Drones are in northern Virginia too!!

The truth about the "Drones"

What we are witnessing here is an actual "Chicken Little" event. If you're not familiar with that folk tale, then look it up.

This situation is irrefutable proof of the stupidity and easy manipulation of apparently the majority of the population. And it's not being helped by the stupidity of the media and the incompetence of government. The govt is full of regular people ie stupid people. The majority of people are complete idiots, but this is taking it to beyond Idiocracy level.

I have not seen a single video or photo of these sightings of lights in the sky that I can't easily identify as what it really is.

Most videos don't even show a craft, just lights. Some do even show what is clearly an airliner or helicopter. Yet somehow people are interpreting what they see completely wrong. Most people can't accurately judge size, speed, altitude or distance in the day and sure as hell not at night.

Some videos are clearly showing out-of-focus lights. I can film planes, adjust the focus and create the exact same effects.

Most of these videos are showing very distant lights that are being interpreted as nearby. What are seen as single white lights are typically 20-40 miles away, maybe more. They are airliners stacked on approach. Others described as flying back and forth, which I have yet to see in a video, would likely be those flying the downwind leg in one direction and then the final in the other direction. I haven't seen any video that isn't just a short clip. A full video would show the full flight path, but everybody has the attention span of a gnat.

And since they think what they are seeing is close by and check a flight tracker and can't find anything, well it must be a drone. It's no surprise that they're not seeing anything on a flight tracker if they're looking in the immediate area. They need to be looking well beyond. But their spatial referencing and orientation is so out whack we end up where we are now.

In all these reports why is there never any accurate information about the exact time, location and azimuth of viewing at the time these lights are spotted? With that I can very easily identify which airplane/helicopter someone is seeing. Even from the comfort of my home hundreds of miles away.

At night from my home I can see loads of flights inbound to IAD and DCA. They look exactly like the so-called drones too. Imagine that! To the south I can see them about 40 miles out when they're at about 5000ft and I can follow them to less than 1000ft before they drop below my horizon of the distant trees. To the west I can see them ~25 miles out before they reach the mountains in western Loudoun Co. And then there are all the departures where I get to see different lighting patterns which somehow idiots are also interpreting as drones even when the fuselage, engines and tail are clearly illuminated.

I get to see the DCA and BWI departure at 10,000-18,000ft. I get IAD departures at 4000-7000ft coming directly over me. Before reaching me and going overhead, the appearance of those could be interpreted by a dumba$$ as a smaller object climbing straight up from the tree line in the near distance.

As far as these spottings 'over' Picatinny Arsenal, where are the spotters? Nearby and looking to the southeast? Well guess what is 20-40miles to the southeast? Approaches to EWR, LGA and JFK.

Think about this morons- if all those lights are drones, then where are all the lights of all the commercial air traffic?

The sound- Some people say don't hear anything. Well no shit. It's nowhere near you. Even some of the clearly airliners they claim to not hear a jet. Well, planes have gotten a lot quieter. They also often have noise restrictions they have to follow so they won't be at full power, so quieter still. Additionally atmospherics play big role on what if anything you will hear. I've got a large highway south of me. Some days I hear traffic very well, other days nothing. Same for hearing the siren on the firetruck I ride on. Some days it will be passing by on the highway and I hear nothing, yet other days I can hear it several miles away shortly after it has pulled out of the station.

Atmospherics also have an effect on how lights appear.

The government has finally come out and said they are commercial planes, which is entirely true. Their failure has been in explaining the why. They need to explain the optical illusion. But since people already don't believe the government, that will be a big hurdle.

Out of all these video, I've only seen one that is an actual 'drone', a hoax video using a quadcopter with the lights of distant airliners in the background and implying all the objects are the same distance away and are interacting with each other.

I imagine most of the people not creating hoax videos have never actually seen a quadcopter or other type of RC aircraft at night. They have no idea about the brightness of their lights at altitude. The lighting of a typical quadcopter lights are not even close to the brightness of lights of distant airliners.
The lights on a quadcopter at a few hundred feet are comparable to the positional and strobe lights of a plane directly overhead at 35,000ft.