In all frankness, this needs to happen. Let's start the groupchat and crowd source some drone hoaxing. I'm tired. Let's teach the world a lesson about social contagion. Hank, John.. I'll see you in the groupchat.
Yeah lol, like just ignoring a lot of iran's millitary influence has been decimated as of late i really dont think theyd be doing this silly ass prank on new jersey
And why would Iran operate drones at night with their navigation lights and white strobes from mother ships. Our government at its best. It is just commercial planes.
Isn’t it insane that the politician even said it at all? It’s incredibly irresponsible to just make up stuff like that and “report” it as if it’s real..
@@kateapple1because once people start freaking out they start to see more “drones” and it snowballs into hysteria. Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Drones aren’t that fast. I haven’t seen anything interesting besides a weird picture of a confirmed airplane. But yeah holy shit, an airport in New Windsor, NY had to close for AN HOUR today because of a reported drone sighting. Luckily, “there were no impacts to flight operations” during their hour long break while an FBI agent looked around. People who think there’s big, 2 ton, Iranian/Martian drones flying around are the ones who go out and look for them and call things in.
Not really, anyone just minimizing this hasn't done any research. You tell me what those pilots saw over Oregon at the beginning of December, audio on RUclips.
@@natatattful I did not hear Hank minimizing it. I heard him pointing out that we do not yet know whether it is all really normal stuff. Just because no one yet has come forward with an explanation that you have found, that does not mean it is anything to worry about.
@@AJarOfYams there is actually evidence that one of our earliest predators were large eagles...so the instinct to look up is likely still with us. Like how some people are scared of snakes or spiders...it's an response to danger. Look up taung child skull if you're interested.
@@amor2874 why? we have official FAA recordings of pilots saying they are seeing weird orbs in the sky they cant identify and moving in anomalous ways. We have multiple military bases saying they are also seeing unknown objects in sensitive airspace over military bases. Where is the ironic part? There are also reports of similar things happening in China and Russia.
When LA had the big earthquake back in the 80s the power went out for 3 days. Because of the lack of light pollution people started seeing the milky way in the sky for the first time and called emergency services by the thousand to report the "strange lights in the sky". I wish we cared more about light pollution.
Light pollution is so underrated as a concern. I go off about it every chance I get and I'm not even really informed on the subject (I really should though... maybe Hank could do a video about it lmao). Some of the solutions would be so easy to implement..
Oh my GOD - Seriously, people who have NEVER actually seen stars in the night sky. ?? And they were surprised to see those strange lights in the sky? Talk about being clueless and narrow mined. But after all ... this SURELY comes with the territory in California. I lived there for 18 years, which trust me, was ENOUGH years. For once in your life ... get MILES and MILES away from any city, then look up at the night sky to see more starts than you could hope to count in one entire lifetime - Figure out where Jupiter is, and go grab a sizeable telescope, and at least examine the more largest moons orbiting Jupiter. Then look at the rings of Saturn. You won't see much unless your telescope is HUGE, but Saturn might possibly look a bit like it has Micky Mouse ears with a smallish telescope.
I swear to God, if we find out these drones are just a few dudes in a garage trolling the entire state of New Jersey people are going to lose their minds🤣
Nah, they'll just be like "No that's the Iranian deep state brainwashing them to lie to us. We don't fall for their lies!" or whatever other kind of bs that can be come up with. People who can't admit fault will double down no matter how much of a clown it turns them into. And like... I'd LOVE for them to be alien UFOs, but there's a million things they are more likely to be before that.
I'm showing my age, but in the early 90's there was a band named Squirrel Nut Zippers. I'm sure if they are still active, but I'm all for the name of your new band.
That was one of my first thoughts when he said the time of year and hours these sightings tend to happen. In late December Sirius rises around 8PM and being near the horizon for a few hours after that can twinkle and blink colors in an unexpected way.
Hank continues to be the best social commentary channel. He tells you to not be afraid yet be curious. To not be swept away in the frenzy and be critical.
Also isn't condescending to others. It's so easy to go "look at these MORONS who are worried". Internet culture is so obsessed with 'dunking' on others that it's exhausting.
Too bad it literally wasn't though. Here in brum we had a lot of people claiming aliens and all sorts of nonsense. Don't fall for the "we're better" trope. Brits love to pretend that we're not just as wretched as the US.
I saw someone post a live stream of a beach, where they were freaking out about a giant orb in the sky that was "summoning other orbs." It was the Moon that was brighter than normal with planes passing through the light of it. That's when I realized that most of these drone observations and assumptions were definitely wrong lol.
"the moon was brighter than normal with planes passing through the light of it" Can you explain more what that means? I'm having trouble visualizing that.
@@peregrinecovington4138 Google can probably explain it better than I can, but the Moon isn't the same brightness every night. I'm pretty sure it depends on the phase of the Moon that night and a couple other factors. I worded the plane portion poorly, my bad. You know how at night, planes can look just like a dot of light? Imagine that, but they were passing in between the camera and the Moon. So for a split second, the light of the plane would blend in with the Moon and then reappear once the plane finished passing the Moon. I hope that makes sense.
@@peregrinecovington4138 Have you ever looked at the moon and thought "that's a lot bigger than I remember"? Some interaction of atmosphere and the moon's orbit sometimes amplifies it's presence in the sky for reasons I am not informed enough to explain.
For a moment, they took their eyes off the Kardashians, or whatever it is that these people watch nowadays. And of course, they did not comprehend what they saw.
@@JamesO512 - Literally the scene in Wall-E where he bumps into someone and knocks their screen away and they basically start a whole new life simply by observing the outside world.
@@JamesO512 simultaneously condescending and out of touch. No one is paying attention to the Kardashians anymore lol. Hallmark of believing you’re in the right side of the bell curve when you’re smack in the middle!
@@KingBobXVIHey I love wall-e! Such a good film that warns us not to allow mega corporations to pollute the earth! as well as our own human incompetence, it's not buy-n-large, its just walmart. 😂😊
Love the optimism in your videos. I hate going on the internet because people's pessimistic takes make me upset. Thank you for your hopeful corner of the internet
Hey Hank, I just want to say I have OCD and because of that and the culture of the internet it can cause me debilitating paranoia and anxiety with how most people talk about things. I've been going through a particularly tough time which has ramped up my sensitivity to this and watching videos of you explaining things that seem scary in a reassuring way has been helping me work towards processing things that might make me scared in a way that's more rational. Genuinely thankyou.
Oh hey, I also have OCD and have been dealing with this exact problem this year. The disinformation machine is in full overdrive and it's becoming really hard to avoid things online that will cause my OCD to go into a doom spiral. Resources that can logically just lay out the actual facts (also really hard to find these days) is the only thing that helps. So I entirely agree, I'm really grateful for people who can provide this for us.
I’m only about halfway through rn but what I so far gather is that this is a weird combination of “I just learned a new word and now I notice it being used everywhere” + “is the dress blue/black or white/gold.” 🛸
There is definitely an element of rumors spreading like wildfire here. I have a cousin who lives in NJ and the first I heard of the drone thing was a text from her saying "lots of drone activity in (my town in NJ) tonight." Now I am 100% sure my cousin has not been monitoring daily drone activity nor was she carefully observing the night sky for no apparent reason, so what she meant was "a lot of people I know are texting me about drone activity tonight." all it takes is one person with social media to start a rumor about "suspicious drone activity tonight over Someplace, USA" and all the people from Someplace, USA who see it are going to freak out and start texting this alarming news to everyone they know. and then those people will text everyone they know, and on and on it goes until it feels like "everyone" is observing suspicious drone activity. except in reality almost none of them are observing anything, they're just panicking and spreading a rumor they heard to the point that it start to seem more credible.
Human observers are garbage. No matter who they are. I have an uncle who swears the military showed him an invisible jeep once. He also did a lot of drugs in the military. So how do you know if he saw an invisible jeep. Or if he was high on mushrooms and his friends taped tinfoil to a jeep and absolutely blew his mind. I'm sure he is totally certain of what he saw. And he was a trained observer.... He's also a braggart and a pothead. Both can be true.
