I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
Of course, not all "Lights in the Sky" are airplanes, helicopters, drones, stars, satellites or reflections of ground-based lights. There was an interesting sighting in Arizona two weeks ago analyzed and explained by the indefatigable Mick West (2 min video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V00KT4PCd-0.
Because they were stars. Naturally, this dimwit took the opportunity to blame the feds for failing to act.
Apparently there are a lot of people out there who ordinarily just never look up in their daily lives. And instead of thinking “I’m not familiar with this stuff so I don’t know what I’m seeing,” they manage to conclude “I’m seeing something strange and nobody knows what it is.”
And of course there have always been plenty of airplane lights.
Not to mention Venus, which more than one fighter pilot has tried to shoot down.
The additives added to tap water to make them generate rainbows is a good example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIYZvr3ueGw
There is a BBC Radio program called More or Less, which covers analysis of statistics in the media. They have a motto "Is that a big number?" which is a great starting point for any investigation, essentially asking if the observation is what you would expect if nothing newsworthy were occurring. It's worth keeping that idea floating in your head.
It's not any one individual thing. You can even reframe some (one?) of the factors as Great Democracy Saving.
But they add up to: it is rational to not really trust anything, and people don't mind if you were wrong if you just didn't trust The Man/They, so there's more incentive to not trust, than trust.
Hyperbole from people who should know better doesn't help. Ex. a quite intelligent AI commentator tweeted yesterday, asking why there hasn't been a reckoning for anyone who publicly worried about effects of AI imagery on truth.
It gets easier to believe when supposed trustworthy sources: news outlets, the government as a whole and even specific senators/ex governors, fan the flames of conspiracy instead of common sense.
pennies are useless junk, straight to the recycling bin for me. really epitomizes our dysfunction that we are unable to stop making them
I put mine in baggies and use them as weights
I worry more about things I can’t see…
I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at first, but it was too close to the ground (seemed a few hundred feet up at most), had the mismatched light pattern characteristic of trans-wing drones, and moved too slowly for other types of aircraft. And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish. Honestly, it kind of freaked me out having some previously abstract news-cycle object just floating ominously down the road across from me.
EDIT: I thought that HN of all places would be able to pick what’s actually happening from what’s not; Mass hysteria occurring and drones being everywhere are not mutually exclusive, and a critical analysis of the info available makes it very clear that there are mysterious drones out at night. Seeing one article about people misidentifying things only tells you that people are misidentifying things, it says nothing about the countless videos showing positively identified drones, and certainly not about the fact that the government has repeatedly stated that there are drones doing this. And given all of that, downvoting someone giving their personal account with reasonable criticality is at best ignorant.
100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks, &c.
> (seemed a few hundred feet up at most)
At night you have absolutely no way to tell
> And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish.
My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an alien craft
> Honestly, it kind of freaked me out having some previously abstract news-cycle object just floating ominously down the road across from me.
That's the definition of media induced mass hysteria, you notice a lot of weird things when you look at things you usually don't bother looking at. People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way during an electricity outage in 1994
It's a natural approximation to a Total Perspective Vortex. Knowing what it represents probably makes the likelihood of an existential crisis more likely.
A lot of videos are bunk, I have seen at least one video that is certainly drones.
> At night you have absolutely no way to tell
I agree, but I’ve seen plenty of other aircraft at night and it appeared to be much closer than any of those. And you can get a rough guess based on apparent size of the lights, though of course that’s extremely rough unless you know the size of the aircraft.
> My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an alien craft
I know, I never claimed it was aliens or a Chinese super weapon, I claimed they were drones. It’s almost certain that they are military drones, and if I had to guess they’re searching for something that would cause real mass hysteria if told to the public.
> That's the definition of media induced mass hysteria, you notice a lot of weird things when you look at things you usually don't bother looking at. People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way during an electricity outage in 1994
That certainly occurs, what I meant is more that I felt an odd sensation having the news cycle and what I observed collide, in the sense that it didn’t feel quite real. I would normally notice at an aircraft that appeared to be as close as it was, and I would definitely pay more attention to it when I noticed the lights and movement pattern, regardless of the news cycle. It actually took me a second to connect the two.
