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So any opinions on the drone sightings in New Jersey? Is it just mass hysteria and people mistake airplanes for drones? Are they aliens? Supernatural phenomenon? Just a distributed prank by drone owners?
So far the confusion and appeal to the government is bipartisan:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/15/politics/mysterious-drone-sightings-lawmakers-criticize-response/index.html
What drives me crazy is that only phone videos seem to exist and phone cameras suck for faraway objects in the night. Is there not one good camera with a zoom in New York/New Jersey?
Edit:
This orb ABC News was puzzled over is really an out of focus Venus:
https://x.com/MatthewCappucci/status/1868052013164134899
Should maybe repost to the new thread
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As obviously some good cameras exist - I would expect that reason is the same as lacking high quality pictures of Yeti, Bigfoot, Ukrainian biolabs from Russian propaganda fantasies, Loch Ness monster and so on.
These things are not actually existing or have a boring explanations.
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There's probably a significant element of mass hysteria adding noise to the body of reports, but I found this theory from Reddit (tl;dr: US government sockpuppet theatre to create momentum/public or internal support to marshal significant funds for a drone defense moonshot) plausible. Considering the way the Ukraine war is being conducted and the Chinese drone swarm videos that are being circulated, it would be shocking if US military planners were not currently running around desperate for a way to get the funding bodies to acknowledge the scale of the problem without projecting weakness to the outside.
As in my own favoured theory for the "tictac video" UFO case before, there could also be an element of flexing the US military's own capabilities to likely adversaries. "See, our ship-launched drones confuse and overwhelm even the rest of our military and civilian law enforcement. Do you think you would have a chance?"
There's an absolutely absurd amount of money being thrown at drone warfare in general in the US - eleven figures and growing by my estimate. But the thing is, that's almost entirely about building up attack capabilities - because drone warfare is the culmination of like five different disciplines worth of buzzword bingo! AI, machine learning, machine vision, autonomous weapons, 3d-printing, batteries, advanced semiconductors, supply chain challenges, mesh networks, swarms and coordinated behaviors, cost-to-hazard ratios...
Drone defense is surprisingly straightforward, provided you're a real first world country. There's a lot of fancy electronic warfare toys that can trivially defeat anything off-the-shelf, and anything more robust to EW (whether a cheap firmware reflash or a custom high-autonomy platform) is still vulnerable to a half-decent shotgun. In fact, basically all drones are weak to shotgun, and mounting a radar on a rapid-fire spreader turret is pretty cheap by military standards. Protecting high-value locations is basically a solved problem - I'm sure there's still some ongoing grifts to solve it even
more expensivelybetter, but for any location worth protecting, the means exist today.Of course, cheap by military standards is still ludicrously expensive by infrastructure standards, and there's a few orders of magnitude more critical infrastructure targets than military targets, so there's not really a scalable solution to this problem that involves grounding or destroying drones just before they strike infrastructure targets. The actual scalable solution is to license and regulate drone ownership, and use early warning systems built on top of existing surveillance capitalism to track and crack down on anyone whose purchasing habits start to look like the incredibly obvious signs of building a drone fleet, not to mention the equally obvious signs of building a ton of explosives to attach to those drones. Anyone with the capability to overcome regulation and surveillance and still pose a credible threat (cartels, China, Russia, maybe Iran) faces the risk of starting a war with their actions - and if this risk isn't enough deterrence, we've got bigger problems.
It is in principle possible for some jihadi group to smuggle enough drones, explosives, and operators into the US to do 9/11 Part 2: Electric Boogaloo, but it would take an uncharacteristically spectacular degree of coordination, training, and resources. I don't think anyone is sockpuppeting drone terror in response to a perceived threat of jihadi drone terror.
This sounds like copium to be able to say that it doesn't mean much that Russia and Ukraine are not managing to pull it off reliably.
