john_browns_beard [he/him, comrade/them]

  • 21 Posts
  • 3.82K Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 29th, 2020

help-circle






  • I hope so, but I'm at ground zero over here and it seems like there's a lot more people freaking out about this than the balloon panic.

    I do think the more normal people are starting to lose their patience already, though. The amount of "very clearly an airplane" videos being posted is quickly delegitimizing the whole thing for everybody except the most extreme conspiracy-minded. All it would take is one clear video of a big scary drone, it's been weeks and still nothing.

    What's wild to me is A) how few people have actually looked at a plane for more than a second prior to last month, and B) how easily people will see what they want to see, even when they are looking at something that is very obviously not that thing.




  • I live here and I'm positive that 99.9% of the reports are just commercial airliners. Every video I've seen is either obviously a plane or too far away/blurry to tell. People have a very hard time gauging the distance, size, and speed of objects in the sky at night. Distant planes can appear to move through the sky as if they were much closer drones. Lighting on planes has also gotten much brighter in recent years due to the adoption of LEDs - if they are pointed exactly in your direction, the distance can be very deceptive.

    When the comet was here a couple of months back, we had dozens of posts on local astronomy FB pages where people were mistaking airplane contrails at dusk for the comet. People are generally not aware or observant of their daily surroundings and this time it has spiraled into a mass panic.

    I will gladly walk back my hypothesis when I see one clear video of something that can't be anything else but a drone, but I'm not holding my breath as it's been weeks now and we still have nothing. The "government testing out drones" theory just requires too many leaps of logic in this case to be believable for me.









  • The drone panic continues to spiral out of control here in NJ with the governor's office and countless county/municipal agencies releasing statements in an attempt to keep the public calm. Of course, this has had the side effect of bolstering a conspiracy that the drones are military in nature.

    Meanwhile, we continue to have zero physical or video evidence of the thousands of drones which now patrol our skies. All recordings I've seen are very clearly just commercial airliners.