What are these drones?

[Chris OConnor]

I'm curious what you guys think of the current situation with the drones over New Jersey and several other states. Who is controlling these drones? Why are they up there?
In my opinion there are two plausible explanations for the drones. Neither one of them is comforting, but I'll present them and wait to see what you guys think about my ideas. I don't think these are amateurs having fun with their drones. These things have been flying in zigzag patterns and traveling long distances. And they say some of them are the size of cars in SUVs.

IDEA 1: The US government is searching for something
These are privately owned or corporately owned drones contracted by the US government to search for a potential dirty bomb (or something else) that is believed to have been sneaked into the country. When Pentagon officials, and Biden administration officials, have been questioned, they repeatedly say, "These are not our drones." Well, technically speaking they might not be government drones. So they are not "lying" but bending the truth. Perhaps they are desperately searching before this dirty bomb is set off. They want the public outcry to die down so that they can continue the search without whomever is controlling the drones to escape.

IDEA 2: China is testing our drone countering technology
Unfortunately, this is the idea that makes the most sense to me. I remember the first time I saw one of these multi-propeller drones flying stably through the air - so stably that literally anyone could fly it. My mind just went to all of the possibilities. Endless possibilities. I've been watching videos of how drones are used in Ukraine and Russia, to kill soldiers and take out tanks. They hover over soldiers and drop explosives on them. It's a horrible death and you cannot hide.

What if China has been developing drone technology secretly, for military use, ever since drone technology first emerged? Maybe this is a test to see how we would react, and if we even could react, to dozens of drones overhead. Maybe they came over on submarines, or in shipping containers with Chinese migrants helping, or maybe drone ships or some other method of traversing the ocean. As concerned as everyone is right now, imagine if China were to release 25,000 of these drones all over the US. they would in essence shut down our entire country. Periodically they could drop bombs on groups of people, instilling absolute terror into the population. Or they could disperse chemical agents or biological weapons. The possibilities are indeed endless.

This could be just a very small test to see how long it takes us to knock these out of the sky. Obviously, we now realize we need technology to pick these off quickly. We need some sort of new weapon that can shoot them down, without jeopardizing all the people potentially below. Fire a net on them so they fall? Disable them with some sort of electrical signal?

Developing that technology will take time. So this could be a test by China, because they have something big planned. They now know that we don't have a freaking clue how to deal with this. I wouldn't be surprised if they attacked Taiwan soon, and let us know in no uncertain terms, that if we interfere they will set swarms of drones across our country and we won't be able to do anything about it.

I am tremendously disappointed that the Biden administration hasn't knocked a ton of these out of the sky, so we can analyze them and reverse engineer them and see where they were built. See what type of intelligence they are gathering. The fact that we haven't done that makes me think that maybe this is indeed the US government contracted with some drone manufacturer, searching for something. Because if this isn't the US government, we are messing up big time. The worst possible scenario is these drones suddenly vanish and we don't have a single one of them knocked out of the sky, so we can only speculate who was controlling them. We need to act now.

Please tell me your opinion!

EDIT:

I'm embarrassed to say that I missed one other highly probable explanation for the drone sightings. This really could be mass hysteria. What people are looking at and seeing could very well be fixed wing aircraft. I'm watching a few videos by Mick West, someone I very much respect, and he's suggesting that many of these drone sightings are not really drones at all. They are literally commercial aircraft in landing patterns or other general aviation aircraft. Of course some of them are genuinely drones, but at any given time when you look up in the night sky, there are lights all over the place. This could easily be something that we are all just jumping on, because of some conspiracy theorists that have run some good marketing.

[Taylor]

Chris OConnor: I'm curious what you guys think of the current situation with the drones over New Jersey and several other states. Who is controlling these drones? Why are they up there?

Enthusiasts are controlling the drones, the drones are “up” there because enthusiasts “fly” drones.
Nitwits claimed there’s a situation that’s unacceptable happening in the sky, the no news; news created public hysteria and amplified that hysteria by repeatedly headlining a story that is meaningless. Even at a local news level there simply isn’t anything there to report. It’s a manufactured controversy that should disappoint people everywhere. The US media is lame, they no longer care to report via investigation, they just repeat what ever Apple News headlines are available, they no longer discern what is a real news story.
Is it possible that the ChiComs are behind this for some nefarious reasons? Yes of course they could be, is it likely? No it is not.
Is it possible the Federal Government is looking for something? Sure they look for things all the time. Is it possible that they are trying to hide something? Sure why not, but as inept a political class as we now have there’s no possibility of secrecy anymore.
Drone Warfare is now demonstratively real, the Ukraine War is the live fire testing ground for this latest application of technology.
Drones are relatively cheap entertainment, weird people entertain themselves by doing stupid shit, that’s what I think we are witnessing. The hysteria is part of the shit show of entertainment. Drinking cheap beer and boxed wine goes along with the idiocy.
America is becoming a sick twisted fuck of a country, the outcome of 5 November is all the proof one needs.
That last sentence is way too harsh and for that I apologize.
I will not take it down though as I want people to understand what I apologized for and to also understand that I am disappointed and frustrated with the way something’s are.