Russia has widely been considered superior to the US in EW, and yet both Russia and Ukraine are now in a place where all their EW measures are at best a minor annoyance to each other's drone activity and the only things they can jam reliably are stodgy known-frequency systems like GPS and Starlink. Shotguns on turrets sounds appealing, but I haven't seen evidence that it works reliably in a realistic settings - physics get in the way of any sufficiently heavy cannon rotating to track a fast-moving close target, an additional drone coming in from a different angle costs much less (and eats much less manufacturing line capacity, before you start talking about GDP gaps) than an additional turret, and with anything more advanced than Shaheds the drones can come in low/sneak around terrain in such a way that just firing a shotgun at them is bound to cause collateral damage. Then, of course, a modern country's functioning depends on the safety of more than a few "high-value" locations - a Factorio gamer faction like China could easily afford paralyzing a city by sending one quadcopter equipped with a grenade and a frequency-hopping transponder to each gas station and perhaps even each of those small plastic roadside electric/telecom switchboxes. In terms of larger infrastructure, a container port occupies tens of square kilometres, while a putative scifi shotgun turret against low-flying drones in such an environment could perhaps cover a 0.01km² area.
There may be a reason why the NJ drones are reported to come in from the sea, too. Ukraine has demonstrated the unreasonable effectiveness of jetski-sized drone boats. Cartels have already DIYed similar craft. It wouldn't take much inventiveness to replace the explosive payload of one of those designs with 4 quadcopters to be launched at inland targets when the boat gets close enough to shore.
Well, the thing is - speculation about the game theory of an actual direct US-versus-adversary conflict and how the ability to wreak more non-nuclear chaos on the US mainland may impact the game tree aside, the goals and ambitions of the US still go well beyond defending its own territory, even if this is a hard sell to funders and the voting public sometimes. The problem the US currently faces with drones is not just that it may not be able to defend its own territory; it's also that there is no technology platform it could even hypothetically provide to Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, Australia or any other ally that is not quite under the US nuclear umbrella or even the US dead fresh-faced college kids umbrella to save them from the threat of drones, and this is a glaring limitation to its ability to project power. If the US just wills it, you could be made safe from traditional air attack, obtain arbitrary amounts of firepower, or sub-1h delay high-resolution satellite imagery and RF emissions data for any point on earth; but apparently (and so whether you get those blessings is merely a matter of being willing to pay up/sufficient alignment with its objectives); but it turns out that if you are suffering a death by a thousand drone cuts all across your territory, this is beyond the Fairy Godmother's powers to prevent.
Your estimate of engagement area is off by three orders of magnitude. Existing systems are designed to bring down drones from several kilometers away. This is actually really easy to do, and gets easier the closer you get.
Collateral damage is a problem, so we usually deploy these kind of systems in remote military installations with established secure perimeters. It's difficult to imagine a scenario where drones could be deployed close enough to these installations that they couldn't be intercepted in time. But again, it's not really feasible to place a secure perimeter around every substation, dock, or bridge in the country, and there are actual collateral damage risks for doing so even in limited capacity. Hence the fun EW toys.
Then they got into a war where EW matters, and the truth became more complex. There are effective EW systems on both sides of the conflict, which can and do suppress drone activity, this is not some hypothetical annoyance when effectively deployed. The challenges are not the capabilities of the technology, but the logistics of supplying advanced technologies to the combatants, particularly across several hundred km of active conflict zone. Ukraine has effectively no domestic EW manufacturing capability, and its benefactors provide extremely limited quantities of systems, in many cases for prototyping assessments before high-volume manufacturing can take place. Russia is so systemically corrupt that they can assemble heaps of money for EW manufacturing, pocket 90% of it, and distribute chinesium equivalents that basically don't work instead.
Compare with growing domestic stockpiles of anti-drone EW equipment near military bases, and active deployments around high-value political targets. These have a different logistics problem - how to deploy them effectively and immediately against a threat - but if it ever came down to street-level warfare with a threat of prolonged drone attacks, a response does exist.
