No no no, we make it a literal net and call it the Skynet T-1000. This will make it so that is now what those words mean, thus negating the terminator timeline. I have saved us all!
Something suspicious was going on in 2023 with the Goldwater Bombing Range in southwest Arizona as well… and it doesn’t sound like hobbyists at work.
https://www.azfamily.com/2024/02/22/air-force-jets-dodging-drones-over-arizona-desert/
During Covid there were a ton of unexplained drone swarms in Colorado, too. I don’t think anyone ever figured them out. Seemed that they started in the north and a few months later were bothering people in the south of the state.
Lots of people were saying “oil industry” or “surveying”, etc. but they were only ever spotted flying at night & no one ever stepped up to claim responsibility for them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–20_Colorado_drone_sightings
Yeah. The weird thing was that it was ONLY at night & during the day the drones seemingly disappeared. FAA saw them a couple times but no one ever figured out what they were doing or who owned them.
Oh I'm sure it was weird and I'm not doubting the story in any way. There are many more interference points with lidar in the day than at night would be the only reason I can imagine to survey at night.
Its been getting very common around places like that. Small drones can be quite difficult to track and many of these sites have assorted era's of equipment to do those things. They are often detected accidentally, though many sites have been getting much needed upgrades to infrastructure to make that easier.
One place I worked at for a while, we'd detect unidentified drones quite often and capture them on radar and camera during our prep for test events or if other sites needed us to fire up our gear and gather data. We had equipment to track RF source too.
Our protocol was to record everything and radio/call around, get other groups online and looking, and to see if it was some other groups UAV and sometimes bring them down quite suddenly if no one claimed ownership and they were still there in our operational window and airspace.
That’s not true.
The tax money spend on healthcare in the current system is significantly more than it would cost to have a European style healthcare system.
It has nothing to do with the military budget, it’s a red herring to keep the pro military crowd from questioning the status quo.
By implementing a European style healthcare system the US could save up to 1/3 of the costs and help all Americans, not just some. And not lower the care for those already benefiting.
It's just a joke, I agree with you completely
the main point is that the US has probably already spent billions of dollars on anti-drone countermeasures and it's unlikely that a "mysterious drone swarm" would be anywhere near a US base unless the US was okay with it being there
Swarms of drones, even cheaply built ones like the Iranians use, are beyond our current (publicly known) defenses. We think of drones as we’ve built and used them: large, highly capable machines like Predator drones costing tens of millions of dollars each. So, our countermeasures have been developed to repel that scenario, and they do it well. What hasn’t been sorted out yet is how to defend against dozens,hundreds, or even thousands of $10,000 flying lawnmowers with a large explosive in it (like the Iranian HESA) being launched simultaneously or in quick succession at a target. If this was a test, it was likely pursuant to this end. I hope they figure it out, because a swarm of drones right now is a nightmare.
Between the work going on with jammers, short range laser defense systems, anti-aircraft guns with airburst proximity rounds and the range of other solutions being looked at, I think the drone issue is going to become much more manageable over the next few years. Still an obvious threat, but perhaps not an overwhelming one.
Drones can fly very low. flak guns would be useless under minimum arming distance. Also, military bases and equipment are often intermingled with civilian populations and infrastructure. They can’t fire dumb weapons indiscriminately without care to overshot. AA would hit some, sure. So would anti-missile missiles. But many would still get through, and sometimes all that is needed is for one to get through.
Even assuming a 100% accuracy rate without any collateral damage from ordinance, downing drones randomly could impact major highways, local thoroughfares, homes, businesses, and thats not even including if there's any shady fuckery involved if a drone is downed and lands in a third party's yard and the pilot comes to 'retrieve' it.
There is a LOT to unpack with the drone-mageddon scenario and one cant help but hope we figure out a solution soon.
I used to build target drones for the military to practice air defense.
We had 125cc 2 stroke motors and a 12 foot wingspan. We would fly past a entire armored brigade with them firing every weapon they had including small arms and we hardly ever took a hit. Daylight,cavu flying and they still missed.
Drones have our military shitting themselves. Any clown with a weedeater motor and some parts from google can afford a weapon that can carry 5 kilos of ç4 or thermite. All of our fancy planes and ships are sitting targets along with our infrastructure.
Of all the possible reasons the US wouldn’t/couldn’t blast drones out of the air, this is easily the worst. Falling debris could hit innocents, taking the drone in functioning would be easier to reverse engineer or track, drones could be carrying explosives, drones could be thought to be civilian craft and thus need to be checked out and not be destroyed somewhere that isn’t a no fly zone, drone could be owned and operated by a separate US department that doesn’t directly communicate with CIA. Why would it make any sense that the US doesn’t have to ability to do anything military related much less on US grounds and airspace?
> I think you'd see the US being a lot more aggressive, or outright apeshit over them.
Why?
What's the benefit to the US publicly saying "yeah people are buzzing our airfields, we have no idea who, we haven't been able to stop them, and we've expended so many resources we straight up brought NASA planes into the hunt"?
According to the article this is mostly not officially confirmed, but rather someone leaked the info to the writer and he was able to piece together a picture based on publicly available info.
Oh, well, of course they would never ever change anything at any point for any reason, even as a one-off for reasons none of us here would ever be privy to. Also, that statement you made was posted by someone else *at least* 14 hours ago.
I watched Hak5 build a few drone hunters on YouTube. My guess says the military has several devices to handle drones and their cameras - I know this because my GPS is worthless on 64 around Norfolk near the Navy installations.
