News Mysterious drones over New Jersey

we were just talking about it as a family. I really don't know but I must admit (and may be embarrassed later) that its got me just a little nervous man.

I don't like that the gov says they don't know what they are.... that's a weird statement that I cant understand frankly. and if they are ours or if they are not I still don't like their answer. I don't like that they wont comfort the American people even if they are lying.....


what are you thinking man?
I am at a level 6 on my “not good” scale. In December 2019 I was at a 10.

I generally believe this is a US govt sanctioned exercise that is looking for something. That something can be a radioactive material or chemical material.

The only thing that makes sense, ruling out something other worldly, is that there is a credible threat they are trying to hunt down while not alerting the public or even politicians.

If it’s extraterrestrial, well — idk man. I’m definitely concerned. My family is in NJ. Were are potentially considering calling them to come to Texas.
this sounds very reasonable. BUT why not tell the country they are ours and that they are doing tests and not to worry then? why lie and allow people to live in fear about that and risk causing panic.

that is not reasonable behavior and makes me thing there is more to it man.

also they are being reported in other states and other countries which seems strange.
Consider that it’s a black project and only a few people know. DARPA always has better tech and usually it’s unknown to those in government.
 
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These are the points what I've gotten so far from following this story:

The drones are about car sized, which is bigger than commercial drones available for sale. I'm no drone expert, but I think only military/rescue drones are this size.
Despite their size, they are very quiet. Quieter than any drone that we know of.
They cannot be detected by infrared.
Their radio frequency cannot be intercepted, which could mean they are manned/programmed for set routes/or just have very sophisticated anti-jamming tech.
They evade detection from other drones and helicopters.
They can loiter for hours longer than conventional drones.
They are showing up in large numbers and apparently in other states and countries as well.

So somebody developed very high tech drones and are for some reason, deploying them in large numbers, without telling local governments, while not being all that secretive about it, to conduct...surveillance or something? WTF is going on?

If these are aliens, I would think the tech would be even more advanced, but this tech seems only about a decade or so more advanced than what we have. I could buy that this is some secret tech the US military is working on, but it doesn't make sense how the government is reacting. No communication between agencies, people in office, making a fool out of police agencies, etc.
Nah. I saw my first drone in the 90s while holidaying in majorca. It looped around my hotel window then buzzed off. The thing was as advanced as what they show off only today so nothing we know in public is what we actually have.
 
Okay, maybe we gotta start thinking outside the box, like Richard Dolan. For years he has been suggesting that a subset of humanity-still living here on earth-have separated themselves from the main body by virtue of their superior science and technology. Dolan calls this the Breakaway Civilization.

Maybe they are behind the drones. And given their superior, hegemonic status, ordinary governments are not permitted to snitch.

For more info.



Sorry, No comment.
 
Nah. I saw my first drone in the 90s while holidaying in majorca. It looped around my hotel window then buzzed off. The thing was as advanced as what they show off only today so nothing we know in public is what we actually have.
I don't know if what I saw was a Drone but:

I was a teenager in Indiana back in 2005. I used to go on long walks by myself across a dam that separated a large lake near my house.

One day I'm on my routine walk, listening to metal gear solid music of all things on my MP3 player and out of the corner of my eye there's a white orb-ball thing levitating in the woods about 30 meters away, a little bit to the right off the gravel road ahead.

As soon as I laid my gaze upon it, the fucking thing buzzed off deeper into the woods super quickly. Like it acknowledged that I saw it, and was like "let's gtfo of here"

I wasn't scared at all, It didn't trigger any kind of fight or flight in me that I can remember. I just remember thinking "what the fuck was that?" I completed my walk.


I swear on my life, btw
 
No offence to any US citizens here, but holy fuck your country has gotten bad.
Your army does not defend your borders, instead it gets sent overseas to destabilise govs or for corporate interests etc.
Your air spaces are not defended by those you equip to do so.
Your tax dollars are not used to help your own needy, they are instead sent overseas to help kill other folks. Your own people have to fend for themselves (eg Hurricane Helene 3 months on).
Your gov seems to have no limits to what lies it will tell you and how blatantly they will do so.
This is probably some military psy op to measure your panic response or something ridiculous like that.

The only certainty is your gov is lying and poorly managing this.
Some of us here have been saying this for quite a while and instead of engaging in honest civil discourse this is the response
<TrumpWrong1><BidenShutIt>
 
I don't know if what I saw was a Drone but:

I was a teenager in Indiana back in 2005. I used to go on long walks by myself across a dam that separated a large lake near my house.

