US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

I still haven't seen a convincing drone video.

The last one I saw was someone on Facebook posting what is clearly a video of an airplane coming in for a landing at Newark Liberty International, which is all of three miles away from us.

If you are trying to spy on something at night, why put lights on your drone?

Viral marketing for Anduril's drone-seeking drone(s)? Whip up hysteria and sell a "solution"?

(So far it seems the beneficiary isn't Anduril but Robin Radar:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/know-special-drone-dete... )

I think right now, the most likely explanation is that people are just seeing things.

Few months ago I was watching Perseids [1]. I was in a field with no street lamps around me, with headphones on, watching the sky for a long time, and suddenly a drone appeared. It seemed to hover maybe 50 meters from me, 20 meters from the ground, moving slowly from the south-west, then circling around me. I wasn't scared, but it was weird.

After 5 minutes (!) I realized it wasn't a drone, it was just a plane landing on the airport located 1 km to north-east. The specifics of the plane route (the runway is oriented from west to east; I saw only one light from the plane) plus the lack of noise (because of my headphones) plus the dark (wrong distance estimates) contributed to this mistake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids

I spoke with a friend who consults for the DOJ about this. A few of the things he shared:

1. This is a "slow news day" thing. There is so much drone traffic that people never see, mostly from commercial actors, and this phenomenon has been going on for over a year now.

2. There is absolutely a risk of asymmetric engagements through drone warfare (in fact, this is part of the reason Ukraine has been as successful as they have been).

3. Drone jammers don't work for sophisticated drones. They have onboard AI (not LLM) and can navigate autonomously within areas where they aren't piloted in very complex ways.

He was very bearish on there being an easy fix for increasing drone traffic. Commercial entities don't want the regulation, and it's too cheap for someone to flaunt the law.

It’s always funny to see which mental patients jump on the latest mass hysteria.

Amazon is selling 1000’s, if not 10,000, drones EVERY SINGLE DAY!

If they were hostile—clearly they're not intending to be secret, since they have bright lights. So if they're not trying to spy, what else might they be doing? The most likely explanation I can think of is, they're trying to provoke a reaction, to see what defenses the US has against hostile drones. So you can take that information and build defenses for your drone.

So maybe shooting them down isn't the best idea, unless they begin to pose a more direct threat.

There is no mystery, except for how millions of people think blurry videos of regular passenger aircraft, radio towers in fog, and dudes flying DJI phantoms at night are mysterious.

And the media is stoking the flames of this hype train as fast and hard as they can for those sweet sweet clicks.

Posts with much more comments than upvotes seem to get buried.

> 222. US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery (theregister.com) | 26 points by LinuxBender 1 hour ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments

I’m surprised someone hasn’t simply flown their toy drone directly into one of these things to bring it down and inspect.

rope a dope - we should all be looking what ELSE is going one while we are staring at the sky :)

I used to be amused at all the silly medieval peasants and their weirdness, like witch burnings or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518

I am no longer amused.

The official information seems to boil down to:

1. The drones are not ours (Unites States).

2. They are not from a foreign country.

3. We don't know what they are.

4. There is nothing to worry about.

Who wants to bet that 1 and 3 are lies?