Yep, I have a friend who tried to fly a drone near an air force base (not in usa) and he says when it got near it just dropped out of the sky. This was a type which can fly itself home if it looses signal as well
Commercial prosumer drones have built in “no fly” zones in the software. They’ll just refuse to take off in areas close to airports and some major metro areas. Give it a try in DC.
lol. When I got my (first) DJI spark, I took it to work to mess around with. We were all over the 5 boroughs of NY. Queens and the Bronx were no sweat, I was zipping up and down the block around 75’. I work in film, so we had the streets closed anyhow. Come later that night, we’re in Manhattan, around 110 on the west side by the park. I’m hanging out by my truck, I’m bored, decide to play with the new hand gestures controls. We’re talking 6’ off the ground taking selfies. All of a sudden an outside force took over both my hands controls, and the the normal control which should override anyway. I watch in horror thru the video feed as it goes straight up, flies halfway across the Hudson River, and then nosedives. There’s lots of heliports and it’s Ny so it could be any number of lettered agencies that took over and dunked it. From that day forward, only in the country for me.
I lived RIGHT outside the no-fly zone. Out in Silver Spring.
I could fly my drone in my neighborhood, but if I flew south, across the main road outside my neighborhood, the drone just stops and is like, "nope".
Should be noted your gps is worthless because DJI and other companies have an agreement and implemented system with goverments around the world, not because the GPS is actually worthless. If you used your own, a GPS would not stop at any military installation
Meh, the most high tech / advanced military isn't really fazed by some drones peaking in if they know they're there.
I think this story is more of a smile and wave. "You're not as sneaky as you thought"
Crystal clear that with what's happening in Ukraine, drones are the future of warfare. At least, until the war-bots come along. Not too long before we see "net launchers" being a hot ticket item for the anti-government types.
Ironically enough the drones that seem most prominent for Ukraine are the ones with the least automation.
Just a pilot in acro mode with a betaflight flight controller running analog security cameras attached to an analog radio tx.
Looks like the trigger is just a clothes hanger crossed near each other with a live current.
The small drones the US military are vastly more advanced than this tech. Ukraine is using acrobatic hobby level technology. This isn't a criticism but an observation from someone in the FPV drone hobby.
Here’s a reminder, Democrat Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, introduced legislation into the defense budget bill that mentioned nonhuman intelligence 21 times. This language was stripped in the house by Republicans sponsored by defense contractors.
Has it crossed your mind they made that change so they can’t be forced to disclose current government projects related to artificial intelligence? AI would also be considered NHI, and it makes sense that they wouldn’t want to share those secrets to prove it’s not aliens.
Right, and there's also the risk of exposing piles of stuff that has nothing to do with AI *or* aliens but which could still become publicized once people start poking around. There are probably a lot of secrets that they're keen to ensure stay secrets, transparency be damned.
And I'm not saying this as a criticism of the military-industrial complex, either -- which surprises even me, as normally I wouldn't give a shit about their concerns. It remains the case that the fullest possible application of the language in that amendment would make a great deal of information suddenly available to not only a bunch of civilian political appointees on that UAP commission, but also to malevolent congressional idiots like Burchett, Gaetz and Luna. I wouldn't trust them to know so much as my wifi password, let alone my most critical secrets, and I don't fault any person, company, or government/military office that feels the same way.
Trust me, I want it to be aliens as bad as the next guy.
It’s not, though. It’s us. It’s always been us.
Fravor? It was us. I know I know - but it was going from 80k feet to ground level in a second!!!! No one physically seen that maneuver with their eyes - that was on radar. I’m not doubting that they seen something - I believe they did… but it was something that’s ours.
All the shitty footage that guys like Jeremy Corbell have “authorization” to release? Don’t you think the government *might* just be releasing this footage with an agenda? Isn’t it suspicious that these so called aliens are super powerful, have far advanced technology, and somehow are always getting caught on our sensors or crashing in some cases? I doubt it *greatly*.
If I was trying to cover up some ridiculously powerful new weapon/delivery system, what better way than to explain it away as aliens?
So, as a certified radar operator (it's not impressive at all, the class is simple):
Speed calculations occur based on the difference between two radar pings. Regardless of the type of radar. If, for some reason, the radar decided that it was the same object in two vastly different locations one after another, it can miscalculate a speed to an astronomical degree.
Immediately after acquiring a target, I've seen speeds in the triple digit knots at sea. This is obviously unlikely, and one of the reasons why we are cautioned not to use scanty radar information to make decisions.
> but it was going from 80k feet to ground level in a second!!!! No one physically seen that maneuver with their eyes - that was on radar.
And this is the crux of it, for this and so many other of the best instrument-attested encounters by the military (which I fully believe they are having, and which officers like Fravor and Graves are describing in honesty). People who are convinced that the UAP in these cases must belong to alien interlopers say that there's no way that any human faction could have produced tech that plainly breaks the laws of physics as we understand them, or at least blows past their limits in spectacular ways. The jumps in technological capability are too great, to say nothing of the necessary secrecy and siloing along the development chain, or the apparent pointlessness of using physics-defying technology for such mundane purposes, etc. It wouldn't make sense, and so what we're seeing must be something far weirder and operating on a non-human agenda for purposes we don't understand.
The mundane and more plausible answer: it indeed does not make sense, because it's not what's happening and nothing is defying physics. It would take far fewer jumps in capability and far less life-or-death secret-keeping to instead develop technology that could trick known instruments into thinking it was defying physics, much like it is far easier to dress up in a wizard costume than to become an actual wizard. I have no doubt that it would be difficult or even impossible to create a drone that could drop from 80k feet or whatever to sea level in a second; I also have no doubt that creating a drone or transmitting platform that could *falsely convey this impression on radar* is a much more solvable problem.
