The real story here is the apparent... and I use this term very, very deliberately... fecklessness of all the relevant authorities. Apparently... again, a deliberate choice... nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation, or nobody has the technical capability, or something like that. I'm not sure what the problem is, exactly, and that is in some sense now the dominant problem. How can there be no clue by now?
Your sort of post is relevant in the first few days of the story. But if this was the case, with all this attention on it, it should already have been determined. But authorities aren't even floating this as a theory. Basically all they're doing is shooting down (pun somewhat intended) every theory.
That there is this much confusion, days later, is itself now the most important aspect of the story.
And we're getting up to where there are international consequences to this sort of issue, too. If we can't figure out what these drones are in a week, how can we be trusted to defend Taiwan or other allies in a world where "drone swarm" is slowly but quite steadily moving its way up to the #1 most likely attack vector? At some point it stops mattering if maybe it is just helicopters miles away being misidentified, at some point that becomes even worse in some ways than other answers, as it gets hard to claim we're going to be totally awesome at defending you against drone swarms if we can't even figure out in less than two weeks whether or not there are drones in our own airspace.
I don't know what's going on and am not pushing any particular theory. I've got a lot of things in my probability matrix but none of them particularly make any sense at all, which means I'm missing something critical. (Which is hardly a surprise.)
> nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation, or nobody has the technical capability
Well .. SNAFU? This is basically what I'd expect. In these kind of cases there's a steady stream of crank reports from the public which are 100% false positives. The authorities will have a process for routing all the UFO reports to someone who sends out form letters and otherwise ignores them. The actual airspace protection is done by radar and whatever the US calls "QRA".
There's no suggestion or evidence of any damage, so this ranks as a much lower threat than all sorts of other things like celebrity CEO assassins.
In order of decreasing likeliness:
- nothing there
- just regular commercial aircraft
- weird aircraft, but classified, hence the blank response from authorities
SNAFU is high on my list too, though generally I'd expect someone to have jumped in front of this by now. (That may be happening; see the responses from Congress today, which are the sort of thing that would look like.) Again, part of my analysis is the length of time this has been occurring; theories I had in the first couple of days generally involved the problem being only a couple of days old. The longer the mystery persists, the more we have to reconsider such theories.
I don't expect you to believe in aliens. I don't tend to believe in much of anything. But when you have multiple whistleblowers giving testimony to congress that UAPs are operated by non-human intelligence, I think keeping aliens as "just speculative science fiction" is factually incorrect.
Human intelligence should be enough to understand what parallax is and how gimbals and IR sensors work.
All those published videos were no less than a psyop to demonstrate weapons system's capabilities - with the implicit brag that there's even more powerful stuff they're not showing.
Why would they be interested in a random military installation in New jersey? And not omething on the Pacific coast or Hawaii or Guam or in the Philippines or Japan or Okinawa be more likely?
Because the US is full of infrastructure that is critical but weak, and the JIT supply chain stretched to the thinnest of margins in the name of sacred profit can often be the best point of attack.
Remember when Helene ravaged the southeastern US? One of the things that got cut off was a plant producing saline -- turns out, the US gets its saline from three manufacturers, when one went dark, the effects were felt nation-wide. Effects like cancelling surgical procedures for the lack of basic resources, and saline shortages lasting until today.
It would make a lot of sense for foreign adversaries to scope out these weak points, and integrate them into their strategies.
Question: how do you think the US government post-9/11 would respond if they actually didn't know who belonged to these drones and they were less than an hour from Washington DC (given a flight speed of 200mph https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/325_kmh_while_ukra...)? Would they pussyfoot around for a week, then blow smoke up our asses about it or would they immediately eliminate the threat and then blow smoke up our asses about it? I think that someone somewhere knows what's happening and won't tell us but has enough authority to stand down an armed response, which to me sounds like DHS or DoD.
yeah they shot down a friggin weather balloon with a JET, but nothing to worry about with these? they definitely know what they are and they're fine with it. field testing new drone based surveillance systems?
Not even as nefarious as that I don't think. The NJ and NY port authorities have an existing agreement as of Feb 2024 to allow for experimentation and buildout of drone-based last mile delivery systems. I think this is all a case of lazy/sensationalist journalists realizing that if they report "mystery drones" they get to write multiple content-free articles that will generate a lot of attention but if they do the investigative work they'll find a boring answer that costs them attention. Journalism in America being an industry that converts your attention into money.
