Mystery Drones Swarmed a U.S. Military Base for 17 Days. The Pentagon Is Stumped.

[Zorro]

U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly wasn’t sure what to make of reports that a suspicious fleet of unidentified aircraft had been flying over Langley Air Force Base on Virginia’s shoreline.

Kelly, a decorated senior commander at the base, got on a squadron rooftop to see for himself. He joined a handful of other officers responsible for a clutch of the nation’s most advanced jet fighters, including F-22 Raptors.

For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the U.S. The show usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told Kelly.

The first drone arrived shortly. Kelly, a career fighter pilot, estimated it was roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Other drones followed, one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawn mowers.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/drones-military-pentagon-defense-331871f4?st=2PCi2g&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

[barbtries]

1. I'm ignorant I'll admit,

but it doesn't seem all that credible that they could not have felled one of these things?

[Igel]

6. They could have.

But the article specifies that the military can only shoot down a drone if it poses an "imminent threat."

So, not shooting them down is exactly what you'd expect, regardless of the non-imminently-threatening purpose of the drones.

[barbtries]

8. okay.

i wonder how that would be defined. Seems to me that with the likelihood of these drones being deployed by hostile forces it would be prudent to bring down at least one of them to ascertain from where they came. Since it is restricted airspace, I expect there would be no legal impediment to doing so.

Anyhow. Hopefully we'll learn more as time goes by.

[Wonder Why]

2. This whole thing sounds so stupid. If they were flying as low as 100 feet and only

100mph, a helicopter's rotors should have been able to force one down. Or even a rifle shot. They couldn't down one in 17 days? All they could do is stand around and watch with their heads up their butts while they couldn't decide if the threat was significant enough to permit military action? We wouldn't want to scare any Americans or have the FAA order all planes to not fly over Langley for the next couple of days.

Hey, look at all those Japanese Zeroes flying over Pearl Harbor! They have been coming for the last 16 days and have never attacked so let's wait until tomorrow and see if they come back again.

[Igel]

7. The military followed the law.

Which does not allow for what many think is the only right approach.

[Wonder Why]

11. Do they always wait for the bombs to fall before considering it an attack? Nobody willing to

say this is an attack on the United States because it is obviously a coordinated attempt to do something? C'mon! Someone has to make that decision.

[dalton99a]

3. Chinese spies collecting info

During a rainy morning on Jan. 6, Fengyun Shi parked a rented Tesla near 65th Street and Huntington Avenue in Newport News, Va., 11 miles from the Langley base. The car was outside a shipyard run by HII, the company that builds nuclear submarines and the Navy’s newest generation of the Ford Class aircraft carrier.

Shi, a student at the University of Minnesota, told nearby residents around midmorning that he was flying a drone that got stuck in a tree. As he tried to free it using his controller, a neighbor called Newport News, Va., police. Officers asked Shi why he was flying it in such foul weather, and they told him to call the fire department for help.

Shi instead returned his rental car an hour later and took an Amtrak train to Washington, D.C. The following day, he flew to Oakland, Calif. By chance, the drone fell to the ground that same day and ended up with federal investigators. FBI agents found that Shi had photographed Navy vessels in dry dock, including shots taken around midnight. Some were under construction at the nearby shipyard.

On Jan. 18, federal agents arrested Shi as he was about to board a flight to China on a one-way ticket. Shi told FBI agents he was a ship enthusiast and hadn’t realized his drone crossed into restricted airspace. Investigators weren’t convinced but found no evidence linking him to the Chinese government. They learned he had bought the drone on sale at a Costco in San Francisco the day before he traveled to Norfolk.

U.S. prosecutors charged Shi with unlawfully taking photos of classified naval installations, the first case involving a drone under a provision of U.S. espionage law. The 26-year-old Chinese national pleaded guilty and appeared in federal court in Norfolk on Oct. 2 for sentencing.

[GreenWave]

4. So he claims to be a ship enthusiast and to take pictures

of some he has to fly all the way across the USA to of all places, Norfolk, home of many naval operations.

[dalton99a]

5. And he had to take pictures at midnight

[milestogo]

9. You know what it could be...

[LymphocyteLover]

10. 20 feet long is a very substantial size... where would they be based?