[LanDroid]

I'm not up on this story other than the rumor mill. How many drones are we talking about? 10? 100K? 5 million?
Feels like a combination of amateurs getting new drones for the holidays and mass hysteria might explain most of this?

Reminds me of the balloons China sent over. We used a $500K Sidewinder missile to blow one up (its extreme maneuverability not required for that target) where a few shells from a fighter jet could have downed it. Perhaps we need Sidewinders to shoot down these drones.

"This is a case of the general populace not being familiar with the density of air traffic in the national airspace, particularly on the Eastern Seaboard. Most people today generally don't spend much time looking up at the night sky, and when you do, you finally start to see what's around you."
- Jamey Jacob, executive director of the Oklahoma Aerospace Institute for Research and Education at Oklahoma State University

12/21/24
https://www.space.com/space-exploration ... jersey-sky

[Chris OConnor]

At first I was extremely concerned about these drones, but at this point I'm noticing less and less talk about them. I feel that maybe this was a form of mass hysteria in gullible people (me included) that get their news from the wrong sources. One person probably started this and it just hopped from brain to brain like a virus. I looked on Drudge Report today and I don't see any talk at all about the drones. So maybe Mick West is right and all we are seeing are people having fun with their personal drones, and actual aircraft mistook as drones.

[LanDroid]

Black spatulas and mystery drones: Your guide to the unfounded panics of the season
...It started with warnings about your black plastic spatulas and other such implements. Spurred by a study and press release issued Oct. 1 by the Seattle nonprofit Toxic-Free Future, news organizations from coast to coast — including The Times — posted articles advising consumers to ditch their black food utensils and children's toys with black plastic pieces.
...A few points about the Toxic-Free Future paper, which spurred all that news coverage. First, it's based in part on a massive mathematical error.
...Yet the issue for the average consumer is how dangerous are these products, really? The answer is, not very.

...The claims of an invasion of the Eastern seaboard by swarms of drones has every marker of a groundless social media frenzy. This started with some truly baroque partisan speculation; on Dec. 11, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) cadged himself some airtime on Fox News by claiming that his home state was under attack from Iran.
...That should cover the hysterias of the moment. Black spatulas won't kill you, and the lights in the sky aren't alien spaceships or Iranian bombers. Any questions?

LA Times 12/24/2024
https://www.yahoo.com/news/column-black ... 56148.html

[geo]

. . . This really could be mass hysteria. What people are looking at and seeing could very well be fixed wing aircraft.

Right now drones are in the news, so people go outside and see a light in the sky and of course they assume it’s a drone. In the 1970s, when UFOs were so popular, these lights would have been interpreted as flying saucers.

And also because drones are in the news, people who don't normally go outside and look up at the night sky are astonished at all the things up there. Some of the things are even moving around! They must be drones!

If a religious person glances out the window in the middle of the night and sees a light floating around in his yard, he might think it's an angel. A UFO enthusiast will think it's a UFO. A conspiracy theorist will think it's a covert surveillance operation by a foreign power and that our government is trying to cover it up.

Larry Hogan, Maryland's former governor (and in my opinion a pretty decent guy) recently posted a video of "drones" flying around his neighborhood. He claims the drones are large. These certainly could be drones, but there’s no way of knowing how large they are. A low-flying drone might have the same brightness a fixed-wing aircraft flying at 35,000 feet or even a distant star.

Hogan lives in a pretty rural part of the state and I can imagine a few of his neighbors might own drones. Maybe they're having a drone-flying party. That’s certainly one possible explanation, though admittedly not as sexy as aliens from another planet.

Here’s the video that shows Larry Hogan’s drones, but perhaps what is more telling is the terrible quality of the news coverage. Of course, it includes the obligatory statement from Donald Trump, who says "can this really be happening without our government's knowledge? I don't think so."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZWrqWgOAeU&t=12s

[DB Roy]

I watched some of the videos people had shot and they appear to be both fixed-wing and moveable-wing types. Some appear to be extraordinarily large. But, they say that they do make drones that big. But the question is, of course, whose is it? What is being employed to do? Obviously, a casual civilian drone enthusiast is not going to own or fly these huge drones. But there is no denying that they are up there.

