This seems unbelievably credulous on the part of Vice.
On the one hand, we have 23 sightings a week, across the town, from a variety of people, including a helicopter pilot, over a sustained period of time. On the other hand, we have a government report that all of those sightings were of "stars, planets, or hobbyist drones". The people of this town have never seen a star before? Really? Is the government report really more believable?
It sounds like the scene in Men in Black, but even more lame. "No. Those weren't drones. Those were nothing."
"Mass hysteria" is an explanation that seems hard to swallow. These people weren't panicking, they weren't seeing demons or magic, they were making reports of real things (drones) acting in plausible ways. That a group of local government officials couldn't find any evidence doesn't seem to mean anything. What evidence would we expect them to find?
I'd like to know what the usual rate of false drone reports is in a typical town. Is this an average number of reports? More than average, and if so, why?
I work with lots of people who seem to have this attitude. When customers submit bugs that immediately think the customer is imagining the problem, or doing something wrong, or that the bug is magically a transient issue that isn't worth investigating or something like that. I think the reality is investigations are hard and sometimes yield nothing, but that doesn't mean we should jump to preposterous conclusions.
There is a precedent for exactly this kind of thing: The Marfa Lights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights). These were strange sighting of moving lights in a desert landscape. They were attributed to UFO's or exotic ball lighting (all this was "pre-drone"). The phenomena were regular enough that some physicists performed a spectroscopic analysis. Turned out, it was headlights of cars in the distance and small campfires.
Lights in a place where you can see very far away tends to confuse our perception of scale, distance and speed.
> I think the reality is investigations are hard and sometimes yield nothing, but that doesn't mean we should jump to preposterous conclusions.
Okay, there is one and presumably many more examples of people mistaking non-flying lights for flying things. How many times do people accurately identify drones though? I don't mean airline pilots flying into or out of airports overzealously reporting nearby drones, but how frequently does your average person see something they are so confident is a drone they go to the trouble of reporting it to local officials, and turn out to be wrong?
It seems to me, if we had that latter figure, and we knew how many independent reports there were, we could calculate the likelihood that every reporter was mistaken.
> The first historical record of the Marfa lights is that in 1883 a young cowhand, Robert Reed Ellison, saw a flickering light while he was driving cattle through Paisano Pass and wondered if it was the campfire of Apache Indians. Other settlers told him they often saw the lights, but that when they investigated they found no ashes or other evidence of a campsite.
So it wasn't car headlights in 1883 and "no ashes or other evidence of a campsite".
> So it wasn't car headlights in 1883 and "no ashes or other evidence of a campsite".
... and also not little green men from Mars nor up-close sightings of ball lighting in 120 years.
The distances here are large (potentially 10's of miles with mountains) and the phenomena occur at dusk/night/dawn. It would be very hard to localize such lights by merely eyeballing it and then walking for hours over rugged desert to where it looked like it came from.
Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, especially as related to stuff they see in the sky, and even more specifically related to drones.
What seems overly credulous is that people are willing to think there are large groups of drones flying around, and there are no definitive images or video of them.
Eyewitnesses are unreliable, but that does not mean that events attested to by eyewitnesses are likely false, it means that they aren't certainly true.
As I mentioned above, consider the weight of evidence on either side. On the one hand, many eye witnesses many times. On the other hand, a government found no evidence. If that disposes you to conclude that the drones didn't exist, then I think that's probably just too fundamental a difference in our reasoning to reconcile by argument here. For me, I think the government findings are evidence against the drones but not as good as the evidence in favor of the drones.
The people of this town have never seen a star before?
Sadly, this is very believable to me . . . not that they haven't seen a star or a planet, but that they don't really know what they are looking at. People don't seem to look up very often nor do they seem to spend much effort understanding what they are seeing. This past week, we had people claiming that the International Space Station was next to the moon (the children are doing a section on space at school). I am sure I could easily find a couple of dozen people in town who will swear to have seen it. It was Venus.
A large percentage of UFO reports are planets. Another large proportion are regular aircraft (I've seen all the "classic" UFOs, they are all airliners under different conditions). Military flares are another sort of light that tends to hang around in the sky.
