0:01:54] IP: Yeah. Unfortunately, we're not done with this thing yet. That's true. Okay, so here's
as best I can understand it, what has happened so far. We're of course referring to the drones.
More specifically, the mass hysteria that has gripped much of New Jersey with regard to what
many, many people are claiming are drones. Drones is any aircraft, apparently, that you cannot
identify because you're not on, or something. It's unclear to me how they're these distinctions
are being made. But here's what's happened as far as I understand it so far. In mid-November,
there were reports and what seemed to be legitimate reports of unknown small drones over the
Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey.
Those reports are being investigated by the military, which certainly takes seriously the
incursion over its facilities. It's being investigated by a variety of three-letter agencies in the US.
Now, it's apparently being investigated by every single person who has decided to look up into
the sky. That seems to be where this all started, as far as an actual thing to kick off a conspiracy
theory. From there, everyone, it seems, on the East Coast and especially in New Jersey, looked
up for the first time at night and saw lights in the sky. Instead of thinking, oh, I live next to
Newark International Airport, one of the busiest international airports on the Eastern Seaboard.
Maybe those are airplanes. People have decided that those are drones.
This is expanded to be anything that happens mostly at night. These things only fly at night
apparently, and they all have navigation lights. so people have taken to claiming that these are
drones, these are unidentified aircraft. Certainly, they are unidentified, if you personally are
unable to identify them. for the most part, they are easily identifiable as human manufactured
and operated aircraft. Lots of the videos that I've seen have made these aircraft easily
identifiable, not even pulling out flightradar24, just looking at the airplane and going, that looks
like an American Airlines 737. That looks like a French BA350.
When you add the ability to track aircraft via flightradar24 into the mix, it becomes even easier
to see that people are discovering that they apparently live under approach and departure paths
from major international airports.
[0:04:56] JR: Not just major international airports. There is also in Central Jersey, if that is
actually a thing, Maguire Air Force Base, a pretty large Air Force Base, and not all of those
aircraft rightfully so transmit ADSB, and they are not trackable for obvious reasons. Yeah, there
probably are untrackable aircraft flying low over New Jersey, because that happens all the time.
That's not anything new. It's just the mass hysteria that has been stoked, not just by people in
New Jersey looking up, which is a fun sentence to say, but also, up into the ranks of
government, where you have politicians from Pennsylvania, seeing a very clearly fake Star
Wars prop on the back of a flatbed truck driving and he's going, oh, that must be one of those
drones that got downed. then you have what was the governor of Pennsylvania pointing his
phone up to the sky.
[0:05:54] IP: I believe, it was Larry Hogan, former governor of Maryland.
[0:05:57] JR: Oh, that's right. I'm sorry.
[0:05:59] IP: That discovered Orion's belt. My apologies to Josh Shapiro. That didn't sound
right, but I got the wrong governor. But the governor of Maryland looking up at the sky saying,
"Drones," when it was literally stars in the sky. Proven to be stars in the sky. We have gotten to
this point of mass hysteria that I think is the pinpoint moment of peak stupidity of at least the US
population, that government officials state top government officials are looking up, panicking at
the literal stars in the sky. That's how bad this is.
[0:06:35] IP: Speaking of government officials, all of the statements that we've – the official
statements that we've got, as in here's a statement from the FBI and from the military, they say,
"We haven't found anything that would indicate that any of this is a systematic operation of
unidentified aircraft." All of these statements point to the fact that all of the reports that they've
received so far have been found out to be human powered, human operated aircraft stuffed with
humans, hundreds of them as well.
[0:07:11] IP: Because here comes the FedEx and UPS pilots banding together to say, "Please,
stop shining lasers at us. We are carrying your Christmas presents and do not want to crash
into your neighborhood."
[0:07:22] JR: Yes, that would be helpful. To that point, the FAA at the exact moment we started
recording this podcast today, actually, put out some laser incident data that year over year from
December 2023 over to December 2024, which is not over, it is only December 18th, reports
specifically of aircraft getting lasered in New Jersey is up 269% over the same year. December
2023 reported 16 incidents for the entire month. So far in December 2024 through December
16th, there have been 59 incidents of morons going outside, pointing lasers at aircraft that could
range anywhere from nothing bad happens to blinding the pilots operating the flight leading to
some incident, which seems like it's only a matter of time at this point.
