It's something to consider, given the transition team has a wealthy aerospace magnate playing a large role in the transition. If anyone has the resources to pull off a drone "hoax" of this size meant to terrify the citizenry (to soften us up before they take power?), Elmo Musk does.

Myself, I'm still "drone-agnostic". We're still missing huge amounts of information to be able to formulate a theory on their origin. I believe they exist (many people are reporting seeing actual drones the size of a card table, and they've seen them *in groups*) but I'm just not ready to say where they come from.

I think it is possible. I keep in mind that the terrible excuses for human beings that the felon wants in his administration are simply the tip of the ice cube, with much more below the surface that are not visible to the public. And tat ice cube is in Putin's drink.

One thing I would warn against is taking people on the ground's account of how big or heavy they are. Such accounts always have a habit of growing larger. Last night, I listened to a very reliable retired intelligence person. He noted someone saying they saw one that "was at least 600 pounds." Really? How exactly does one weigh something flying in the dark night sky? Same with size.

Note: in 2004, when some person was attempting to stoke anxiety on this very forum -- a person soon be be zapped in DU's troll zapping machine -- I noted that my greatest fear was that it would start raining console televisions that went unsold in the 1960s. Though no one shared my fear, it still haunts me to this day. Especially if these are 600 pounders, and just as large as the fish that got away.

large, AI-directed drones will be used in the targeted neighborhoods to save on expenses and resources. This will be like Trump/Musk's version of Robocop.

It is some kind of distraction by 45 team.

Or just harmless fun by a bunch of drone enthusiasts?

Faux will make it into some kind of scare tactic no matter what it actually is, so it doesn't matter.

Watching the Fox News reports about Iran resulted in my having a panic attack, and trying to enter the building where I attended grade school, so I could seek the safety and comfort of getting under a desk. In fact, I'm still there now. I had to explain that I'm thinking about trying out for a scholarship that John Bender told me about.

On a less serious note, I thiink it's jets, planes, drones, and wild imaginations. I do not doubt that there are those in the shadows who started this as an operation, and who are pleased it has become a fad.

Oh, that would be great!

My late brother and one of my cousins are believers in alien contact. I'm not expecting anyone to come out of the sky to save us. No one saved Neanderthals, etc. Our species will go extinct after a relatively brief stay on Earth.

Martians (and others) may take offense.

He's already guilty of space pollution.

It does NOT mean an extra-terrestrial craft. There is zero, I repeat ZERO evidence that anything from elsewhere has visited our planet.

For one thing, understand that the speed of light is an absolute limit on how fast anything can travel, and suggesting that some vastly more advanced civilization could travel faster is a non-starter.

And even though we are finding planets everywhere, we still have not found anything actually earth-like. For one thing, about 70-80% of the stars in Milky Way are red dwarfs, and are probably not ever going to host an actual Earth-like planet.

They really are ordinary drones. For whatever reason a lot of people are looking up at the sky and seeing them.

That is, of course, exactly what I said several times: "unidentified."

Also, I agree 25% with you. Drones, planes, jets, and imaginations. We can't forget imaginations now, can we? What would our first grade teachers think? Of course, mine got old and died, so I'll have to use my imagination on what she might say. It's not as if I could identify what she might say with any certainty.

If the beings in the craft were in suspended animation of some type, or were some type of cyborgs or AI robots that did not age as we know it, or the original crew were replaced by descendants many times over it is certainly possible for
"beings" from many light years to have arrived here at any time in our history and established bases or a hidden civilization.

Next.

flying things in the sky -- planes of various sizes and appearance, helicopters, drones, balloons (whether party balloons, passenger balloons, or spy baloons), human-made satellites, our own spacecraft taking off or returning, meteor showers, kites.

So when people witness flights in certain areas more often than usual, some of which they can't identify, of course the logical conclusion is the most esoteric of all the probabilities -- aircraft of space aliens from a distant galaxy.

Sure.

That's like hearing a scratching noise in your attic and concluding that it's a ghost haunting and not a nest of squirrels or some other natural wildlife.

And we laugh at MAGAs who fall for Q-Anon

one percent of light speed Yes, our technology will surely improve that by a lot.

Meanwhile, at the risk of repeating myself, there is zero evidence of alien visitors in the last several thousand years. Perhaps no technological civilization lasts very long. it looks like we won't. So while it's possible that technological civilizations happen all the time, they just don't last very long. The age of the Universe, some 13.7 billion years, while vast, is really not that long. My Son The Astronomer has told me that many, perhaps most, astronomers think we may well be the very first technological civilization in the galaxy.