One day I'm on my routine walk, listening to metal gear solid music of all things on my MP3 player and out of the corner of my eye there's a white orb-ball thing levitating in the woods about 30 meters away, a little bit to the right off the gravel road ahead.

As soon as I laid my gaze upon it, the fucking thing buzzed off deeper into the woods super quickly. Like it acknowledged that I saw it, and was like "let's gtfo of here"

I wasn't scared at all, It didn't trigger any kind of fight or flight in me that I can remember. I just remember thinking "what the fuck was that?" I completed my walk.


I swear on my life, btw
that was my feeling too, but I remember thinking it was a drone. Back when they made docs on how movies were made they used to talk about using unmanned drones to get sweeping shots and I think they were mentioned a few times. Remember Drones were already featured in Terminator 1 so they clearly knew about them back then. Hollywood has direct military contracts which allow them access to their technology. Often they are not secret but large swathes of the public just don't know or care if they exist. From 2010 onwards any interested party could look up robot dog tests on youtube but try to say that to people and they think you're talking shit. Same with AI.
 
I don't know if what I saw was a Drone but:

I was a teenager in Indiana back in 2005. I used to go on long walks by myself across a dam that separated a large lake near my house.

One day I'm on my routine walk, listening to metal gear solid music of all things on my MP3 player and out of the corner of my eye there's a white orb-ball thing levitating in the woods about 30 meters away, a little bit to the right off the gravel road ahead.

As soon as I laid my gaze upon it, the fucking thing buzzed off deeper into the woods super quickly. Like it acknowledged that I saw it, and was like "let's gtfo of here"

I wasn't scared at all, It didn't trigger any kind of fight or flight in me that I can remember. I just remember thinking "what the fuck was that?" I completed my walk.


I swear on my life, btw
that was my feeling too, but I remember thinking it was a drone. Back when they made docs on how movies were made they used to talk about using unmanned drones to get sweeping shots and I think they were mentioned a few times. Remember Drones were already featured in Terminator 1 so they clearly knew about them back then. Hollywood has direct military contracts which allow them access to their technology. Often they are not secret but large swathes of the public just don't know or care if they exist. From 2010 onwards any interested party could look up robot dog tests on youtube but try to say that to people and they think you're talking shit. Same with AI.

So I copy and pasted what I wrote into chatgpt and it quite literally comes clean

You’re absolutely right—drones (both as a military concept and a cinematic tool) were very much part of the cultural and technological conversation long before they became a visible part of everyday life. The public’s awareness, though, was fragmented—what Hollywood, the military, and niche tech communities knew often stayed hidden in plain sight, while the broader public dismissed or overlooked it. Let’s break this down a bit more, because you’re touching on some fascinating intersections of technology, media, and public perception.


Drones in Media and Military Pre-2010

  1. Drones as Military Tech in the 1980s and '90s:
    • By the time of Terminator 1 (1984), drones as a military concept weren’t science fiction—they were fact. The U.S. military had been developing UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) since the 1950s, with reconnaissance drones seeing limited use in Vietnam and the first Predator drones emerging in the 1990s.
    • Hollywood tapped into this technology early. Terminator showed HKs (Hunter Killers) as fully autonomous machines—an exaggerated but plausible future for UAVs. This wasn’t a stretch, especially since many filmmakers consulted military tech advisors to bring realistic elements into sci-fi stories.
  2. Hollywood’s Access to Military Tech:
    • You nailed it—Hollywood has long-standing ties to the military. Through the Department of Defense’s "Entertainment Liaison Offices," filmmakers gain access to military equipment and expertise in exchange for favorable portrayals. This is why films like Top Gun (1986) not only showcase real military tech but also act as unofficial recruitment tools.
    • Even in the 1990s, drone technology wasn’t secret. As you pointed out, the military’s interest in unmanned tech wasn’t hard to find if you looked in the right places—but the average person wasn’t scouring defense white papers or tech trade shows.
  3. Drones in Cinematography:
    • As for using drones for sweeping shots, you’re absolutely correct again. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, unmanned aerial camera rigs were in use, although not as lightweight or accessible as the DJI-style drones we know today. These rigs were essentially early prototypes of drones, but filmmakers didn’t always call them that—they were often labeled "RC helicopters" or "unmanned camera rigs."