It is to anyone who says this is just harmless activity, people being stupid, nothing bad is going
to happen, something bad will eventually happen if this hysteria keeps up. I mean, there are
other government officials saying, "If I see this over my lane, I'm going to shoot it down." Well, at
some point that NOTAM that's in Haiti, that you don't want to fly too low, because people are
shooting at airplanes. Well, that's going to become New Jersey. Man, that's going to make it
hard for United to operate a hub.
[0:08:45] IP: Yeah. I mean, let's widen our scope here and talk a little bit about what people are
seeing in the sky and how you can – and this might be a little remedial for our audience. In case
you're listening to the podcast for the first time, or you just think to yourself, "Okay, maybe this
will be helpful. I can share it with someone who," if you're the avgeek in your group of friends, I
assume that people have been asking you what you think is happening. Let's talk about what
people are saying.
Aircraft on approach often are visible, because they have turned their lights on, are more visible
because they have turned additional lights on, which is often, I think, what we're seeing with
these videos is where aircraft are turning on their landing lights and people go, "Oh, that must
be one of the drones." You'll also notice that aircraft are blinking with anti-collision beacons and
navigation lights. If it has navigation lights, it's fairly safe to assume that it's an aircraft that does
not want to crash into things.
[0:09:51] JR: Yes. Drones flying over areas for espionage, or spying reasons probably aren't
turning all of their anti-collision and landing lights on and all sorts of other lights. They usually
don't have people looking out the windows either.
[0:10:04] IP: There's that.
[0:10:06] JR: If you're running an espionage drone mission, you're probably not going to turn
the lights on.
[0:10:09] IP: Exactly. Also, as far as identifying where aircraft are and identifying the specific
aircraft, if you're hearing aircraft, you are behind where the aircraft actually is, if you're hearing
it, because light travels faster than sound. If you hear where the aircraft is, look in front of that,
because that's where you're going to see the aircraft. I think that gets a lot of people in trouble,
especially at night, where they're saying, "I hear it, but I can't see anything," because you're
probably looking in the wrong spot. Be aware of that.
Two, human depth perception, especially at night, is terrible. It is terrible. People often perceive
things, especially aircraft, as closer to them than they actually are. One of the things that folks
have done when they're trying to use flightradar24, or whatever, if you're using another service
and listening to this podcast, fine, I guess. But zoom out, because the aircraft could be further
away, or higher than you think. Those are just some of the tips that I've been giving far too often
this week. I really hope that we can be done with this before, like Jason said, before something
happens, before something bad happens, before somebody takes this too far.
[0:11:41] JR: Yeah. I do have a theory of why this has been so disproportionately reported for
New Jersey and to a lesser extent, New York. No, we're not elitist here. We know what airplanes
are, but I do have a feeling that in New York, Air Traffic Control has a tendency to bring aircraft
to a lower and slower altitude far sooner before they arrive at the airport than other major metro
areas, just because of the traffic conditions here, how congested the airspace is. It may not be
something people are used to elsewhere to see a 787 at 3,000 feet nowhere near the actual
airport, but that's actually quite common here.
The approach path for all three of our airports, depending on where you're coming from,
Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK, all of those routes have a tendency to go over New Jersey pretty
close to each other. It's not surprising that there are a lot of aircraft flying low and slow at night
when air traffic increases into over New Jersey, because that's just how it works around here.
[0:12:44] IP: I thought we were going to try and find a way to blame this on the FAA moving the
trade responsibility to Philadelphia.
[0:12:50] JR: If New Jersey can blame Philly for something, that's always a good scapegoat.
Maybe let's just go with that.
[0:12:56] IP: There you go. Hopefully, we're not back with any additional stories on this, but we'll
keep you posted. I fear that this might not be the last we hear of the drones.
.
