[AlexandrB]

I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting?

I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.

[mrandish]

It's also clear that some more recent reports are trolls flying their Costco drones around. Amazingly, as documented on the news and YouTube, there are now people flying their personal drones at night in an effort to find and follow the 'original' drones (!) I assume they are now all following each other around, creating new reports of "Mysterious Drone Swarm Sighted". :-)

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.

[wat10000]

The Governor of Maryland posted a video of lights in the sky that were very clearly not any kind of aircraft.

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.”

[ekidd]

Even 30 years ago, if you had a clear sky in countryside, you could see the occasional satellite. Very tiny, much tinier than airplane lights, and surprisingly fast. Today, there are a lot more.

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.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

I got to see an ISS flare once, that was fun

[Lerc]

The problem is that too many people don't know what 'normal' is and nobody can pay attention to everything all of the time. When attention is drawn to something, and without the ability to judge if something is unusual, the inclination is to believe that noticing for the first time is the same as occurring for the first time.

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.

[outworlder]

Aliens are just good neighbors and figured out FAA regulations before visiting.

[refulgentis]

To me, people are A) out of touch with how degenerate our information environment has gotten B) generally, how little people look into things outside their wheelhouse.

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.

[dfxm12]

Most people don't know what airplanes really look like or what lights they have on them. To most people, any flying object is unidentified and any aerial phenomenon is unexplained. We use pennies more regularly than we see airplanes, but how many can pick the right penny from this lineup? https://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/groups/cognition/tutorial...

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.

[whimsicalism]

i have not used a penny in at least 5 years, i see planes on the daily - but get your point.

pennies are useless junk, straight to the recycling bin for me. really epitomizes our dysfunction that we are unable to stop making them

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

I have to keep making pennies to replace the ones you're throwing away! Don't destroy currency!

I put mine in baggies and use them as weights

[whimsicalism]

dealing with them in any other way is literally not economical to me if it takes more than like a quarter of a second of time.

[ggm]

A quarter of a second or a bit of a second ain't worth a dime.

[jerlam]

They were primed by social media and other sources to believe it.

[evan_]

Not to mention, videos of "drones" are hot right now and get a lot of traffic, so if you can convince yourself that the lights you see in the sky above the airport are drones, you too can get some of those eyeballs

[shreddit]

Even then my first thought would be “military” or “idiot with a plane license” before worrying about “attack of the flying saucers”.

I worry more about things I can’t see…

[lm28469]

Same reason people hearing moose or coyotes think they're about to get attacked by a skin walker: ignorance and being primed by social medias

[op00to]

Obviously they would have lights to blend in with all the other air traffic! /s

[willy_k]

There are without a doubt large drones with nav lights flying around multiple states at night now. There are a lot of people seeing drones where they aren’t, too, and it would be odd if that weren’t happening. But to take that and say “nothing to see here” is ignoring the mass of solid video and official non-statement evidence to the contrary.

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.

[lm28469]

> ignoring the mass of solid video

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

[grues-dinner]

> People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way

It's a natural approximation to a Total Perspective Vortex. Knowing what it represents probably makes the likelihood of an existential crisis more likely.

[willy_k]

> 100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks

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.

[wat10000]

You absolutely cannot determine the size, distance, altitude, or speed of an unknown object in the sky at any significant distance. It’s not even rough, it’s completely impossible. You can determine the ratios of those quantities, but the best you can do is come up with a wide minimum and maximum of, let’s say, 500ft to 50 miles of distance (more if it’s just one light).

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.

[willy_k]

An unlit one or one with blinking or few lights, sure. This had four constantly illuminated nav lights, and I was in a car so I was able to see the parallax relative to the clouds. I couldn’t tell if it was 500 feet or a mile, but I could tell that it was either close enough to be audible, or many times bigger than the largest jetliners.

> 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.

[wat10000]

Parallax relative to the clouds doesn’t tell you anything unless you know how fast it’s moving or how far away it is.

Given all the rest, I have to say I’m not super confident in your estimate of angular size.

[echoangle]

> 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.

Why is that almost certain?

[willy_k]

Well almost is doing a lot of heavy lifting, the case is all circumstantial. But I say that both because of a Reddit post that makes a strong case that at least some portion of sightings are a specific model of navy drone, and more so because their being military is the only situation where the government response makes sense to me.

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.

[echoangle]

Can you link the post?

[echoangle]

> 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.

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.

[willy_k]

You can gauge rough distance/height pretty well by the angles and relative distances between the nav lights. If it is was high enough to be silent, it was at least 10x the size of a 747.

[engcoach]

You can't gauge the airspeed of an airplane from the ground. What you are observing is the ground speed, which is affected by winds. So a small Cessna flying into a heavy headwind can appear to move very, very slowly relative to the ground.

[willy_k]

I’m aware of that, and I tried to think that was what was happening. But the motion apart from speed was nothing like a typical plane, and the other factors led me to conclude it was a drone. When I say the FAA light patterns were off, what I mean is that it had two red lights on the outside, and two green lights on the inside. AFAIK, the only type of aircraft that might have that configuration is a trans-wing drone.

[echoangle]

> When I say the FAA light patterns were off, what I mean is that it had two red lights on the outside, and two green lights on the inside. AFAIK, the only type of aircraft that might have that configuration is a trans-wing drone.

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?

[willy_k]

> 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.

[echoangle]

> 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?

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.

[willy_k]

I’m kind of baffled how incredulous the response to this comment has been.

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.

[mcswell]

What exactly makes a drone "mysterious" or "omonious[ly]"?

[willy_k]

The phenomena is a mystery right now, unless you discount military and government statements. Ominous might not have been the most precise word for what I meant, more out of place yet unassuming.