> The NJ and NY port authorities have an existing agreement as of Feb 2024 to allow for experimentation and buildout of drone-based last mile delivery systems.
And if this were the reason for these particular drones the NJ and NY port authorities don't really have any reason not to just come forward and state as much. You'd think they'd be more than happy to crow about their "innovation hub" and the work they are doing. They've already gone to the trouble of having their Media Relations staff write up the article you cited. Why waste an opportunity certain to have a greater reach now?
Journalists didn't generate this attention, the drones themselves did. The public is genuinely interested and concerned. Journalists may be capitalizing on what the public is already wanting to learn more about, but I don't think they're avoiding investigative work for fear of the public losing interest. There is simply no one they could ask who would be willing to provide them with the truth.
Any journalist who did somehow manage to get the real story would pull the attention from all the other journalists without answers so they've got the incentive, just not the means. All they really can do is repeat what little they are told to a public which has been asking them to give them that information while also pandering to their audience with whatever speculation they think their viewers/readers will want to hear. A large part of journalism in America is entertainment after all. They wont waste this opportunity since they absolutely want attention and money, but they can't take the blame for "content free articles" when no one is willing to provide them with anything but speculation and more questions.
> fecklessness of all the relevant authorities. [...] nobody has the authority to figure out what is going on, or nobody has the motivation
Some would see that as an admirable example of a small government not overstepping its bounds.
The local sheriff doesn't have the authority to shoot down aircraft? And doesn't exceed their authority by shooting them anyway? Good job local sheriff.
The FAA has a handful of drone regulation folks? Nowhere near enough for a 24/7 national quick response drone tracking force? Very restrained and cost-conscious, good job FAA.
Congress hasn't authorised the military to spend taxpayer money on a national anti-drone-swarm defence system, and nobody's spent taxpayer money without authorisation? Sensible, we don't need bureaucrats funding their pet projects on the taxpayer's dime.
> Some would see that as an admirable example of a small government not overstepping its bounds.
some would see it as a government in paralysis through bloat and bureaucracy with accountability not being clearly assigned to anyone. This is more likely the case now.
Ah yes, but who is responsible for delegating authority and assigning accountability? Certainly can't trust the government to such tasks. They might try and use bureaucracy.
Lawmakers have created endless nests of ordinance, law, etc deferring responsibility to other aspects of government. Regime change plans generally involve sabotaging resilient systems to make them become brittle. Then you force those systems to bear loads they cannot, destabilize, bring to crisis.
The problem here appears to be conflicts at a state level (safety mandates) and that at the federal level (airspace management, you don't shoot at planes and drones are small planes).
That's the gist of what I've seen with regards to these things. Paralysis and lack of proper chain of command absent disaster, is a sign of impending collapse when there is calamity.
Its unclear who owns the drones but it should be relatively simple with SIGINT to trilaterate the control signal, any decently experienced ham should be able to do that.
If there is no control signal and they are operating autonomous, they should be considered restricted/military weapons with a proper chain of command and oversight. Lawmakers have been paralyzed and unable to keep up for decades though. Its hardly a surprise.
When the costs aren't paid for proper preparation beforehand, the cost is almost always paid in lives.
The type of drones that are small and cheap enough to make a "swarm" lack the range to cross the Taiwan Strait. They would have to be launched from a ship or larger aircraft, which are vulnerable to existing defenses. Lessons from land conflicts in Eastern Europe have very limited relevance to naval conflicts in the Indo-Pacific.
Your sort of post is relevant in the first few days of the story. But if this was the case, with all this attention on it, it should already have been determined. But authorities aren't even floating this as a theory. Basically all they're doing is shooting down (pun somewhat intended) every theory.
That there is this much confusion, days later, is itself now the most important aspect of the story.
And we're getting up to where there are international consequences to this sort of issue, too. If we can't figure out what these drones are in a week, how can we be trusted to defend Taiwan or other allies in a world where "drone swarm" is slowly but quite steadily moving its way up to the #1 most likely attack vector? At some point it stops mattering if maybe it is just helicopters miles away being misidentified, at some point that becomes even worse in some ways than other answers, as it gets hard to claim we're going to be totally awesome at defending you against drone swarms if we can't even figure out in less than two weeks whether or not there are drones in our own airspace.
I don't know what's going on and am not pushing any particular theory. I've got a lot of things in my probability matrix but none of them particularly make any sense at all, which means I'm missing something critical. (Which is hardly a surprise.)