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House intelligence committee briefed in secret meeting over all the drone sightings

If I were a conspiracy theorist I would believe the government is doing this all on purpose to terrorize their own citizens. So that they can pass yet another draconian tyranny department like NSA to take away even more of our freedoms again. After all, the government will need to be even bigger to "protect us from the drones".

It's the Russians. They're dropping even more fluoride into your water so they can track you.
 
Some of the “drone” sightings have turned out to be airplanes, planets, and stars. It isn’t clear what fraction of the recent reports are of actual drones.
The fraction that is actual drones must be vanishingly small given that the videos and photos that have been on the news and social media have all been aircraft, Venus, and such.
 
If it is US military then there may be very good reasons they are not revealing much info.
That kind of makes sense to me. But why would the US military be testing drones or conducting military exercises so close to heavily populated centers near New Jersey? Don't they have their own desolated locations in Nevada for that?
A better question is why all these people have never noticed that the are a lot of well lit planes in the sky in that area? I’m sick of the people claiming drones and then sharing video of landing lights on approach to LaGuardia or Newark.
 
If there is anything classified the briefing will be classified.

Look at what happened in Roswell--some sort of oopsie dumped a classified bit of equipment into the desert and people went bonkers over the idea of aliens. Think about what would have been in the classified briefing: our balloon payload crashed into the desert. Total nothingburger.

Think about what's happening now--suppose there was one sighting that was of something classified. It would be a classified briefing and the conspiracy theorists would go nuts about it.
That is not how free and open government should be run. Those particular 1% of the classified drones or incidents should just not be brought up in the meeting. You see this happen in congress all the time on cspan so people are used to someone saying they can not talk about something classified.

Just don't censor the entire meeting and expect people not to wonder about it.
 
If it is US military then there may be very good reasons they are not revealing much info.
That kind of makes sense to me. But why would the US military be testing drones or conducting military exercises so close to heavily populated centers near New Jersey? Don't they have their own desolated locations in Nevada for that?

I'm assuming your "desolated locations" refers to the famous "Area 51." That made sense as they were testing experimental aircraft didn't look or fly like anything that your average denizen of New Jersey would recognize, and even isolating it in the (relative) middle of nowhere still attracted UFO true believers. I mean, in the early 80s an F117 looked like an alien spacecraft.

Drones? They're pretty normal at this point, so testing them near a population center like New Jersey makes sense. You can fly a drone over a neighborhood and it gets "lost in the noise" so to speak. It's not a weird looking thing like a stealth fighter. It could be some company testing delivery drones or someone filming a YouTube video. The ubiquity of drones gives them "cover" to test stuff.
Something alone these lines. If the military needed to perform testing in a real world environment, a typical radio frequency background of cities, particularly near airport radar.

I remember some eight years ago when I worked at the FAA there being mention of setting up systems (they were recruiting people internally) to protect commercial aircraft from drone attack during the vulnerable time of takeoff and landing. Seems plausible that eight years later they'd finally be in a real world testing phase.
So the military needs to test its drones close to LaGuardia airport. No problem. Just tell the people who live there the truth so they aren't freaked out.
 
If it is US military then there may be very good reasons they are not revealing much info.
That kind of makes sense to me. But why would the US military be testing drones or conducting military exercises so close to heavily populated centers near New Jersey? Don't they have their own desolated locations in Nevada for that?

I'm assuming your "desolated locations" refers to the famous "Area 51." That made sense as they were testing experimental aircraft didn't look or fly like anything that your average denizen of New Jersey would recognize, and even isolating it in the (relative) middle of nowhere still attracted UFO true believers. I mean, in the early 80s an F117 looked like an alien spacecraft.

Drones? They're pretty normal at this point, so testing them near a population center like New Jersey makes sense. You can fly a drone over a neighborhood and it gets "lost in the noise" so to speak. It's not a weird looking thing like a stealth fighter. It could be some company testing delivery drones or someone filming a YouTube video. The ubiquity of drones gives them "cover" to test stuff.
Something alone these lines. If the military needed to perform testing in a real world environment, a typical radio frequency background of cities, particularly near airport radar.

