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Something bad is about to happen

I fear something very bad is about to happen in the skies over Europe.

Sadly, the idiocy that surrounds drone paranoia has reached the point where lives may be lost -- but it's not enemy drones that are going to be doing the killing.

The enemy is ignorance and arrogance on the part of officials who should know better.

A small but active group of *real* experts has warned those officials but they appear to be ignoring the facts and instead focusing on surrendering their commonsense to the lobbying of headlines in the media.

I am referring to the alleged Russian drones which are being regularly reported as appearing in the skies around airports in Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands.

A smart team of "sensible people" have been dedicating their time to debunking these sightings and, almost without exception, they have proven that the "lights in the skies" that officials and the media attribute to enemy drone incursions, are actually nothing more than regular manned aircraft and helicopters.

This is exactly the same situation we saw last year in the skies over New York and New Jersey.

The sad fact is that very few people actually look up at the sky at night -- probably because in most urban centres there are no stars to see thanks to huge levels of light polution.

However, when they do look up, they see mysterious flashing lights of varying colours and configurations. These are the navigation lights and strobes of manned aircraft and helicopters but, to the untrained eye, they're obviously "drones".

Just as was the case in NY/NJ, we've had people claiming that they are Russian drones, right down to the assertion that they've been launched from offshore submarines in swarms.

Perhaps we could cut some people a little slack in Europe because there is a pretty active theatre of war in Ukraine where drones are being used with frightening regularity and to great effect. However, nobody outside of the small community of "sensible people" have even bothered to correlate the European sightings with flight track data from services such as FlightRadar24 or FlightAware.

If they had done the correlation, like those "sensible people" have done, then they would quickly see that these are not drones, they are things like police helicopters, scheduled commercial passenger flights and the like.

That we're seeing airports regularly shut down in panic simply because a member of the public has phoned in and said "I see drones in the sky" is ludicrous.

In a completely predictable twist, it seems that when some of those airports have installed sophisticated drone detection systems, the drones just disappeared -- as if by magic.

The big worry now though, are reports like this which document the fact that stupid decisions are being made to try and shoot down these "mystery drones".

Yes, despite the fact that "sensible people" have conclusively proven that the vast majority of these sightings are of manned aircraft operating in a legitimate fashion in the skies around airports, a bunch of military idiots with guns and worse are now trying to shoot them down.

To quote fromt he above linked story:

WTF?

Who is going to carry the can when we see a commercial passenger jet or even a police helicopter shot out of the skies by paranoid idiots who won't listen to "sensible people" who base their conclusions on hard data rather than the hysteria induced by a few phone calls from ignorant members of the public?

Fortunately, at least at this point, chances are they'll keep mising because what they think are small drones "really close" are actually big airliners "really far away" so their aim-point will be all wrong. However, if they do break out some SAMs the picture could change dramatically.

I'm sounding a warning here and other "sensible people" have sounded the same warning as loudly as they can -- but it seems that the media (aside from a few sensible journalists) are ignoring the facts, as are politicians and the military.

At least the USA finally worked out what was going on -- let's hope the Europeans do as well -- before innocent lives are lost.

Meanwhile, Putin must be convulsing in fits of laughter that ignorant people are achieving levels of disruption across Europe that he could never hope to equal with real drones.

Carpe Diem folks!

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