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It's happening again

Earlier this year there were mass reports of unidentified drones being seen over the US states of New York and New Jersey.

The media went wild -- what could these drones be and who was operating them?

The US government itself was silent, aside from a few individual politicans who were more than happy to demonstrate their stupidity by suggesting things such as they were Russian drones operated from submarines off the coast.

Night after night, the sightings continued and TV stations carried endless footage of these drones sweeping across the sky.

At one stage there were calls for them to be shot down, since they may have posed a danger to those below, we'd all seen the footage from Ukraine!

As someone considered by some to be something of an "expert" in the field of drones, I could see immediately that none of the footage being shown in TV reports and on social media was of drones -- and certainly ny "spy drones" as some alleged.

Firstly, if you plan to spy on someone, you don't fit navigation lights and brighly flashing strobes to your drone -- do you?

Secondly, some of the people I regularly correspond with in the industry had already done the correlations between the time and location of these "drone sightings" and the transit of scheduled airline flights.

They matched.

The reality is that these were not drones at all... they were simply good old manned aircraft that people, in a fit of mass hysteria, were believing to be drones. Perhaps they'd never before looked up at the night sky and seen an airliner before.

Eventually, after far too long a delay, the USA's FAA made an official statement that these drones were either airliners or legitimate drone activity and that there was nothing to see here.

If, as by magic, the sightings stopped.

In the UK a few months back at a military airbase called Lakenheath another spate of "mystery drone" sightings occurred. Yet again, for weeks, these sightings confounded officials, the public and the media -- until the same group I work with did the correlations and discovered that, as expected, these sightings were not drones at all. Yet another case of mass hysteria no less.

And now, exactly the same thing is happening in Denmark.

Several airports have been closed after "mystery drones" were sighted in the night sky and officals are running around chasing their tales in an attempt to identify them and their operators.

You would think that the first thing they'd be doing is correlating these sightings with the transit of manned aircraft -- but no, that's way to easy eh? To be fair, one of the sightings was subsiquently discovered to be the star Betelgeus by members of the loose-knit group that has been doing all the debunking.

Unwilling to listen to reason or commonsense, regardless how much evidence it comes with, the government of Denmark has decided to ground all drones in the country for a period of one week.

It won't make a jot of difference -- idiots!

The real concern now, in light of all this buffoonery, is that sooner or later, some trigger-happy nation will shoot down one of these "mystery drones" -- only to discover that it was actually an airliner filled with innocent souls. This is particularly worrying when you look at the state of Eastern Europe right now and the actual airspace incursions being undertaken by Russian drones and aircraft.

The more I discover the calibre of people we have in such crucial positions within governments and the military, the more I fear for the future of our species.

Meanwhile -- NZ's CAA is proposing rule changes that would make it illegal for me to fly my tiny 20g drone *INSIDE* my own house without special training and without all manner of red tape.

I rest my case.

Carpe Diem folks!

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