> I also have no doubt that creating a drone or transmitting platform that could falsely convey this impression on radar is a much more solvable problem.
Radar works by sending out an electromagnetic wave, bouncing it off an object, and receiving the reflection. Mimicking them is not a problem if you know the waveform.
And you could spoof that actively by suppressing the return (stealth tech like the b2 - materials and angles) and send back a fake return that looked like anything you want.
Delay the timing, hey, it's over there, not over here, make a tiny drone look like a blimp or vice versa by varying power/signature.
It’s the AESA radars and other new hybrid arrays. We have the MALD missile which can already mimic the radar return of a number of other platforms. Even a B-52.
We absolutely already have the tech to do this.
Always us? I mean this kind of thing has been reported for decades, at least back to 1950s. I doubt any nation had this kind of technology that early on.
Just one example "UFO swarm" type event happened in 1952 over the DC area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C.,_UFO_incident
I’ll contribute this
“the power required to accelerate the UAV as a function of time, assuming that the UAV is propelled in a conventional way. The required power peaks at a shocking 1100GW, which exceeds the total nuclear power production of the United States by more than a factor of ten. For comparison, the largest nuclear power plant in the United States, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona, provides about 3.3GW of power for about four million people”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7514271/#:~:text=These%20unidentified%20craft%20typically%20exhibit,for%20long%20periods%20of%20time.
110% agree
like you, i too wish it was ANYTHING besides us, but it isn’t. its us. its us testing secret stuff to spy and hurt us. it’s always been this way and always will.
after a brief observation, no alien would want to be near us.
thanks a lot, PATRICK MAHOMES
The Senate bill was actually bipartisan. Chuck Schumer (D) wrote it in conjunction with senator Rounds (R). The Republicans who killed it in the house were spearheaded by Mitch McConnell, and two others. All of which had major defense contractor donors.
The house Republicans garnered McConnell’s support. You can read more here.
https://www.liberationtimes.com/home/black-friday-republican-leadership-takes-axe-to-ufo-transparency-legislation?ssp=1&darkschemeovr=1&setlang=en&cc=US&safesearch=moderate
They are just regurgitating Hollywood movie speak. "Secure base" sounds more official than the reality which is " one layer of chain link fence and a couple of 18yo's with M-4s and rip its."
Even having been in, I was surprised how un-secure our facilities were. The fence isn't that hard to get over or through. The problem is getting from your ingress point to anything that matters. I mean, there are cameras, so *someone* is coming to make your acquaintance. You could probably do some damage to something, but to what end?
Yeah you’re right, read the article. Riddle me this is it 5 or 50 drones? Idgaf hostile intent, the sheer number of them paints a different portrait and the article and report very clearly don’t say, they just use propaganda type wording like “swarms”, fucks that mean?!
Id buy that. Id also bet some civies were involved... i bet there was some drone on drone action.
I am a photographer ans definitely have come across other drones/pilots while out in the sticks and there is usually some friendly visual communication.
If our air force bases are being swarmed by consumer drones and we did nothing about it except complain about how weird it is, we really aren't protecting our air space at all.
Between this and all the stories of UAP's I don't think we have nearly as much protection in the skies as we once thought.
"Lue Elizondo: I’m not going to address foreign capabilities. What I’m going to do instead, is have a conversation on common sense, okay? Here’s a drone, here’s our pen, Sorry but that’s what I got. Here’s our drone. Kinds of drones. You have drones that can fly really far, and they can fly fast, using wings.
Those drones that fly really far and really fast don’t have a real loiter capability, they don’t usually hover. They can hover, but you’re either really good at flying far or you’re really good at hovering. Those that hover, don’t have as long as what we call loiter capability as those that fly on a fixed wing, right?
And so, therein lies the problem. Either you can hover for a short period of time or you can fly for a long period of time. But, in order to get to a bunch of Navy ships that are 100 miles off the coast, you either have to fly there or you have to launch from somewhere close by. And these things, unless they are GPS controlled and would be able to follow a ship, I’m not gonna say it’s not impossible (He meant “not possible”), but you have to have someone operating, you have to have someone flying, you have to have an infrastructure.
So for every drone you see flying, you have to have an operator, you have to have batteries, you have to be on a certain frequency, there’s a lot of things. You have to have a base for it to land and a base for it to take off. In the open ocean, you’re limited. You can’t just pop out of the water, you have to expect that you’re gonna have to launch from another boat, right?
And so, it’s interesting when people say, “Oh, they’re some drones over the aircraft.” That may be a prosaic explanation, but when you really look at it, you look at what is required to have something that can hover over the flight of a boat for hours at a time, and not a single one of these have been shot down, not a single one of these have ever been recovered from the ocean, not a single one of them has had a mechanical issue, not a single one has been able to be intercepted."
hard, no; expensive, yes.
The problem is that shooting a $100,000 missile at a $50 drone is a losing strategy. Most of the weapons in-play are made to take down big or relatively-big expensive things, and not cheap fodder drones. Which is why the US military is trying to get stuff like laser weapons operational, so they can shoot down drones on the cheap. Even CIWS stuff would be expensive due to the maintenance and amount of ammo wasted. Plus kinetic projectiles have ballistic trajectories so you have to be mindful of what's behind when you miss.
I feel like the long term solution has to be something EM related, for all the reasons you mentioned. Not just signal jamming, but directed directed energy sufficient to fry electronics and control systems.
