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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8369 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Reposting another post from last week which @Blueberry put up right before the CW thread switched over:

—-

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

Lawmakers from across the political spectrum on Sunday criticized the federal government’s response to mysterious drone sightings in the Northeast, as officials emphasize there is no evidence of a security threat.

Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, also expressed frustration with the administration’s response to the public. “The government has a real responsibility to put more information out there so people better understand what the real dangers are,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Trump said Friday that the government needs to convey more information and shoot down the drones.

Asked Sunday about the president-elect’s post calling on the government to shoot down the drones, Mayorkas said, “We are limited in our authorities.”

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

—-

I know many Mottizans think this is all just deep state weapons testing or something, and I’m curious for theories in that vein along with more esoteric ones?

What does the U.S. gain from this? Will Trump meaningfully increase what we know about these drones or muddy the waters?

How much do we not know still about what the spooks are up to?

Trump talked about the drones at a press conference. As best I remember, he refused to say if he had been briefed, said they couldn't be foreign, and said the US government should say what they are. Assuming Trump was briefed and is not being misleading this means the drones are likely controlled by the US government. The military has massive bases on which to test drones, so I'm guessing the drones are looking for something.

Tests on a base in the middle of nowhere are necessary, but running tests in more real-world conditions (such as over other bases or naval formations) is extremely valuable. It's quite possible that's what this is.

Could be, but then why wouldn't the military admit what it is doing?

Their default is to not tell anyone anything and they aren't getting enough political pressure from the Biden admin to be more open.

Why would they? If they leave it vague, "we are conducting tests of classified defense technology over civilian airspace," that would make everyone freak out more. If they say specifically what they're testing, that compromises our counterintelligence efforts.

Is that true? There is a military base within 50 miles of where I live and we occasionally get loud military jets going overhead. We don't expect to be told the purpose of the flights and accept the inconvenience as part of the price of having a strong military

Because the first, second, and third impulse in the classified world is to keep your mouth shut and admit nothing. Admitting the program's existence to the public (assuming it exists) would likely require pretty high-level approval, possibly even the SecDef, or the CIA director if it's under them instead of the military.

Like most UFO’s, these are almost certainly mundane flying objects getting misidentified by onlookers. That should be our default assumption in a ‘see Bigfoot think black bear’ type way. This case is bolstered by the sheer number of sightings which are clearly identifiable as planes.

It would be very exciting and cool for this to be ayys, but each of the videos I've seen ends up looking either like a regular drone, a commercial airliner, or something else that happens to have FAA red-green lighting (which wouldn't make sense for a military stealth drone experiment or for alien aircraft).

So yes, I think you're right. We are seeing mass hysteria possibly coupled with people just not having taken the time before to notice just how many flying objects are actually in your typical American night sky. And really, I can relate to this (at the risk of typical minding I suppose) because over the last year, my toddler has become obsessed with planes and seeing them at night so I didn't have any idea myself how active and busy aircraft are at night until we started watching them all the time.

something else that happens to have FAA red-green lighting (which wouldn't make sense for a military stealth drone experiment or for alien aircraft)

Seems like a decent disguise, though.

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.

So YOU'RE the one responsible for all this!

Naa, none of my model helicopters even has lights. Model aircraft are mostly illegal* in NJ, wouldn't want to be noticed.

  • everything's at least mostly illegal in NJ.

There are lots of people jumping into the conversation who have not looked into it. People will say: why waste my time? Simple answer: its fun. Its a mystery and clearly people get a lot of enjoyment from participating in the whole thing. Its trivial to go on X and watch some videos, read some threads, and come up with an opinion.

Here are few thoughts I've had from watching this for the past week:

  1. a narrative started to form over the weekend that the drones were military WMD sniffing drones doing a grid search of NJ. It originated with some DOD drone manufacturer speculating on tictoc and then went viral. It seems plausible, if not more likely than not, that this story was the psyop. If the cover story is a lost nuclear warhead coming to the USA, it makes you wonder what crazy shit is actually going on.