As to the speculations of generation ships or AI robots colonizing the galaxy, again the question is, where are they?

There is no public absolute proof. To say there is no evidence is just not true. I am not claiming it is extra-terrestrial, but like I said an advanced civilization could have reached earth without exceeding light speed. Whether or not that civilization collapsed at a later time would not affect the probes. There could also be an advanced human civilization that has existed without our knowledge. We know less about our oceans and what lies beneath than we do about our solar system. Millions of square miles at our poles lie unmapped. To claim that there is no evidence of advanced technology operating on our planet, especially "flying" craft is to ignore the testimony of thousands of military and commercial pilots that have observed these craft for decades. And the unreported incidents, because of fear of ridicule or loss of employment, multiply that number by many times.

None. And yes, our government has lied and obfuscated endlessly on this topic, but still no proof.

As Fermi asked "Where are they?"

I am also quite skeptical of the hypothesis that they have managed to build replicating machines to colonize the galaxy. Again where are they?

My mom told me that yes, Welles had a great voice, in fact it was so distinctive to those who routinely listened to his radio show that they knew it was a drama. She said that she and the family never once thought it was anything but a radio drama, particularly with the brevity of orchestral interludes between the bulletins. And of course, the Mercury Theater stars’ voices.

One thing that I am 100% certain of is that what I saw in 1967 was not a jet, plane, or drone. No one that I am aware of could identify exactly what it was.

Not the time, I was young enough that my father was able to force me to attend the catholic church as well as catechism. The week after the sighting, some of the other POWs in catechism were discussing the sighting. The sister/nun said there was no such thing as UFOs, for if there was, they would surely be mentioned in the bible.

This caused me to ask how the prophet Elijah left the earth? She said on a flaming chariot. The room was quiet for a moment, and then every (except the sister) cracked up laughing. My father was called to fetch me for that.

Is Elijah returning, with an army of angels in aircraft?

Or, since this is the Christmas season, could the Nativity angels who appeared to the shepherds be returning for a reenactment?

Hope it's not the Rapture.

I do not doubt people who report seeing an unidentified object in the sky. But, to me, the significant word in that phrase is "unidentified." Why can't we accept that we don't know what something is, without assuming the most esoteric explanation?

It's natural to speculate. But one of the lessons that I learned from high school geometry was to accept that sometimes there is not enough knowledge given in a problem to establish a proof, i.e. to determine the size of an angle, or the perimeter of a shape. The correct answer to such questions on a test was "insuficient information."

When I was 19, I had a second floor apartment in an old house which had been divided up into rental units. Sometimes in the evening when my roommate was out, I heard sounds coming from a small room that we used for storage. We had a puppy who noticed it too, and would bark at the door to the room.

An old couple next door told me that the original owner of our building had killed herself. We told our friends about this and they suggested that the deceased woman haunted our apartment. They brought a Ouija board over and got answers that fit their idea.

A whole story evolved out of that. The woman who had died had a young son at the time, who was an adult by the time we rented our apartment. Our friends said that her spirit must be seeking out her son. They led us to the room to tell the woman's spirit that her son was doing well and she could leave.

A couple nights later, the puppy was barking up a storm at the door and I heard sounds in the room. When I peaked inside, a black starling was perched on a tall floor lamp just below the ceiling. I moved the puppy away from the door and when I looked back, the bird had disappeared.

Next day, the maintenance manager looked into it. There was a small trap door in the ceiling that led to an attic from when the building was a one family home. We had never used it or even opened the trap door. The maintenance guy found a small eroded space in the ceiling tile adjacent to the trap door. Inside the attic crawl space, he found bird droppings and a space under the building's eaves where the starling apparently got into the attic.

Poof! There went the elaborate, esoteric haunting story.

was factual are vastly overstated, and that when it happened, as you pointed out, essentially no one thought it was real.

his Mom and family didn't think it was real. That may -- or may not -- because they heard the introduction to the show. Or it might be because when CBS radio was getting lots of phone calls, a reminder was made mid-show. The number of people who reacted in panic has likely been inaccurately reported on the plus side, maybe due in part to the newspaper coverage the following day. But it is an error to say "essentially no one" believed it. No one can put a number on it, only speculate ...... much like one can only speculate on the drone crisis of 2024.