USS Kidd (and other Ships) "Drones" Encounter, 2019

I simply don't see that UAP report making it all the way up the chain to Washington, DC, if that was a planned exercise; and then that encounter still being counted as "unidentified" in last year's UAPTF report.
 
Were they "initially unidentified" "unidentified as far as the report knows" "unidentified because no-one has managed to work out which specific drones from the exercise were actually represented in the pictures."

Also we are all focussing on the 'Bass Strait/Russell' incident here but there are a few other events in that period seem to be possibly just curious fishermen/civilians with drones getting too close to Navy ships and these are probably more likely to be unidentified whilst being "characterised" as drones, remember it seems the Navy has very high standards for using identified as per the recent hearing.

Also given it seems airliners are getting bundled in with the drone reports (triangle and IR image from The Drive) it's possible that some of the UIs are just other aircraft not involved but picked up due to heightened awareness.
 
A DoD denial of classified US military capabilities featuring in leaked UAP footage would make sense in both scenarios; (1) such capabilities actually featuring in the footage or (2) not. In the first scenario, an obfuscating form of denial is to deem the UAP in the footage "unidentified" without having to outright lie that the footage doesn't feature US capabilities.

Last year's UAPTF report indicated "some" of the 144 UAP incidents may feature classified US technologies without specifying which incidents and obviously without disclosing which technologies:

"USG or Industry Developmental Programs: Some UAP observations could be attributable to developments and classified programs by U.S. entities. We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected."

"Unable to confirm" is an interesting choice of words that could obviously mean several different things.
 
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Interesting line here in the Bunker Hill report, UAS still active after Bass Strait departure, I guess it depends what 'departure' means, if the drones were still in range then they could still be being controlled from there.
 
According to this article quoting Corbell on the 2019 incident. An anonmyous crewman said some of the objects were flying for 4+ hours and reached 21k feet.
As we know, hybrid drones can fly for that long, one example was the previously mentioned skyfront drone that flew for 13+ hours

The other aspect is altitude. This reminded me of a thedrive article which noted a 2018 incident in a warning area. 4 objects were tracked flying at 16k - 22k feet. When a pilot investigated one of them he saw a quadcopter drone flying at 20k feet. See below

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Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...onfirm-warships-swarmed-100-worldly-UFOs.html


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Source: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...ts-from-navy-pilots-flying-off-the-east-coast
 
According to this article quoting Corbell on the 2019 incident. An anonmyous crewman said some of the objects were flying for 4+ hours and reached 21k feet.
As we know, hybrid drones can fly for that long, one example was the previously mentioned skyfront drone that flew for 13+ hours

The other aspect is altitude. This reminded me of a thedrive article which noted a 2018 incident in a warning area. 4 objects were tracked flying at 16k - 22k feet. When a pilot investigated one of them he saw a quadcopter drone flying at 20k feet. See below

1656636885657.png

Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...onfirm-warships-swarmed-100-worldly-UFOs.html


1656637115127.png

Source: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...ts-from-navy-pilots-flying-off-the-east-coast
I mean Corbell can selectively quote all he wants, but the Navy pilot specifically says it looked like a quadcopter.

I guess infallible super human Navy pilots are only infallible when they are saying things moved at inhuman speeds but not worth quoting when they say things look like regular human technology.

Giant Killer is the call sign for Coastal ATC

GIANT KILLER is a military Air Traffic Control (ATC) call sign used within certain regions of the contiguous United States (CONUS). The callsign is primarily administered by the United States Navy for military flight operations on the East Coast.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Killer_(call_sign)

Drones are increasingly standard tools in outdoor industries especially maritime, fishing, oil/gas etc, are they operating them illegally out at sea? Or do the rules not apply in those locations? Should Giant Killer officially be aware of them or not? Or are these drones actually spy drones?
 
Corbell can selectively quote all he wants
where does he get "apparently impervious to anti-drone Navy technology" from?

I believe identifying a 3-4 ft wide quadcopter at 2000' requires some kind of optics, to the naked eye it'd look like a speck in the sky.
 
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where does he get "apparently impervious to anti-drone Navy technology" from?

I believe identifying a 3-4 ft wide quadcopter at 2000' requires some kind of optics, to the naked eye it'd look like a speck in the sky.
4 foot at 2000 feet is an apparent size of 0.114592 degrees

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_eye
I would assume that us just knowing something is there though, not sure how many degrees you need to recognise a quadcopter.

Given they had radar tracks if they had ATFLIR etc they could look at it with that but it does say visually, but that could mean optically via ATFLIR..
 
4 foot at 2000 feet is an apparent size of 0.114592 degrees

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_eye
thank you for the correction, I mistyped and computed 4/20000=0.0002 rad as the angular size instead of 0.002 rad. The correct value makes the quadcopter ~7 "eye pixels" wide, which is probably enough to get some idea of what it is, especially when in motion. It corresponds to 1/16" seen from 2.5', or 2mm seen from 1m distance.

And obviously there are optics on the aircraft, too.
 
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I did some googling around to see if Naval aviators might use binoculars from the cockpit, it would seem to be useful for the WSO in a 2 seater aircraft. Found a few scant references but nothing concrete..
 
According to this article quoting Corbell on the 2019 incident. An anonmyous crewman said some of the objects were flying for 4+ hours and reached 21k feet.
As we know, hybrid drones can fly for that long, one example was the previously mentioned skyfront drone that flew for 13+ hours
There are also two other hypotheses that I'd put higher on the list than 4+ hour drones.

1) Corbell is exaggerating or misinterpreting something.
2) The account of the "anonymous crewman" is inaccurate
 
In thje unredacted documents /emails etc the DoD released on the 2019 drone sighting. There were these two bits

Seems they noted in at least one case that some of the drones were quadcopter types.

In another case they mention wings?

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In episode 2 of weaponised there were a couple of things raised:

1) That the object shone a light down that was very bright. Some comments implying it couldnt be a drone.

A couple of things , surveilance drones like the Anduril Ghost do have spot lights. Which makes sense if they are trying to capture imagery during night time. There are also LED panel lights that are bright that can be attached. If the drone is big enough it could even carry a flashlight type lightsource and they can be very bright.
For example. look at how the Imalent MS-18 flashlight can light up a whole area like it's daytime. Something like that attached can be almost unbelievably bright

2) There was mention of the reports simply saying they saw UAS in 2019. And that UAS was a catch all they used sometimes. The problem here is that in at least one report , they went further and noted the object sighted was a quadcopter. See the Paul Hamilton 20119 report below for example:

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