  2. It seems like there are at least 3 categories of phenomenon. 1) misidentified airplanes, helicoperts, and lens flares, 2) unmanned drones (the size of a car or a SUV) flying very low over populated areas using traditional aerodynamics and 3) orbs, lights, or other true UAPs that are hovering or exhibiting flight maneuvers that do not correspond to known physics. I am not convinced that the things in category 3 are easily explained. The debunkers are just as invested as the pro-UAP crowd and they generally always assume the person who filmed the object is a liar or an idiot. There are pilots, air traffic controllers, and professional photographers that are posting some interesting evidence. Air traffic control reports of objects at 50k ft elevation. Military air traffic control shutting down a base due to extreme UAP activity. The ABC video of the "orb" is professionally shot. I would imagine the camera man knows how to operate his camera and is not showing venus out of focus.

  3. There have been a number of high profile military pilots that have been reporting their experiences of seeing objects, orbs, and other unexplained phenomenon. Most people do not think these military pilots are lying. Theyre clearly seeing something. If there has been a large uptick of these UAPs over NJ over the past few months, it would not surprise me if the government were to fly the drones from category 2 in order to muddy the waters. Then you get the mass hysteria and most people start writing off the story.

The answer does not have to be extra-terrestrial. Mark Andresen recounted a story on the Bari Weiss podcast where he was in a meeting with the white house and he is representing that the WH claimed to "have classified whole branches of physics during the cold war". If you take that language plainly, they are not talking about specific nuclear weapons engineering. "Whole branches of physics". It seems fairly reasonable to me that the USG, after realizing how powerful nuclear physics was in WW2, decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain. It would not be the least bit surprising for me to learn that there are groups within the government that have spent the last 70 years progressing their tech into something that would look totally alien to us. Such a group, with no oversight, would essentially be a rouge element of our federal government.

There is really no way to know or prove any of this and its mostly speculation. That being said, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence out in the public domain for those who are interested. Eric Weinstein has speculated about this in public. There's a few good youtube channels out there that talk about this stuff.

ET are often part of the story that gets told, but they are not necessary. It could be as simple as "the US Government took all fundamental physics in house after the Manhattan project and the group that controls that tech is doing some sort of power play with feds".

If you take that language plainly, they are not talking about specific nuclear weapons engineering.

I would love to believe that we classified psychotronics or faster-than-light-travel or quantum communications or time travel something crazy like that but I tend to think this was probably just nuclear engineering (which as I understand it can get pretty exotic). If it was something more exotic than that, I just sorta doubt the White House LLM Czar would be familiar with it. Like, if we classified time travel, let's say, what are the odds that you send your Time Travel Czar - one of a handful of people who know Time Travel is real - to go work GAI policy and then he goes around Darkly Hinting that we classified Time Travel during meetings with GAI people? So I tend to think he was talking about nuke stuff. That (and less-remembered, cryptography) were areas of physics and math that were the focus of government containment.

The answer does not have to be extra-terrestrial. Mark Andresen recounted a story on the Bari Weiss podcast where he was in a meeting with the white house and he is representing that the WH claimed to "have classified whole branches of physics during the cold war". If you take that language plainly, they are not talking about specific nuclear weapons engineering. "Whole branches of physics". It seems fairly reasonable to me that the USG, after realizing how powerful nuclear physics was in WW2, decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain. It would not be the least bit surprising for me to learn that there are groups within the government that have spent the last 70 years progressing their tech into something that would look totally alien to us. Such a group, with no oversight, would essentially be a rouge element of our federal government.

This sounds implausible. As the saying goes, "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead".

As an example of a rather successful government conspiracy, consider the NSA spying program. Pre-Snowden, there were certainly credible rumors that the big ISPs passed their cables through a government-controlled room. It would take an especially naive person to say "Surely the US government would not spy on its citizens." Internet veterans will remember the crypto wars, the US gov decision to classify PGP as munitions for the purpose of export restrictions and the attempts of the NSA to push broken crypto on the people. The thing which Snowden delivered was rather substantial evidence regarding the specifics -- which was admittedly a bit worse than I would have estimated. But the fact that state actors had the tech, the money and the incentive to spy on people was plain as day even before that.

