Comment by obmelvin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by obmelvin | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

Can you link a map?

A web search will turn up a bunch. Here's one - https://www.gmcmap.com

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.

You need to go by date, not whatever pages are. When I made that post, levels were around 400 which is dangerously high.

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.

You sort of people are so weird.

I haven't made any claims about the recent sightings. Some have clearly been planes and people are just looking up more.

My original point was and is that there are many laws restricting what the military is able to do domestically.

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.

You're arguing with me about points I haven't made.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com