. 2011 https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1gsdwl6/full_10_minute_video_showing_glowing_multicolored/ https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1gsdwl6/full_10_minut... ^ maybe those are targeting drones and the rocket missed. but then why are they dripping? 2 days ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/InterdimensionalNHI/comments/1hfkcg6/uap_ejecting_something_before_exploding_video_by/ https://old.reddit.com/r/InterdimensionalNHI/comments/1hfkcg... ^ maybe those are targeting flares, and thats why they're dripping, but if they're flares why does the second one seem to fly away when the first is struck? meanwhile 7 days ago https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hcfaqw/glowing_orb_flies_by_miami_balcony_a_few_hours_ago/ https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hcfaqw/glowing_orb_f... ^ maybe thats just a commercial drone modified to be super bright. But why fly it there, as a hoax? (so, so many orb videos to repeat this logic with, you get the idea.) If you're interested in finding more, you need to get very used to seeing lots of balloons, planes, commercial drones, planets, stars, satellites, flares, skydivers, lens flare, insects and birds and there's common examples of all of them. The ones we should be interested in are usually uniformly luminous, follow non linear flight paths, exhibit extraordinary acceleration (for which you need size to estimate distance which is tough with only one camera), and/or exhibit extraordinary altitude. Whether they're controlled by a non-human intelligence or some government, they do exist and are super interesting to watch. You're just gonna have to wade through an absolute mountain of bullshit.
- ceejayoz 2y ago> maybe those are targeting drones and the rocket missed. but then why are they dripping? They're balloons carrying flares for target practice. You can see lots of falling embers in https://youtu.be/XHDXk9THJZM?si=CKSBB3AuslBizXxh&t=179 https://youtu.be/XHDXk9THJZM?si=CKSBB3AuslBizXxh&t=179 from a military flare. > if they're flares why does the second one seem to fly away when the first is struck? Because that's the maneuvering target drone (something like a QF-16, probably; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting_Falcon_variants#QF-16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting...) that's dropping the flares. > maybe thats just a commercial drone modified to be super bright. But why fly it there, as a hoax? Asked and answered. We live in a world where "flashlight enthusiast" is a real niche thing; "bright drone" is not an implausible thing. https://www.reddit.com/r/flashlight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/flashlight/
- mvkel 2y agoThe difference these days seems to be that the frequency of the hysterical events has gone up. One every other month, rather than every other year. What happens to a society that has been desensitized to mass-hysteria, where no single event can evoke a reaction? Is it a horseshoe, where we're so vigilant that nothing fazes us anymore? Do we lose our humanity in the process?
- Aloisius 2y agoSome just learn to ignore news gossip.
- mvkel 2y agoSlippery slope. I posit that there are news items that deserve real cause for concern, but because we're so overwhelmed with information, we throw it into the same "gossip" bucket with the rest of the slop.
- Aloisius 2y agoFew news items ever rise to that level and fewer still deserve immediate attention. Daily news is merely a first rough draft of history and I'd argue most people would be better off instead reading later drafts - after much of the confusion/gossip/rumor/panic that plagues daily news clears. Sadly there's not a lot of news sources that limit themselves to writing articles about month+ old well-covered news.
- mvkel 2y ago> Daily news is merely a first rough draft of history Love this.
- whatevertrevor 2y agoA lot of news that positions itself as "you should be concerned about this" seeks to exploit the "always alert ready to respond to an emergency" part of our brains. In reality almost nothing truly deserves that kind of attention. But since humans are bad at separating important from urgent, news broadcasts will continue to exploit with "24/7 Breaking News".
- carabiner 2y agoThe subreddit /r/njdrones is sooo off the rails right now. It started out as "I think this is a drone, maybe military?" to classifying different drones as energy "orbs" and "mimics" that only look like airplanes when photographed.
- stevenhuang 2y agoConsider that you are uninformed about the UAP phenomenon.
- IAmGraydon 2y ago[flagged]
- stevenhuang 2y agoWhat can I say. You refuse to engage with evidence in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405429 that the phenomenon might in fact be real, so you fall into the quite predictable conclusion that all of it is hysteria. Be better.
- carabiner 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- itronitron 2y agoThis feels like it was written as a satire based on the screenplay of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"
- j_timberlake 2y agoThis was literally my first thought for the anomalous drones like 2 weeks ago, and it was immediately obvious that the entire NJ police department should not be incompetent enough to fall for something so obvious. The mayors and governor should not be dumb enough to stake their reputations on this when the null hypothesis of "mass hysteria" is easier and safer. Even back then, we knew the sightings do not appear on flight radar apps that show every commercial flight and which any civilian can access. But since then we've also had airport shutdowns, incursions over airforce bases, drones in no-fly zones. These are easy to Google: https://www.recordonline.com/story/news/2024/12/16/stewart-airport-shutdown-aftermath-drones-in-new-york/76993746007/ https://www.recordonline.com/story/news/2024/12/16/stewart-a... https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/16/us/us-air-force-base-closes-airspace-drone-sightings-hnk/ https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/16/us/us-air-force-base-closes-a... https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/article297295919.html https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/article297295919.ht... Also NJ police report the anomalous drones give off no heat signature like normal drones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K98A4CLMwf4&t=209s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K98A4CLMwf4&t=209s There's a lot more I could post about, but most importantly Chuck Schumer is trying to get Robin drone radar detectors deployed, and I'm predicting that he's the smart guy in the room who will get us answers.
