The UFO Hunt Becomes Harder

42Drones are messing up the search for UFOs.

I’ve said this before on this blog, and I don’t want to harp on it, but I found a new statistic that is worth sharing. We now have statistical proof that shows drones being used by the government and various other agencies are playing havoc with UFO hunters around our country and possibly around the world.

There was an article earlier this month in the UK’s Daily Mail Online that drew from another article in the Huffington Post.  The articles are stating that UFO sightings have increased by 42% from 2011 to 2012. This statistic comes from the National UFO Reporting Center.

DroneMilitaryPart of the problem is that some of the new drones are actually saucer shaped. But even if they were small enough and lighted, someone would think a bright light in the dark night sky is a UFO instead of recognizing the drone as the mundane manmade craft that it is.

 

Misuse of Drones So Far

According to Lee Spiegel, described as a “paranormal expert”, “The thing about drones is that you can make them look like UFOs. You can go to the local hardware store, and for not a lot of money, you can pick up the materials you need to make people go crazy.”

The article sites two examples of misuse of drones that we know about:

  1. September 2013, fans attending a baseball game at the Nat Bailey Stadium, Vancouver, Canada, noticed a UFO in the sky. Witnesses said the object was blue and had flashing lights all around it. Turns out, this was a drone programmed by the Canadian planetarium for the express purpose of fooling Canadien and AquaSox fans.
  2. During the week of June 14, 2012, many people along the highways of Washington, DC spotted a classic UFO loaded onto the back of a flat-bed truck. Many people thought it was a real UFO that had been captured. Turns out, it was only an experimental vehicle called an X-47B on its way to the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in South Maryland.

If you’d like to read more about the Washington, DC incident, here’s a link to my post about it:

https://visitcryptoville.com/2012/06/14/ufo-on-washington-dc-highways/

ERTeam They’re Useful at Times

There are good uses for drones:

  1.  Aid in law enforcement activities such as hostage situations, gang violence, pursuit of criminals (depending on the drone’s size).
  2. Assisting in finding victims of disasters, such as collapsed buildings, tsunami survivors, etc.
  3. Taking weather and atmospheric measurements to be better able to predict the weather
  4. During times of war, they’d be very useful for surveillance and covert missions.

Drones themselves aren’t the problem. It’s the people controlling them that we need to worry about. If anyone can go make a drone from hardware store parts, then there is no telling what kind of trouble they could make.

1984CoverThings to Fear

The main thing to fear with drones is spying on private citizens for no good reason. We have to decide if we trust our government enough to allow them to use their discretion as to whom they will spy on and for what reasons. I keep thinking about Big Brother.

Wiki states, “Since the publication of [the book] Nineteen Eighty-Four [by George Orwell], the term “Big Brother” has entered the lexicon as a synonym for abuse of government power, particularly in respect to civil liberties, often specifically related to mass surveillance.”

Another concern is, if amateurs are able to make them, how reliably will they fly? Could they come crashing down and cause harm to people or damage property? You know it’s going to happen eventually.

drone-hunting-licenseCitizens Fight Back

Believe it or not, the state of Colorado is fighting back against the use of drones.  The battle has gone back and forth between the state and the FAA, but the gist of it is the state wants its citizens to be able to shoot down the drones at will.

In Texas last year, a legislator introduced a bill to make it illegal to take photos of any property from a drone. An article from Popular Science states, “Texas House Bill 912–and similar laws under debate right now in Oregon and elsewhere–are driving a burgeoning debate about how to use and control unmanned air systems, from an AR.Drone to a quadcopter. The Federal Aviation Administration is in the process of drafting new rules governing unmanned aircraft in civilian airspace, including military-style aircraft. But in the meantime, plenty of cheap, easy-to-use aircraft are already popular among hobbyists and, increasingly, activists and law enforcement.”

AirTrafficA Mess

It’s going to be a mess no matter what they do. People with ROVs (remote operating vehicles) who can now make drones, activists using drones, law enforcement drones, government and military drones – the sky is going to be full of aircraft. How will that effect current airplane traffic? 

For UFO enthusiasts, it just adds to the confusion and misidentification. Right now people can hardly tell the difference between standard civilian and military air craft, earth science phenomena, and UFOs. But all this is overshadowed by the spectre of Big Brother, in my opinion.

What do you think?

30/30

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