This phenomenon felt unique to TikTok. Many people on there were noticing the lack of NJ drone related content on other social media apps in comparison to TikTok, and felt that TikTok was the only reliable source. It turns out that TikTok is just very good at pushing content that is sensationalized. There was so much that it convinced me that there was actually something to be concerned about. Someday I hope to get an explanation of what the blinking lights and slowed-down radio programs were all about.
"Slowed-down radio programs"? Seriously? How would that even work, would the program skip whenever it returned to normal? Speed up in order to catch up? Cripes.
I would suggest learning a little bit about aviation laws and drone rules if you would like to understand these things more as they're pretty well documented. Pretty much if the lights blinking, it's not weird. As for radio stations slowing down I don't know what you mean, but you can have distortions and disruptions and signals that when reconstructed by certain types of systems that are picking up the signal result in slowdown. Essentially we're talking about a variation of lag in systems with predictive algorithms. If you'd like to learn more about that, I think electronic communications engineering would be the area to look into😊 I'm just guessing though because it didn't have a name when I was doing that type of work, but it's sort of a way of reducing how degraded the station comes through when the signal is bad, it just has this really weird side effect.
Thank you Hank. America should watch this not just to learn about the drones, but to learn about how to think usefully about things that make you go hmmmm.
Is anyone saying that this has anything to do with magic? I just see some claims of it being alien technology, which is not magical whatsoever. Have you encountered a single claim of this being something magical?
This is why I like cryptozoology. Not necessarily because I think cryptids are real, but because the actual science/psychology and discourse around it is really interesting. I remember a show years ago where there were sightings of a large creature at the edge of a forest on the side of a road at night. A test was done to see how well people could perceive the size of a creature in the dark by putting humanoid cutouts along the side of that same road, having people drive past, and estimate the size of the cutouts. Pretty reliably, people tended to overestimate the size by a substantial margin. This is also true for things in the sky since, as mentioned in the video, there's nothing to reliably compare the size to. On the side of believers though, specifically people who believe in aliens, a response to the question, "If aliens are here, shouldn't more people be seeing them?" is, "How often do you actually look up into the sky?" The first time I heard that question, I realized I don't personally look up into the night sky all that often. For all I know, there could be objects flying around up there all the time that I'd never know about. At this very moment, there could be something in the sky that I would see if I got up and walked over to my window, and I can't say for sure whether there is or isn't unless I actually take the time to check. Then there's also the tendency when there's a cryptid sighting and a story gets around for other people to jump on the bandwagon and add to it, whether they're actually seeing something or not. One person sees mothman, and suddenly an entire town has their own version of a sighting story. Some might see an owl flying overhead that they overestimate the size of because they don't see owls very often, some might entirely make up a story for attention or to simply conform to the group, and in some situations there might actually be a creature not known to live in the vicinity that's newly discovered for that area. It happens on a much larger scale all the time too, like with the rash of shark attacks that led to the creation of the Jaws movies. There weren't any more shark attacks than normal at the time, but a news channel reported on it and got good ratings, so other news channels did the same. Suddenly it seemed like people were constantly being attacked by sharks out of nowhere. So if you combine the tendency to overestimate the size of things at night, especially in the sky with no objects to use for a size reference, the fact that more people are actually looking up now and possibly seeing drones that have always been there, and that it's a popular issue to talk about right now, the drone situation makes perfect sense without there necessarily being anything malicious about it. TL;DR, the drones are cryptids, basically.
Thank you Hank!! As a NJ resident who even before all this enjoyed watching all the planes coming and going from the airports, I do feel strongly that I have seen some drones. But you helped me feel better about this blowing over without major incident. I appreciate you now and always! DFTBA 💙
This is one of the few times where instead of splitting my attention from viewing a video every few seconds on random intervals, I was completely engaged in the content and felt my brain happily dancing in it's cage as a result. Absolute cinema.
The neighborhood facebook group in my town is SO FUNNY about this. planes frequently fly over our town because we're right next to the major airport in the area, and the number of people going "I SAW A DRONE!!! IT'S HAPPENING HERE TOO!!!" and posting a picture of an airplane is the best.
@Imperial_Squid Even better detail I forgot to add: Not only are we like two towns over from the major airport, we also have a small private airport for prop planes and hobby aviators IN TOWN.
@@jupiterliam7961 lmao, I wonder how off the deep end they might go, like "the aliens must have holograms or some other kind of disguises, one of them claimed to be my flight instructor the other day?!? I couldn't tell the difference between the alien and the real guy, it was so weird!!!"
@Imperial_Squid I don't think the people in my town think they're aliens necessarily, but they definitely think they're surveillance drones. We have an aerospace government contractor in town that's a big employer, so I'm sure these people feel justified.
Being so exhausted from the constant deluge of internet nuttery, the clear-eyed, rational thought in this video makes me so happy. My day is now just better.
@@DABA2024 Joe Rogan was ruined by an entire different generation - nothing new. Truth is, humanity is both extremely curious and extremely incurious. We want answers so bad we'll just make them up.
Even before you made the exact same point towards the end of the video Hank --something about the phrase "when people are confused and worried and looking at the sky" made me mentally zoom out to the tens of thousands of years of us, small worried confused humans, looking out at the big giant sky and trying to make sense of what we're seeing with, shall we say, a mixed record. And that was quite comforting. We really just were not quite built for any of this and we're doing our best. This also really affirmed my decision to be very offline in the past few weeks because all I had absorbed about this was "there's been some drone sightings in New Jersey and people are kinda freaking out" which turns out to be about as much as we actually know for a fact and certainly all that I actually need to know!
I once woke up screaming to the sight of a 10 inch wide spider on the ceiling over me, just that it was half an inch wide and hangig by a thread right over my face...
its an american thing. people are not educated and the system with mass media spreads uncontrolled news. ABC news for example got hysteric about planet venus being a drone. well its popcorn time for me as an european, but i still love you americans.
If I were a part of a secret drone program to fly secret drones around New Jersey secretly, I would totally cover those secret drones with bright flashing, FAA compliant, lights.
when i saw the "mysterious orb" I immediately thought to myself: "that's just a bokeh... I have a photo of Jupiter on my phone that looks just like it"
Somewhere else, someone insisted that the "orb" couldn't possibly be something mundane, because they could clearly see a rotating cube in the middle of it. Jeez, maybe we shouldn't legalize weed and mushrooms after all! 😉
I found myself being called a fed and getting heat by a bunch of people because I explained “that’s an out of focus image. Probably Venus or Jupiter.” People truly believe these are angels or aliens and refuse to learn how things work. Apparently we have this weird math that occurred in the last 5 years: Alex Jones + Covid Lockdowns + Trump = Narnia We are all trapped here now forces to deal with people who distrust anything and everything, except the people who tell them to distrust anything and everything
This video feels a little bit like Carl Sagan. I remember how he had to keep reminding us about this stuff. Especially the last piece about aliens. Reminded me about his Dragon in the garage from his book "The demon haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark". Its kinda profetic in how relevant the book still is. Thanks Hank!
Thank. You. Hank. My friends would probably be super surprised to learn that I don’t believe these sightings are aliens, but I don’t. All the same i couldn’t put in to words all the reasons I remain skeptical. You are one of the few loud voices of rationality out there and for that I’m thankful.
This whole conversation reminds me of when I first joined Nextdoor and people were freaking out that drones were hovering over our county for a bit in the last year or two. It was so easy to believe the discourse too from how passionate people were. It also helped that I was home alone and have anxiety. Turns out it was Jupiter. Everyone got really good at “drone” spotting but few people in my neighborhood had a star app on their phone to ask what it could be.