- vasco 2y agoYou can buy satellite pictures of almost anywhere on earth with pretty good definition and so I deduce that the US government with almost 100 StarShield satellites plus who knows how many ones with huge cameras probably can almost livestream any place on earth GTA top view style. So shouldn't be hard to see what it is and where it came from unless cloud cover is bad.
- nicholasjon 2y agoThe Omnibus Project (Ken Jennings and John Roderick) did a podcast on this back in June: https://www.omnibusproject.com/episodes/the-western-washington-windshield-epidemic-entry-1422rv0613 https://www.omnibusproject.com/episodes/the-western-washingt...
- GreenAlien 2y agoIn 70 years, articles will talk about the strange drone invasion only for it to be discovered that planes and drones were always in the air, but people just never bothered to look up until everyone started talking about it.
- yalogin 2y agoPeople just don’t want to accept simple, no drama and explanations, even more so if it means they have to accept they are wrong. This is a trait we as a species had all along apparently but manifested much more during covid. I am just amazed we made this much progress cumulatively in which a short time. May be because we let it happen because the growth itself is so fantastic!
- sombragris 2y agoEnglish is my second language, so this might explain what I'm going to say. I really did not understand what this was all about. Even worse, the pictures were not clear. AFAICT, there were some minor dents in windshields that caused some hysteria in the Seattle area but no further explanation was given. The article was confusing indeed.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoBasically a lot of people mistakenly thought something had been damaging their windshields, but it was just regular wear and tear they had never noticed before. The damage appeared to spread as more people talked about it The pictures weren't clear to me either, probably because they're pictures of ordinary windshields lol
- sombragris 2y agoThanks for explaining this. You were much more clear than the whole article.
- ofslidingfeet 2y agoHow many closed session hearings did the U.S. congress have over windshield pitting again?
- f3z0 2y agoAre you saying the drones and planes have always been there and we are just noticing it now?
- bagels 2y agoIt's probably regular airplanes, stars, and Venus, and now, I assume civilian drones. Once people started claiming drones, other people who never bothered to look in to the sky started seeing lights they didn't understand (planes, stars, planets) because they never bothered to study the night sky in even a basic way, and they are suggestible. Then people probably started flying their own drones to do investigation + prank people.
- oneshtein 2y ago+ StarLinks or other low orbit satellites and space stations. In 2014, when Russian invasion started in Ukraine, we had so many reports from folks about drones in the sky about ISS or Venus. I saw this myself when I was at Chongar, near to Russian occupied Crimea: my comrades pointed to bright Venus in the night sky and said that it can be a Russian drone. I dismissed the claim by pointing out that army doesn't turn lights on when on mission.
- tzs 2y ago> Some thought that the Navy’s new million-watt radio transmitter at Jim Creek near Arlington was [absurd theory deleted] There actually is a problem some Washington residents occasionally have from powerful navy transmitters. Every so often in Bremerton many garage door opener remotes and car keyless entry systems become very unreliable for a few days to a week or two. This generally corresponds to when aircraft carriers visit the Bremerton naval shipyard. There are often multiple kinds of use allowed on a given radio frequency band. The different allowed uses will be grouped into different priority classes and the general rule is that (1) lower priority uses are not allowed to interfere with higher priority uses, and (2) if a higher priority use interferes with a lower priority use it is up to the later to deal with it (move to another frequency, use better shielding to keep the interference out, etc). Many garage door remotes and keyless entry systems use frequency bands that overlap with bands used for Navy radar and communications and as you can probably guess the Navy's uses are the higher priority. So a carrier comes in to the shipyard for maintenance or upgrades, and as part of that they test the radar and communication systems and so for however long that takes you've got ridiculously powerful transmitters blasting out on the frequencies your stuff wants to use.
- hedora 2y agoEarly car door openers were triggered by normal airplanes, so they’d just randomly open while the homeowners were away. Lawsuits were filed, and a standard that didn’t have that problem took over. (Calling the replacement standard “secure” would be overselling it, but I guess it was good enough to make the courts happy.)
- johng 2y agoLife always imitates The Twilight Zone. My favorite episode actually: The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPOoEQ2vx7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPOoEQ2vx7w
- 2lazy2pwdmgr 2y agoTL;DR - The drones sent by the UFOs did it in the drawing room with the candlestick.
- darepublic 2y agoIs this in reference to the drone sightings over New Jersey / elsewhere? UAPs?
- orbisvicis 2y agoAs the story reads this isn't really a mass delusion - people read about pits in windshields, people examined their windshields, people saw pits in their windshields. If it was about the "Jersey Devil" and people started claiming to have spotted the "Jersey Devil", now that would be a delusion. The only possibly deluded people, as the story is told, are reporters, policemen and politicians - but as the adage goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
- IAmGraydon 2y agoIt is a delusion - the delusion is that the pits are new and suddenly appeared.