No one wants it to be aliens more than me. Even if they plan to force us to work in diamond mines in space, I would do it Despite it Welcome alien overlords. But it never is Aliens. The “drones” everyone sees are not aliens. They’re not foreign invaders or part of a secret government project or anything else cool. No one can say with 100% certainty, but I’ll bet with my collection of solid gold back scratches that the recent spate of reports of unidentified flying objects is because humans are very bad at identifying objects.
Here’s a quick recap in case you’ve been under a rock: In mid-November, dozens of people in 10 New Jersey counties reported seeing drones (or something similar) in the night sky. According to authorities in New JerseyDrones have been seen in the skies over critical infrastructure such as water reservoirs, power lines, train stations, police departments and military installations. After the initial media coverage, further reports of sightings were received. People posted pictures and videos or lights and spots in the sky. Congressmen demanded Transparency and vigilance. The Ministry of Defense did not reassure anyone by saying that they did not know what the objects were, but that they did not come from a foreign source and were not dangerous. Gullible online types Shared theories, fuzzy photographic evidence and their feelings about the alien visitation/foreign invasion/secret project/mass psyop to distract us from it real Threat: Vampires. And that’s where we are now: searching through a growing trove of over 5,000 citizen reports about UFOs or UAPS, positing theories and waiting for an official statement or visit from the mothership.
I could easily imagine someone thinking drone madness was the start of an alien invasion –this Pentagon briefing would fit perfectly in the first act of a Michael Bay movie, for example – but we don’t really know what an invasion of the US by aliens or high-tech enemies would look like because it’s never happened before. We know what mass hysteria (or Mass sociogenic technophobia) looks, and it turns out that it looks like this Exactly like this. And it’s not just me who thinks that; The Department of Homeland Security, FBI, FAA and Department of Defense also say: “There is nothing here.”
Some of the many, many things in the sky that people might confuse with UFOs or mysterious drones
As reports of drone sightings spread across New Jersey and the rest of the country, more and more people are probably looking to the skies, and it turns out there are a lot of things up there that are difficult to immediately identify. How:
Planes and helicopters
Many reported drone sightings occur along the known flight paths of manned aircraft or helicopters and are almost certainly aircraft or helicopters. As Drone expert Dr. Will Austin explains“After analyzing numerous videos shared by concerned citizens, I am inclined to believe that many of the reported ‘large drones’ were actually manned aircraft that were misidentified as drones.”
An identifying sign for an airplane or helicopter are the red and green lights. The FAA requires this on aircraft flying at night. Therefore, be extremely suspicious of drone photos in these colors. If you can find out the time and location of a sighting, you can check if this is the case an airliner to.
Moving objects in the sky can appear stationary depending on your movement relative to them, making it easy to confuse a moving plane with a hovering drone. Check out this video to see what I mean:
Venus, Jupiter and other celestial bodies
People often confuse everyday celestial bodies with UFOs. For example, Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland, appears to believe that the Orion constellation is made up of “dozens of large drones.”
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be loading or may have been removed.
Everyday American drones
You have to imagine that anyone with a drone on the East Coast is trying to get a better look at what’s supposed to be up there at night, and any new drone could potentially be mistaken for something mysterious. In addition to hobbyist drones, there are commercial and government drones that are used for everything from firefighting to photography. Unlike airplanes, you cannot check flight routes.
Lens flares, bokeh and other camera artifacts
Check out this crazy “alien bullet” filmed by ABC News:
It is actually an enlarged, blurred point of light. Probably a star. Like this:
Balloons, plastic bags, etc.
As a frequent lurker on Reddit’s r/UFO, I’m amazed at the number of people who can’t tell a Mylar balloon from a flying saucer. Actually, anything can look like a UFO, from a strange cloud to a dragon a beetle getting close to the camera lens.
Intentional false reports
Anyone interested in scamming people must have a big deal. It’s not particularly difficult to do that even if we’re not in the middle of a UFO madness, you know?
Satellites and space debris
The International Space Station, Elon Musk’s StarLink satellites, and thousands of other things we’ve launched into space orbit the Earth. Many of them are visible from Earth and might make you think of “alien drone”! Or “UFO!”
Secret plane
Now we come to the more entertaining area of UFO sightings: experimental aircraft. The US government has a history of flying aircraft that no one knows about, and many people who saw the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk and the Northrop Grumman B-2 thought they were UFOs before they were announced. A stealth plane even crashed in Bakersfield The result is a scene straight out of AND. So it’s possible, folks Are Seeing secret drones, but it seems unlikely: Testing an unknown drone in a densely populated area seems like a bad way to keep it secret, especially if it is illuminated. But it is possible.
…Something unknown, like a flying object
Known flying objects probably account for almost all reported sightings, and if given enough time and energy, I’m confident someone could certainly figure out what each object actually was. But that’s not enough all UFOs and/or UAPs. There are a handful of examples of UFO sightings in which multiple credible witnesses report seeing something mysterious in the sky, often backed up by solid evidence. For example this USS Nimitz Tic Tac was seen by several experienced military pilots, whose reports were supported by infrared camera and RADAR footage.
Although these cases cannot be dismissed as nothing, they cannot be confirmed as anything either. At the moment, such sightings are in the “We don’t know what this is” file. They may be explained in the future, but for now they remain a troublesome mystery. In the most recent wave, there have been no sightings that have come close to the level of evidence needed to believe that there might be anything “real” there, at least none that I am aware of.
Back then, aliens broke everyone’s windshields
If you want a prediction about how this will all end, this is “Windshield pitting epidemic in Seattle“ provides a possible result. This incident began in April 1954 when a handful of Bellingham, WA residents reported mysterious dents, chips and holes in their car windows that they said had been fine the day before.
Newspapers reported on the mystery. Police initially suspected that a local gang of juvenile delinquents (I assume dressed in leather jackets and armed with switchblades) were committing the vandalism, but that theory was debunked as reports came in from across the Pacific Northwest. Some people said they watched bubbles form in the glass in real time, and car lots were said to have been hit particularly hard.
No one had any idea what was behind the phenomenon, but theories ranged from sand fleas burrowing in glass to fallout from offshore H-bomb testing to damage from radio waves. Police were soon inundated with thousands of reports of windshield damage from Vancouver and Ontario. Seattle Mayor Allan Pomeroy asked the governor and President Eisenhower for help, and police examined over 14,000 windshields. But the Seattle police crime lab solved the case. A few weeks after the panic began, they released a report and concluded that the culprit was literally nothing. Holes in the windshield are a normal byproduct of driving, and the newspaper reports caused people to look at their windshields – instead of at them through their windshields – for the first time. If you didn’t know, there were pits.
It was a classic case of mass deception, and I strongly suspect this is happening in New Jersey, but instead of confusing a scarred windshield with radiation damage, people are confusing airplanes with mysterious drones.
Just as the windshield pitting theories arose from the unrest over the then-new hydrogen bomb, I suspect that our current mass delusion has its roots in the unrest over all the new things in the sky – there is over one Millions of drones for example, registered with the FAA. By the 1950s, people seemed to have either accepted the scientific and logical explanation or at least stopped talking about it, and the windshield pitting epidemic faded into history.
I’d like to think something like this will happen with the drones, but these are different times when expertise and science aren’t as respected and people seem eager to find their own explanations. I’d bet we’ll be talking about fake UFOs and mysterious drones for a long time.