I wish more people would just look up more often. There's a lot to see. In Missouri, someone freaked out about white lights in the clouds that turned out to be (drum roll) over a farm hosting a christmas light show! They FORGOT what high-powered spotlights look like because they were primed to freak out. Or read about adaptations of The War of the Worlds
They already caught and took care of all the people that were actually breaking the laws they just didn't report on the fact that they caught them in the larger news stations. It is really weird though that the tiny news stations reported on it in the big ones didn't or maybe it's not weird, no I guess it's not weird just disappointing.
K, so i just finished Arcane and have been thinking about the quote from Viktor..."There is no prize to perfection, just an end to pursuit".... so in this context perfection is the 'answer' we all force on phenomena to avoid living in 'I Don't Know'. I think living in I don't know is so much more interesting...keeps you curious. Great take, Hank!
Also around Christmastime because it gets dark sooo early that people notice more totally normal lights in the sky. But like Hank said - we’ll likely not know the initial start.
This is an old quote but I always say it when stuff like this happens: *anything can be a UFO if you’re bad enough at identifying stuff*! Love the part about how if we skip over the “I don’t know” part then we’ll stop looking and never actually know. Such a good way of putting it when some conspiracy minded people seem to think that we’re the ones getting in the way of The Truth™️
my favorite thing I've seen about this is a thread about a drone show displaying a human face, a comment saying, "Imagine if we put that over an uncontacted tribe and pretended to be their god, they'd go crazy. ", and a reply saying, "or better yet, an American city"
but we've seen drone shows before. imagine if it was a really big mothership. Phoenix lights in 1997 weren't military dropping flares. AZ governor who was in the Air Force even said so.
I live in New Jersey, in an area where there have been a lot of sightings. I've been avoiding looking at the sky at night and initially, I just figured that it was the local joint base testing something. Given the lack of further, credible evidence, I'm assuming that it's just people misinterpreting the perfectly mundane things that they were seeing in the sky.
It might have started with the test of something. Clearly that's not what people are seeing at this point, but wouldn't be unexpected for there to be a test flight of something. People jumping to wild conclusions is beneficial for when test flights get seen because it distracts from what they actually are, though in this case anything that's lit up at night probably isn't stealth anything😂
This! This is what I've been trying to tell people! I'm a BIG nerd and avid sky watcher. As soon as I saw the videos people were posting, I knew it was a mass hysteria-type incident. Well, my first thought actually was, "Y'all, if they were drones doing anything illegal, they wouldn't have the lights on." It's disappointing that people are so easily fooled.
This reminds me of a story about three people in a room taking a psychology test for a government job, two of the people taking the test are part of the test and the third person doesn’t know that. The person giving the test shows each of them a card of a triangle and puts the card face up on the desk, then asked one person who is a part of the experiment to say what they see on the card, and that person says they see a square, then the person giving the test asked the other person who is part of the test what they see and that person says they see a square, then the person giving the test asked the person who is not part of the test and has no clue what is going on what they see, and that person is confused and seems to just want to go along with what the others said so they don’t look foolish and says they see a square. The point is don’t let anyone make you secound guess what you are witnessing You have can get information, but use your own judgment, people and media can influence our decisions.
as an avid stargazer who enjoys looking at the sky between dusk and 11pm, in new jersey : what?? i haven't seen a single thing. seems like a few strange sightings caused a mass hysteria
@@illuminoeye_gaming Right, I was making a joke, but seriously, like, you just identified the problem yourself lol. The number of "PLANES and plane like flying objects you have noticed" You correctly identified a bunch of things as planes and dismissed them from your brain. Then you identified a bunch of other things as "plane like" possibly drones, who knows and dismissed them from your brain rather than jumping to ALIENS!!!!! or GOVERNMENT SHENANIGANS!!!!! (Which like, the gov is definitely up to shenanigans, but we can't automatically jump to that every time we see something weird). You are probably outside at night on a regular basis and have a consistent view of the situation long term, whereas these people do not and are suddenly looking up and going, oh $#!% there's lots of stuff in the sky and I don't know what any of it is!!!! AAAAAAHHH!!!!!
I remember the Colorado drone sightings, which is why I wasn't worried when I heard about the current drone stories lol. I bet this will happen again several times in my lifetime
Something about how he said "(your brain) would conclude, that's a big nut!" And then saying "Because nut sized squirrels are a lot less likely than a squirrel sized nuts" really threw me off, like the oven the cold food, and of out the cold hot eat the food
I had absolutely no idea about this drone thing and it is WILD to learn about it in this way. It really does feel indicative of a very US thing right now.
its an american thing. people are not educated and the system with mass media spreads uncontrolled news. ABC news for example got hysteric about planet venus being a drone. well its popcorn time for me as an european, but i still love you americans.
A lot of people feeling very uncertain and worried about our country and our future, and a lot of people all too ready to capitalize on those emotions. It definitely feels like a microcosm of where we’re at as a country right now 😕
As I was telling a friend: I would love it to be aliens, if only because it would further affirm that nothing makes sense right now. But, it's almost certainly not aliens. It's probably something boring, like drone hobbyists. Especially seeing as, specifically, many of these apparently have FAA lighting - would be very polite aliens. Anyway, it's probably not polite aliens. Solid rant, Hank. 10/10, would send to aliens.
You left out, "If this is how some Americans act over some drones, we are doomed when something SERIOUS happens." Doomed because the media just ran with the hysteria and some govt reps went cuckoo for cocoa puffs. Depressing.
I’ve been waiting for someone with an audience to call this out! So many “drone” videos are so obviously normal airplanes. It’s driving me nuts that this is so wide spread and not real at all.
I wonder if some of this is from younger generations being stuck inside too much, especially with things like the pandemic. I've definitely had some people show me some stuff where I'm just kind of flabbergasted because it's just so incredibly recognizable to me that I am confused by it being not recognizable. Maybe City light pollution is also been a problem so people don't see them regularly enough to realize that this always happens and has been happening for years or decades? I've had a couple of people show me planes that are flying towards or away from them and a couple of people show me the space station. People who I would have expected to have seen these things before but apparently had not. I mean everybody has to ask the first time they see something, I'm just surprised the first time for a lot of people is teens to 40s.
In my AP bio class back in high school, for as best I can figure, shits and giggles my professor spent a class talking about the mind and about suggestion and how people can be primed to see things in even the most random splatter of ink of page and then showed us a slide, it was in black and white and was a chaos of spots and blotches all irregular. Then he pointed out that it was a black and white photo of a cow by a fence with a barn in the background and it was freaking nuts to experience that.
"During the 1994, a 6.7-magnitude earthquake rumbled through Los Angeles at 4:30 a.m. The shaking woke residents, who discovered the power had gone out citywide. Some left their houses or peered outside to check on the neighborhood. It was eerily dark - no streetlights and few cars at that late hour. They looked up at the sky. It was flush with cosmic bodies that had been invisible up to that point - twinkling stars, clustered galaxies, distant planets, even a satellite or two. Then some people became nervous. What was that large silvery cloud that trailed over the city? It looked so sinister they called 911. That cloud was the Milky Way. They had never seen it before." -Medium
"I don't know" is SUCH a powerful phrase. It's honest, first and foremost. Then it inspires us to TRY TO KNOW. When I, or someone close me asks how something works, I frequently have no idea and turn to the sum of all human knowledge accessible online to try to find out. Often, it turns out that we* DO know! But when we** don't know, it's still pretty cool to think about. *We being humans in general, not me and my friends. We don't know anything. **Yep, still all humans who have ever lived. Not this idiot (me) and his pals.
Hank I'm a media and comms grad student that just studied priming theory this last semester. In the midst of, you know, the chaos, I didn't think to consider this, but it's fascinating and I love how sensical of an approach it is.
Thank you Hank, I appreciate your talk about how to interpret “I don’t know”. Also I remember my aunt lived near Midway Airport in Chicago. The planes were loud and right above her house. Because of the loud noise and like you said brain eye stuff. It would really look like they were just a few feet above us, and just very small planes. Yes, if you’ve ever taken off from Midway at this time it felt like you were going to hit the telephone lines at the end of the runway. But, I still think reality is the planes were a little higher than my brain was telling me they were.