Back around 2019, Colorado and Nebraska were heavily hit by phantom drones that flew very near sensitive areas as missile silos. Police chased some of them and said they moved at around 60-70 mph. The police also stated that they drones seemed to both ejecting and also picking up objects that they claimed resembled "potatoes." The sightings continued until 2021, I think, and then they ceased and the following month phantom drones began buzzing Navy ships at sea on maneuvers. The Navy never could pinpoint the source.

There is a history of these "phantom assailants" through history. Back in the 70s, there was a major UFO flap over the Midwestern US that involved abductions and cattle mutilations and cryptids and also phantom shooters. Military installations all over the Midwest were buzzed by UFOs and phantom helicopters that no one could catch. Sometimes military personnel saw helicopter lights with no accompanying sound. Others heard helicopters over but saw no lights. Other personnel reported hearing jet planes overhead but could not see them. The mysterious choppers flew in weather impossible for choppers to fly in but these choppers had no trouble. These UFOs too buzzed very sensitive areas looking initially like helicopter lights but turned into a blob of lights running together like a heat mirage, made no sound, remained utterly still in the air and simply blinked out.

In the 50s, the deserts of the Southwest were subject to almost nightly "ghost rockets" that flew blazing across the night skies, often exploding soundlessly. Witnesses reported most of them as being green. In the late 40s, the green fireballs were seen over Scandinavia as well as missile with fusilage and wings. They too were silent. Some missiles seemed to be in battle with one another and many of them exploded soundlessly--except for one which allegedly crashed into a lake causing a terrific explosion. When the army looked for the fallen craft, they could not find a trace of it but did find a large, fresh, gouge in the lakebed. Eric Malmberg, who headed a ghost rocket committee, stated that, from the reports they received that it seemed as though someone had fired "some kind of cruise missile" on Sweden but no one on earth had that technology in the 40s.

Before that, it was ghost fliers--phantom planes that flew over Scandinavia in the 1930s. No one knew whose planes or why they used them but it was assumed they were smugglers probably Russian. This was at a time when ANY airplane seen in the skies of such a remote area of Northern Europe was so exceedingly rare that it constituted a real event. This was simply unheard of. Moreover, these planes flew in all kinds of weather that would have destroyed any plane attempting flight but, miraculously, these planes had no trouble. Nobody could ever figure out where they were coming from or where they were going.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, the US was plagued by phantom airships. These were propeller-driven dirigibles with searchlights mounted on them. They were reported all over the United States. Someone even photographed it but it doesn't look like much. There is also a photograph of an alleged ghost rocket over Sweden but the photographer believes it was a daylight meteor.

In the 1940s, there was also an infamous phantom shooter known as the "blue phantom of Route 66." Someone was firing on other cars from a blue car that no one could catch up to despite several attempts. Although there were shattered windshields and windows, no bullets were ever recovered even when it was determined that the bullet did not pass out of the vehicle having left no exit hole. In the 70s Midwest UFO flap, military personnel reported being fired at on-base by a phantom shooter firing at aircraft on the SAC alert ramp. Several planes were hit but no bullet holes were ever found.

In the 40s, not far from the haunts where the blue phantom was making his rounds, was another phantom known as the Mad Gasser of Mattoon--a town in Illinois. This phantom attacked people with noxious gases--sometimes knocking them unconscious or incapacitating them. For days, the town was terrorized and then it stopped as suddenly as it began. The decade before, Botetourt County, Virginia was plagued by a phantom gasser who terrorized the area for a few days and then simply ceased. This is still going on today as I have catalogued several recent accounts of mysterious masked figures throwing gasses that smell sweet but make people sick but then recover and doctors can never find anything wrong with them nor recover any trace any kind of drug or poison that might have been used. Despite witnesses seeing the perpetrator throwing the gas, he is never caught.

We must show some alarm at the fact that we are constantly plagued by something that seems to have a foot in reality and in fantasy. We must ask ourselves if have been conditioned and, if so, by whom and to what end. Because, if we can be conditioned to feel as though we are under attack by phantoms, we feel harassed but helpless which is debilitating and makes us feel desperate for a solution. In other words, phantom assailants are an aid to somebody looking for population control. You can manipulate a lot of people with fear, with frustration, with anger. We need to understand why the phantoms keep coming back.

Psychologists Robert E. Bartholomew and Erich Goode examined the phantom assailant phenomenon for Skeptical magazine in the Vol. 7, No. 4, 1999 issue in an article called Phantom Assailants & the Madness of Crowds: The Mad Gasser of Botetourt County. They write: “From time to time, under certain conditions and in various locales, episodes of collective delusion erupt, then quickly subside. One common subtype of the collective delusion is a widespread fear of a phantom assailant. Such outbreaks are remarkable, noteworthy, and in need of systematic study; we ignore them at our peril.”