This sure beats the hell out of winter clothing threads.
I'm trying to break this down in a simple and concise way. By no means am I a genius in thought experiment, so this may sound entirely dumb but here it goes anyway.
So there are sightings, and we can break those into 2 groups: people who are clearly looking at planes without knowing it, and people who are seeing things that are not planes. While I'm 100% sure there are people in the first responder realm of govt. who fall into the former category, is it possible that
every single one of the sightings, including the government "confirmed" sightings, are all 100% planes? Maybe.
So let's assume that every single sighting
is a plane. Why would the NJSP send choppers out multiple times to look for and/or follow something around? Why wouldn't the government come out and say all the sightings are planes? Why would there be statements from multiple branches of government on this? Maybe a politician wouldn't want to come out and say "they're all planes you morons" but the FBI, Military, and FAA are all apolitical arms of the government. They presumably have nothing to lose by saying they are all planes, even if it was a fabrication. In fact this would be the easiest way to solve the problem. Are we just too early in the process to have this statement come out?
Alternatively, let's assume at least a few of these sightings are legitimately non-airplane objects. There are a few scenarios that come to mind. First is that someone majorly F-ed up some sort of top secret operation, and no one can admit it because it's classified shit and someone would have major egg on their face if it came to light. I think this is pretty far fetched, especially because the "it's just planes" option would be the easiest cover-up. Another possibility is that some nefarious actors have managed to breach our air space multiple times, and again no one would admit it because it would be a major defense and homeland security failure. It's another pretty far fetched scenario and the "just planes" excuse would be the easiest cover. But,
the balloon thing from last year is a bit of a precedent, and the response to that incident is interesting in this context.
The balloon was at 60,000 ft and spent a lot of time flying over less populated areas. Military planes tracking it would not cause such a huge public disturbance. Even then, the military waited until it was tracked over open water to be shot down. And I'm sure there was a lot of analysis along the way (i.e. trying to detect what it was carrying). Back to the drones, there were some pretty interesting arguments earlier in the thread about closed airspace and jets that would be dispatched to shoot down unidentified drones. While this does seem to make sense, how would fighter jets manage to fly at a rate that can keep pace with a drone? As mentioned earlier, they struggle to go slow enough to escort a Cessna out of restricted air space. Also, there was mention in the balloon wiki that the balloons are tough to shoot down due to lack of signature, and I'm guessing a lot of that would also apply to drones. Again just a guess. Ultimately what I'm getting at is a major defense response along with shooting down drones with unknown cargo over the most densely populated are in the country seems like a pretty risky move and something that would get people pretty panicked in a hurry. I don't think there's any right answer in that context. But this is getting off the rails.
The final scenario I thought of, which to me is the most plausible outside of "everything is a plane", is that some one or a group of people were flying hobbyist drones and got too close to something they were not supposed to (like Picatinny). This caused a response, and then word got out, and people started watching the sky. Then it snowballed from there, when everyone started reporting every light in the sky as a drone.
Or, maybe it's all just a false flag, someone call Alex Jones
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/nf...ongress-take-action-threat-drones-2024-12-09/
www.nj.com