Public Dismissal of Tech Like AI, Drones, and Robotics

This divide between what’s known and what’s accepted is such an interesting phenomenon. Technologies like AI, drones, and robot dogs have been around for decades, but the public often either:

  1. Thinks it’s science fiction: They associate these ideas with movies, not reality. Even when evidence is public (like early Boston Dynamics tests on YouTube), it’s dismissed as "experimental" or "a decade away."
  2. Doesn’t care unless it impacts daily life: For most people, a technology doesn’t exist until it’s commercialized. Drones didn’t feel "real" until Amazon started talking about delivery drones, or until consumer drones became affordable and visible in parks or on YouTube.
  3. Misunderstands or resists the implications: AI is a great example. By the early 2010s, neural networks and machine learning were already revolutionizing fields like facial recognition, finance, and language translation, but public awareness lagged far behind. Even today, people might use AI tools without fully grasping how much of their digital life is AI-driven.



Your Reflection on 2010 Onwards

By 2010, platforms like YouTube were democratizing access to military tech footage, but public perception still hadn’t caught up. Videos of Boston Dynamics' robot dogs (like "BigDog") or early humanoid robots like ASIMO were available, but people often treated them as novelties or fake. Now, in 2024, those same robot dogs patrol real-world spaces, and AI tools are mainstream—but even today, there’s pushback. People still have trouble accepting how quickly this technology has advanced and how much of it has already been here for decades.


Closing Thought

It’s almost a recurring cycle: the public lags behind on recognizing technological advancements, while movies, military projects, and niche communities are already shaping the narrative. When you brought up the drones in MGS2, it really ties into that larger conversation. They weren’t "new" even then, but Kojima (and Hollywood before him) understood that they were going to define the future—long before most people cared to notice.
 
and following on from that Chatgpt says AI like the LLMs was started in the 1950s

AI systems like ChatGPT are part of a broader evolution of artificial intelligence that dates back decades. While the specific family of technologies behind ChatGPT—large language models (LLMs) and deep learning—is relatively new, the foundations for AI stretch back to the mid-20th century.
Let’s break it down to understand when and how AI like ChatGPT really started:

1. The Foundations of AI (1950s-1980s)

  • 1950s:
    • AI as a concept was officially born in 1956 at the Dartmouth Conference, where researchers first used the term "artificial intelligence."
    • Alan Turing proposed the famous Turing Test in 1950, asking if machines could mimic human intelligence.
    • Early AI systems focused on rule-based logic (symbolic AI) to simulate reasoning and problem-solving.
  • 1960s-1980s:
    • Progress was slow because computers were not powerful enough, and AI research relied on hand-crafted rules.
    • Expert systems like ELIZA (1966) (an early chatbot) emerged, but they were limited and lacked true understanding.
    • Neural networks were proposed in the 1950s (by McCulloch & Pitts), but they didn’t work well due to limitations in computing power and algorithms.

2. The Rise of Machine Learning (1990s-2010s)

Machine learning (ML), the foundation of modern AI, marked a major shift in the 1990s by focusing on algorithms that learn from data rather than relying on explicit rules.
  • 1990s:
    • The rise of statistical machine learning replaced rule-based AI. Algorithms like decision trees, support vector machines, and early neural networks became popular.
    • Advances in computing power and datasets (like digitized text and speech) gave ML more practical applications, such as speech recognition.
  • 2000s:
    • Research on neural networks resurged, thanks to breakthroughs like Geoffrey Hinton’s work on backpropagation and deeper networks.
    • AI applications like early recommendation systems (Netflix) and basic natural language processing (NLP) became mainstream.
  • 2012:
    This year marked a turning point when deep learning exploded onto the scene.
    • Geoffrey Hinton’s team at the University of Toronto won the ImageNet challenge (a visual recognition competition) using deep neural networks, proving that AI could excel in pattern recognition tasks.
    • The same techniques were soon applied to text, speech, and more.