Now you claim that the US government decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain (but bizarrely only after the Teller-Ulam design became public knowledge). Consider what it would imply. A cabal of Nobel laureates sitting in some smoky room in their anti-grav chairs having a meeting to decide what the exact mass of the Higgs particles which will be "discovered" at CERN should be. Of course, CERN is international, and over the decades, a lot of countries who were antagonistic to the US (i.e. the USSR or China) have had their own "fundamental physics" research programs. Unless the first secret discovery was a particle which makes it trivial to change the outcome of any physics experiment on Earth (in which case why keep pretending to have a cold war), the US would have had to have the convince at least some senior physicists in these countries to keep their mouths shut. Now if I were a senior researcher in the USSR, no amount of Nobels would convince me it would be a good idea to deceive the party leadership about the nature of reality as related to the feasibility of new weapons. Or would the Soviets have been in on it, too?

Also, there have been some areas of applied research where the US has allowed and indeed lead tremendous progress over the last few decades. Modern electronics and computers certainly seem to make physics research of all kinds so much easier. "They" must really feel secure in their absolute superiority to allow such tools in Muggle hands. If I was trying to keep fundamental physics secret, I would certainly not allow society to develop into an information society with more and more physics graduates poking at things.

I can see a state government keeping some particular design a secret (e.g. "You can ignite fusion bombs through fission bombs in precisely that way"), but not the basics ("Fusion exists. The sun is powered by fusion. Some people have been wondering if the power of fusion can somehow be harnessed by mankind.")

I thought I was pretty clear that I’m speculating - not claiming claiming anything. But address some of your points.

  1. Secrets. There is no shortage of people out there giving interviews, claiming to be part of programs, publishing book, patents etc. These people are generally ignored, mocked, or written off as cranks no better than some skitzo in his basement. The political economy of academia makes dissent from the party line unthinkable. And for what? It’s not unreasonable to think that some step function change in our understanding of physics could be legitimate threat to humanity.

  2. Ridicule. The second part of your reply is building a strawman of my alleged claim and then mocking it. At its most basic level, I’m saying that that the USG, having just unlocked nuclear weapons through physics, decided it was best to have a black fundamental physics program and made advances over the last 70 years. It would almost be irresponsible for them to have not done something like this. If I had to guess, I’d guess that they made progress manipulating another fundamental force - gravity. There appears to have been at least a lot of talk about that in public before everything and everyone involved vanished and mainstream physics focused string theory. No time travel or antigrav chairs needed. Just a relatively small group of scientists, in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, already nearly merged into the MIC, deciding that this is the most responsible path for physics.

It seems plausible that the USSR and China came to similar conclusions either independently or loosely connected. We seemed to be able to understand the importance of a hotline or other space research despite hostilities. Given the stakes involved, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to me to think that everyone agrees to not make this public. Of course these other programs would likely be far behind the US. In fact I’ve heard speculation that the US governments abrupt change in UAP policy in the last 10 years could be a result of these other programs having finally caught up with us.

Again. None of this sounds even remotely ridiculous to me. Yet people get their backs up on even the most mild version of this story. Why is that?

As I said, the whole topic is a lot of fun. There is so much interesting stuff out there. And it’s easier than ever to find.

I know the guy who developed the gravity bomb concept. Want a miles-wide chunk of Earth gone? I know which book to point you to.

Oddly and anecdotally, I've seen large, heavy-duty drones flying around my area (Western Maryland) and between Baltimore and Annapolis. This was in the last year. It was shocking and gross, but I also just assumed it was our overlords testing out their latest toys, which isn't such a surprise considering I live on the flight path from DC to Camp David. I don't think it's just peoples' imaginations--these things are out there flying around.

