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!
I 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.
> I 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.
You better crank out your camera and collect any proof at all,because what you are describing bears no resemblance to the sightings mentioned in the article.
There is a reason why sightings of supernatural fenomenal went down abruptly with the inception of cheap digital cameras.
For real, with everyone having a smartphone with high quality cameras on them there really is zero excuse for there to not be highly detailed accurate videos of this if they are legit especially with people describing them as "low and slow".
The article suggests the drones appear during nighttime with which cameras will struggle. "low" is relative and can mean 200 meters which would be very difficult even for regular cameras (without a tripod), let alone a smartphone.
I’ll stop you there and say there are videos. They just happen to be of naturally-occurring phenomena and captured by inept operators who don’t subscribe to Occam’s Razor.
Smartphone cameras are absolutely useless when it comes to taking useful pictures of distant, moving objects. Even a proper DSLR is extremely difficult to use on a moving object at night due to focus issues.
Not focus issues. Set to infinity it will be fine. But shutter speed issues certainly. When people take sharp photographs at night they generally aren’t handholding a camera and shooting a moving subject. And if they are they are close enough to use flash.
Tbf, smartphone cameras are not really "high quality" in a way that's useful here. Try taking a video of something with small angular subtension like an aircraft at cruising altitude with a cell phone camera.
I'm not arguing that these are or aren't anything interesting, but low, relative to airplanes is still pretty far for cell phone cameras, especially in the dark.
You go take that smartphone of yours and try and take a high quality video of just an airliner at night. Its not easy at all. Even in daylight this is like a 35mm lens on a tiny sensor its not the hardware you need to crop out a speck from the sky and show the world what it is. You really need a lens thats about the size of your calf and the sort of camera that goes along with that. And probably a tripod. Not something many have handy.
>with everyone having a smartphone with high quality cameras on them there really is zero excuse for there to not be highly detailed accurate videos of this
Absolutely not.
I understand the tendency to assume that modern tech would make it relatively easy thing to accomplish but there are considerable challenges with ground-based aerial photography/videography...at nighttime...completely unplanned and unscheduled...by an amateur. Better technology makes the field more accessible in a general way, but there is still a very large barrier of: skill, hardware, and out-right luck involved in good image capture as a medium.
Consider, if you ever look towards the beginning or end of some runways you may see a group of plane spotters setup taking photos and video of the airplanes. The typical hardware used to capture things well is a minimum of: DSLR, tripod, battery extenders (or spares), and good perch to rest during lulls (it's more physically demanding on your arms then you might imagine.) More crucially, this is for airplanes that are taking off and landing 1) in a predictable pattern 2) at routine intervals 3) captured primarily in daylight.
Add in height? Introduce increased shake. Add in darkness? Introduce exposure (hold the camera still, longer to get a brighter image). Add in inexperience? Introduce beginner mistakes. On top of those practical concerns, it's probably also pretty creepy to see these unknown objects/drones/whatever. Fear impacts our ability to react in a helpful way.
Smartphones make it simpler to capture a picture or a video, but there is profound gulf between getting something and something even remotely good.
If you're not sure what I mean, here's a simple test you can try: 1) Grab a pencil and go into a completely dark room like a basement 2) Turn off the flash on your phone 3) Holding the pencil between pointer finger and thumb stretch your hand as far from your body as you physically can 4) Take one photo of the tip of the pencil eraser one-handed.
That is considerably easier than it would be to photograph/video a moving object across the night sky, even if it is perceived as moving "low and slow". Longer exposure times mean the camera has to be held motionless for longer so the camera sensor can "soak up" more light to "expose" the photograph properly. (This is why photos at night feel like they take perceptibly longer to capture than they do in daytime - they do take longer!) Flash can help with nearby subjects, but for objects far away (thousands of feet above you) no amount of flash is going to reach the object to reduce exposure time.
Then, let's make things even worse! The object is moving which means that overexposure will turn that solid object into a blur. This is something that is easily possible[1] when taking photos of the night sky.
I live in the Pacific NW and there are a vast number of people with really good quality trail cameras who put them tied to trees all over the place for deer and elk hunting purposes. If Bigfoot was real, we absolutely would have seen one by now.
