Flying a long range unarmed stealth drone in lightly populated areas through the US would tell you a great deal about how observable the drone is to US radars. Flying dangerously through Air traffic controlled space also ensures that the military radars get pointed in your direction at some point or another.
For an unarmed small(ish) drone the risks of getting caught are likely minimal. Crash in an unpopulated area (plenty of those in the west coast), self-destruct at high altitude or simply acknowledge the spying incident and point to the SR-71/U-2 as precedent.
Edit: Any resemblances to these?
Case in point: the FAA now requires a digital transmitter beacon (ADS-B) in most of the commonly used airspaces in the continental US as of last month.
Not a reasonable presumption. VFR aircraft are lowest priority, and traffic calls for VFRs are very much not guaranteed. If a controller has too much to do, you won’t get traffic calls. And just because the frequency is quiet, doesn’t mean the controller is twiddling their thumbs. They could be on the landline or briefing the next controller.
I hope I don't sound too critical. I wondered if the thing in the article's story was some small object ejected from the pilot's own plane and he overtook it as it slowed down so it appeared to be moving backwards. Since you had a similar experience, I wondered if there was some other information that helped you judge it.
When you say "small", can you give an estimate of it's length and diameter?
Are we talking small-plane-small, or welding-gas-cylinder-small?
Alternate theory: Boeing wheels one of these things out to buzz commercial aircraft and airports every time they have some sort of mishap as a PR diversion.
Color: Twilight.
(b) Completely impossible to get good video about them.
a & b => bs
https://listverse.com/2010/04/16/10-beasts-that-used-to-be-m...
We're talking about visual phenomena, and we capture video constantly.
By the time I see the thing and pull out my phone it's already gone before I can hit record (unless it's really slow I guess, but those reports are much less common).
Reminds me of growing up in fundamentalist religious communities where it was commonplace to hear of physical miracles. All sorts of people had stories of God healing people for example. And yet it never happened around me or on film, despite me spending over a thousand hours at religious services as the like.
Eventually I realized many people are just willing to believe things and succumb to simple cognitive biases.
...because one has seen UFOs in the past, and wants to capture them?
If I went on a walk through the woods behind my house and saw Bigfoot, I would probably carry a camera next time I went walking behind my house to try and get a picture of bigfoot.
Also how many thousands of hours of flying and not seeing anything interesting do I have also add another thing I have to focus on when it will likely last only a few seconds and I can never guess when? I don't need another distraction while flying.
Pilots claiming to see these aren't typically trying very hard to convince others that they're real (or at least I've never met any, they're often hesitant to bring it up at all for fear of being labeled crazy). They're just reporting what they saw. So most really don't have much incentive to bother with installing a GoPro on their flights.
Yes, if my goal were to prove the existence of these things what you're saying makes sense. But my goal is to fly the plane to wherever I'm going.
The joys of having radio control. As a driver, I find a dash camera very valuable for the rare occasions I've needed it, but maybe pilots think "radio control knows where everyone is flying, and even if there's any accident, the black box will survive. That's all I need".
A380 has camera on it's tail, aerodynamic external camera system mounts are can be installed in almost all Airbus and Boeing models. Passengers have cameras.
There are satellites with radar, IR and visual range looking downwards.
"Ernst Florens Chladni, was the first to publish (in 1794) the idea that meteorites might be rocks that originated not from Earth, but from space....The scientific community of the time responded with resistance and mockery." - Wikipedia
Ball lightning stories disappeared with mobile phones. Ufo stories are also disappearing. It's less and less likely that everybody just happens to miss opportunity of taking pictures.
The difference can be lots of things of course: densely populated, maybe seen from further away etc. But it's indeed peculiar that now in the smartphone age, we hardly see any UFO's on video, relative to how many camera's there are.
That said, because they're very common, and that there are many stories about them across the history (and not just in recent times) and from many different sources, and that there's a lot of government documentation, and the fact that even Pentagon officially recognized that there's something going on, should be at least enough to steer you away from saying something is just 'bs'.
I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss anecdotal reports of simalarly rare and hard-to-capture aeronautical pheonmenon.
Exactly my point. There are so many cameras in the air that you should trust less and less these ufo stories.
I own a small light sport airplane and was flying between UT and CA at 12.5k ft and saw one of these pass 1,000ft below me not far outside of Reno. ATC didn’t call it so presumably they didn’t see it on radar. It was exactly as described, small, shiny, cylindrical, no wings, and fast. If I could guess it was doing 500kts in the opposite direction. By the time I pulled out my phone to snap a picture it was gone. If it was a cruise missile it was flying over a populated area and not in restricted airspace or a MOA. Not sure what conclusions to draw other than these things are real and probably more common than people assume. It was not an airliner or private jet I’ve seen plenty of them.