Now, why are they flying around NJ/NY or are those people seeing what I saw? Don't know, don't really care. I consider it another media distraction that I don't have bandwidth for. It's certainly curious? Certainly. Is it important? Maybe, but probably not as important as--say--the escalating war in Ukraine.

FWIW, Walter Kirn, in reference to his government sources, says it's 99% psy-op. His claim is that it's another churn of the news-cycle meant to gin up anxiety and present Trump with another problem his enemies can try to cudgel him with. Not sure I'm on-board with all that, but since I agree with the assessment it's a distraction, it's as good of an explanation as I care to present.

Kirn and Taibbi livestream (Drones are near the middle): https://youtube.com/watch?v=VvYPaEO_4gQ Here's Michael Tracey saying he saw them: https://substack.com/home/post/p-153179566?source=queue

Most likely mass hysteria. Are there any compelling videos that aren't obviously traditional aircraft flying in normal ways/astronomical bodies/hobbyist or commercial drones doing normal hobbyist or commercial drone things?

So why is the House Intel committee receiving a classified briefing on the mass hysteria? Is this standard procedure for mass hysteria?

receiving a classified briefing

The classified briefing could just be "we have no idea what these sightings are." It could be classified even if it is mass hysteria for any number of reasons. Perhaps the briefing reveals something about our radar/intelligence capabilities. Perhaps the military has no idea what these things are and on the off-chance they really are drones from Russia/China/Aliens they don't want to reveal how little we actually know about them. The government routinely investigates a bunch of stupid shit, Stargate Project?

Edit: In effect, I think the likelihood of a classified briefing is essentially equal whether this is real or mass hysteria. To me all it reveals is that there is 1) enough public outcry to demand congress investigate it and 2) this investigation to some extent entails consulting our military intelligence capabilities.

If your agency will give classified briefings in the case there is something shady going on but publicly denounce mass hysteria, then the very fact that they are giving classified briefings would be an information leak. So I would fully expect the CIA to give a highly classified briefing on bigfoot (likely "to our best knowledge, it does not exist") to Congress if they demanded it.

When people start pointing green lasers at commercial airplanes then maybe there is something worthy of a briefing.

Do you genuinely believe that the briefing is about actions that civilians have taken in response to the drones and not about the drones themselves?

Again, I’m not sure if there’s really a precedent for that sort of thing.

I wouldn't discount that possibility. If people are violating Federal laws in hysteria then maybe something needs to be done.

The question I have been asking since this whole "mystery drones" thing started: drones with video cameras aren't all that expensive, and are widely available to be purchased. Has anyone tried sending up a drone of their own to follow the mystery drones and see where they go?

Consumer drones with the best range and battery life ($1000) get you about 15-30mins flight time and 1 mile of distance, commercial drones ($20,000+) driven by cellular LTE modem can fly for an hour on battery and for indefinite ranges if they have wings or are internal-combustion powered. Would be very hard to catch one class of drone with the other.

Another reason they aren't doing that is that flying a drone within city limits in a blue state is almost always illegal and if somebody did do that, they wouldn't want to admit to it. Pretty much the only way people get in trouble with drones is to break the law and post video footage online.

People have been shining lasers at commercial aircraft though, which is super-duper illegal, and while the sorts of weird libertarians(seriously, what is it with libertarians being such normal boring business savvy centrists recently? Bring back the schizoposting bigamist with YouTube videos on how to drill 1/8” holes with equipment convertible to a grow lab) who just blatantly violate regs like that are rare in urban blue states, there should be at least some in the largest metro area in the country.

what is it with libertarians being such normal boring business savvy centrists recently?

Liking smaller government and being concerned about massive domestic surveillance operations should be considered normie Republican positions. Yet somehow that's not how the DC Republican establishment view them.

