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Bizarre UAVs Incident By The U.S. Navy

@eburacum, @EnolaGaia, @feinman
Maybe the change in description to 'drones/UAV is as simple as the change from 'flying saucer' to 'UFO' just the next generation of linguistic nuance, or like @feinman says, its less controversial than calling them 'UFOs'.
 
Certainly the best alternative to the alien hypothesis!
 
There are rumours that these drones came from a Liberian-registered-but-actually-Chinese oil tanker. The performance of these drones, if accurately reported, would be far in advance of anything commercially available; but it is not impossible that military drones could be much more capable than over-the-counter drones.

I'm not convinced - there have been many cases of distant aircraft and stars mistaken for drones in the past, but even if these particular sightings weren't drones, the technology is improving so rapidly that I expect to see a myriad of flying robots everywhere in the (relatively) near future.

Regulating these craft will be a nightmare - but quite possibly advances in tracking and information technology will be able to untangle this problem eventually. Every drone will need to have a transponder of some sort - and rogue UAVs should be relatively easy to detect because of this.
 
There are rumours that these drones came from a Liberian-registered-but-actually-Chinese oil tanker. The performance of these drones, if accurately reported, would be far in advance of anything commercially available; but it is not impossible that military drones could be much more capable than over-the-counter drones.

I'm not convinced - there have been many cases of distant aircraft and stars mistaken for drones in the past, but even if these particular sightings weren't drones, the technology is improving so rapidly that I expect to see a myriad of flying robots everywhere in the (relatively) near future.

Regulating these craft will be a nightmare - but quite possibly advances in tracking and information technology will be able to untangle this problem eventually. Every drone will need to have a transponder of some sort - and rogue UAVs should be relatively easy to detect because of this.
I believe in the UK you already need so sort of licence/registration

"Owners are obliged to identify and label all drones by 30 November, and operators must pass a test about legaland safe usage before they can fly them. ... All drones weighing more than 250g, which encompasses virtually all but the smallest toys, must be registered and labelled with a unique licence number." 4 Nov 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...tration-made-compulsory-as-uk-scheme-launches
 
Maybe the navy personnel called the objects "drones" because they behaved like drones? How objects move can help identify them, particularly when surface details can't be seen clearly, as I learned during the months when I was nearly blind.

Drones already have been used in combat and for espionage by earthly forces, and these roles are bound to increase with time. I think that Occam's Razor in this case favors the idea that earthly militaries are testing their new toys by buzzing one another's assets.
 
Iirc though, the drones seemed to not need to recharge / refuel and would drop from 80,000' down to sea level instantaneously. I also think it has happened in our territorial waters, and flying unknown objects directly over adversaries' ships would again, possibly cause a serious international issue or war. The incursions of UAPs into our airspace have been considered and act of war by Fravor and others, and it would be. So, then if they are our technology, why are we naively laying our cards on the table and looking like morons when all it would take would be a single call to cease the congressional enquiry and stop us from embarassing ourselves by revealing many generations out secret weapons for which there is no evidence of prototype development or spending, or manufacture of the devices. And why would we fly them over every country and risk the capture of something with such amazing capabilities --and fly hundreds of them at a time..
 
The latest, most highly advanced military-grade drones from major world powers probably have capabilities that leave commercial hardware in the dust.

Why use them so aggressively? Well, "brinksmanship" is a one-word answer. If a country finds, through testing, that it has a decisive advantage over a geopolitical rival's hardware, using deniable assets, then in many cases it has no reason not to strike. But the testing must come first...
 
And they would test them with their own forces rather than drop these countermeasures into a potentially hostile scenario. Collate the reports and evidence, discuss the programme, make adjustments, improve the effectiveness and move forward. The tech has probably become redundant but the concept has been proved sound. Now the next stream of better tech is in place and has probably been tested already.


Batman Airwalker Balloon - 44
 
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