I've been following the story and this has been discussed on the local Reddit subs. They are almost certainly PteroDynamics XP-4 drones flying from and to the military bases in question for testing purposes. There literally was a public demo of them on the USNS Burlington in Philadelphia a year ago.
I really like that it switches off the outer pair of propellers in level flight, that's a nice feature.
Changing the vertical alignment of the wings to horizontal after takeoff is also really cool, an interesting alternative to 4 vertical propellers with a separate pair of wings. It seems to eliminate the extra moving parts to control those vertical propellers.
The wing folding mechanism is pretty novel as far as I'm aware. The idea of quad hover to forward flight isn't new or unique but the specific configuration is something I haven't seen before. NASA was working on some that tilted the whole wing not this folding design which uses fewer motors compare to the old NASA Greased Lightning test article.
Osprey has a common power shaft between the engines for fault tolerance, constraining the structure's design, such as the lack of dihedral. This has a different set of design constraints and a different solution to propulsion failure.
> should've already learned this, if they were not so stupid.
The stupid take is the one you propose, it's ridiculous. So USAF has secret decoys in WWII and before, that followed WWII fighters, and hovered over people's houses, among millions of other sightings worldwide? So advanced yet they don't send them to war?
> People should've already learned this, if they were not so stupid.
You're falling in the same trap as conspiracy theorists, though: Putting out almost non-falsifiable statements, and then claiming you know better and are smarter. Either it will be revealed that it was USAF and you can feel smug about being correct, or it will not come out and you can still feel smug about being correct because no one can prove you wrong.
Some of the articles are claiming "SUV sized" drones, but their photos are either of commercial aircraft, or of something that looks to be a DJI Phantom 4, or something much like it.
Have you managed to capture any videos of images of these large, low flying, slow moving drones?
it’s amazing how so many people have seen these truck sized drones but they’ve all somehow failed to get pictures.
i can go outside right now in the dark with this phone i’m typing on and get a solid picture of stuff but somehow they keep showing us pictures that look like 1940s era ufo photo blur.
The same probably happens with blurry small aircraft in the scene. It'll "upscale" (i.e. draw in) all kinds of objects with what it thinks is most likely from the context, from its training set.
I can get an acceptable picture of the moon with my phone (at least when autofocus doesn't decide to do something stupid), yet also I can't get good pictures of birds in nearby trees or urban foxes on the other side of the road.
Phone can do night with just hand jitter ok, can't effectively compensate for target motion.
Probably not with a phone, but "affordable" full-frame MILC/DSLR cameras with 100-400mm or 600mm lenses exist and people have them. Much better chances.
Odd, one of those pictures clearly show either a regular RC helicopter, or a full-scale helicopter. You can see the boom and tail light clearly. And no sound associated with it? There are designs for "silent" blades. I mean theyre not silent, bud at least less noisy.
Even decently fast glass won’t do a good job of capturing drones at night unless there’s a significant amount of ambient light.
And telephoto lenses with the range you mention with fast apertures are not exactly cheap. A 600mm F/4 goes for $12-15K and is still not fast enough for shooting moving subjects in the dark.
I did find it odd when this news reporter said of the craft "it's really difficult to show you with our camera, so we have to show you with our phones." You'd think a broadcast-grade camera rig would be better than a smartphone at this.
In my experience the majority of that 1940s photo blur comes when you crop and zoom what otherwise looks like a beautiful digital photograph. I experienced this quite often when utilizing security cameras to try and read license plates.
Any movement of the vehicle whose plate you are attempting to track creates pixelization requiring you sometimes to stitch together multiple frames where individual characters on the plate have become clear in order to read the entire license plate.
And 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.
Oh, 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
> My personal feeling is if it was enemy drones, our military would have already taken them down
I think you overestimate a few things here… the military isn’t constantly monitoring all airspace across the country for drone-sized objects and shooting things down if they don’t recognize them.
Perhaps they should be as we enter this brave new world of drone-everything, but they don’t right now.
NJ has some of the leading research centers for the US military, our new president's second estate, and critical infrastructure for telecommunications. Reportedly drones were flying close to all of these spots. I would fully expect our military to be monitoring these parts of the country for drone-sized objects given how effective they have been in waging our wars the past 20 years. So yeah, it's a massive intelligence failure if these are combatant drones.
