The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884xv3/the-colorado-mystery-drones-werent-real

by tpc3 • 6 years ago

125 76 6 years ago

vice.com

opwieurposiu• 6 years ago

Very common for people to report drones when there are no drones. This is what shut down gatwick airport for 3 days!

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gatwick-dron...

jibbit• 6 years ago

It was very interesting to be caught up in a mass hysteria event https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-eng...

draugadrotten• 6 years ago

The article you link mention they found a damaged drone on the ground. That doesn't sound like evidence of "no drones" to me.

rwiggum• 6 years ago

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.

java-man• 6 years ago

CDPS “confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity.”

this means the "activity" was legal.

deadmetheny• 6 years ago

Exactly this. I'm not convinced in the least that nothing happened, merely that nobody was breaking any laws with whatever they were doing.

crooked-v• 6 years ago

13 were determined to be “planets, stars, or small hobbyist drones.” Six were commercial aircraft, and four remain unconfirmed.

Sounds to me like a case of one or two guys flying drones sometimes that turned into "What's that light in the sky?! It must be a drone!!"

JohnFen2• 6 years ago

And not suspicious.

dang• 6 years ago

The previous thread about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21876818

testis321• 6 years ago

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.

giancarlostoro• 6 years ago

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.

mterrel• 6 years ago

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.

sneak• 6 years ago

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.

the-pigeon• 6 years ago

FCC already has a good solution proposed that will probably be implemented in the next several years.

Put transponders on all drones that must be registered. Then it's easy to track and ID anyone legally flying.

And anything large/long range without a transponder is illegally flying.

jshevek• 6 years ago

I don't think it's a "good solution" for *all" drones to be easily tracked.

nkrisc• 6 years ago

Thirty years ago it would have been aliens, right? I'm a little surprised no one reported being abducted by the drones.

dmix• 6 years ago

Did you notice in the police report that "someone got a picture of the drones" but it turned out to just be a picture of a "white light in the sky".

This would definitely be UFO two or three decades ago.

Also the number of spelling and grammatical errors in the sheriff's email was quite... surprising. Or maybe not, for small town police...

a3n• 6 years ago

I've found spelling and grammar errors after very common, even among "smart" people.

I think it's just a matter of what you've focused on in your life, purposely or not.

ALittleLight10• 6 years ago

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.

Trombone123• 6 years ago

Bit weird to not use spell check, but when writing a mail to a crank... eh, whatever.

I'm honestly more surprised the vice editor left out a [sic] after "fdar", did they really miss that one?

aaron695• 6 years ago

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.

mark-r2• 6 years ago

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.

ALittleLight10• 6 years ago

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.

subsubzero• 6 years ago

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.

driverdan• 6 years ago

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.

ALittleLight10• 6 years ago

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?

Johnny555• 6 years ago

"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.

Trombone123• 6 years ago

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?

fsh• 6 years ago

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.

jjwiseman3• 6 years ago

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.

You might find this post interesting, https://www.metabunk.org/threads/plane-shaped-drone-caught-o..., in which a local news reporter and law enforcement officer think they see a drone, but it is convincingly argued that what they saw was an airplane.

ALittleLight10• 6 years ago

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.

crispyambulance2• 6 years ago

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.

I agree. "Occam's Razor" is wise.

ALittleLight10• 6 years ago

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.

carapace• 6 years ago

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".

phyzome• 6 years ago

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.

symplee2• 6 years ago

Fairly well documented throughout history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness

crazynick4• 6 years ago

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.

hnuser123456• 6 years ago

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.

jamisteven• 6 years ago

Agreed, Vice is usually good stuff.

goodcanadian2• 6 years ago

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.

ALittleLight10• 6 years ago

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?

thaumasiotes• 6 years ago

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.

ALittleLight10• 6 years ago

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.

friendlybus• 6 years ago

A person is smart, people are dumb panicky animals and you know it. And they panic the most when secrets need to be kept secret.

mikedilger• 6 years ago

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.

stillbourne• 6 years ago

Eye witness testimony is the lowest form of evidence.

exabrial• 6 years ago

Had anyone correlated the sightings with weather radar?

semi-extrinsic• 6 years ago

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.

basicplus2• 6 years ago

"These aren't the drones you are looking for.."

newnewpdro• 6 years ago

"That’s because the drones never existed."

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?

mirimir• 6 years ago

I love the quote from Sheriff Combs. It's priceless. That guy has quite the sense of humor. Reminds me of Tommy Lee Jones in "Men in Black".

shrubble• 6 years ago

There is so much military and government in the state of Colorado that the concept that 'authorities were baffled' is laughable.

Anything that was happening in the air, someone knew about. Whether they were able to speak on the record about it is a different matter.

droithomme• 6 years ago

The article didn't convince me at all that it was mass hysteria, in fact that conclusion seems fairly specious.

hexane360• 6 years ago

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.

alecjaco• 6 years ago

Move along sir, nothing to see here

c3534l2• 6 years ago

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.

333c• 6 years ago

Is this a reference to some movie? Or just a peculiar email?

c3534l2• 6 years ago

It sounds like it would make a good movie, but it doesn't ring any bells.

shadowprofile77• 6 years ago

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.

Jamwinner• 6 years ago

This kind of 'Journalism' exemplifies my feelings about vice news. Sensentional, missing the point of the core premise, and sporting a profoundly misleading headline.

Awelton• 6 years ago

"You didn't see anything, and here is a crappy vice article to prove it"

The Colorado mystery drones weren’t real

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