7:48 Seeing the drones searching for drones makes me think of bigfooters. The go out in the woods and make "bigfoot" calls. Then they hear something in response. It's probably another group out looking for bigfoot.
9:20 This right here is exactly what frustrates me to no end. Every single message is always misconstrued to be the most outrageous clickbaity version of itself. Unexplained object in the sky -> it's unexplained therefore it defies physics, officials can't 100% confirm what something is -> scientists are baffled by strange objects in sky.
I mean idk about nothing, but I think people just usually don't notice drones. They're so cheap and easy to use these days though that they're pretty ubiquitous. There might have been a slight uptick in their use that caused people to finally start noticing them.
The first reports I was aware of started a year ago over Hampton, Virginia/Langley AFB. The drones came back multiple times over weeks, and the base leadership have doubled down on visual security around their F22s and other sensitive equipment (as reported in Military Times and elsewhere). No idea if that drone mystery has anything to do with the current drone sightings.
The only question that matters to me atleast, is this: Who knows what these are? The answer is either 1. Someone does, but they won't say what they are, or 2. No one knows. Neither is a good answer.
I think this was a very well thought out video. To accept 'aliens' as an answer 'aliens' needs to stop being an all encompassing answer and start having defined properties that something can be compared to.
Proper leadership would have taken public concerns seriously, educated the community about night sky objects-as this gentleman has done-and ensured public safety by investigating and identifying them. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, leading to the significant confusion and concern we’re facing now. What we’ve witnessed, aside from the issue with drones, is a display of truly terrible and reckless leadership-though the mayors have been an exception to this.
Just like a cat being scared by a cucumber, we too also often incorrectly identify entities in our environment. We observe our by the limited components and qualities that we see and because things that make us scared need to be identified quickly, we often don't take the time to actually think things thru, but one needs to laugh off the incorrect assumption instead of holding onto that anxiety, especially when you can take your time to evaluate.
Working for a high-tech company some years ago, a smell began to go through the factory floor. No one knew what it was, we couldn't identify the scent, which had a slight chemical aspect to it, but not overwhelming, just noticeable--but everyone noticed. Within 20 minutes two people had passed out, others were having trouble breathing, someone called an ambulance. All told, over 30 people reported symptoms and ailments, and several went to the hospital. The source? Someone had parked a pile of wooden pallets near an air handler outside--not an issue.
I will say, in situations like this it also utterly muddies any effort to figure out what the inciting event was. What was the initial event that set off this loop? Did someone notable or important screw something up? Some media release? Or was there a genuine brief spike in drone activity for whatever reason that ended and is now buried in all the nonsense.
They've been spotted where I live recently. I saw a few in the sky as I was coming home. You know what I thought? Huh. Drones. Then I finished my drive and didn't think any further about it until I opened up Facebook and the town was all aflutter and reporting where they were spotting them around town. The conspiracies were flying about. Some of the responses were funny though. It'll be interesting to find out who they are being operated by
Thumbnail titled "Please Don't Get Mad" had me prepared for a confession video where Hank admits they're his drones.
😭
If we take the 4th letter of every 20th word it reveals his hidden message "the drones are looking for my butt"
Hank Green charged with organized sock crimes after using drone swarm to find more awesome socks
that would be awesome
In all frankness, this needs to happen. Let's start the groupchat and crowd source some drone hoaxing. I'm tired. Let's teach the world a lesson about social contagion. Hank, John.. I'll see you in the groupchat.
Hank is just three drones in a human Hank costume.
His cancer diagnosis and treatment were a cover for technical upgrades.
Being able to split into three would explain how he does SO. MUCH. STUFF.
Hank suit.
You win
@@TheGreat_Kramer1LOL, one of the best and most underrated comments (and line of dialogue in cinema)
Here, I do believe this belongs to you 🏆
“Reports that Iran has a mothership off New Jersey” “Reports” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Yeah lol, like just ignoring a lot of iran's millitary influence has been decimated as of late i really dont think theyd be doing this silly ass prank on new jersey
And why would Iran operate drones at night with their navigation lights and white strobes from mother ships. Our government at its best. It is just commercial planes.
Isn’t it insane that the politician even said it at all? It’s incredibly irresponsible to just make up stuff like that and “report” it as if it’s real..
So then why did the US close off over 60! Airspace’s… did you see the map today? If it’s nothing then why are they rerouting all the planes?
@@kateapple1because once people start freaking out they start to see more “drones” and it snowballs into hysteria. Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Drones aren’t that fast. I haven’t seen anything interesting besides a weird picture of a confirmed airplane.
But yeah holy shit, an airport in New Windsor, NY had to close for AN HOUR today because of a reported drone sighting. Luckily, “there were no impacts to flight operations” during their hour long break while an FBI agent looked around.
People who think there’s big, 2 ton, Iranian/Martian drones flying around are the ones who go out and look for them and call things in.
"the primordial urge to be concerned about things in the sky" - what a great phrase.
And very true
Not really, anyone just minimizing this hasn't done any research. You tell me what those pilots saw over Oregon at the beginning of December, audio on RUclips.
@@natatattful I did not hear Hank minimizing it. I heard him pointing out that we do not yet know whether it is all really normal stuff.
Just because no one yet has come forward with an explanation that you have found, that does not mean it is anything to worry about.
@@natatattful I, for one, sometimes look up at the sky instinctively on the look-out for predator birds that may or may not be there
@@AJarOfYams there is actually evidence that one of our earliest predators were large eagles...so the instinct to look up is likely still with us. Like how some people are scared of snakes or spiders...it's an response to danger. Look up taung child skull if you're interested.
Hank has the kind of media scepticism and literacy that I wish a lot more of us had. And I include myself in this.
hes also flat out wrong. multiple us military bases have confirmed sightings of unknown objects. unknown = weird
@@iraniansuperhacker4382 doesn't mean aliens
Amen, but I also don't freak out everytime the media says something I don't understand or that sounds weird. 🤣🤣🤣 unlike the idiot above me🤣🤣🤣
@@iraniansuperhacker4382 your comment is just plain irony
@@amor2874 why? we have official FAA recordings of pilots saying they are seeing weird orbs in the sky they cant identify and moving in anomalous ways. We have multiple military bases saying they are also seeing unknown objects in sensitive airspace over military bases. Where is the ironic part? There are also reports of similar things happening in China and Russia.
When LA had the big earthquake back in the 80s the power went out for 3 days. Because of the lack of light pollution people started seeing the milky way in the sky for the first time and called emergency services by the thousand to report the "strange lights in the sky". I wish we cared more about light pollution.
Light pollution is so underrated as a concern. I go off about it every chance I get and I'm not even really informed on the subject (I really should though... maybe Hank could do a video about it lmao). Some of the solutions would be so easy to implement..
Oh my GOD -
Seriously, people who have NEVER actually seen stars in the night sky. ??
And they were surprised to see those strange lights in the sky? Talk about being clueless and narrow mined. But after all ... this SURELY comes with the territory in California. I lived there for 18 years, which trust me, was ENOUGH years.
For once in your life ... get MILES and MILES away from any city, then look up at the night sky to see more starts than you could hope to count in one entire lifetime -
Figure out where Jupiter is, and go grab a sizeable telescope, and at least examine the more largest moons orbiting Jupiter. Then look at the rings of Saturn. You won't see much unless your telescope is HUGE, but Saturn might possibly look a bit like it has Micky Mouse ears with a smallish telescope.
I guess it's weirdly reassuring that at least this isn't a new level of stupidity.
The real drones are the American people, instantly creating a panic over some unexpected lights.
@@scotthullinger4684 I've seen stars, but I've never seen the Milky Way (as a "hazy band of white light" across the sky)
I swear to God, if we find out these drones are just a few dudes in a garage trolling the entire state of New Jersey people are going to lose their minds🤣
They won't believe it, even with proof anyway 😂
I mean, that seems like the most likely outcome. People getting christmas presents early and trying them out without knowing the local rules.