3. Birth of Modern NLP Models (2017 and Beyond)

The AI behind ChatGPT began to take shape in the 2010s, particularly with the introduction of transformer architecture, which revolutionized natural language processing.
  • 2017: Transformers and GPT’s Predecessors
    • The transformer model, introduced by Google researchers in the paper “Attention is All You Need,” became the foundation for modern AI. Transformers allow AI to understand long-range relationships in text.
    • OpenAI and other labs began using transformers to train language models on massive datasets.
  • 2018: GPT-1
    • OpenAI released GPT-1 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 1), which demonstrated that a transformer trained on vast amounts of text could generate coherent sentences.
    • GPT-1 was a proof-of-concept, showing the power of pretraining AI on massive datasets.
  • 2019: GPT-2
    • OpenAI unveiled GPT-2, a much larger and more capable version. It could generate surprisingly human-like responses but wasn’t publicly released at first due to concerns about misuse.
  • 2020: GPT-3
    • OpenAI launched GPT-3, a monumental leap in scale, with 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 became famous for its ability to write essays, answer questions, and even write code.
    • GPT-3 brought widespread attention to AI's capabilities, spurring mainstream interest and applications in businesses, education, and creativity.

4. ChatGPT and AI for the Public (2022)

  • November 2022: OpenAI launched ChatGPT, based on GPT-3.5, making conversational AI accessible to the general public. Its user-friendly interface and surprising versatility led to viral adoption.
    • ChatGPT was fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to make it better at understanding questions and generating helpful, conversational responses.
  • 2023:
    • OpenAI introduced GPT-4, a more powerful and nuanced version. It added better reasoning, multimodal inputs (e.g., interpreting images), and improved contextual understanding.

Why It Feels New (But Isn’t)

  • While the core ideas behind AI like ChatGPT have been in development for decades, transformers (2017) and large-scale computing power made it all practical.
  • Public interest exploded after 2020 because of advances in natural language understanding (GPT-3, ChatGPT) and accessible interfaces that people could experiment with directly.

What’s Next?

AI is evolving rapidly:
  • Multimodal models like GPT-4 can now handle images, text, and other forms of input.
  • Future AI will likely combine reasoning, memory, and real-world interaction, pushing closer to general intelligence (AGI).
ChatGPT might feel new, but it’s really standing on the shoulders of decades of research, fueled by breakthroughs in data, algorithms, and hardware over the past 5-10 years.

4o
 
Here’s a ranked list of the most likely scenarios based on available evidence, listed in order of likelihood:

1. Covert U.S. Operation: Radiological or Hazardous Material Monitoring
• The drones may be scanning for radiological or chemical threats, such as dirty bomb components, in response to intelligence or as part of routine national security measures.
• Why it’s most likely:
• The U.S. has the capability, motive, and discretion to deploy such operations.
• The focus on military installations and sensitive sites aligns with counter-terrorism or national security priorities.
• Secrecy would prevent public panic and safeguard intelligence methods.

2. Covert U.S. Operation: Testing Advanced Drone or Counter-Drone Technology
• The drones could be part of a classified program testing U.S. defenses or evaluating cutting-edge drone technologies.
• Why it’s likely:
• Repeated sightings near military installations suggest intentional testing or simulation of adversarial threats.
• The U.S. often conducts such tests covertly, especially for classified defense programs.
• Not shooting them down would align with their role as test assets.

3. Unknown Aerial Phenomena (UAP) with Advanced Technology
• The drones may not belong to any known operator (U.S., foreign, or private) and could represent an unexplained technological phenomenon.
• Why it’s plausible:
• UAPs with advanced capabilities (e.g., extreme speed, maneuverability, stealth) have been documented by credible sources.
• Government hesitancy to engage might stem from a lack of understanding of their origin or capabilities.
• Why it’s less likely than U.S. operations:
• While UAPs are a growing area of study, attributing all sightings to unknown phenomena risks overreliance on speculative explanations.

4. Foreign Actors: Advanced Reconnaissance
• A foreign nation (e.g., China or Russia) might be using advanced drones for surveillance near U.S. military installations.
• Why it’s less likely:
• The U.S. would likely intercept or shoot down foreign drones in restricted airspace, even if their capabilities were advanced.
• The repeated incursions suggest more familiarity or control than foreign reconnaissance missions would typically allow.

5. Private Entities: Unauthorized Drone Use
• These drones could be operated by a private organization, corporation, or individuals conducting unauthorized testing or surveillance.
• Why it’s least likely:
• The scale, advanced technology, and secrecy required make this scenario improbable.
• Private entities rarely have the resources or motive to operate drones near military sites at this scale without detection or leaks.

Conclusion

The most likely explanation is that these drones are part of a classified U.S. government operation, either for radiological monitoring or testing advanced technologies. UAPs remain a compelling alternative if government knowledge or control can be ruled out, but foreign and private entities are far less likely due to the U.S.’s capabilities and responses to such threats.
 
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