I remember some eight years ago when I worked at the FAA there being mention of setting up systems (they were recruiting people internally) to protect commercial aircraft from drone attack during the vulnerable time of takeoff and landing. Seems plausible that eight years later they'd finally be in a real world testing phase.
So the military needs to test its drones close to LaGuardia airport. No problem. Just tell the people who live there the truth so they aren't freaked out.
1. That won’t stop people from freaking out, claiming all sorts of bizarre shit and so forth.
2. It is possible that some aspect of this is not for public knowledge.

I realize that you don’t think that US foreign policy, including various negotiations with foreign powers, some of them hostile to the US, should all be done out in the public’s view but that is unwise and unsafe.
 


Why the secret meeting over this? The fact that they are telling the public everything is alright, and there is nothing suspicious... then have a secret meeting, should make anyone curious. Here is our big and bloated government telling the public not to be alarmed, "don't worry about these drones that may be the size of pick up trucks hovering above your house. Because we have it all under control in our secrecy meeting! Nobody means you any harm....now just go back to bed and be a good boy."

Is that the kind of government we are supposed to have representing us?

Just tell us the truth already!

If I were a conspiracy theorist I would believe the government is doing this all on purpose to terrorize their own citizens. So that they can pass yet another draconian tyranny department like NSA to take away even more of our freedoms again. After all, the government will need to be even bigger to "protect us from the drones".

When they tell the truth you won't believe it anyway, so why do you care?

Because I am paying and expecting our representatives NOT to be corrupt.

And yes, the government can and often does lie and I may choose not to believe what they say. What is far worse than lying is for the government to be involved in organized secrecy meetings. We are supposed to be a free and open society. The public should be able to listen in real time to what our house intelligence committee learns and not treated like children and sheep. There should be nothing in those meetings that should not pass scrutiny from the average public.

Do you really want to live in a free and open society or do you want to pretend you are a child covering your hands over your eyes, who needs to be led and guided by the adults in Washington? I want the truth even if it is hard to hear. Such meetings in secret invite corruption and invite the public not to trust government.

Yet you supported a candidate who refused to release the truth about his health or wealth.

And his taxes.
 
If it is US military then there may be very good reasons they are not revealing much info.
That kind of makes sense to me. But why would the US military be testing drones or conducting military exercises so close to heavily populated centers near New Jersey? Don't they have their own desolated locations in Nevada for that?

I'm assuming your "desolated locations" refers to the famous "Area 51." That made sense as they were testing experimental aircraft didn't look or fly like anything that your average denizen of New Jersey would recognize, and even isolating it in the (relative) middle of nowhere still attracted UFO true believers. I mean, in the early 80s an F117 looked like an alien spacecraft.

Drones? They're pretty normal at this point, so testing them near a population center like New Jersey makes sense. You can fly a drone over a neighborhood and it gets "lost in the noise" so to speak. It's not a weird looking thing like a stealth fighter. It could be some company testing delivery drones or someone filming a YouTube video. The ubiquity of drones gives them "cover" to test stuff.
Depends on the drone. Pusher-propeller aircraft are very uncommon.

And there are probably some being used for espionage by parties hostile to the US. We have no adequate system to defend our bases from drone overflights, nor any way to prove who was operating the drone.
 
If there is anything classified the briefing will be classified.

Look at what happened in Roswell--some sort of oopsie dumped a classified bit of equipment into the desert and people went bonkers over the idea of aliens. Think about what would have been in the classified briefing: our balloon payload crashed into the desert. Total nothingburger.

Think about what's happening now--suppose there was one sighting that was of something classified. It would be a classified briefing and the conspiracy theorists would go nuts about it.
That is not how free and open government should be run. Those particular 1% of the classified drones or incidents should just not be brought up in the meeting. You see this happen in congress all the time on cspan so people are used to someone saying they can not talk about something classified.

Just don't censor the entire meeting and expect people not to wonder about it.
1) That's not how it works. They have to answer questions from the intelligence oversight committee.

2) If you only censor the important parts you reveal what are the important parts. That's why the US Navy has the policy of "we will neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons aboard any ship of the US Navy", even ships which clearly don't carry nukes. It's widely enough known that we have reduced it to "the confirm or deny option" to mean nukes.
 
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