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What's going on with all the drone sightings? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Title says it all. I see a lot of chatter, but what's going on?

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

The short version;

There was probably a legit sighting of a few drones at some point. (Its a pretty regular occurrence).
It got amplified by a few people.
News media amped it up more
People started looking up in the sky at night and not knowing what they were looking at.
MANY many reports of drones are just regular air traffiic, or planets, or stars.
More people started looking. Some of then launching their own drones to look at the drones.
And it just kinda snowballed from there.

TLDR; People looking at the sky for the first time discover its full of lights from various sources which they can't id.

Note: I do find it rather amusing how many people apparently can't ID an aircraft flying overhead or know what an out-of-focus star looks like. I guess theres always new people learning new things. Just wouldn't have put those two things on my list.

Edit: A fair bit of it is the usual "Aliens" people making noise, and im sure there are plenty of others farming engagement for $$$. I don't think we are going to get a clear picture for a while. We will have to wait for the hype / hysteria to die down before we get any reasonable assesment.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Some of then launching their own drones to look at the drones.

South Park once again predicting the future...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Don’t forget that Russia seems to be more interested in western infrastructure, especially military infrastructure, recently.

Drones are pretty great to look at stuff, because they are hard to detect, hard to defend against and offer some plausible deniability, because there are actually idiots flying drones where they should not due to said idiocy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Perhaps, but Russia also has satellites for that.

If Russia was doing spy drones, they would not be fitted with navigation lights flying on normal flight paths.

There is basically nothing that you'll learn from flying a drone over New Jersey that you can't learn from Google Earth.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

The conspiracy bullshitters also tend to find links between sightings that aren't there. Let's say there's some Russian recon drones over European military bases to spy on Ukrainian training. Then they'd immediately claim that there's "drones" (in their worlds that's literal aliens) all around the globe, even though those scout drones have nothing to do with what is being seen elsewhere.

I do believe there's some US drones being tested in somewhat publicly though, because the press release wordings were very deliberate, but that's not really weird. I think the F-117 & B-2 were also often confused with UFOs when they were prototyping the planes.

I'm curious why especially the US tends to be so prone to mass hysteria events though. Just a matter of the country's size encapsulating so many places & people?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

MANY many reports of drones are just regular air traffiic, or planets, or stars.

Even the former leader of your United States of America, James Earl Carter Jr., thought he saw a UFO once. But it's been proven he only saw the planet Venus.

Venus was at its peak brilliance last night. You probably thought you saw something up in the sky other than Venus, but I assure you, it was Venus.🛸👽🕶