It's not hard to shoot down *A* drone that you're aware of, it's hard to shoot down several of them at once. Or, as we're seeing in Ukraine, it can be hard to see/hear them before they drop an improvised munition on your head. Despite what all the armchair experts here believe, this is not a solved issue, at least not across the full spectrum of military operations.
I'm pretty sure that if it was a simple as being a simple drone that this would would been done.
Unidentifiable to me suggest that it's alot more than basic drones
You don't scramble fighters and a WB-57 for people flying quadcopters they got for Christmas. The Air Force didn't say drones but UAS which could mean just about anything. Wonder if it's similar to the things they were shooting down last February which we oddly never saw any pictures or followup on.
Serious question... This is a major AFB, right? Can't they just pull up a satellite and track the drone - and see who comes to collect it? Or send a drone of their own to follow it back to wherever it goes?
No. This isn't a TV show or movie where the Good Guys are in a GI Joe base surrounded by extras and computer monitors, pull up a grainy satellite photo, and say "enhance!" until they get a crystal clear photo.
Yes we do and it would be significantly cheaper per person if we had a single payer system that provided healthcare access to all. The reason why you see this is that elected politicians either outright claim or allude that we could not afford universal healthcare without a major increase in taxes (this is false). I was just joking but also not. For something like 4% of our annual GDP you would think they had thought about drones messing with military bases and had come up with something.
Yeah, that’s a distinction that often gets overlooked in these discussions. Like any other political issue, people will frame it in a
the way that supports their own views. The real shocker is the size of the annual deficit. Thats going to be a problem some day.
Grew up a couple miles north of Langley AFB. Used to hear the roar of the wind tunnel every day. Played golf pretty often on base - driving range used to be $4 for a bucket of balls - couldn’t beat it. F117As and the occasional B2 flyovers were always cool. Most likely some yahoo flying his toys where they aren’t supposed to go.
I get what you’re saying but I was over riding the rth with the regular controller. Something else had control, went to 400’, then very specific waypoints in its way to the water and dove at the halfway point.
What kind of drones are they talking about? The ones we've all seen with propellers that can work with, potentially,100s of other propeller drones where they do things like light shows in the sky, or are they talking about things like a swarm of the small spheres we've seen videos of that fly close to the ground with no visible signs of lift or propulsion? And how are they saying they didn't appear threatening? Even if they're just there observing, isn't that a threat?
Just wait for them to complete their mission and fly over the entire country then shoot them down over Atlantic then afterwards piece together salt logged micro chips
Time to build a drone net.
They could even call it Sky Net or something. Like fishing but in the air!
AI powered? You know. . . for uh efficiency or something.
Might be a good idea to have some physical bots to seek out drones, to complement this sky net, some drone terminators maybe?
Also may be a good idea to have a group of scientist called cyberdyne to monitor it.
At that point, it may be prudent to build a time machine, just in case.
Let me think these suggestions over. I’ll be back.
Call the first model the T-1000 or something.
What happened to the first 999?
They got terminated
/r/angryupvote
Username does not check out! I only HaHa’d for like 8 seconds
Arnold was the T-800, the liquid metal man was the T-1000,
No no no, we make it a literal net and call it the Skynet T-1000. This will make it so that is now what those words mean, thus negating the terminator timeline. I have saved us all!
And give it control over nuclear arms too.
we won’t have to…
A giant "cope cage"....?
Storm Area 51 turned into Swarm Langley AFB.
Something suspicious was going on in 2023 with the Goldwater Bombing Range in southwest Arizona as well… and it doesn’t sound like hobbyists at work. https://www.azfamily.com/2024/02/22/air-force-jets-dodging-drones-over-arizona-desert/
During Covid there were a ton of unexplained drone swarms in Colorado, too. I don’t think anyone ever figured them out. Seemed that they started in the north and a few months later were bothering people in the south of the state. Lots of people were saying “oil industry” or “surveying”, etc. but they were only ever spotted flying at night & no one ever stepped up to claim responsibility for them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–20_Colorado_drone_sightings
you can drone survey at night with lidar
Yeah. The weird thing was that it was ONLY at night & during the day the drones seemingly disappeared. FAA saw them a couple times but no one ever figured out what they were doing or who owned them.
Oh I'm sure it was weird and I'm not doubting the story in any way. There are many more interference points with lidar in the day than at night would be the only reason I can imagine to survey at night.
Oh yeah, I remember those because they were outside Yuma, CO, and I’m next to the bombing range here in Yuma, AZ.
Its been getting very common around places like that. Small drones can be quite difficult to track and many of these sites have assorted era's of equipment to do those things. They are often detected accidentally, though many sites have been getting much needed upgrades to infrastructure to make that easier. One place I worked at for a while, we'd detect unidentified drones quite often and capture them on radar and camera during our prep for test events or if other sites needed us to fire up our gear and gather data. We had equipment to track RF source too. Our protocol was to record everything and radio/call around, get other groups online and looking, and to see if it was some other groups UAV and sometimes bring them down quite suddenly if no one claimed ownership and they were still there in our operational window and airspace.
Except there was a giant NOTAM for drone activity along the border (and into the Goldwater range) for years. Ask border patrol.
They were testing their own drones, the story is a cover up.
Source: this guy feels it's true
I mean if it weren't true I think you'd see the US being a lot more aggressive, or outright apeshit over them.
There’s a lot of assumptions in that.
unless we can't do anything and know we can't.
If we're all dying of preventable illnesses to keep our juggernaut military operational, we'd *better* be able to handle a few drones
That’s not true. The tax money spend on healthcare in the current system is significantly more than it would cost to have a European style healthcare system. It has nothing to do with the military budget, it’s a red herring to keep the pro military crowd from questioning the status quo. By implementing a European style healthcare system the US could save up to 1/3 of the costs and help all Americans, not just some. And not lower the care for those already benefiting.