I don't disagree with any of this. Obviously drones are an extremely real intelligence and actual security threat that we clearly don't know how to handle.
20 years lol Off by a factor of 2.5x, but your expectation is reasonable --so is having a Defense Secretary that tells his staff when he's checking into the hospital for a serious medical condition and an airspace that doesn't allow balloons to get within range of broadcasting firmware updates to ESP32s.
..and Abichandani is reported to be an actual academic (in drone swarming technology) at a prestigious university that is local to the observations, not an enthusiast or politician!
In next room, I have a nearly 100yo man who, in a small group of people using computers with (literal) core memory, invented the technology, satellites and delivery systems to do Reconnaissance from orbit and more importantly, to spot the first signatures of arial weapons systems, yet downvoted here in the dystopian future when I merely correct the peanut gallery for spreading obvious fiction that America's ability to spot drones does not go back further than 20 years (or that the internal proprietary code of the latest ESP32 series Chinese MCUs has the well known ability to receive firmware updates via RF, even from Chinese balloons, Chinese LEO Starlink competitors and yes, drones).
The military isn’t allowed to shoot down drones in the US. There was a WSJ story last month about drones flying over Langley for 2 weeks. All the general could do is stand on the roof and watch
They shot down at least 3 including one that 100% belonged to a local club, meaning the military had no clue what they were launching missiles at. One was shot down over Lake Huron, and the pilot actually even managed to miss the balloon with his missile. It's like 99 Red Balloons meets Idiocracy.
Obviously the military can shoot down whatever they want, let alone use EM tech, which is highly effective at grounding drones. Drones keep getting sighted near the exact areas that would be testing out drone militarization, and not getting shot down. Gee, I wonder who's they might be.
People would be so dramatically more informed if they dropped social media and corporate news.
1) there was a very public delay to shoot down anything even remotely above people. They just aren’t going to shoot something down over a city
From the WSJ article I mentioned:
“ Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the U.S. unless they pose an imminent threat. Aerial snooping doesn’t qualify, though some lawmakers hope to give the military greater leeway”
2) as you probably know, the pilot doesn’t really guide the missile…calling the pilot an idiot just clearly shows you have an axe to grind. Also, it’s not like the seekers are calibrated to take out balloons.
3) regarding EW - the tech is obviously still evolving and not always deployed
“ U.S. officials said they didn’t know who operated the drones in Nevada, a previously unreported incursion, or for what reason. A spokeswoman said the facility has since upgraded a system to detect and counter drones.”
Also, it is certainly possible to harden drones against EW as is being done in Ukraine on an evolving basis
Just think rationally - in one case you had completely harmless weather balloons, and the government completely freaked out, scrambled fighters and even recklessly launched missiles at them.
Here you have supposedly car sized drones operating, in large numvers, in high risk areas and the government response is nonexistent. Nearby flights have not even been diverted as they do when there's the slightest security risk in an area.
Check any radiation map to see what's probably happening. Parts of New York, in the vicinity of the sightings, are showing extremely high radiation levels.
Its probably just drones searching for the source with the secrecy aimed at trying to avoid a mass panic.
Looking at the history of the one counter currently showing elevated levels (northjerseymike), it looks like the current value is well within variance of historical levels. I jumped back 10, 50, and 100 pages and without plotting, it didn't seem anything is notable about more recent data.
Also... why wouldn't the feds just say they're inspecting infrastructure and avoid the entire question...?
IMO this is almost certainly a commercial LIDAR mapping effort plus right wing conspiratorial hysteria.
The pages are sorted by date... I ended up going back roughly 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months.
A single value at a moment in time doesn't mean anything at all. You need to see the variance over time. And you need to trust the source data. The only "dangerously high" readings I saw were from counters that had no name, no history, no identifier, no additional values.
This theory makes no sense from the get-go and this "evidence" is extremely low quality.
Ok so you went back a day, saw the ongoing sky high readings from multiple sources which you were apparently trying to claim didn't exist, now acknowledge they exist, and now you want to claim they don't mean anything. Ok.
I do challenge you to show me the law stating that the military cannot engage unidentified and non-responsive potentially hostile vessels breaching controlled airspace, let alone with full authority from the CIC. That's just about the dumbest talking point ever.