I'm pretty sure airplanes at EWR (Newark) get lasered on a regular basis; occasionally they bust someone for doing it, but I think they usually prefer to keep it quiet to avoid copycats. It's much more a problem at takeoff and landing, when the plane is close and you can hit the windshield. There probably are people pointing handheld lasers at the "drones", but pointing a laser essentially at the bottom of an airliner 10,000+ feet up doesn't do a thing even if you aim perfectly. Wouldn't be surprised if they are hitting the occasional private pilot.

My sub $1000 drone (DJI Mini 4 Pro) can fly for over half an hour with the default battery (keeping it under the 250g weight limit where other rules kick in) and around 45 minutes with the slightly heavier battery. It has a range of around 20-30 miles if you maintain line-of-sight.

It's actually rather remarkable how cheap some of this stuff has become.

I know the marketing material says 20-30 miles for the radio control link, but if you follow the FAA rules regarding altitude, your video connection will get you between 1-2 miles (with the Mavic 3). The furthest I've ever been with it is 2 miles away while at 400' altitude while standing on my roof, then when I turned it around to fly back, I lost signal and the drone had to use GPS-return-to home until it got back into range. Obviously you could have infinite range if you're flying at 2000' while standing on a mountaintop but I don't think that's very informative to people when they ask what kind of range your drone gets.

How far away have you actually seen the Mini 4 fly? If it's much more than 2 miles I'll go upgrade immediately. I only have a Mavic 3 and DJI-FPV (O3 video transmission protocol) and not a Mavic/Mini 4 (O4), but it seems unlikely that the new revision would be that much better.

How far away have you actually seen the Mini 4 fly

The mini doesn't fly as far as the air or pro. My own tests in perfect environments get it about 2 miles easily, but RF interference degrades it significantly. Normally at around 0.5m

2.4ghz for the Mavic 3 gets you about 2 miles, 5.8ghz mode in a low-RF saturation environment can push up to 5, 10 with a patch antenna.

All of this ignores 4G/5G teleoperation kits that can be mounted onto even Mavic Pros now, which do exist and can be controlled via a sim card, or full autonomous drones. Range is definitely not the limiting factor for these drone sightings.

The boring answer for the drone sightings is likely mass hysteria and false attribution, since small aircraft are not noticed by people most of the time and when they are now being paid attention to they seem so different from the big liners that they cause confusion. Drone shutting down airports like what happened at Gatwick a few years ago started with dickheads flying a drone for that sweet shot, then general incompetence during the monitoring phase. A common problem is observation drones used by one agency without notifying other agencies, causing other agencies to scramble their own observation drones etc etc etc.

Most LEO have DJI aeroscopes in their inventories, which can track all DJI models up to 2022 that were in the air, and a fair few newer models using legacy firmware. By now someone would have figured if it was a rogue DJI drone in the air. If the flight lights can be seen its a low altitude drone. Its most likely some trolls fucking about and piling on for shits and giggles.

But its much better if its ayys looking for their dropped nuclear fuel. Lets hope the greys land and demand to see the manager here.

Drone shutting down airports like what happened at Gatwick a few years ago started with dickheads flying a drone for that sweet shot

There is to this day no evidence there was any drone at Gatwick that did not belong to law enforcement.

I'm told the DJIs are quite hackable; if you're flying out of visual range you're already breaking the regs, what's a few more? But I don't think altitude should be a big issue; even if you're at half the legal altitude, distance to horizon is 17 miles.

I have the mini 2! Love it, best camera I own. But I can't fly it very high where I live due to FAA regulations. I've taken it to other places, like a beach in Florida--or even England-- and it soars. The "military" drones I saw in MD were easily 4-6X in size, painted drab colors and flying formation. They were also only about 3-4 stories up so very easy to see. Not sure this is what people are seeing in NJ though. As I said in a different comment, I live around all kinds of National military crap, so you just sort of get used to seeing weird stuff. (This is also where Mothman, Snallygaster, Jersey Devil and the Blair Witch originate, so maybe just a crazy place).

The Blair Witch Project was set in Western Maryland and filmed in Montgomery County, Maryland. New Jersey had nothing to do with it.

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