Ranger222 said:
I live in Columbus, OH and two nights ago the wife and I were out walking the dog around 9 pm. We have been trying to observe anything weird going on, especially to our west, as last weekend Wright-Patterson was shut down one night with "drone activity" which is about 70 miles away from us.
We did see two drones that night which we haven't ever seen before. Several of our neighbors also came out to look at them. They looked like a few of the drones in the videos posted in this thread - almost like a small plane, size of an SUV. Not a hobby drone or even some of the commercial ones you see.
Turns out is was our local PD searching for a missing child. We learned that a few hours later.
Big lesson for me in that when you are trying to go out and specifically look for something, everything turns into what you are looking for. Had this mess not been going on, we may not have viewed these drones as being weird. While I'm not suggesting this is ALL this is, with so many people going out now "expecting" to see something, you have to be that much more skeptical or require a higher burden of proof now in different reports versus when these anomalies began.
I've dismissed most sightings as due to what you are mentioning here, millions of people are really focusing on the sky (not their phones) more. That combined with people who own drones looking to have some fun at this time, maybe make it in the paper as having made people nervous. So those now looking up see all kinds of things they may not usually notice, and they find it interesting. I was out near Big Bend last year, in far clearer and darker skies than I am used to, looking up and saw a completely symmetical display of dots moving across the sky way beyond plane height. All equal spaced, perfectly straight, and seemed to go on forever. I was completely baffled. Simple google and video examples showed it was 99% Starlink communication satellites being launched. Never seen anything like it, wasn't sure what I was looking at, but it had an explanation.
I do find the arrest of a Chinese national, boarding a plane for China after flying a drone over protected airspace, of interest. I actually think the reports similar to yours, where they report a car or truck sized drone, interesting because I wasn't familiar with drones that size and wasn't even finding anything listed as a law enforcement drone that approached that size. I finally found this -
https://www.jouav.com/products/cw-30e.html - which is quite long and wide, with long flight times and I assume louder operation due to gas option. I'm not sure how many government agencies deploy those, but if I saw one that size I would be surprised by it.