Nah, they'll just be like "No that's the Iranian deep state brainwashing them to lie to us. We don't fall for their lies!" or whatever other kind of bs that can be come up with. People who can't admit fault will double down no matter how much of a clown it turns them into. And like... I'd LOVE for them to be alien UFOs, but there's a million things they are more likely to be before that.
@@vlogbrothers WHERE IS CONNECTIONS?
I can't say I'm not slightly entertained by that possibility
Squirrel Sized Nuts is now the name of my punk rock band. Thank you!
I'm showing my age, but in the early 90's there was a band named Squirrel Nut Zippers. I'm sure if they are still active, but I'm all for the name of your new band.
@@deedsterdoo1603 They're still around!
Don't be ashamed, I'm glad you've made it this far :)
you will be in court with MULTIPLE ska bands :D
"Bucket of monkeys" comes to mind.
Congrats, you are looking pretty good these days. Hope recovery is going well 🪷
Xmas Eve is historically a peak UFO flap, because grown-ass adults can't stop watching the skies for Santa.
🤣🤣🤣 I know, like aliens who can go anywhere in the known universe would come to new jersey🤣🤣🤣
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft
For better or worse, Lovecraft had a lot of experience with being reactionary.
"And that's why I hate them foreigners, creepy fishmen the lot of em'" - Also Lovecraft
I don't sense any fear in 99% of people posting... It's mostly amazement and awe
Lol,,, I think we all know what lovecrafts greatest fear.... Jews
i thought it was a fear of heights, its built into every baby
My 22 year old neighbor was freaking out about a "rainbow orb" I go outside, it was SIRIUS.
how sirius?
very sirius!
... and don't call me Shirley.
Sirius is one of my favorite stars 😊. Yes I have a list of favorite stars, sue me.
That was one of my first thoughts when he said the time of year and hours these sightings tend to happen. In late December Sirius rises around 8PM and being near the horizon for a few hours after that can twinkle and blink colors in an unexpected way.
Thanks for talking about drones, Hank
This was the only take I need on the topic
I'm from Jersey, and I'm totally not mad at you!
Whoever put that Tie Defender in at 9:03 is my freaking hero lol
Hank continues to be the best social commentary channel.
He tells you to not be afraid yet be curious. To not be swept away in the frenzy and be critical.
Also isn't condescending to others. It's so easy to go "look at these MORONS who are worried". Internet culture is so obsessed with 'dunking' on others that it's exhausting.
Over the summer we had the Northern Lights pretty far south in the UK. I am so glad everyone's reaction was just "oh! The Northern Lights, neat!"
Too bad it literally wasn't though. Here in brum we had a lot of people claiming aliens and all sorts of nonsense.
Don't fall for the "we're better" trope. Brits love to pretend that we're not just as wretched as the US.
You must not know many conspiracy theorist then because my mom was convinced that they were a product of some nefarious govt agency.🙄
Not EVERYone I'm afraid
How do we know its the northern lights and not aliens using their death ray on the earth?
Apart from that one person who thought they saw the northern lights bit it was actually tomatoes.
I saw someone post a live stream of a beach, where they were freaking out about a giant orb in the sky that was "summoning other orbs." It was the Moon that was brighter than normal with planes passing through the light of it. That's when I realized that most of these drone observations and assumptions were definitely wrong lol.
"the moon was brighter than normal with planes passing through the light of it"
Can you explain more what that means? I'm having trouble visualizing that.
@@peregrinecovington4138it's kind of like a giant orb summoning others.
@@peregrinecovington4138 Google can probably explain it better than I can, but the Moon isn't the same brightness every night. I'm pretty sure it depends on the phase of the Moon that night and a couple other factors. I worded the plane portion poorly, my bad. You know how at night, planes can look just like a dot of light? Imagine that, but they were passing in between the camera and the Moon. So for a split second, the light of the plane would blend in with the Moon and then reappear once the plane finished passing the Moon. I hope that makes sense.
@@Hydra48no one has posted this video... Are you kidding.... The moon?? You can't mistake the moon, I'm sorry but no.
@@peregrinecovington4138 Have you ever looked at the moon and thought "that's a lot bigger than I remember"? Some interaction of atmosphere and the moon's orbit sometimes amplifies it's presence in the sky for reasons I am not informed enough to explain.
People have discovered the night sky. Truly incredible times we live in.
For a moment, they took their eyes off the Kardashians, or whatever it is that these people watch nowadays. And of course, they did not comprehend what they saw.
@@JamesO512 - Literally the scene in Wall-E where he bumps into someone and knocks their screen away and they basically start a whole new life simply by observing the outside world.
@@JamesO512 simultaneously condescending and out of touch. No one is paying attention to the Kardashians anymore lol. Hallmark of believing you’re in the right side of the bell curve when you’re smack in the middle!
@@KingBobXVIHey I love wall-e! Such a good film that warns us not to allow mega corporations to pollute the earth! as well as our own human incompetence, it's not buy-n-large, its just walmart. 😂😊
Hank, this was an absolutely masterful video. You are such a compelling and impactful storyteller and science communicator!
Love the optimism in your videos. I hate going on the internet because people's pessimistic takes make me upset. Thank you for your hopeful corner of the internet
Hey Hank, I just want to say I have OCD and because of that and the culture of the internet it can cause me debilitating paranoia and anxiety with how most people talk about things. I've been going through a particularly tough time which has ramped up my sensitivity to this and watching videos of you explaining things that seem scary in a reassuring way has been helping me work towards processing things that might make me scared in a way that's more rational. Genuinely thankyou.
@@paulwal222 😭😭😭😭
You'll be aaight! 🙂
Oh hey, I also have OCD and have been dealing with this exact problem this year. The disinformation machine is in full overdrive and it's becoming really hard to avoid things online that will cause my OCD to go into a doom spiral. Resources that can logically just lay out the actual facts (also really hard to find these days) is the only thing that helps. So I entirely agree, I'm really grateful for people who can provide this for us.
@@vanished9835 It's really validating hearing that someone is going through the same, thankyou for they reply c:
ocd sucks, i’m honestly so happy for u after reading this comment :)
I’m only about halfway through rn but what I so far gather is that this is a weird combination of “I just learned a new word and now I notice it being used everywhere” + “is the dress blue/black or white/gold.” 🛸
There is definitely an element of rumors spreading like wildfire here. I have a cousin who lives in NJ and the first I heard of the drone thing was a text from her saying "lots of drone activity in (my town in NJ) tonight." Now I am 100% sure my cousin has not been monitoring daily drone activity nor was she carefully observing the night sky for no apparent reason, so what she meant was "a lot of people I know are texting me about drone activity tonight." all it takes is one person with social media to start a rumor about "suspicious drone activity tonight over Someplace, USA" and all the people from Someplace, USA who see it are going to freak out and start texting this alarming news to everyone they know. and then those people will text everyone they know, and on and on it goes until it feels like "everyone" is observing suspicious drone activity. except in reality almost none of them are observing anything, they're just panicking and spreading a rumor they heard to the point that it start to seem more credible.
USAF pilot got chased by a silver cigar shaped object for ~40mins. It was a bubble in his cockpit canopy.
Is _that_ what it was? Nice
@@Lantalialook mahne, being a red neck pilot is HARD okaaaayy
Human observers are garbage. No matter who they are. I have an uncle who swears the military showed him an invisible jeep once. He also did a lot of drugs in the military. So how do you know if he saw an invisible jeep. Or if he was high on mushrooms and his friends taped tinfoil to a jeep and absolutely blew his mind. I'm sure he is totally certain of what he saw. And he was a trained observer.... He's also a braggart and a pothead. Both can be true.
Unlikely since they have radar
@@1183newman The bubbles have radar!?!?
This phenomenon felt unique to TikTok. Many people on there were noticing the lack of NJ drone related content on other social media apps in comparison to TikTok, and felt that TikTok was the only reliable source. It turns out that TikTok is just very good at pushing content that is sensationalized. There was so much that it convinced me that there was actually something to be concerned about.
