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Comment by the-dude | Hacker News Reader

There are many eye witnesses, but no pictures or videos?

Yeah, I really don't understand this. There are also people on nextdoor claiming that they spotted "the Colorado drones" in my neighborhood which is nowhere near north west Colorado. At this point I think people are just seeing anything in they sky and assume its "the drones" spying on them. The news also says that they are not violating any laws currently and that we need more regulation of drones. And then local law enforcement says they do not know who it is but its not them. I really doubt this because it is not legal currently to fly a UAV at night without special permission. Also the area it is reported to be happening is near a bunch of ICBM missile silos. I suspect it some military thing and when it made the news they just let people think whatever they want in part because it will get people to be in favor of more regulation.

I fly small tinywhoop quadcopters around my house. Its a 21gram palm sized quad with fpv camera. Some people have a hysteria about drones and assume that you must be spying on them. If they could see what I see in my camera they would realize you cant see much detail of a person unless you get pretty close.

I’d have to go digging but a local news crew was able to capture video at one point.

Here’s an amateur video... https://www.denverpost.com/2019/12/31/drone-video-yuma-count...

Thank you!

Funny the video quality is very UFO-alike : it could be anything.

Yep, all I see is a small white dot moving on a completely black background - not particularly convincing.

What would you expect though? More than likely someone's mobile device. These things are not good at taking pictures without plenty of light.

Maybe it would be more convincing if you could see something, anything other than pure black - buildings, a tree line, whatever. As it is, it's literally a white dot on a black background - I couldn't even see any image noise in the black (although I am on mobile).

Why? It's western Colorado. There's nothing out there except land. The sky at night is black. Something flying in the night sky will be flying above tree lines requiring the observer to be looking up. I honestly don't know why you'd be expecting a full on feature film production level of equipment to be available to someone that happens to notice a drone flying and trying to capture it. There's a reason certain activities take place in the dead of night. Avoiding being seen is one of them. What's the confusion? I get it's "disappointing" to not see everything, but if everything could be seen in the footage there'd not be mystery/intrigue.

> honestly don't know why you'd be expecting a full on feature film production level of equipment to be available

You're exaggerating now. My point was simply that the imagery is entirely unconvincing, and could be trivially faked.

The objection several posts up was "there are all these reports, but nobody captured video?" And then somebody pointed out that in fact witnesses did capture video, but it's as predictably terrible as one would expect given that smartphones are terrible for filming remote airplanes at night.

Agreed.

The news crew video was a little better as they had some sound of the propellers lending some credibility. I just can’t seem to track it down.

If it's just one that's not particularly weird. There are really powerful lighting systems available now in packages small enough to be put on a cargo quad that put out a LOT of light. On an octocopter like the Alta X or other cinema style drones they could stay up for a while just carrying the light. There's also some companies with tethered systems that could stay up indefinitely.

A larger 'swarm' could be any number of even non defense companies testing.

https://www.stratusleds.com/module

Stratus Light in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvDXjC-_7uo

AirMast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nllC9LGnUMQ

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