Though even if such law exists, which it doesn't, then like any law in modern times, or even increasingly the Constitution, if the political establishment deemed it inconvenient then they would simply ignore it, and make up some lies.
And on that note, they are now acknowledging that they are indeed drones. The 'its just airplanes' lie lasted about 5 minutes. These people seriously hold the public in contempt.
It's not hysteria if UFOs start showing up en-masse and then people start thinking everything in the sky is a UFO. It just means people are more likely to attribute lights in the night sky to this new phenomenon. Of course there will be false positives, but it does not mean the underlying issue exists.
> And those other 4 out of 10 are very clearly not commercial airlines.
Cool, so a simple cursory glance of these mysterious phenomena is enough to immediately call bullshit on 60% of the claims.
That's a heck of a false positive rate, given the fact that this happens before any verification takes place.
If at least 60% of the claims given the same credibility are outright rejected without any effort, what does it say about the claims and those who make them?
There is supposed to be an elemwent of 'mimicry' on the part of the Phenomenon. Kelleher in his work with AAWSAP was the most vocal in studying & concluding that aspect:
The drones only operate at night and it's hard taking good pictures at night with phones (or even nice cameras) - try to take a picture of the moon, which isn't moving, is brighter, etc.. you can tell it's the moon but it's a lot quality picture.
It sucks that we have to worry that our normally silly and harmless UFO hysteria and other fringe stuff might actually be an influence operation. (Just because tone doesn’t go well over the internet sometimes: Not disagreeing or being sarcastic, commiserating).
Well that's the natural result of not doing anything meaningful against Russia and its "plausible deniability" campaigns in well over a decade. Of course Russia and China feel emboldened when they never felt consequences.
As someone who lives in New York near two very busy airports, I can assure you that after seeing dozens of planes fly over my house every hour, year after year, it isn't hard to figure out what isn't a plane.
Under what circumstances and motivations, exactly, do you think that unlicensed and illegal (clearly not FAA Part 107 compliant) drone operators would be motivated to put blinking white, red and green lights on their mystery drones? Why would they do that?
If you're doing to build a drone to fly at night and do clearly illegal things you're going to make the thing matte black and have no lights on it whatsoever.
For starters, you need special waivers from the faa to fly at night. If any such waivers existed, I am sure the FAA would have told the news media who are hyping up this story.
I was referring specifically to BVLOS operations at night. It's doubtful if there are any nearby operators of these craft that they're within legit LOS. Combination of BVLOS and night operations is presently only found in very special circumstances and test ranges like at Pendleton.
Of the number of operators who have active BVLOS waivers I am aware of, such as for powerline, pipeline survey and delivery operations, very few or none are trying to also operate at night.
It would allow for different configurations to make identification harder. It's very easy to only operate at night and swap out the color and pattern of the lights constantly. Almost every photo device would capture the light pattern the attacker WANTS them to capture. High quality equipment could get better pictures, but such equipment is often not rolling 24/7 or easy to point at a drone moving fast.
> can see how it's tempting to chalk this up to hysteria, but they are absolutely large drones of some kind
It's probably neither enemy infiltration or hysteria, but mis-identified drones and aircraft. (Together with some hooliganism.)
Pentagon should investigate. But this is way below the threshold of warranting public alarm. "What is that thing in the sky" is a notoriously terrible game for the public.
The videos i saw ostensibly showed what looked like rear fixed wing aircraft, like a small f-16 or something. But you could only make out that detail from the lights, which can be configured however you want to configure them to look, so, technically, it could be a large quadcopter (or octa, or hex) with lights affixed that make it look like a fixed wing aircraft.
none of the videos i saw had sound from the drone to verify fixed wing or "copter".
regarding night flights, FLIR would work better for certain things at night ;-)
when i say FLIR i mean the things that militaries use, not the little doodad you plug into a cellphone or a handheld device with a screen and a camera. I was under the impression these things loitered much longer than any commercial quadcopter or normal battery powered aircraft. if my understanding is correct, that leaves two options - a glider, which is weight constrained so probably just a gopro or two, or a fueled aircraft, in which case, FLIR makes sense because that's a decent platform.
the reports were "flying around for hours" but that could be exaggeration and it flew a pattern several times over a couple of hours but was landing to swap batteries or whatever. IDK. I think this is all much ado about nothing.