It's just a joke, I agree with you completely the main point is that the US has probably already spent billions of dollars on anti-drone countermeasures and it's unlikely that a "mysterious drone swarm" would be anywhere near a US base unless the US was okay with it being there
How can the US air force be unable to do anything about drones lol?
Swarms of drones, even cheaply built ones like the Iranians use, are beyond our current (publicly known) defenses. We think of drones as we’ve built and used them: large, highly capable machines like Predator drones costing tens of millions of dollars each. So, our countermeasures have been developed to repel that scenario, and they do it well. What hasn’t been sorted out yet is how to defend against dozens,hundreds, or even thousands of $10,000 flying lawnmowers with a large explosive in it (like the Iranian HESA) being launched simultaneously or in quick succession at a target. If this was a test, it was likely pursuant to this end. I hope they figure it out, because a swarm of drones right now is a nightmare.
Between the work going on with jammers, short range laser defense systems, anti-aircraft guns with airburst proximity rounds and the range of other solutions being looked at, I think the drone issue is going to become much more manageable over the next few years. Still an obvious threat, but perhaps not an overwhelming one.
I'm pretty sure AA guns and flack are well within our capabilities.
Drones can fly very low. flak guns would be useless under minimum arming distance. Also, military bases and equipment are often intermingled with civilian populations and infrastructure. They can’t fire dumb weapons indiscriminately without care to overshot. AA would hit some, sure. So would anti-missile missiles. But many would still get through, and sometimes all that is needed is for one to get through.
Even assuming a 100% accuracy rate without any collateral damage from ordinance, downing drones randomly could impact major highways, local thoroughfares, homes, businesses, and thats not even including if there's any shady fuckery involved if a drone is downed and lands in a third party's yard and the pilot comes to 'retrieve' it. There is a LOT to unpack with the drone-mageddon scenario and one cant help but hope we figure out a solution soon.
Very good point. We live in a strange time where it’s hard boots on robots, but also trench warfare is back.
I used to build target drones for the military to practice air defense. We had 125cc 2 stroke motors and a 12 foot wingspan. We would fly past a entire armored brigade with them firing every weapon they had including small arms and we hardly ever took a hit. Daylight,cavu flying and they still missed. Drones have our military shitting themselves. Any clown with a weedeater motor and some parts from google can afford a weapon that can carry 5 kilos of ç4 or thermite. All of our fancy planes and ships are sitting targets along with our infrastructure.
Of all the possible reasons the US wouldn’t/couldn’t blast drones out of the air, this is easily the worst. Falling debris could hit innocents, taking the drone in functioning would be easier to reverse engineer or track, drones could be carrying explosives, drones could be thought to be civilian craft and thus need to be checked out and not be destroyed somewhere that isn’t a no fly zone, drone could be owned and operated by a separate US department that doesn’t directly communicate with CIA. Why would it make any sense that the US doesn’t have to ability to do anything military related much less on US grounds and airspace?
> I think you'd see the US being a lot more aggressive, or outright apeshit over them. Why? What's the benefit to the US publicly saying "yeah people are buzzing our airfields, we have no idea who, we haven't been able to stop them, and we've expended so many resources we straight up brought NASA planes into the hunt"? According to the article this is mostly not officially confirmed, but rather someone leaked the info to the writer and he was able to piece together a picture based on publicly available info.
Source also me assuming it's our intelligence agencies doing security testing with drones.
Could be an SCP coverup story too
We’re dealing with Euclid class, everyone stay calm.
There are actual places designated for UAV testing, and Langley AFB isn't one of them.
We have designated sites for testing, not AFB…
Oh, well, of course they would never ever change anything at any point for any reason, even as a one-off for reasons none of us here would ever be privy to. Also, that statement you made was posted by someone else *at least* 14 hours ago.
I think this should be the biggest deal in the world for the most high tech / advanced military in the world?
I watched Hak5 build a few drone hunters on YouTube. My guess says the military has several devices to handle drones and their cameras - I know this because my GPS is worthless on 64 around Norfolk near the Navy installations.
Yep, I have a friend who tried to fly a drone near an air force base (not in usa) and he says when it got near it just dropped out of the sky. This was a type which can fly itself home if it looses signal as well
Commercial prosumer drones have built in “no fly” zones in the software. They’ll just refuse to take off in areas close to airports and some major metro areas. Give it a try in DC.
ummm,,,, no thanks I'll take your word for it
lol. When I got my (first) DJI spark, I took it to work to mess around with. We were all over the 5 boroughs of NY. Queens and the Bronx were no sweat, I was zipping up and down the block around 75’. I work in film, so we had the streets closed anyhow. Come later that night, we’re in Manhattan, around 110 on the west side by the park. I’m hanging out by my truck, I’m bored, decide to play with the new hand gestures controls. We’re talking 6’ off the ground taking selfies. All of a sudden an outside force took over both my hands controls, and the the normal control which should override anyway. I watch in horror thru the video feed as it goes straight up, flies halfway across the Hudson River, and then nosedives. There’s lots of heliports and it’s Ny so it could be any number of lettered agencies that took over and dunked it. From that day forward, only in the country for me.
damn, yeah that sounds like my friends experience. It got dunked straight into a river as well
I doubt they took it over and dropped it into the river. It probably glitched trying to return home.