There are people who are surprised that you can sometimes see the moon in the daytime . . . I could go on.
UFOs are a useful analogy. Let's just consider the "flying saucer" class of UFOs that people sometimes claim to see, but let's imagine we live in a world where Flying Saucers aren't just a figment of the imagination but are also mass produced by many companies, built by hobbyists, owned in large numbers by governments and all manner of organizations. Flying Saucers are regularly flown by all these people for reasons ranging from test flights to reconnaissance to just plain fun.
Now, in this world some people will mistakenly spot Flying Saucers for the same reasons that people on Earth. In fact, spotting Flying Saucers will be even more likely because everyone will recognize they are real.
Now, in Flying Saucer world, suppose that 93 people, including police officers, over a period of weeks, spotted and reported, sometimes repeatedly, a group of Flying Saucers flying in a pattern - something that it's well known Flying Saucers can do.
Would you conclude that these people are all mistaken and caught up in mass hysteria?
I see your point, but I think the fact that drones unequivocally exist makes it more likely that people will mistakenly attribute something they see but don't understand to them, not less.
Ultimately, I make no conclusions on this particular case; I merely state that I find it completely plausible that a large percentage of those 93 people were mistaken and caught up in mass hysteria, especially after reports have been in the media.
If 92 out of 93 witnesses were wrong that would mean that the strange drones were there to be correctly witnessed.
I agree that nothing is certain about this. I don't completely rule out the mass error or mass hysteria hypothesis either. I just think it's more likely that there were some drones behaving oddly in the area. I doubt the witnesses are exactly right, but I also be doubt they are completely wrong.
This makes Vice look like state media. If they were capable of being real, independent journalists, they'd say "government says there were no drones", not mindlessly parroting.
>CDPS “confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity.” In other words, they found nothing.
This doesn't say "they found nothing." It says "they found nothing illegal."
So what if they're testing drone swarms anyways. It's inevitable.
I couldn't agree more wth you, how dumb do they think people are to write off dozens of eye witness accounts to hysteria, And I really disagree with this statement Vice makes:
">That’s because the drones never existed."
is absolutely not the same as:
">CDPS confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity."
Basically it could have been legal drone activity by either a company or Govt. agency. My thoughts when I initially heard about this was this could have been a mapping startup or maybe something a larger tech company is testing out.
Have you actually read through these cases? Looking through all the cases in the 2000s they are all basically cases of hypochondria on a larger scale. There's no instances of mass independent sightings of UFOs there.
Just because you can't explain it doesn't mean it didn't happen.. It's OK to say we don't know.
"Mass hysteria" is an explanation that seems hard to swallow
It sounds like people were making independent reports, it's not like they were all listening to a "War of the Worlds" broadcast and then reporting based on what they heard on the radio.
Can it really be called "mass hysteria" if the individuals didn't know about each other's reports?
From the original description:
On Friday, Myers said he watched eight of the large drones flying along the Yuma County border near the intersection of U.S. 385 and County Road 54. At the same time, a single drone hovered about 25 miles away over the town of Paoli — it didn’t move all night, just hovered over the town — and eight more drones flew over Haxtun, about 10 miles down the road from Paoli, Myers said.
It sounds like military drones, which probably wouldn't be unexpected in Colorado given the amount of military bases there.
He said "drone", and surely it wasn't simply a point light that Myers observed, but rather a perceptibly extended object at least?
So did this credible Myers also demonstrated the about 6 cm diameter binoculars needed to resolve a 20 metre "drone" 25 miles away? Or maybe he was using a 30 cm telescope to resolve a 5 metre drone?
Half the population has a phone with a reasonably competent low-light camera in their pocket and yet nobody took a good video of a drone that "didn’t move all night, just hovered over the town"? Bullshit.
> I'd like to know what the usual rate of false drone reports is in a typical town. Is this an average number of reports? More than average, and if so, why?
This is a false premise. You can extend the anthropic principle to observe that, given the existence of an average rate of false reports, either every town has exactly the average rate of false reports, or some have more. But that's a purely logical dichotomy; only the second option is actually possible.