The only openly available price I've seen for such things is from China, and then it's $80k. The Teledyne FLIR stuff is probably quite a bit more expensive.
It contains speculation about their height and speed. You usually can't estimate those things for a UFO because near, low, and slow looks the same as far, high and fast when you have no idea how big it is or how it "should" behave.
Man you're a killjoy, but you can't really say they can't estimate it as you don't know the specifics of what they saw, so there's speculation on your part too. I'd say you get a rough estimate, but you can't know for sure especially at night.
Although in this case if the person thinks it was low, and slow, that's less remarkable than if it was high and fast, because then it would be giant.
Overall, I'd say we're "converging on truth" because of all the reports. Like sparsity, even if each report is incomplete or has innacuracy overall we can build a picture, which is what we're doing. Killjoy. Hahahaha :)
Yea, maybe he had other information that helped. I'm just sensitive to reports of UFOs that include estimates of those derived quantities because people reporting them never say how they worked them out or what assumptions they were making. They could have reported the more directly observed quantities like angular speed instead of linear speed.
I know someone who saw an alien spacecraft landing on a distant mountain. Turned out to be Venus :P
This story is so strange. I mean the US if im not mistaken allowed a huge white ballon to transverse the country and i heard Trump say that was from China. If that's true we just allowed it fly all over our airspace (weird). Is that not a potential public safety hazard and now these things. So odd nothing is being done like one of our jet fighters going up and shooting one down into a field.
It's much more valuable to watch it, see what kind of scans are coming from it than to just shoot it down immediately. It is also a bargaining chip for those in international politics.
If you're going to shoot it down, it has the same value if you do it immediately or later (assuming any remote wiping/detonation), so either you're paranoid that it poses a legitimate threat or it's beneficial to not shoot it down immediately.
> American officials later disclosed that they had been tracking the balloon since it was launched from Hainan and its original destinations were likely Guam and Hawaii,[a] but prevailing winds blew it off course and across North America.[11]
> The Chinese government maintained it was a civilian (mainly meteorological) airship that had been blown off course.
So weird my comments in this thread here are being downvoted a ton.
Those who are downvoting and you are in the US i'd love to hear why you have no concern about these things and or no concern the world thinking we let drones fly unabated in our airspace ... prompting various foreign nations to try and do the same over our massive US of A airspace on up into remote-ish Alaska. You have congressman saying scary things while the Pentagon says those congressman words arent true.
I mentioned Trump above (i voted for her) if that was something that triggered some downvotes?
overall this says the US will allow undenitified drones in our air space and to fly unabated to our enemies ... one of these or future ones could be weaponized. So its unfathomable to me that they we are letting these things fly unabated in our airspace, as well the govt is providing zero info or re-assurance.
- We certainly can't deny that "something" is happening
- The US, if not the world, is going to be rocked by (basically) open war in the skies of America
- If we fail to down these things, we look like utterly weak fools
- Succeed or fail, we reveal our capabilities (or lack thereof)
- Legit public safety issue, bullets/shells/missiles/etc that miss these things have to come down somewhere, as well as wreckage (if any) it self
These drones, IF hostile are not necessarily the security risk one might think IMO. If we are just leaking radio signals into the air around bases that these things can intercept, then those communications could just as easily be intercepted by people/cars/etc on the ground. And our "near peers" have plenty of satellites overhead.
I am not going to tell you that letting them fly around unmolested is good. It is not. It sucks. But it is probably the least shitty option.
Because they're not threats, and your 'enemies' are just other countries who have resources your country wants, but won't do what your country says. The calls are coming from inside the house.
Nah dude, all of these people in the comments thread who live in northern California and have no knowledge of drones beyond playing with a buddy's DJI one time at a cookout are insisting it's your imagination, and that you're gripped by a mass hysteria.
Who are you gonna believe? Them, or your lying eyes?
I don't think your sarcasm adds anything constructive to the discourse. If anything, it makes the person you're replying to look less credible because you're furthering the stereotype of UFO conspiracy theorists touting "trust me bro" evidence and little else.
I 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.
>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.
> 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.