I suspect they could not afford the war it would start... Even if they could, they nevertheless choose not to.
Ukraine's drone boat campaign took Russia quite by surprise, and the cost-to-hazard ratios has been quite impressive. But there's a lot more going on here:
In principle, an autonomous submarine drone carrier unloading a swarm on Manhattan sounds like it could work, evading existing oceanic tracking systems and putting a swarm near critical infrastructure with minimal risk of interception. I don't think "autonomous stealth submarine drone carrier" is something straightforward to develop and deploy - this takes a lot of research and resources to get right. Some smaller-scale swarms using very small surface vessels also seem possible, but low-yield.
The reality is: if any significant number of drones are in the air and angling to explode on your infrastructure, and your country is not a postage stamp investing heavily in modern missile defense systems to repel an endless stream of homemade rockets from the doghouse next door, you and whoever is attacking you are already in deep shit. The time to prevent drone attacks is before the first drone ever takes flight. If your argument is that preemptive deterrence doesn't sell expensive drone defense systems, I agree.
But on account of all the collateral damage concerns outlined above, deploying sockpuppet drone warfare against your own civilian population is a terrible idea that invites chaos. It's not impossible that encouraging spending on expensive drone defense systems could invite such reckless behavior, so I'm not going to dismiss the possibility outright... But it's not in my top three explanations, which currently look like:
I think we still may be thinking of different types of drones - there are the long-range plane-type ones like Russia's Shaheds/Lancets/Orlans and Ukraine's jury-rigged single-engine aircraft and some dedicated designs the names of which I don't remember, and then there are the low-flying helicopter types ranging from Ukraine's Baba Yaga to modded off-the-shelf FPV ones. The latter can easily fly between trees, buildings or stacks of containers; I don't see how you can engage them in a much larger area from a single point because in a busy industrial area there is simply no point near ground level that has line of sight of that much space. (You could of course place it in an elevated area and aim down, but then you are aiming towards the ground and I'm not sure what you would have to pay people to work in an industrial area covered by such a contraption.)
I see an abundance of FPV drone video streams from both sides where the drone actually flies into a vehicle with EW equipment. This usually plays out as some noise in the video stream that gets worse as the drone gets closer, but the target is hit all the same. I'm sure there are cases where the interference results in failure, but cases where it does not are not one-offs.
Since the whole "Russian economy collapse in a month" fiasco, I'd take Western predictions about the financial capabilities of its adversaries with a lot of salt...
That's a fair point, but what do we know about Chinese satellite capabilities? Russia's legacy kit is one thing, but I'd imagine China to actually be quite good at something of type "get a lot of good cameras and radios into orbit fast".
Interesting if true (but again, is that really the bottleneck for an adversary like China or even Iran?).
That's only really relevant for the scenario where naval drones attack ships, no? In the autonomous drone carrier scenario, they would not even get close to capital US surface ships.
Would the "submarine" element really be necessary? Do you think the naval tech gap between Russia and the US is so big that Russia can't track surface craft of the size of Ukraine's drone boats in the open sea but the US reliably can?
You lost me with the metaphors in this passage.
They've evidently failed with that in the case of Iran + proxies (and yet they are still not in an official state of war against either). What do you think would happen if, say, China did a drone-swarm warning shot against the US, say in the context of US saber-rattling against a blockade of Taiwan intended to break its resistance? It's hard to predict, but I could see a drone attack that manages to largely avoid human casualties failing to elicit the Pearl Harbor response and instead making public opinion lean towards "yeah, we don't need this war".
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I never saw an automatic or anti drone turret in combat footage, despite a very high incentive for Russia/Ukraineto to have that.