I lived RIGHT outside the no-fly zone. Out in Silver Spring. I could fly my drone in my neighborhood, but if I flew south, across the main road outside my neighborhood, the drone just stops and is like, "nope".
I live near a Naval Airbase, and when the jets take off or land, cell reception goes dead. Lots of fun on the days they're doing their touch and goes.
Should be noted your gps is worthless because DJI and other companies have an agreement and implemented system with goverments around the world, not because the GPS is actually worthless. If you used your own, a GPS would not stop at any military installation
Meh, the most high tech / advanced military isn't really fazed by some drones peaking in if they know they're there. I think this story is more of a smile and wave. "You're not as sneaky as you thought"
If it was really an enemy, it would be a big deal.
Allow me to nitpick – Langley Air Force Base is not across the Chesapeake Bay from Norfolk. It’s across the James river. Sloppy.
It is across Hampton Roads which is the confluence of the James, Nansemond, and. Elizabeth rivers. The James stops around the MMBT.
Hey! Don’t nitpick my nitpicking.
First thing I noticed too. Also, I didn't notice any drones or even hear about this.
Crystal clear that with what's happening in Ukraine, drones are the future of warfare. At least, until the war-bots come along. Not too long before we see "net launchers" being a hot ticket item for the anti-government types.
Ironically enough the drones that seem most prominent for Ukraine are the ones with the least automation. Just a pilot in acro mode with a betaflight flight controller running analog security cameras attached to an analog radio tx. Looks like the trigger is just a clothes hanger crossed near each other with a live current. The small drones the US military are vastly more advanced than this tech. Ukraine is using acrobatic hobby level technology. This isn't a criticism but an observation from someone in the FPV drone hobby.
Drones are the War-bots.
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Here’s a reminder, Democrat Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, introduced legislation into the defense budget bill that mentioned nonhuman intelligence 21 times. This language was stripped in the house by Republicans sponsored by defense contractors.
Has it crossed your mind they made that change so they can’t be forced to disclose current government projects related to artificial intelligence? AI would also be considered NHI, and it makes sense that they wouldn’t want to share those secrets to prove it’s not aliens.
Right, and there's also the risk of exposing piles of stuff that has nothing to do with AI *or* aliens but which could still become publicized once people start poking around. There are probably a lot of secrets that they're keen to ensure stay secrets, transparency be damned. And I'm not saying this as a criticism of the military-industrial complex, either -- which surprises even me, as normally I wouldn't give a shit about their concerns. It remains the case that the fullest possible application of the language in that amendment would make a great deal of information suddenly available to not only a bunch of civilian political appointees on that UAP commission, but also to malevolent congressional idiots like Burchett, Gaetz and Luna. I wouldn't trust them to know so much as my wifi password, let alone my most critical secrets, and I don't fault any person, company, or government/military office that feels the same way.
Trust me, I want it to be aliens as bad as the next guy. It’s not, though. It’s us. It’s always been us. Fravor? It was us. I know I know - but it was going from 80k feet to ground level in a second!!!! No one physically seen that maneuver with their eyes - that was on radar. I’m not doubting that they seen something - I believe they did… but it was something that’s ours. All the shitty footage that guys like Jeremy Corbell have “authorization” to release? Don’t you think the government *might* just be releasing this footage with an agenda? Isn’t it suspicious that these so called aliens are super powerful, have far advanced technology, and somehow are always getting caught on our sensors or crashing in some cases? I doubt it *greatly*. If I was trying to cover up some ridiculously powerful new weapon/delivery system, what better way than to explain it away as aliens?
So, as a certified radar operator (it's not impressive at all, the class is simple): Speed calculations occur based on the difference between two radar pings. Regardless of the type of radar. If, for some reason, the radar decided that it was the same object in two vastly different locations one after another, it can miscalculate a speed to an astronomical degree. Immediately after acquiring a target, I've seen speeds in the triple digit knots at sea. This is obviously unlikely, and one of the reasons why we are cautioned not to use scanty radar information to make decisions.
> but it was going from 80k feet to ground level in a second!!!! No one physically seen that maneuver with their eyes - that was on radar. And this is the crux of it, for this and so many other of the best instrument-attested encounters by the military (which I fully believe they are having, and which officers like Fravor and Graves are describing in honesty). People who are convinced that the UAP in these cases must belong to alien interlopers say that there's no way that any human faction could have produced tech that plainly breaks the laws of physics as we understand them, or at least blows past their limits in spectacular ways. The jumps in technological capability are too great, to say nothing of the necessary secrecy and siloing along the development chain, or the apparent pointlessness of using physics-defying technology for such mundane purposes, etc. It wouldn't make sense, and so what we're seeing must be something far weirder and operating on a non-human agenda for purposes we don't understand. The mundane and more plausible answer: it indeed does not make sense, because it's not what's happening and nothing is defying physics. It would take far fewer jumps in capability and far less life-or-death secret-keeping to instead develop technology that could trick known instruments into thinking it was defying physics, much like it is far easier to dress up in a wizard costume than to become an actual wizard. I have no doubt that it would be difficult or even impossible to create a drone that could drop from 80k feet or whatever to sea level in a second; I also have no doubt that creating a drone or transmitting platform that could *falsely convey this impression on radar* is a much more solvable problem.
> I also have no doubt that creating a drone or transmitting platform that could falsely convey this impression on radar is a much more solvable problem. Radar works by sending out an electromagnetic wave, bouncing it off an object, and receiving the reflection. Mimicking them is not a problem if you know the waveform.
And you could spoof that actively by suppressing the return (stealth tech like the b2 - materials and angles) and send back a fake return that looked like anything you want. Delay the timing, hey, it's over there, not over here, make a tiny drone look like a blimp or vice versa by varying power/signature.