Wouldn't it be much, much, much easier and less crazy that, if you want to fly a small object at night and hide its exact nature and position, you would just paint it a deep, non-reflective black? Adding lights to an object you want to hide at night is completely crazy.
This is true, and we had this debate a little bit - disguising is not the same as hiding.
If you're trying to avoid any detection then you would also want to mask the sound, or else people will be hearing things in the sky and not seeing anything... until they start pointing low-light and infrared cameras at the sky. When that happens the vantablack drones are going to pop against the background and leave no doubt that there is something strange in the sky, since they def won't be looking/moving like bats.
By disguising as planes you blend in with the air traffic for most people, and create confusion and debate with anyone who does notice they are out of the ordinary (exactly what we're seeing now).
Another point is that lights on flying objects in the dark serve a purpose, and if these drones are coordinating with each other, they may be using the lights to maintain formations or avoid running into each other without relying on other communication channels that could give away more information.
> the fact that it is _still_ not been resolved by any agency is insane
I don't think it's insane. We won't get serious about tracking UAVs/drones/RC aircraft until there is an incident. Until then, agencies likely do not have the money, resources, time or motivation to do it.
From 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.
well, 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!
Most of the Toyota acceleration accidents were almost certainly the result of operator error. The fact that the staistical probablity increased with age gives that away.
However, Toyota got convicted because their software development process was so terrible that they were effectively criminally negligent and deserved to get absolutely roasted for it.
Globals are common and even right in this application. However they didn't take proper care in other ways (i'm not clear what I've just been in embedded long enough to know globals are often required despite how hard they are to get right)
Global variables (nee static) are fairly normal in embedded. You want to preallocate all your memory since you generally don't have a heap.
Mostly you have specific inputs from some other tasks and your outputs are consumed by different tasks. So, even though the variables are "global" they generally only have one writer with multiple readers in properly done embedded programming.
What Toyota did was not even in the same universe as "properly done embedded".
"specific inputs from some other tasks and your outputs are consumed by different tasks" sounds a lot like how PLCs work. Just running an infinite loop scanning inputs and triggering outputs in response to the state of the inputs.
In general embedded controllers like this don't have a lot of people working on them. They also have rules (enforced by review which isn't great) about when they can be accessed. In an embedded context you are not allowed to allocate memory (except at startup), so a lot of these globals are just arrays/buffers only used by one function or pseudo class (a class by intent but not actually a class by the language if the language even has a concept of class)
I 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?
Yeah, 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.)
I 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.)
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):
My 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?
> The pentagon, for example, just declared that they do not know what they are
I often hear those hyping UFO sightings citing this type of statement by the Pentagon. However, the Pentagon saying the don't know what it is doesn't mean anything. Of course, they don't know what it is. They weren't there. They didn't see it nor have any idea if there was anything unusual seen. The null hypothesis is the still the most likely: this is a result of media hype causing increased erroneous reports of aircraft and hobbyist drones along with false reports by social media attention seekers.
Also, the Pentagon has a consistently terrible track record of failing to properly identify spurious internal lens reflections, digital stabilization artifacts, IR ghosting and gimbal rotation on their own footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs.
> The pentagon, for example, just declared that they do not know what they are
That is absolutely not what was said in that video. They just said that they're not drones from a foreign entity or adversary, nor are they US military drones.
> 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.
>people don't seem to realize that there is no USGOV tracking of drone-sized objects
Anything 250g or heavier has to have Remote ID now. Now that doesn't exclude the possibility of illegal drones without it, but it isn't true that there is "no drone tracking".
Unless there are also receivers for this operated by the government, that's technically not a conflict with the claim. Tracking means you're tracking something, not just forcing them to send a signal. It's only tracking once you receive and process the signal.
What do you think Drone ID is? It’s basically Bluetooth transmissions. Very localized reception and basically impossible to monitor over a wide area without many, many receivers spread out evenly all over the place.
The pentagon also didn't tell anyone in the 80s that all the "UFO sightings" in Nevada were test flights of the F-117.
You know the pentagon doesn't have to tell you (or even the feds!) the truth, right? You know that when they say "We can't track 1 trillion dollars of our budget!" they aren't being fully honest, right?
One 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
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.
Something 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.
Something 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.)
what/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?
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.
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.
Yes 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?