Someday I hope to get an explanation of what the blinking lights and slowed-down radio programs were all about.
"Slowed-down radio programs"? Seriously? How would that even work, would the program skip whenever it returned to normal? Speed up in order to catch up? Cripes.
I would suggest learning a little bit about aviation laws and drone rules if you would like to understand these things more as they're pretty well documented. Pretty much if the lights blinking, it's not weird. As for radio stations slowing down I don't know what you mean, but you can have distortions and disruptions and signals that when reconstructed by certain types of systems that are picking up the signal result in slowdown. Essentially we're talking about a variation of lag in systems with predictive algorithms. If you'd like to learn more about that, I think electronic communications engineering would be the area to look into😊 I'm just guessing though because it didn't have a name when I was doing that type of work, but it's sort of a way of reducing how degraded the station comes through when the signal is bad, it just has this really weird side effect.
Thank you Hank. America should watch this not just to learn about the drones, but to learn about how to think usefully about things that make you go hmmmm.
"And your brain would conclude that's a big nut"
Oh, uh yeah. Definatly don't see a tiny squirrel. Nope, certainly not.
*gulp*
I've seen enough pics and footage of tiny vertebrates to be perfectly comfortable with a squirrel that size.
To quote Tim Minchin: "Throughout history, every mystery, ever solved, turned out to be NOT MAGIC."
Turned out to be not magic, not aliens and not god.
Is anyone saying that this has anything to do with magic? I just see some claims of it being alien technology, which is not magical whatsoever. Have you encountered a single claim of this being something magical?
Does that mean that all of the ones still unsolved definitely are magic, though? XD
Storm is genius!
@@Alice_FumoNo mysteries have ever turned out to be aliens either, tho. 🙃
This is why I like cryptozoology. Not necessarily because I think cryptids are real, but because the actual science/psychology and discourse around it is really interesting. I remember a show years ago where there were sightings of a large creature at the edge of a forest on the side of a road at night. A test was done to see how well people could perceive the size of a creature in the dark by putting humanoid cutouts along the side of that same road, having people drive past, and estimate the size of the cutouts. Pretty reliably, people tended to overestimate the size by a substantial margin. This is also true for things in the sky since, as mentioned in the video, there's nothing to reliably compare the size to.
On the side of believers though, specifically people who believe in aliens, a response to the question, "If aliens are here, shouldn't more people be seeing them?" is, "How often do you actually look up into the sky?" The first time I heard that question, I realized I don't personally look up into the night sky all that often. For all I know, there could be objects flying around up there all the time that I'd never know about. At this very moment, there could be something in the sky that I would see if I got up and walked over to my window, and I can't say for sure whether there is or isn't unless I actually take the time to check.
Then there's also the tendency when there's a cryptid sighting and a story gets around for other people to jump on the bandwagon and add to it, whether they're actually seeing something or not. One person sees mothman, and suddenly an entire town has their own version of a sighting story. Some might see an owl flying overhead that they overestimate the size of because they don't see owls very often, some might entirely make up a story for attention or to simply conform to the group, and in some situations there might actually be a creature not known to live in the vicinity that's newly discovered for that area. It happens on a much larger scale all the time too, like with the rash of shark attacks that led to the creation of the Jaws movies. There weren't any more shark attacks than normal at the time, but a news channel reported on it and got good ratings, so other news channels did the same. Suddenly it seemed like people were constantly being attacked by sharks out of nowhere.
So if you combine the tendency to overestimate the size of things at night, especially in the sky with no objects to use for a size reference, the fact that more people are actually looking up now and possibly seeing drones that have always been there, and that it's a popular issue to talk about right now, the drone situation makes perfect sense without there necessarily being anything malicious about it.
TL;DR, the drones are cryptids, basically.
Thank you Hank!! As a NJ resident who even before all this enjoyed watching all the planes coming and going from the airports, I do feel strongly that I have seen some drones. But you helped me feel better about this blowing over without major incident. I appreciate you now and always! DFTBA 💙
This is one of the few times where instead of splitting my attention from viewing a video every few seconds on random intervals, I was completely engaged in the content and felt my brain happily dancing in it's cage as a result. Absolute cinema.
The neighborhood facebook group in my town is SO FUNNY about this. planes frequently fly over our town because we're right next to the major airport in the area, and the number of people going "I SAW A DRONE!!! IT'S HAPPENING HERE TOO!!!" and posting a picture of an airplane is the best.
"The aliens keep flying back and forth between here and at regular intervals?!?! What could they possibly be planning????"
@Imperial_Squid Even better detail I forgot to add: Not only are we like two towns over from the major airport, we also have a small private airport for prop planes and hobby aviators IN TOWN.
@@jupiterliam7961 lmao, I wonder how off the deep end they might go, like "the aliens must have holograms or some other kind of disguises, one of them claimed to be my flight instructor the other day?!? I couldn't tell the difference between the alien and the real guy, it was so weird!!!"
@Imperial_Squid I don't think the people in my town think they're aliens necessarily, but they definitely think they're surveillance drones. We have an aerospace government contractor in town that's a big employer, so I'm sure these people feel justified.
You haven’t seen one yet. I have they are legit.
I love the nuanced conversation that happens on Vlogbrothers
this should be their catchphrase- vlogbrothers: we make nuanced conversation happen
Being so exhausted from the constant deluge of internet nuttery, the clear-eyed, rational thought in this video makes me so happy.
My day is now just better.
Joe Rogan has ruined an entire generation of young men.
@@DABA2024 Joe Rogan was ruined by an entire different generation - nothing new. Truth is, humanity is both extremely curious and extremely incurious. We want answers so bad we'll just make them up.
@@ratofthedumpster read the bible :)
Even before you made the exact same point towards the end of the video Hank --something about the phrase "when people are confused and worried and looking at the sky" made me mentally zoom out to the tens of thousands of years of us, small worried confused humans, looking out at the big giant sky and trying to make sense of what we're seeing with, shall we say, a mixed record. And that was quite comforting. We really just were not quite built for any of this and we're doing our best. This also really affirmed my decision to be very offline in the past few weeks because all I had absorbed about this was "there's been some drone sightings in New Jersey and people are kinda freaking out" which turns out to be about as much as we actually know for a fact and certainly all that I actually need to know!
I once woke up screaming to the sight of a 10 inch wide spider on the ceiling over me, just that it was half an inch wide and hangig by a thread right over my face...
The idea that answering the question "I don't know" with aliens is probably similar to how humanity came up with gods is haunting me right now
That was me about 5 years ago
That's exactly how we got religion. Invent a cause, pass it down thousands of generations till it's not questioned anymore.
It is exactly the same. God of the gaps.
its an american thing. people are not educated and the system with mass media spreads uncontrolled news. ABC news for example got hysteric about planet venus being a drone. well its popcorn time for me as an european, but i still love you americans.
Nah y'all need Jesus lol this got nothing to do with that at all
If I were a part of a secret drone program to fly secret drones around New Jersey secretly, I would totally cover those secret drones with bright flashing, FAA compliant, lights.
Absolutely
when i saw the "mysterious orb" I immediately thought to myself: "that's just a bokeh... I have a photo of Jupiter on my phone that looks just like it"
It is sad that believers just dont get it. For them they are plasma orbs or even worst biblical angels.
Big Bokeh Balls
@@Existidor.Serial137
As an actual Biblically Accurate Angel I feel kind of offended.
Somewhere else, someone insisted that the "orb" couldn't possibly be something mundane, because they could clearly see a rotating cube in the middle of it.
Jeez, maybe we shouldn't legalize weed and mushrooms after all! 😉
I found myself being called a fed and getting heat by a bunch of people because I explained “that’s an out of focus image. Probably Venus or Jupiter.”
People truly believe these are angels or aliens and refuse to learn how things work.
