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Comment by one2know | Hacker News Reader

These drones had Denver area defense contractor written all over them. I would guess Lockheed or Raytheon or Boulder based lab or company. They would not coordinate because 1. every project they do is classified 2. probably is some sort of mass surveillance tech that they would rather not advertise 3. Probably not sponsored directly by the military or deemed a weapons system, so no need to go through the hassle of testing on a military range (lets just drive a few hours outside town). 4. Didn't want to go through the hassle of dealing with the FAA and know that if the FAA seriously got involved they could just pull strings. 5. Don't care if they bother a few farmers and consider most of the area to be "empty"

Clearly the drones stopped because it was a limited term contract.

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A list of Lockheed Martin Space projects, headquartered in Denver. None of these are "classified":

NASA's Orion spacecraft

NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-R) weather satellite series

NASA's MAVEN

NASA's JUNO

NASA's OSIRIS-REx

NASA's InSight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Space#Civil_Sp...

There are a lot of space/satellite companies in the Denver area, but not many drone companies. As you may know, design of a satellite is different from design of a quadcopter drone. Satellites are launched by rockets, powered by solar panels, and orbit earth. Drones fly in the atmosphere using rotors to move air, controlled by humans on the ground. So it would seem odd to associate satellite-building engineering operations, often completely civil, with clandestine drones.

I wonder if anyone has checked what satellites were where during these sightings.

Satellite detection tech of drones could be a thing...

Correct me, but Lockheed has four divisions. I just saw an ad for Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR). Just because a sensor goes on a spacecraft, doesn't mean it can't be tested on a drone.

The projects you listed may not be top secret but I'm sure they still fall under ITAR. Either way if a defense contractor was out testing stuff on drones, then I doubt they would coordinate with anyone.

Ball Aerospace is another near Boulder

This is the most obvious answer.

There is nothing obvious about this. It's the kind of baseless speculation that belongs in fringe conspiracy forums, not here

Former defense contractor at (Relatively) small company here, this is a reasonable and common sense explanation, especially from what I know from being inside the defense industry. It’s not even far fetched at all. I don’t think this goes to the level or being conspiracy or fringe at all.

Why is that a "conspiracy?" It makes good sense, just sign an NDA with a farmer to use their property. What is the alternative? For every single test travel down to a missile range having days of turnaround.

A conspiracy would be more like they are testing remote monitoring drones on unsuspecting farmers and are not supposed to be spying in the United States because they are under government contract. But there would be no need for something like that for some tests.

Or its aliens.

> For every single test travel down to a missile range having days of turnaround.

Or just use Lockheed's test facilities in the desert in California, which are far more remote and have better weather.

There's a reason aviation companies operate in SoCal, and not Colorado.

As with the death of Fahim Saleh, HN is trending towards shadowy, dramatic reasons that just don't make sense in the face of numerous mundane explanations.

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