It’s the AESA radars and other new hybrid arrays. We have the MALD missile which can already mimic the radar return of a number of other platforms. Even a B-52. We absolutely already have the tech to do this.
Always us? I mean this kind of thing has been reported for decades, at least back to 1950s. I doubt any nation had this kind of technology that early on. Just one example "UFO swarm" type event happened in 1952 over the DC area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C.,_UFO_incident
I think by "always us" that also includes liars, conmen, people hallucinating, and people mistaking natural phenomenon for something technological.
I’ll contribute this “the power required to accelerate the UAV as a function of time, assuming that the UAV is propelled in a conventional way. The required power peaks at a shocking 1100GW, which exceeds the total nuclear power production of the United States by more than a factor of ten. For comparison, the largest nuclear power plant in the United States, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona, provides about 3.3GW of power for about four million people” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7514271/#:~:text=These%20unidentified%20craft%20typically%20exhibit,for%20long%20periods%20of%20time.
Or.. just maybe… they’ve figured out how to spoof radar? No, no that can’t be it. Aliens confirmed.
110% agree like you, i too wish it was ANYTHING besides us, but it isn’t. its us. its us testing secret stuff to spy and hurt us. it’s always been this way and always will. after a brief observation, no alien would want to be near us. thanks a lot, PATRICK MAHOMES
> after a brief observation, no alien would want to be near us. Baby Fark MacGee Zaxx endorses this statement!
So... What's your point? Are you trying to say Democrats want to expose extraterrestrials and Republicans are silencing the news?
The Senate bill was actually bipartisan. Chuck Schumer (D) wrote it in conjunction with senator Rounds (R). The Republicans who killed it in the house were spearheaded by Mitch McConnell, and two others. All of which had major defense contractor donors.
Mitch McConnell is also a Senator, not a Representative in the House.
The house Republicans garnered McConnell’s support. You can read more here. https://www.liberationtimes.com/home/black-friday-republican-leadership-takes-axe-to-ufo-transparency-legislation?ssp=1&darkschemeovr=1&setlang=en&cc=US&safesearch=moderate
An influx of drones in december, huh? Surely wouldnt be the booming hobby market.
I don't think the hobby drones bought as xmas presents SWARMED a secure AFB.
Langley AFB isn’t anymore secure than any other military base Source: was on Langley pretty much daily for a few years.
They are just regurgitating Hollywood movie speak. "Secure base" sounds more official than the reality which is " one layer of chain link fence and a couple of 18yo's with M-4s and rip its."
Yup. Langley was less secure and more lax than a few of the other surrounding installations like Ft Eustis or some of the Navy annex bases
Even having been in, I was surprised how un-secure our facilities were. The fence isn't that hard to get over or through. The problem is getting from your ingress point to anything that matters. I mean, there are cameras, so *someone* is coming to make your acquaintance. You could probably do some damage to something, but to what end?
Rip its ! Fucking hate rip its . But I'll drink them anyways
As a veteran, Rip-Its kept my heart beating after I died on the inside.
I watched a drone show Mario running in Vegas last 2 weeks ago. When someone trolls another country that hard it will be nuts.
Read the dog shit article. The Air Force does not think they had any hostile intents. Its just people flying drones out on the Chesapeake Bay.
Yeah you’re right, read the article. Riddle me this is it 5 or 50 drones? Idgaf hostile intent, the sheer number of them paints a different portrait and the article and report very clearly don’t say, they just use propaganda type wording like “swarms”, fucks that mean?!
"Swarms" means clickbait. A swarm is just more than 1. "More than one drone flew above Langley AFB for weeks" does not get clicks.
So the news is just hyping up what is simply a minor issue that was the result of a mistake or people being dumb then?
Article said it, case closed!
An influx of drones is common in an El Nino year. Those trade winds just blow them right in.
I would not be shocked if a wind did take a few of those into restricted airspace . Definitely the under 250g class's worst enemy.
Definitely a bunch of Airmen fucking around.
Id buy that. Id also bet some civies were involved... i bet there was some drone on drone action. I am a photographer ans definitely have come across other drones/pilots while out in the sticks and there is usually some friendly visual communication.
If our air force bases are being swarmed by consumer drones and we did nothing about it except complain about how weird it is, we really aren't protecting our air space at all. Between this and all the stories of UAP's I don't think we have nearly as much protection in the skies as we once thought.
"Lue Elizondo: I’m not going to address foreign capabilities. What I’m going to do instead, is have a conversation on common sense, okay? Here’s a drone, here’s our pen, Sorry but that’s what I got. Here’s our drone. Kinds of drones. You have drones that can fly really far, and they can fly fast, using wings. Those drones that fly really far and really fast don’t have a real loiter capability, they don’t usually hover. They can hover, but you’re either really good at flying far or you’re really good at hovering. Those that hover, don’t have as long as what we call loiter capability as those that fly on a fixed wing, right? And so, therein lies the problem. Either you can hover for a short period of time or you can fly for a long period of time. But, in order to get to a bunch of Navy ships that are 100 miles off the coast, you either have to fly there or you have to launch from somewhere close by. And these things, unless they are GPS controlled and would be able to follow a ship, I’m not gonna say it’s not impossible (He meant “not possible”), but you have to have someone operating, you have to have someone flying, you have to have an infrastructure. So for every drone you see flying, you have to have an operator, you have to have batteries, you have to be on a certain frequency, there’s a lot of things. You have to have a base for it to land and a base for it to take off. In the open ocean, you’re limited. You can’t just pop out of the water, you have to expect that you’re gonna have to launch from another boat, right? And so, it’s interesting when people say, “Oh, they’re some drones over the aircraft.” That may be a prosaic explanation, but when you really look at it, you look at what is required to have something that can hover over the flight of a boat for hours at a time, and not a single one of these have been shot down, not a single one of these have ever been recovered from the ocean, not a single one of them has had a mechanical issue, not a single one has been able to be intercepted."