Apparently we have this weird math that occurred in the last 5 years: Alex Jones + Covid Lockdowns + Trump = Narnia
We are all trapped here now forces to deal with people who distrust anything and everything, except the people who tell them to distrust anything and everything
This video feels a little bit like Carl Sagan. I remember how he had to keep reminding us about this stuff. Especially the last piece about aliens. Reminded me about his Dragon in the garage from his book "The demon haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark". Its kinda profetic in how relevant the book still is. Thanks Hank!
Thank. You. Hank. My friends would probably be super surprised to learn that I don’t believe these sightings are aliens, but I don’t. All the same i couldn’t put in to words all the reasons I remain skeptical. You are one of the few loud voices of rationality out there and for that I’m thankful.
This whole conversation reminds me of when I first joined Nextdoor and people were freaking out that drones were hovering over our county for a bit in the last year or two. It was so easy to believe the discourse too from how passionate people were. It also helped that I was home alone and have anxiety.
Turns out it was Jupiter. Everyone got really good at “drone” spotting but few people in my neighborhood had a star app on their phone to ask what it could be.
Nice, welcome to stargazing :D
No matter what it is, you can count on Nextdoor to overreact 🙃
I wish more people would just look up more often. There's a lot to see. In Missouri, someone freaked out about white lights in the clouds that turned out to be (drum roll) over a farm hosting a christmas light show! They FORGOT what high-powered spotlights look like because they were primed to freak out.
Or read about adaptations of The War of the Worlds
Interestingly, the best-known War of the Worlds hysteria (the one caused by Orson Welles) also happened in New Jersey
This video both informed me that there is a drone issue in the news and that said issue is actually a nonissue. Thanks, Hank Green!
Saying that the drones haven't broken the law is a stretch. You can't fly over military bases, it's illegal.
They already caught and took care of all the people that were actually breaking the laws they just didn't report on the fact that they caught them in the larger news stations. It is really weird though that the tiny news stations reported on it in the big ones didn't or maybe it's not weird, no I guess it's not weird just disappointing.
K, so i just finished Arcane and have been thinking about the quote from Viktor..."There is no prize to perfection, just an end to pursuit".... so in this context perfection is the 'answer' we all force on phenomena to avoid living in 'I Don't Know'. I think living in I don't know is so much more interesting...keeps you curious. Great take, Hank!
"It's a MESS! We're in a mess! I kinda can't believe no-one is saying this!"
Thank you for saying it, Hank!
A Melee, as some whistleblowers and predictions have called it
Also around Christmastime because it gets dark sooo early that people notice more totally normal lights in the sky. But like Hank said - we’ll likely not know the initial start.
This is an old quote but I always say it when stuff like this happens: *anything can be a UFO if you’re bad enough at identifying stuff*!
Love the part about how if we skip over the “I don’t know” part then we’ll stop looking and never actually know. Such a good way of putting it when some conspiracy minded people seem to think that we’re the ones getting in the way of The Truth™️
you can't discount every sighting though. There has definitely been some unexplained things in the skies since the dawn of time.
this flap though was 99-100% mass hysteria i'll agree 😂
my favorite thing I've seen about this is a thread about a drone show displaying a human face, a comment saying, "Imagine if we put that over an uncontacted tribe and pretended to be their god, they'd go crazy. ", and a reply saying, "or better yet, an American city"
but we've seen drone shows before. imagine if it was a really big mothership. Phoenix lights in 1997 weren't military dropping flares. AZ governor who was in the Air Force even said so.
I live in New Jersey, in an area where there have been a lot of sightings. I've been avoiding looking at the sky at night and initially, I just figured that it was the local joint base testing something. Given the lack of further, credible evidence, I'm assuming that it's just people misinterpreting the perfectly mundane things that they were seeing in the sky.
It might have started with the test of something. Clearly that's not what people are seeing at this point, but wouldn't be unexpected for there to be a test flight of something. People jumping to wild conclusions is beneficial for when test flights get seen because it distracts from what they actually are, though in this case anything that's lit up at night probably isn't stealth anything😂
You had an opportunity to use your own eyes but kept your head in the sand. Nice
This! This is what I've been trying to tell people! I'm a BIG nerd and avid sky watcher. As soon as I saw the videos people were posting, I knew it was a mass hysteria-type incident. Well, my first thought actually was, "Y'all, if they were drones doing anything illegal, they wouldn't have the lights on." It's disappointing that people are so easily fooled.
Just the fact that people can't tell the difference between a drone and a plane is all you need to know. Oh, and that they're only shown at night.
One of the best videos ever made. It should be required viewing in every high school in North America! 🎉😊
Im so glad we dont have the 4 minute rule anymore! 18 mins gives time for sweet, delicious nuance 😋 🎉❤
This reminds me of a story about three people in a room taking a psychology test for a government job, two of the people taking the test are part of the test and the third person doesn’t know that. The person giving the test shows each of them a card of a triangle and puts the card face up on the desk, then asked one person who is a part of the experiment to say what they see on the card, and that person says they see a square, then the person giving the test asked the other person who is part of the test what they see and that person says they see a square, then the person giving the test asked the person who is not part of the test and has no clue what is going on what they see, and that person is confused and seems to just want to go along with what the others said so they don’t look foolish and says they see a square. The point is don’t let anyone make you secound guess what you are witnessing You have can get information, but use your own judgment, people and media can influence our decisions.
as an avid stargazer who enjoys looking at the sky between dusk and 11pm, in new jersey : what?? i haven't seen a single thing. seems like a few strange sightings caused a mass hysteria
As an avid stargazer, you can probably identify most of the things you're seeing so they aren't notable or scary to you, like stars for instance lol.
@@mayaenglish5424 well yeah lol, but even in the number of planes/plane-like flying objects ive noticed, its not an uptick.
@@illuminoeye_gaming Right, I was making a joke, but seriously, like, you just identified the problem yourself lol. The number of "PLANES and plane like flying objects you have noticed" You correctly identified a bunch of things as planes and dismissed them from your brain. Then you identified a bunch of other things as "plane like" possibly drones, who knows and dismissed them from your brain rather than jumping to ALIENS!!!!! or GOVERNMENT SHENANIGANS!!!!! (Which like, the gov is definitely up to shenanigans, but we can't automatically jump to that every time we see something weird).
You are probably outside at night on a regular basis and have a consistent view of the situation long term, whereas these people do not and are suddenly looking up and going, oh $#!% there's lots of stuff in the sky and I don't know what any of it is!!!! AAAAAAHHH!!!!!
Being able to admit when you don't know what something is is such a powerful thing.
One of Hank's best, the strategic plagiarism is clever
"...Squirrel-sized nuts." Hank Green, 2024
I remember the Colorado drone sightings, which is why I wasn't worried when I heard about the current drone stories lol. I bet this will happen again several times in my lifetime
but it only takes one big mothership parking itself over NYC to blow everyones mind. never say never :)
Something about how he said "(your brain) would conclude, that's a big nut!" And then saying "Because nut sized squirrels are a lot less likely than a squirrel sized nuts" really threw me off, like the oven the cold food, and of out the cold hot eat the food
I had absolutely no idea about this drone thing and it is WILD to learn about it in this way. It really does feel indicative of a very US thing right now.
We don’t know how much we don’t know. Stay safe out there 💜
We're all screwed here. Stay far away 😂😂
Idiocracy.
its an american thing. people are not educated and the system with mass media spreads uncontrolled news. ABC news for example got hysteric about planet venus being a drone. well its popcorn time for me as an european, but i still love you americans.
A lot of people feeling very uncertain and worried about our country and our future, and a lot of people all too ready to capitalize on those emotions. It definitely feels like a microcosm of where we’re at as a country right now 😕
As I was telling a friend: I would love it to be aliens, if only because it would further affirm that nothing makes sense right now. But, it's almost certainly not aliens. It's probably something boring, like drone hobbyists. Especially seeing as, specifically, many of these apparently have FAA lighting - would be very polite aliens.
Anyway, it's probably not polite aliens. Solid rant, Hank. 10/10, would send to aliens.
Those persky canadian lizard people scouting the US coast!
