So you think you saw a drone?

A couple weeks ago, we started getting more news articles claiming drone sightings within CONUS (Continental United States) military bases. This has spawned a lot of panic and speculation about what these drones could be, who is flying them, and what their intentions are. However, most of these sightings are likely misidentified objects rather than actual drones. I’ve done incident response to drone sightings for years, and I can tell you that the vast majority of these reports turn out to be false alarms. In this post, I’ll explain why most drone sightings are misidentifications and what you can do to avoid falling for the same trap.

It has lights, how hard can this be?

People tend to assume that if they see something with lights in the sky, it must be a drone. However, especially in US airspace, there are many objects that can have lights and be mistaken for drones. For example, airplanes, helicopters, weather balloons, satellites, and even stars all either have lights or illuminate and have all been mistaken for drones at some point. People don’t normally look up at the sky, and so when they do, they will often misinterpret what they see. Figuring out how far away and how large an object is can be surprisingly difficult, especially at night. A small drone flying close to you can look very similar to a large airplane flying far away. This even extends to movements, people will often mistake a aircraft for drones because they misinterpret the movements of the object and assume it is hovering or moving too slowly to be anything else.

There is a classic tell for these kinds of misidentifications, which is that the meme of standing there menacingly. In the case reported by ABC news, the witnesses are claiming that a swarm of drones have repeatedly violated US military airspace for the sole purpose of hovering with their lights on while base security panics. This is not how actual drone attacks work, and not something any threat actor would do. Drones are generally used for either surveillance or attacks, and in either case, they would not be hovering in place with their lights on for extended periods of time. No malicious actor would want to draw attention to themselves by hovering in place with their lights on, especially in a high-security area like a military base.

One funny story I have from my own experience is that I once had to rush to respond to a drone incident in the NCR (National Capital Region) because someone reported that a drone was dropping unknown “payloads” on the roof of a instillation. We set up multiple cameras and RF scanners to try and catch the drone in the act, but all we ended up finding was a bird that was flying around and dropping clams on the roof to break their shells. That was the mysterious “payload” that was being reported.