It still doesn't make sense. He was elected to Congress in 2018, long after the end of the Cold War. I think GP is just mixing him up with someone else.
It’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?
Other 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?
After. 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.
Perhaps its satanic ritualists turned techo-optimists who are attempting to convert the public to their baby killing ways through drone-based mind control.
Just 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.
Lol 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.
Why 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.
AAL578 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.
Yeah 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?
i 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.
It'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!".
My favorite part is the part when they say "Aha! It's camoflauge! It LOOKS like an aeroplane but in fact it's a disguise!". I mean, what's next, a helicopter is chasing a drone and they say "Aha! The alien craft has disguised itself as one of our helicopters chasing one of our drones, who would suspect that!"
Anyway the non-alien conspiracy theories are along the lines of radiation sniffers for a suitcase nuke, drone tests for material transport between bases & offshore navy ships, red team vs blue team drone tests.
I 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.
Ah. 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.)
> 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.
I 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.
I 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.
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.
Human eyes also have blind spots called Scotomas- our brains do some sort of calculation to make us not notice the fact our eyes have blind spots. I imagine if your brain is wired to do the calculation "wrong" in this scenario you end up seeing things differently than a camera would.
What 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.
there 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.
They almost certainly had flight spares but with two weeks until your launch window, there is zero chance you are deintegrating multiple systems, swapping in the spare, reintegrating, and re running your acceptance test campaigns. And that is assuming that they damaged a subsystem. Back powering the entire spacecraft could have wrecked your power system and anything connected to it. You'd have to disposition every part of the system that was touched. It's much more involved than just swapping in the spare and sending it.
The implied context here is that you'd forgo the usual tests, because the alternative is to send nothing to Mars.
According to Wikipedia they could have stretched those 2 weeks to around 3 weeks, but after that they'd have missed the launch window.
The usual processes are there to have a near-certainty of a working rover, but under these circumstances I'd think they'd just YOLO it and hope for the best.
But that assumes they've got spare electrical components, or alternatively a better use for the booster sitting on the pad than such an improvised mission.
Spirit/Opportunity had the SSTB1 test rover, which supposedly had a complete set of scientific instruments. If it was fully qualified and tested, swapping it out could have been as easy as dropping it in the lander and writing a different serial number in the paperwork.
(I really doubt it was fully tested. But why else have a flight spare vehicle?)
It sounds like you'd be better served by caffeine pills then. No need to bother with a delivery mechanism you don't enjoy when there are easier solutions out there!
I used to be a caffeine pill person. Would get up at 4:30, have a caffeine pill and a glass of water, ride my bike for a couple hours, go to work. In that case, I wanted caffeine first and liquid later (throughout my ride) so I wouldn't have to make a "rest stop".
I kept up the caffeine pill habit after I stopped doing those rides (social life after work made going to bed at 8:30 a little untenable), but ran out and switched back to coffee. Coffee really gives you some extras that mere caffeine doesn't, I just feel a little "warmer" after a good cup of coffee. Also, all those papers you read about coffee being good for you are coffee, not necessarily caffeine. So if you want those benefits, I recommend the actual thing.
I have some friends who drink energy drinks just for the caffeine ("I hate the taste") and to that demographic I recommend caffeine pills wholeheartedly. If you don't like the taste of caffeinated beverages, don't drink them.
Absolutely! I enjoy my daily routine and all of the nuances associated with it (whether that's just the result of addiction is a different conversation). I was just suggesting that the parent comment doesn't need to use coffee for their caffeine fix if they don't enjoy it.
That's very much not true about heaters. The most common systems in the US are gas, heat pumps, and oil. Resistive heat is nearly always an emergency backup in places that get meaningfully cold for any amount of time.
Resistive heating is more efficient than burning gas for heat. Gas has been historically cheap, so burning it has made economic sense over using electricity.
Heat pumps are kinda what the sound like. Pumping 30 degrees of heat inside to keep warm takes more energy than pumping 20 degrees of heat outside to stay cool. Heating costs will come to dominate residential energy usage as people electrify their homes. A/C will be number two or possibly number 3 behind water heating.