You would love it to be aliens ....what an idiot
Hank. Thank you so much for this. You're like the first other person I've seen who seems like they're approaching this like a rational, sane person.
You left out, "If this is how some Americans act over some drones, we are doomed when something SERIOUS happens." Doomed because the media just ran with the hysteria and some govt reps went cuckoo for cocoa puffs. Depressing.
Americans are desperate and hungry for reasons to be afraid, go to war, and become heroes
What a breath of fresh air Hank. Thanks so much.
I’ve been waiting for someone with an audience to call this out! So many “drone” videos are so obviously normal airplanes. It’s driving me nuts that this is so wide spread and not real at all.
I wonder if some of this is from younger generations being stuck inside too much, especially with things like the pandemic. I've definitely had some people show me some stuff where I'm just kind of flabbergasted because it's just so incredibly recognizable to me that I am confused by it being not recognizable. Maybe City light pollution is also been a problem so people don't see them regularly enough to realize that this always happens and has been happening for years or decades?
I've had a couple of people show me planes that are flying towards or away from them and a couple of people show me the space station. People who I would have expected to have seen these things before but apparently had not. I mean everybody has to ask the first time they see something, I'm just surprised the first time for a lot of people is teens to 40s.
i've seen maybe 4 things about this, mostly people referencing it in jokes. i live under a rock and it's awesome here
I have also not seen those jokes. My rock has your rock beat 💪
Also, I don't live in the states, may have something to do with that
@@christafranken9170 I haven't heard about this, nor have I seen the jokes, and I DO live in the states, checkmate! My rock is the superior rock!
In my AP bio class back in high school, for as best I can figure, shits and giggles my professor spent a class talking about the mind and about suggestion and how people can be primed to see things in even the most random splatter of ink of page and then showed us a slide, it was in black and white and was a chaos of spots and blotches all irregular. Then he pointed out that it was a black and white photo of a cow by a fence with a barn in the background and it was freaking nuts to experience that.
Oh Hank’s back on his “aliens of the gaps” theory.
"During the 1994, a 6.7-magnitude earthquake rumbled through Los Angeles at 4:30 a.m. The shaking woke residents, who discovered the power had gone out citywide.
Some left their houses or peered outside to check on the neighborhood. It was eerily dark - no streetlights and few cars at that late hour.
They looked up at the sky. It was flush with cosmic bodies that had been invisible up to that point - twinkling stars, clustered galaxies, distant planets, even a satellite or two. Then some people became nervous. What was that large silvery cloud that trailed over the city? It looked so sinister they called 911.
That cloud was the Milky Way. They had never seen it before." -Medium
10 out of 10 vid Hank. Appreciate you
the idea that an elected official said that iran had a mothership of the coast and has not had to step down is shameful
I always tend to forget Hank is American cause he’s so calm and well spoken
I appreciate you so much, Hank - Like, so much.
"I don't know" is SUCH a powerful phrase. It's honest, first and foremost. Then it inspires us to TRY TO KNOW. When I, or someone close me asks how something works, I frequently have no idea and turn to the sum of all human knowledge accessible online to try to find out. Often, it turns out that we* DO know! But when we** don't know, it's still pretty cool to think about.
*We being humans in general, not me and my friends. We don't know anything.
**Yep, still all humans who have ever lived. Not this idiot (me) and his pals.
Thanks for making this video, Hank. My mind was going wild before, but your video helped everything calm down
Hank I'm a media and comms grad student that just studied priming theory this last semester. In the midst of, you know, the chaos, I didn't think to consider this, but it's fascinating and I love how sensical of an approach it is.
Thank you Hank, I appreciate your talk about how to interpret “I don’t know”. Also I remember my aunt lived near Midway Airport in Chicago. The planes were loud and right above her house. Because of the loud noise and like you said brain eye stuff. It would really look like they were just a few feet above us, and just very small planes. Yes, if you’ve ever taken off from Midway at this time it felt like you were going to hit the telephone lines at the end of the runway. But, I still think reality is the planes were a little higher than my brain was telling me they were.
In the immortal words of the great philosopher Chicken Little, "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!"
Everybody has drones now. Technology nerds have wild drones that will blow your mind. I think its cool.
7:48 Seeing the drones searching for drones makes me think of bigfooters. The go out in the woods and make "bigfoot" calls. Then they hear something in response. It's probably another group out looking for bigfoot.
9:37 the realest statement about being an American right now
9:20 This right here is exactly what frustrates me to no end. Every single message is always misconstrued to be the most outrageous clickbaity version of itself. Unexplained object in the sky -> it's unexplained therefore it defies physics, officials can't 100% confirm what something is -> scientists are baffled by strange objects in sky.
That's literally every headline about this subject. Our media is so incredibly bad.
I mean idk about nothing, but I think people just usually don't notice drones. They're so cheap and easy to use these days though that they're pretty ubiquitous. There might have been a slight uptick in their use that caused people to finally start noticing them.
The first reports I was aware of started a year ago over Hampton, Virginia/Langley AFB. The drones came back multiple times over weeks, and the base leadership have doubled down on visual security around their F22s and other sensitive equipment (as reported in Military Times and elsewhere).
No idea if that drone mystery has anything to do with the current drone sightings.
This is all part of the most elaborate PR campaign ever. Bravo, James Gunn and your new Superman movies tagline... "Look Up"
😂👽😉
Superman is an alien, after all.
Love how he says water condensation trails instead of opening a comment section can of worms by saying con trails😂
9:29 it's a feed back loop
The only question that matters to me atleast, is this: Who knows what these are?
The answer is either 1. Someone does, but they won't say what they are, or 2. No one knows. Neither is a good answer.
I think this was a very well thought out video. To accept 'aliens' as an answer 'aliens' needs to stop being an all encompassing answer and start having defined properties that something can be compared to.
Hank... I just love your clips mate. Thank you for spreading some clarity, common sense and humor. Love your work. 👽 👾🖖
as a yorkshireman, thankyou for talking sense hank, It's getting fucking hard to come by lately
Proper leadership would have taken public concerns seriously, educated the community about night sky objects-as this gentleman has done-and ensured public safety by investigating and identifying them. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, leading to the significant confusion and concern we’re facing now. What we’ve witnessed, aside from the issue with drones, is a display of truly terrible and reckless leadership-though the mayors have been an exception to this.
Eh, people don't believe what leadership says if it doesn't confirm what they already believe. Adults can't be educated anymore.
The kind of public that freaks out about something like this isn't the kind of public that is smart enough to elect valuable representatives.
What an opening monologue. Great delivery! lol
Just like a cat being scared by a cucumber, we too also often incorrectly identify entities in our environment. We observe our by the limited components and qualities that we see and because things that make us scared need to be identified quickly, we often don't take the time to actually think things thru, but one needs to laugh off the incorrect assumption instead of holding onto that anxiety, especially when you can take your time to evaluate.
Working for a high-tech company some years ago, a smell began to go through the factory floor. No one knew what it was, we couldn't identify the scent, which had a slight chemical aspect to it, but not overwhelming, just noticeable--but everyone noticed. Within 20 minutes two people had passed out, others were having trouble breathing, someone called an ambulance. All told, over 30 people reported symptoms and ailments, and several went to the hospital. The source? Someone had parked a pile of wooden pallets near an air handler outside--not an issue.
13:06 is Orin getting a drone for Christmas… 🤨😂
I will say, in situations like this it also utterly muddies any effort to figure out what the inciting event was. What was the initial event that set off this loop?
Did someone notable or important screw something up? Some media release? Or was there a genuine brief spike in drone activity for whatever reason that ended and is now buried in all the nonsense.
It went to go cart, to mini, to SUV, to buses.
Sounds like a fishing story to me.
They've been spotted where I live recently. I saw a few in the sky as I was coming home. You know what I thought? Huh. Drones. Then I finished my drive and didn't think any further about it until I opened up Facebook and the town was all aflutter and reporting where they were spotting them around town. The conspiracies were flying about. Some of the responses were funny though. It'll be interesting to find out who they are being operated by