So a higher than average rate of false reports doesn't actually need a "why" behind it.
This depends on the rate. If the average report rate is X per person with a standard deviation of Y, and this town has X+ZY reports where Z is a big number, then yeah, that kind of would require an explanation.
Knowing the town has an above average rate of drone reports wouldn't be dispositive. Instead, it would be one bit of evidence to help us weigh competing theories and incline us towards one conclusion or another.
Of course, the other thing it could show is evidence of Vice's conclusion. If this town had roughly the average number of false reports or was even a modest outlier, then that would help reinforce the "no such drones" position.
Learn about mass hysteria. This is exactly what happens. It's very easy for our brains to misinterpret things to match our expectations. If you believe there are swarms of drones you'll see them in things that aren't drones.
I have read about mass hysteria and it doesn't seem plausible to me.
If this were a crowd of people witnessing something and jumping to a strange conclusion where their beliefs were reinforced by each other's behavior - e.g. we both hear a car backfire, you look scared so I start to run and before you know it we're all talking about how we survived a mass shooting, then sure, I'd accept mass hysteria.
This is very different. It is many independent people over many days making reports of strange, but completely natural phenomenon. Nobody is seeing vampires, they are witnessing drones do the kind of things drones do. That a government agency can't find evidence of illegal drone activity after the fact is interesting, but it's absurd to conclude that this is mass hysteria.
If I flew a drone over you at night, and the police showed up a month later to inspect and found no evidence, would you believe that you had been suffering from mass hysteria?
Well, this is Vice we're talking about. It's a tabloid dedicated to sensationalism, prurience, and cynicism. Don't look to them for high quality journalism or analysis.
From the article in brackets to perserve their quoting: [CDPS “confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity.” In other words, they found nothing.]
"They found nothing" is not other words for what the article quoted. Maybe the found something that was not criminal, suspicious or illegal, but still more interesting than stars and airplaines, and they aren't telling.
That's what the article is saying though. That the entire origin story of "drones over Gatwick airport" is that someone found a damaged drone. That doesn't mean that the damaged drone was ever "over the airport", it just means someone found a damaged drone. No mention of how close to the airport, how long the drone had been there, etc. It could have been in a park nearby and someone crashed it into a tree weeks ago and it fell to the ground more recently.
The best part of the article, I can't believe no one has mentioned it yet:
The next day, the Yuma County Sheriff T.C. Combs received an email from a man who wanted to get deputized in order to “form a special task force dedicated to the clandestine monitoring, capturing, and prosecution of those responsible for the recent public panic. My team will be dedicated to the liberation of our skies,” he wrote, and would be known as “Team Alpha WarHawk.” He identified the strengths of each team member, including his own (“comic relief”). His second in command was the “culinary expert” and was “great, but not amazing. However he’s what we got.” The third member of the team specialized in “weapons/Ammunition expert” but was also “just an all around great guy.” One “recruitment pool candidate” makes a “mean pot of coffee” while another is “the most charming man I’ve ever met.” The lone member with a name of Hispanic origin was their “linguistics expert.” It went on like this.
We might be laughing now, but this kind of things bring us new laws, limitations and regulations.
Drones are a great tool, even in the hands of a total amateur. Some regulation is needed (eg. not flying over crowds of people), but otherwise a top-down view shows many, many interesting things, from far crash remains (missing people, atleast finding a body) to illegal dumping operations (eg. a company pouring toxic waste into a river), etc.
They are a great tool. We know a roofer that's using them to easily inspect and do initial quotes for roof repairs & replacements now...safer, easier, faster. Great idea.
It would be really nice to get a blanket permission for all drone activities under 50 feet AGL.
As someone who loves to use them to shoot video instead of using a ladder (for shots 15-20 feet in the air), the insane panic around their use at all has been massively inconvenient: it is illegal to fly one 20 feet off the ground in a national park as a platform for video/stills. This seems crazy to me.
Nothing that low/close poses any threat to anyone.