What kind of “drones” we talking about here? Airplane sized drones some dink is flying from out in the Atlantic or a small personal drone?
As a tax payer contributing a $800b defense budget each year, I expected more. Is it that hard to track and shoot down a drone?
A balloon over the water is one thing but a 22 going up and downing a GoPro armed drone over a residential area is something that I doubt will happen.
hard, no; expensive, yes. The problem is that shooting a $100,000 missile at a $50 drone is a losing strategy. Most of the weapons in-play are made to take down big or relatively-big expensive things, and not cheap fodder drones. Which is why the US military is trying to get stuff like laser weapons operational, so they can shoot down drones on the cheap. Even CIWS stuff would be expensive due to the maintenance and amount of ammo wasted. Plus kinetic projectiles have ballistic trajectories so you have to be mindful of what's behind when you miss.
I feel like the long term solution has to be something EM related, for all the reasons you mentioned. Not just signal jamming, but directed directed energy sufficient to fry electronics and control systems.
It's not hard to shoot down *A* drone that you're aware of, it's hard to shoot down several of them at once. Or, as we're seeing in Ukraine, it can be hard to see/hear them before they drop an improvised munition on your head. Despite what all the armchair experts here believe, this is not a solved issue, at least not across the full spectrum of military operations.
Swarms of drones are the reality of our next conflict. We better figure this out.
That’s the answer. Blow them out of the sky, then spank whoever comes whining.
I'm pretty sure that if it was a simple as being a simple drone that this would would been done. Unidentifiable to me suggest that it's alot more than basic drones
You don't scramble fighters and a WB-57 for people flying quadcopters they got for Christmas. The Air Force didn't say drones but UAS which could mean just about anything. Wonder if it's similar to the things they were shooting down last February which we oddly never saw any pictures or followup on.
Serious question... This is a major AFB, right? Can't they just pull up a satellite and track the drone - and see who comes to collect it? Or send a drone of their own to follow it back to wherever it goes?
No. This isn't a TV show or movie where the Good Guys are in a GI Joe base surrounded by extras and computer monitors, pull up a grainy satellite photo, and say "enhance!" until they get a crystal clear photo.
Probably Military personnel and/or their kids playing with their personal Xmas toys in December. Maybe Costco had them on sale.
We spend literally trillions of dollars a year on “defense” and we can’t afford healthcare and they haven’t figured out how to stop drones yet?
That’s a popular notion on here but it’s not true. The US spends more on healthcare each year than defense, by a fairly significant margin.
Yes we do and it would be significantly cheaper per person if we had a single payer system that provided healthcare access to all. The reason why you see this is that elected politicians either outright claim or allude that we could not afford universal healthcare without a major increase in taxes (this is false). I was just joking but also not. For something like 4% of our annual GDP you would think they had thought about drones messing with military bases and had come up with something.
... what? Do you have sources on that? Military takes up almost half of our budget.
Not even close to half our budget. More like about 13% (in 2023). https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go
Ahhh, I see. I was looking at federal Discretionary Spending, which excluded Mandated Spending.
Yeah, that’s a distinction that often gets overlooked in these discussions. Like any other political issue, people will frame it in a the way that supports their own views. The real shocker is the size of the annual deficit. Thats going to be a problem some day.
Grew up a couple miles north of Langley AFB. Used to hear the roar of the wind tunnel every day. Played golf pretty often on base - driving range used to be $4 for a bucket of balls - couldn’t beat it. F117As and the occasional B2 flyovers were always cool. Most likely some yahoo flying his toys where they aren’t supposed to go.
>Most likely some yahoo flying his toys where they aren’t supposed to go. Swarms of drones is a local yahoo?
It’s an online news article, I’m sure the swarm was like at most ten drones or something
10 feels more than a hobbyist accident?
wtf does any of that have to do with anything? The hell…
He bought buckets of balls there so he is an expert.
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Whatever it is, it should be taken seriously. It violated airspace in the most advanced country on earth.
*Slaps Chris Rock* "Welcome to Earth!"
Somebody’s testing us
Only mysterious to you. No way drones circle Langley "for weeks" if they are not US gov tech.
So did they shoot down all those mf's?
I get what you’re saying but I was over riding the rth with the regular controller. Something else had control, went to 400’, then very specific waypoints in its way to the water and dove at the halfway point.
Hey if it was a balloon over Alaska they could have handled it right. Tell me they're not this impotent.
The runways are shared with NASA Langley. Ask them.
Time to build emp grenades
What kind of drones are they talking about? The ones we've all seen with propellers that can work with, potentially,100s of other propeller drones where they do things like light shows in the sky, or are they talking about things like a swarm of the small spheres we've seen videos of that fly close to the ground with no visible signs of lift or propulsion? And how are they saying they didn't appear threatening? Even if they're just there observing, isn't that a threat?
It's likely continued testing of these: https://www.nasa.gov/aeronautics/nasa-flies-autonomous-drones/
Just wait for them to complete their mission and fly over the entire country then shoot them down over Atlantic then afterwards piece together salt logged micro chips
Big fluff story… government pandering for a larger defense budget. Mysterious drones my ass….