People in LA freaking out because they saw the Milky Way is normal, people noticed something new and reacted to it. I would wager that more people responded with awe than with freaking out, but they weren’t as interesting to the media. Regardless of whether they were freaked out or not (and I wasn’t freaked out so much as it was freaky), they still saw something real.
If you saw an unknown object and it seemed closer to you than normal aircraft, that’s your brain suffering from an illusion. It’s not real information.
> If you saw an unknown object and it seemed closer to you than normal aircraft, that’s your brain suffering from an illusion. It’s not real information.
Ohhh, thanks for letting me know.
Given all the rest, I have to say I’m not super confident in your estimate of angular size.
Neither am I, but I am confident it was a drone. Does “given all the rest” mean I wrote so much I have to be crazy, or do you actually have an explanation that better fits what I saw? Given the light configuration I don’t see how it could be a plane. And helicopters make a very distinctive noise. Maybe I saw a military helicopter, but at that point drones seem more likely.
I am interested in alternative proposals that take into account everything I observed. Less so in single-point criticisms coming from the assumption that there’s nothing to see so I must be deluded if I think I saw something.
I am not discounting what you saw and have no particular reason to doubt you, but human psychology operates in a way that is not conducive to being proven wrong about such things. Take that as you will.
You’re right that my interpretation in the end will be heavily influenced by my expectations, but unless I completely hallucinated the light pattern or gained temporary telescopic vision such that I saw each nav light separated by multiple visual-field-feet (if that makes any sense) on a plane at cruising altitude, I just can’t think of any explanation that fits better than drone.
Why is that almost certain?
If they were an enemy’s, one would expect them to be shot down. If they were an ally’s, they would need a damn good reason to be here and an even better reason why people can’t know. Maybe they’re a private citizen’s, but I struggle to imagine why a private entity would have a fleet of large drones that they covertly deploy along the coasts, and why our government would abide that. So as I see it, the two options that make sense are that they’re an enemy’s that we can’t shoot down for some terrifying reason, or they’re ours.
That’s exactly what you would expect from a regular airplane though. You can’t accurately differentiate „low and slow“ vs „high and fast“ at night. And quiet operation is what high flying planes seem to do regularly.
What? How do you get from a specific kind of lighting to „trans-wing drone“? What prevents me from lighting a regular-wing RC plane with the same lighting configuration?
If I’m not mistaken, the FAA does (unless RC planes aren’t covered?). Are you really positing that I saw an intentionally misconfigured RC plane flying in the middle of nowhere at 2 AM?
You’re right that I’m making a leap with the trans-wing part. I said that because it’s my understanding that some of the sightings have included airfoil and transforming drones, that a trans-wing drone would exhibit the light pattern I saw, and that the military (Navy I believe) does own trans-wing drones that match other the descriptions of other sightings. So to me the lights were the final nail that this wasn’t a plane, but I held on to it being a plane for a while.
So the FAA prevents me from using the scheme you described, but the drones you think you observed are exempt?
I still don’t see how you can draw any conclusion from the lighting, unless the lighting you saw is only permitted for a specific class of object.
The conclusion I draw from that is it’s not a plane. And I didn’t hear a helicopter, so only a few possibilities remain.
Do people think there are 0 drones out at night? Is it that hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that someone actually saw one?
I understand that many are misinterpreting. Official statements make it clear that at some are not. The criticism of my account boils down to “you can’t tell how far something is at night” tata-isms, but you can to a very limited extent - whether it is at an altitude where it would be audible, or not. Similarly, you can observe how quickly it moves from overhead to the horizon. It’s difficult to tell close from far, but it’s trivial to tell far from really far.
Regardless, I was able to see it from both the side and behind, and the latter view showed an aircraft with two red lights on the outside, and two green ones on the inside. It was not an FAA-approved plane, and it was not a civilian helicopter (no noise). At this point, the other possible explanations are less likely than it being a drone.