I've seen real estate agents using them for high altitude views of homes all the time. It does make a difference in addition to other pictures of homes. It's a view you otherwise wouldn't be able to see.
That would be a completely reasonable explanation and I could see that happening. But, there are some other details about the story that make me think there was more to it than that.
There were Sheriffs who reported seeing these fleets of drones. Sheriffs would normally try to calm hysteria rather than contribute to it, and it would be pretty hard to mistake a fleet of drones, not to mention they saw them moving in what they called a "search pattern". The numbers they were talking about were also higher than the number of traditional aircraft than can normally be seen at once, even near major airports with parallel runways in operation. If someone spots a few drones, I could see that being a mistake, but 17 flying in a search pattern? That person saw something exceptional no matter what it was.
Given the way that they worded this response, it seems like there was activity and that activity was found to be legal (ie. the operators had the appropriate 107 waivers to operate multiple drones and at night). It could have been your average joe, but that many drones makes it unlikely.
What else could it be? Lockheed Martin has a significant presence in Colorado and they hold both of these waivers that are necessary to operate multiple drones and at night (the FAA database is public and I looked in there for anyone who holds both waivers). Lockheed also has a small drone product in production that operates as a fleet with an extraordinary flight time and range using mesh networking:
Not to mention, Air Force Global Strike Command, "confirmed that it conducts counterdrone exercises" and it "oversees underground Minuteman silos spread across northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming and western Nebraska, the area where the drones have been spotted nightly the past two weeks"
Unfortunately, we'll never know for sure -- it's impossible to prove something didn't happen. All they can do is not find them when they try, and that was over a month after the initial sightings. Of course, it's completely logical not to believe it unless there is definitive proof too.
So, all of a sudden large numbers of people (among them some, like a helicopter pilot, with presumably much greater than average experience in noting different kinds of aerial phenomena) start misidentifying the stars or suffering mass hysteria or whatnot for the first time in their lives in a single concentrated space of time over a fairly specific geographical area? I'm sorry, that sounds even less plausible than them having actually seen something unusual. This is not to say that they witnessed actual UFOs or literal phantom drones but it still doesn't seem to add up to believable in the way the government report tries to paint it.
This is the kind of narrative embarrassed authorities push when they've utterly failed. "Nothing to see here, move along."
Legally, the drones never existed, otherwise the authorities have to admit incompetence and an inability to defend against and investigate this sort of activity.
It's far more plausible that multiple hobbyists have been simply playing with drones in the area. They are after all fairly popular, and to assert the drones never existed is to also assert that absolutely no hobbyists are flying drones at night in the area. How can you possibly assert that?
I'd also like to point out that much of the initial coverage included quotes from people selling "drone defense" services. It seems reasonable that these companies were incentivized to do whatever they could to stir up public fear.
Recently in Australia they have had the Satanic ritual child abuse mass hysteria come around AGAIN.
They are still facing prison after 2 years of investigation.
We know it happens but we rinse and repeat. Watch out there are two shooters! People loot after disasters! Most of the time there's a chemical leak at a school or business. (ie The plane that dumped fuel over a school recently)
Given a day by day counters for the Coronavirus on social media, it'll hit hard. The mass hysteria for the 2019 n-CoV is going to kill a lot more people than the virus itself although you can't slow / stop the Coronavirus without mass hysteria, it's hard to know if it's just collateral damage or an incident in itself.
Just this afternoon I saw a post on a photography site where someone is worried about cancellation of events he wants to photograph due to Coronavirus, in September and October.
This kind of 'Journalism' exemplifies my feelings about vice news. Sensentional, missing the point of the core premise, and sporting a profoundly misleading headline.
I believe weather radar doesn't even see large jet airplanes. They're probably tuned not to see airplanes, you just want to see the weather. So forget about drones.
I'm not sure what you would expect to see in a photograph of a drone at night. A white light certainly seems like a reasonable thing. My drones have lights on the bottom.
If you photographed a drone without a light it would look like the night sky. If you photographed a drone with a light it would look like a light in the sky.
