Oh, very much so some elements of mass hysteria. It took the better part of two weeks for authorities to recognize it, then it was "nothing to see here", then FBI is investigating. It sucks that one of our state representatives is out their claiming it's Iran and stoking further tensions.
My personal feeling is if it was enemy drones, our military would have already taken them down. It's hard to imagine we'd let this go on for many weeks without a response. But it's also hard to imagine military testing so obviously over public space. So who knows lol
> My personal feeling is if it was enemy drones, our military would have already taken them down
I think you overestimate a few things here… the military isn’t constantly monitoring all airspace across the country for drone-sized objects and shooting things down if they don’t recognize them.
Perhaps they should be as we enter this brave new world of drone-everything, but they don’t right now.
NJ has some of the leading research centers for the US military, our new president's second estate, and critical infrastructure for telecommunications. Reportedly drones were flying close to all of these spots. I would fully expect our military to be monitoring these parts of the country for drone-sized objects given how effective they have been in waging our wars the past 20 years. So yeah, it's a massive intelligence failure if these are combatant drones.
I don't disagree with any of this. Obviously drones are an extremely real intelligence and actual security threat that we clearly don't know how to handle.
20 years lol Off by a factor of 2.5x, but your expectation is reasonable --so is having a Defense Secretary that tells his staff when he's checking into the hospital for a serious medical condition and an airspace that doesn't allow balloons to get within range of broadcasting firmware updates to ESP32s.
..and Abichandani is reported to be an actual academic (in drone swarming technology) at a prestigious university that is local to the observations, not an enthusiast or politician!
In next room, I have a nearly 100yo man who, in a small group of people using computers with (literal) core memory, invented the technology, satellites and delivery systems to do Reconnaissance from orbit and more importantly, to spot the first signatures of arial weapons systems, yet downvoted here in the dystopian future when I merely correct the peanut gallery for spreading obvious fiction that America's ability to spot drones does not go back further than 20 years (or that the internal proprietary code of the latest ESP32 series Chinese MCUs has the well known ability to receive firmware updates via RF, even from Chinese balloons, Chinese LEO Starlink competitors and yes, drones).
The military isn’t allowed to shoot down drones in the US. There was a WSJ story last month about drones flying over Langley for 2 weeks. All the general could do is stand on the roof and watch
They shot down at least 3 including one that 100% belonged to a local club, meaning the military had no clue what they were launching missiles at. One was shot down over Lake Huron, and the pilot actually even managed to miss the balloon with his missile. It's like 99 Red Balloons meets Idiocracy.
Obviously the military can shoot down whatever they want, let alone use EM tech, which is highly effective at grounding drones. Drones keep getting sighted near the exact areas that would be testing out drone militarization, and not getting shot down. Gee, I wonder who's they might be.
People would be so dramatically more informed if they dropped social media and corporate news.
It's not hysteria if UFOs start showing up en-masse and then people start thinking everything in the sky is a UFO. It just means people are more likely to attribute lights in the night sky to this new phenomenon. Of course there will be false positives, but it does not mean the underlying issue exists.
My personal feeling is if it was enemy drones, our military would have already taken them down. It's hard to imagine we'd let this go on for many weeks without a response. But it's also hard to imagine military testing so obviously over public space. So who knows lol