There is tons of footage of shotgun use and this Russian soldier is doing it very non-chalantly:
https://old.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1eq2jmh/soldier_shoots_down_a_drone_from_moving_truck/
Fighting against a drone searching for you must be nerve wrecking, you hear the high pitched sound and play hide and seek against the drone operator:
https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1d1611e/russian_soldier_shoots_a_drone_with_his_shotgun/
Of course this is the lucky case where the human survived. There is tons of footage of drones hitting their target.
Rheinmettal, Thales, BAE all have such systems in production today; other players are in development. Ukraine doesn't have them because they're not 50 years old and rotting in a warehouse; Russia doesn't have them because they went all in on EW and, in typical Russian fashion, produced something claimed to be effective and dangerous on paper, maybe even showed off some fancy prototypes, but then collapsed into graft and half-measures under actual wartime pressures.
As noted, any real first world country can solve this problem today.
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As someone who flies model aircraft in NJ... it's 99.9% fake, and getting more fake by the sighting. There's a LOT of air traffic in this area, and no shortage of private planes, and nearly everything I've seen online has clearly been a full-sized plane. The exceptions are mostly either unidentifable lights which are also probably full sized planes (further away) or stationary lights (yeah, that's not a hovering drone in your neighbor's yard, it's a light on a lightpost, genius). Some do appear to be quadcopter drones... the catch is some police departments have been putting their own drones up to try to spot the original drones, and the police drones then get spotted.
It's possible it was kicked off by a real sighting of a formation of drones; there have been such sighted elsewhere (near military bases, including US bases in the UK) fairly reliably. Those drones, if they exist (which they probably do) are almost certainly military, though "ours" or "theirs" is an open question. If they are "theirs", whoever "they" are is pretty brazen, but China did do that balloon thing, so it's not out of the question.
...like Winnie-ther-Pooh hunting Woozles. (He was following his own footprints around a grove of larch-trees.)
This is what happened during the Great Gatwick Drone Scare. The entire airport was grounded for more than 24 hours.
At least we got this banger of a tweet out of the incident (movie title: New Yorkshire)
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90% chance this is some classified US government project. The feds didn’t officially acknowledge Area 51 for decades after it was obvious they had a test base there. This is just how they roll.
Really? 90%? Only 10% for typical mass hysteria and people confusing stars, planes, street lamps Christmas decorations etc for UFOs?
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They established Area 51 out in the middle of nowhere on government land and forbid people from flying over it. This might be a classified government project but it's very different M.O. from Area 51.
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I wouldn't be surprised if this is pen-testing and/or sending a message, perhaps by a foreign actor. I really think it's hard to counter small UAS and even if you can counter them, hard to finger anyone specific for doing it. This would track with the relatively recent appearance of drones over a number of US bases, including outside the United States.
I guess it could be a classic UFO flap, but the objects seem to be described as being drones, so I'm not really inclined to leap for anything paranormal unless there's a legitimate demonstration of unusual capability.
It’s only hard if the drones are autonomous. With piloted drones, the operator is broadcasting his position out in the open.
Well, I'm not sure exactly how easy DFing a drone transmitter is just as a general rule, especially in a populated area, but if you're trying to evade detection - which these drones reportedly are - you could probably do it successfully. The actual drones spotted in New Jersey are assessed as being about six feet in diameter, which would be large enough to house a satellite communications suite, I think, which would make the operator pretty much impossible to find. (You can also run drones off of fiber-optics but that seems much riskier.) This might be why at least one NJ officials is reporting that their drone "detection equipment" is not working but that they are detecting the drones on radar.
Yeah, and you can take that with a mine of salt. It's really hard to tell how big something in the air is, or how far away.
The formations that have been seen in various places have been a bunch of quadcopter drones along with a fixed-wing drone. In the case of those, I would guess the fixed-wing drone has the comm suite and the quads are controlled through it. But most of the stuff people have been seeing in NJ isn't that.
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People don't look at the night sky enough. Here's the former governor of Maryland complaining about the constellation Orion. There are a lot of things up there that look strange when you zoom in really hard with a shaky camera!
Oh god! The comments!
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