Efficient doesn't really mean anything without an thorough understanding of the local energy grid. Distributed solar mixed with wind and some gas peakers? Sure, probably better from a GhG perspective to use restive heat, even if it isn't cheaper cost wise. Running your house on a coal heavy grid with long transmission lines? Yeah, gas is probably better in the short to medium term unless you can get a good deal on solar panels and storage.
All of that's kinda moot though since modern heat pumps are insanely effective, relatively cheap to install, and work down to sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures using only air-source exchangers.
"sure, my house's foundation is made of cardboard, but have you considered that the empire state building could also be destroyed in a large enough earthquake?"
This suggests that we need to look into the engineering details of a building (or peg arrangement) to determine whether we can trust it, instead of just declaring all building (or all pegs) 'nonsense'.
Pistachios and Almonds use 4x less acreage than Alfalfa, hay, clover, etc. These feed and grazing crops use almost exactly equal acre-feet of water per acre as pistachios and almonds. It's a convenient direction to finger point at if you want to distract from the impact of animal feed agriculture.
There is plenty of water in the south west, we just use most of it to grow animal feed in the desert. Even worst, much of that water is subsidized by the US Government which allows farmers to grow that animal feed in the high plains where it would be economically infeasible otherwise. We have engineered this problem to the benefit of a small number of ranchers and farmers and seem determined to blame it on everybody else.
We agree here. By "consumption," I'm not just referring to residential consumption.
There is enough water in the Southwest for a sizable population, of course. The problem ahead is how to distribute a constrained resource to that population without deferring to lobbied interests, wealthy landowners, golf-course owners, etc. That's an uphill battle, to say the least.
For sure! Even Buy-and-dry schemes seem to be struggling with political backlash and those landowners are being fairly compensated in voluntary transactions. It's not going to be pretty when the junior water rights holders are cut off for good.
Agree. In LV they’ve got huge water works to recycle all water. It’s a known that the water almost exclusively leaves the system when it’s evaporated or used to water plants. And there are tight restrictions on residential use.
The benefit is arguably not just to a small number of ranchers and farmers.
The U.S. went all-in on globalization. That includes globalization of food production. For 50 years the typical USian has taken bananas and coconut for granted. Coffee is a staple in every kitchen.
Produce and dairy of countless varieties are produced in California for consumers around the country and indeed around the world.
Would you argue that globalization of the food supply chain is a mistake? Do you propose that Chicago grow its own spinach? Should Saudi Arabia grow its own alfalfa? Should apples and grapes consumed in Oklahoma be grown in Oklahoma?
I suppose many people are rethinking this whole globalization strategy. From microchips to mozzarella. Economics: the spectator sport with real spectator consequences.
The fact that the US grows a lot of food domestically seems completely counter to what you're saying. Growing food within the US has a lot of benefits but doing so in the middle of the desert is the worst possible spot.
Prove it. Start a tomato farm in Tennessee and challenge Musk and Bezos with your fortune. Replace tobacco with carrots in North Carolina and see how it goes.
Here’s a list of almost exclusively tomato farms in a single county in TN. Your globalization take is bad, but the tired repetition of the only-California-grows-food trope is also bad.
Thank you for those links. I'm very glad to see them. I wish them all success. I really do think it is important to not concentrate food production.
That said, all 70 growers combined total less than 500 acres. It's a good start.
But it doesn't prove that California "desert" is the worst place to grow produce. What is the total yield of those 500 acres? What is the price per pound? How well do they compete in the market?
Again, I hope they compete well. But I know that the tomato in my back yard cost me 5x the one coming off the truck at the local grocer.
> The U.S. went all-in on globalization. That includes globalization of food production.
"Globalization" would include an elimination of domestic agricultural subsidies and tariffs such that everyone is on a level playing field, which is something we have not done in our agricultural sector.
I'm also not convinced that they're even out of Far-field. That looks like a roughly 5m dish, which at 10GHz is still in the radiating near field at 1km. I wouldn't be surprised if the main lobe is entirely incident on receiving aperture. That's a neat demo but it does not demonstrate truly radiating power between two distant points. They've essentially built a fancy a wireless cellphone charger.
60% is also almost certainly not total system. A portable antenna like that by itself, with no path loss or other losses, would likely have an aperture efficiency of about 60%. A planar patch antenna like the one used to receive would be similar.
https://www.app.com/story/news/local/new-jersey/2024/12/11/d...