I would have found it more convincing if there was video showing "large wingspan drones traveling in groups". Even at night, it should be possible to shoot a video of a group of drones that looks plausibly like a group of drones. But there doesn't seem to be any such video. Aircraft with thermal cameras went up looking for the drones, and didn't find anything.
Multiple government organizations, at the local, state and federal government level, investigated. They claim not to have found any evidence of strange groups of large drones flying around. No physical evidence or recordings exists of groups of large drones flying around. There are eyewitness reports, but they are definitely not independent--People were primed to see drones after the first reports. The local news report is a good example of a relatively easy debunked sighting that seems to have resulted from a strong expectation of seeing drones. And almost all of the reports were debunked, according to government claims.
It's possible there's a large-scale government coverup of a large-scale drone flight operation. The operation must be pretty important for so many levels of government to be convinced to lie about it. Very important, very secret, but for some reason still had to be done over populated areas, continuing for weeks after it became a big story--so it wasn't actually a very high priority to hide the drones from eyewitnesses. Coincidentally, and very luckily for the government coverup, not a single one of the many eyewitnesses has any convincing physical evidence or imagery of the flight operations.
I feel like someone is being overly credulous, but it's not Vice.
There's no need to think about a government cover up, and I feel like it's a way to phrase the argument such that it appears one either believes in strange drones or a government cover up. You can argue against the "large-scale cover up" and pretend like you are arguing against the existence of the drones, but in reality, you are not. Incidentally, the government has many times tested technologies that it did not acknowledge to the public or to the press.
In reality, the government team investigating said they couldn't find any evidence of illegal drones. You don't have to invoke a conspiracy to explain this - they didn't find any evidence. As I've written before, what evidence would we expect them to find? Drones flying through the air tend not to leave tracks.
Much of what you write here is incorrect. For example, you say that the government investigation found no evidence of strange groups of drones. That's wrong, in the week of January 6 to January 13 the team investigated 23 sightings and listed 4 of them as "confirmed by law enforcement but unable to identify." [1]
You write that the eye witnesses reports aren't independent because they were influenced by earlier reporting. The story was first reported by The Denver Post and in that story there were multiple reports from different people. [2] Subsequent reports may, or may not, be influenced by the initial story, but the multiple reports in the initial are independent.
You say that there is no imagery or photographs of the flight operations. This isn't true. Here's a photo of one of the drones they are investigating [3] and there are news stories referring to the collection of videos and photos though I didn't find them with a Google search. [4]
Regarding your implication that I'm being credulous - I hardly think so. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that many people simultaneously imagined a drone fleet flying over them, but I need better evidence than "a government team investigating weeks later didn't see the drones that weren't there any more". A good video would be more compelling, but it doesn't surprise me that it's difficult to take a good video at night with a phone.
I don't, but I also don't rule out "drone" as a source of light in the sky.
If I was there in person I might notice that the light seemed to be moving quickly through the sky, shifting elevation, or recognize the whirr of a drone's rotors. My eyesight might be able to distinguish the body of the drone, in the sky, at night, behind the light, where the camera might not.
On the one hand, we have 23 sightings a week, across the town, from a variety of people, including a helicopter pilot, over a sustained period of time. On the other hand, we have a government report that all of those sightings were of "stars, planets, or hobbyist drones". The people of this town have never seen a star before? Really? Is the government report really more believable?
It sounds like the scene in Men in Black, but even more lame. "No. Those weren't drones. Those were nothing."
"Mass hysteria" is an explanation that seems hard to swallow. These people weren't panicking, they weren't seeing demons or magic, they were making reports of real things (drones) acting in plausible ways. That a group of local government officials couldn't find any evidence doesn't seem to mean anything. What evidence would we expect them to find?
I'd like to know what the usual rate of false drone reports is in a typical town. Is this an average number of reports? More than average, and if so, why?
I work with lots of people who seem to have this attitude. When customers submit bugs that immediately think the customer is imagining the problem, or doing something wrong, or that the bug is magically a transient issue that isn't worth investigating or something like that. I think the reality is investigations are hard and sometimes yield nothing, but that doesn't mean we should jump to preposterous conclusions.